Lessons Learned at a Homeschool Convention, Part III

Besides how the convention influenced my relationship with the Lord (Part I) and learning so much from Heidi St. John (Part II), I also attended a few sessions about classical education.  

My knowledge base of classical education is limited to The Well Trained Mind and Classical Conversations.  I attended a panel discussion with Dr. Chris Perrin (from Classical Academic Press), Andrew Kern (from the Circe Institute), Martin Cothran (from Memoria Press), and Carol Reynolds (music professor, professorcarol.com). These people are smart. They introduced themselves, talked a bit about how classical education - educational archaeology really - allows us to meet people of the past and let them teach us. And in classical Christian education, we study the nature of self in the context of the cosmos, in our Maker's image. It allows us the ability to go back in time to see mistakes made in history and learn from them.  

The panel was also a Q/A time with questions from the audience. One parent asked about how to classically teach science at the high school level. Although it doesn't apply to me yet, I loved soaking up the wisdom of these teachers. Their response - science is threefold:  energy (physics), matter (chemistry), and life (biology). By high school, and this is so true of what we know of the trivium and the rhetoric stage, you should be able to DO these subjects (not merely rattle off answers on a test) - create experiments, explain your conclusions. They also referenced current science standards being all about technology and a walking away from nature and classification. They made the distinction that our world does not believe in a Truth that can be known, but we Christian educators do. Another person's question dealt with teaching genders differently.  They said boys succeed because they are inspired and girls succeed because they are naturally self-disciplined. That was so helpful thinking about my boys and how best to lead them!  

I also love this quote (don't know who said it though!):  

The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.  If you're not humbled by classical education, you're not doing it.  Come to classical education with repentance, love, and humility.

I also attended another session led by Chris Perrin, entitled Putting Scholé Back in Homeschool; Finiding Restful Education in a Frenetic World. I wasn't planning on attending this session until I heard him during the panel and knew I had to catch him again. Scholé (SKO-lay) is a Greek term meaning restful education, conversation, contemplation, learning, with people you highly esteem, often times with good food and drink. 

You behold instead of do.  

You appreciate anything good, True, and beautiful simply for its own sake!

Our modern word school comes from scholé, but our culture has misconstrued its original meaning. He said that if you are classically educating, you must include the concept of scholé. He said the Bible refers to a lot of scholé - the Sabbath rest, scripture teaching us to "be still" or "gaze on the beauty of the temple." It is a call to come and sit and be quiet.  We might find that we have to carefully structure our lives to make sure we can have scholé with our children, we have to want it and seek it actively.  Practically in homes, he suggested creating simply beauty in the home through lighting candles, playing classical music, having fine art books available for looking at and discussing. One mom commented that sometimes scholé is putting down the dishrag to look at bugs with the 5 year old. He referred us to a homeschool mom blog called Amongst Lovely Things where the author, Sarah Mackenzie is trying to live a scholé lifestyle.  I'm anxious to explore it more.

He also gave us the stark contrasts of bonum utile (utilitarian/useful good) and bonum commune (communal good/blesses us).  It reminds me of secular humanism which has ravaged our society.  Look at these:

            utilitarian                               communal good

work	leisure/freedom
training	educating
power	wonder/joy
means	ends
ratio (Latin, meaning calculation)	intellectus (Latin, meaning perceiving, gazing)
head	chest
useful	blessed
raw materials	creation to be enjoyed
functionary	creator
worker	lover
self explanatory	the whole soul
shrunken soul	full, charged soul
necessary	sufficient
monotony	adventure

It shocked me to see in list form how our society has moved away from something beautiful because God created it and looking at Creation and deciding it's not useful, so we get rid of it (ie euthanasia and abortion).  

Dr. Perrin closed by encouraging us to recover the lost wonder of childhood THROUGH our children! We should think of curriculum as art to be enjoyed and not to be slaves to the practical.  

If you want to learn more about this stuff, PLEASE Google these insanely smart people listed above and read their stuff for yourselves.  I do them no justice!!  I am eager to continue learning and growing as I seek out scholé in my life!