I finished reading Susan Scaeffer MacCaulay's book For the Children's Sake today. I deeply appreciated her message: do what you can.
She writes,
"[Can you give] your home so much vitality, [and] life through your creative effort that it becomes the 'center of gravity' in a child's life?"
I don't know if I can: but what is homeschooling about, at its heart, if it isn't to make the home the child's "centre of gravity?"
Along with improving my children's academic opportunities, what I want, what I have always wanted, is to make our home and our beliefs the place from which the children go out to live their lives in this big, bad, mean ol' world.
Miss Mason's philosophy of education, as MacCaulay reports it, was based upon her view of children as persons and an understanding of education as an instrument of 1) the atmosphere of the environment, 2) the discipline of habit and 3) the presentation of living ideas. These are taken from the 5th principle found here. These concepts are far richer than these mere words can possibly indicate.
Briefly (and inadequately) the child learns from the atmosphere around him or her. Is it harsh? Is it welcoming? Is there someone available to listen to the child? I was so convicted several times of my own failings here, that I cried as I read through this part. In many ways, I am so stressed by our curriculum and the need to get through everything that I am providing a very poor environment, indeed.
Schaeffer MacCaulay also had wonderful things to say on behalf of Miss Mason about habit--mainly, that, if I read through my red-rimmed eyes properly, "habit" is Miss Mason's way of talking about training the will. I need to reflect on this a whole lot more before I know what to think of it.
As for education being a life, that seems to me to be self-evident. The result of this maxim, however, is that all books should be living books; books written by people who inject their very spirit and enthusiasm and love for their subject into their works. There is obviously more to this concept, reams and reams have been written about "Living Books" vs. "twaddle" but I'm not going there at the moment.
Rather, I want to explore Schaeffer-MacCaulay's caveat: do what you can.
What can I do?
The first thing that leaps to mind, is, no, not going outside, but turning off the T.V during the week. I should clarify--we don't have T.V. per se, we have a TV screen which plays DVD's and videos (and the latter can't be rewound without great frustration). Still, the kids, especially my son, watch too much. My husband doesn't quite understand my hatred of it. He agrees that it should be on "less in the summer." For a few evenings now, I've had the impulse to go in and turn it off and just read to them from The Railway Children. I am very frustrated by our little time we have for reading aloud. So, why haven't I done it?
The usual excuses, I'm tired, I don't want to fight with them, I need a break. After supper and before bed is the only time I have in my day which I can fully claim for myself. I can read, plan, hang out here on the computer. (I should do dishes, laundry and cleaning but you can see how an introvert may be relunctant to scarifice down-time?)
It has a lot to do with the disfunctionality of bed-time around here (One must sit with each child until they fall asleep. My boy doesn't sleep until mid-night and the girl isn't far behind). But perhaps, just perhaps, I can take a half hour after bath-time and read to them. Perhaps. I could certainly try that tonight.
As for other aspects of a CM education, I really need to think it over. I'm a Big Picture sort of gal. I have to understand it and think about it before I implement the practices which facilitate it. But I want to leave you with one more excerpt from Miss Mason which grabbed me by the throat. It may just be school at our house. And what a waste if it is. What a pervesion of my goals! The quote is long. I apologise.
I had at the time just begun to teach, and was young and enthusiastic in my work. It was to my mind a great thing to be a teacher; it was impossible but that the teacher should leave his stamp on the children. His own was the fault if anything went wrong, if any child did badly in school or out of it. There was no degree of responsibility to which youthful ardour was not equal. But, all this zeal notwithstanding, the disappointing thing was, that nothing extraordinary happened. The children were good on the whole, because they were the children of parents who had themselves been brought up with some care; but it was plain that they behaved very much as ''twas their nature to.' The faults they had, they kept; the virtues they had were exercised just as fitfully as before. The good, meek little girl still told fibs. The bright, generous child was incurably idle. In lessons it was the same thing; the dawdling child went on dawdling, the dull child became no brighter. It was very disappointing. The children, no doubt, 'got on'––a little; but each one of them had the makings in her of a noble character, of a fine mind, and where was the lever to lift each of these little worlds? Such a lever there must be. This horse-in-a-mill round of geography and French, history and sums, was no more than playing at education; for who remembers the scraps of knowledge he laboured over as a child?
From Home Education, pp. 98-100 (my italics).
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