What I See at the Homeschool Convention
Day Two: The Challenges of the Good, True, and Beautiful
Further reflections on the homeschool convention, and what it offers to the moral life.
What is education but a search for and preparation to be fully human?
Observation One: The Search for The True, The Whole
The longer we are in the world of homeschooling, the more I appreciate the willingness of the people in it to try new things to problem solve, and to learn from others who are all doing their best. Many of the speakers I heard yesterday got into homeschooling because of their expertise, and finding that their home discipline of education or psychology or agriculture was fairly limited, and did not lend itself to the kind of whole life integration that homeschooling on it the best days can offer.
I think about this lack of integration with respect to my own disciplines of theology and ethics, in which things become very segmented. There is a gift and beauty to having specialty, but the trade-off to that is that we begin to think about knowledge, and our lives become divided, and segmented and ways which are fairly artificial.
For example, there will be whole areas of specialty with an ethics which either I don’t have a lot of interest in, or have interest in that will never master and will be forever a dilettante. I’ve spent the last 15 years more or less in a very specific area of Christian discussions of war and peace, and know it inside and out, as well as many of the other adjacent developments with our Christian discussions of violence more broadly. But ask me some thing about palliative care, and I can give you about three minutes worth of off-the-cuff thoughts, and then that well runs dry.
But homeschooling values the generalists more than the specialist, the entrepreneurial mind more than the institutionalist mind.
In a panel yesterday on homesteading, the speaker, who has been a homesteader for 15 years, acknowledged that there are whole areas of agriculture and animal husbandry, which she has no knowledge of, but has to troubleshoot on a regular basis. The trade-off for this precarity, of course, is that you get to live in beautiful spaces and learn from the land in ways which she wouldn’t know if you were in the midst of the city.
Attempting homeschooling is something like this, I think. It offers the opportunity for an education come together into a wholistic form of life, bundles with the need for trial and error. If we think that it’s just about providing instruction in math and science, and not about induction into new habits of truthfulness, then we’re mistaken.
Homeschooling, like any form of education, offers access into not just of a way of learning. It fosters skills and habits and us, for better or worse. And these habits shape the rest of our existence.
As I indicated yesterday, some of those searches for knowledge can become vices, and can become swept up and to really pernicious directions. Once you begin to explore and learn, it’s very easy to inflate your ability to know the truth for yourself, or to assume that you have the keys to knowledge, and that the main stream is completely polluted.
Observation Two: The Search for Virtue
If the search for wholeness and truthfulness is one of the hallmarks of homeschooling, that goes hand-in-hand with something which I think motivates many within this world: the search for a good life.
This search can begin from hunger, or it can begin from reaction. There are innumerable stories of people who begin homeschooling out of a reaction against political dynamics, and those dynamics will shape the entirety of the educational process.
But there are also many began home schooling out of a desire for goodness, and to have a abiding sense of goodness which is infused with her educational life. They want some thing which available options cannot provide for their children, or they want some thing which allows for a more expanded pace or they want some thing which allows for more deep integration of faith and learning.
And a panel led by the publisher of classical literature, these tendencies collided. On one hand, he extolled the value of the western as a genre in ways, which were overly nostalgic, and did not account for many of the things which, as an emphasis, I know we’re part of the historical record. Western expansion went hand-in-hand, with a great deal of racism, justification for slavery, and brutality. But he was also specific in his recommendations of literature, pointing to the way in which, for example, in the original novel 3:10 to Yuma, the heroes virtue inspires the villain, to sacrifice their life rather than get out alive, or how Shane inspires a defense of the vulnerable.
It’s right and good acknowledge the excesses of vices, and to extol particular forms of virtue, but rhetorically this could be very sanctimonious or nostalgic. And this, the virtue that we become formed forgets the lesson of the classics: that vice can be smuggled in like Greeks in the Trojan horse. And once inside, they become harder to see and harder to disentangle from the virtue we wish to preserve.
Observation Three: The Search for Beauty
And two different sessions, yesterday, one on parenting anxious and smart children, and one on the habits of a writing life, the workshops emphasize the need for not just slow reflection, but orientation of education toward aesthetically good ends. I have to admit that this is always been a bit of a nebulous concept for me, and that there are many things which are morally beneficial, but not aesthetically pleasing.
The children’s author, who I referenced yesterday gave a good workshop on the way in which good writing needs to both convey a positive moral vision, while also being artfully rendered. There’s nothing worse than hammy children’s writing, which is so on the nose with respect to its moral vision, that it becomes onerous to read. And yet, these are books which we’ve actually had to put down for a time, because there is quite a bit of violence and death, which takes place in the latter part of the series. Heroes die, both on and off the page, and villains meet their demise fairly dramatic fashion.
The Old Testament is a great case in point. Ancient commentators regularly drew from these so-called “troubling texts” of the old testament for wisdom, and do so in ways which modern writers tend to dismiss. What good could be found in the cleansing of Canaan, or the death of Uzzah? The ancients were able to read these stories as indicative of the eternal nature of the moral life while also not seeing these stories, as that which we should imitate at all times. Beauty is not that which is pleasing to the eye, in this case, which inspires us to repeat it but to emulate what animates it.
As in the previous literature seminar, which commended the western as a model of virtue, the aesthetic vision of the homeschool world can hew too closely to a mono cultural ideal, unaware of the brutality and vice of the past because it longs for heroes to be like.
But the rejoinder is appropriate: our lives are not to acknowledge the difficulties and darknesses of existence, and to acknowledge the light of God’s wisdom, which comes to us through these things as well. Beauty is not the same thing as happiness. And the moral life is available but not without difficulty.