So I posted a week or so ago my thoughts on our school year next year, but even as I wrote it I still felt a little unsettled about it. It seemed like what I outlined would be fine, but it didn’t feel quite right for us. I continued to think about it and read, and I came to the realization that it just felt like too much busywork. I felt like I was focusing too much on filling buckets and not enough on lighting fires, to use the old phrase (where does that phrase come from? I can’t remember). I have no doubt that what I was planning on doing would be perfectly adequate (if not more so!) but I don’t think it would have been something that would carry through the rest of our day so much. It would be something we would do in the morning, finish, then move on into the rest of our day with the knowledge that at least the education checkbox was firmly marked. I’m not sure it would do much to change our perspective of the world, or give us those little “aha!” moments that help us to see the underlying connections between all that surrounds us.

I started going to back to my memories of For the Children’s Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay, because this is the book that probably best encapsulates my desires for my children. I also started re-reading it today just to make sure my memories are accurate. Here’s a few quotes which I thought I would share:

Education is an adventure that has to do with central themes, not the particular packages a given generation puts them into. It’s about people, children, life, reality!

The truly educated person has only had many doors of interest opened. He knows that life will not be long enough to follow everything through fully.

It [education] does not mean that adults think of a child as a blank sheet of paper on which they imprint their ideas, impressions, and knowledge. Neither does it mean leaving the child unattended like a weed growing in a sidewalk. It is a balanced understanding of education as the provision of possibilities for a person to build relationships with a vast number of things and thoughts.

So what we’ve decided to do may seem like a somewhat strange leap to the modern (post-modern?) mind, but if you hear me out a little bit I think it will make sense. Matt and I have decided that we’re going to follow, to the best of our ability, a classical education. Not a neoclassical education, as popularized by The Well Trained Mind (although I still have a great respect for this book and Bauer, and I know I’ll be using her book as a reference for some things as well as some of her other materials) but instead something more along the lines of what Simmons describes in Climbing Parnassus and Cambell lays out in The Latin Centered Curriculum.

I believe that the classical education is our best bet, so to speak, of living up to the passages I quoted above. I believe that centering our education on this path will give us a firm foundation of logic and rhetoric, and will help us raise children who can think analytically, write coherently and persuasively, and most importantly will be life-long learners of all that is important, true, and good. I believe that a classical education will be true to Charlotte Mason’s principles as well, because it focuses deeply on the most important details of a formal education while leaving plenty of time for playing outdoors, free reading, hobbies, and learning life skills. It isn’t so filled with busywork that we have to do school from 9-4 (as one homeschooling mother described in a recent Veritas newsletter). It is a rigorous and deep course of study (”multum non multa”, not many things, but much - Pliny the Younger), but this does not have to be synonymous with time-consuming. I feel like a classical education is one that is distilled down to the very essence of what education is and how best to form and expose a mind to all the wonders that are out there in this amazing world. I feel that this course of study will best allow us to educate the whole person - not because it encapsulates every little bit of learning a person might need (whatever that list might look like!) but instead because it is focused on the good and true and allows time for everything in its place.

I was also going to do a little writing on what exactly we’re going to do next year, but I’m afraid I’ve run out of time. So I’ll leave you with this great quote from C.S. Lewis:

To lose what I owe to Plato and Aristotle would be like the amputation of a limb. Hardly any lawful price would seem to me too high for what I have gained by being made to learn Latin and Greek.