Anne Marie asked for an update.
I posted about a year ago when we realized that no local private school could educate our daughter in the Catholic way we envision. I posted again last fall after we started with the Classical Liberal Arts Academy ("CLAA"). This winter I posted on my daughter's studies in some detail and discussed CLAA.
As we get to the end of this first year, here is what we have accomplished:
1. We have taken personal responsibility for our daughter's education instead of contracting out the task. Educare means "to lead." Each day we make things happen. Usually she is working through lessons she downloads from CLAA and taking tests and quizzes online, yet we are regulars at the public library. She reads voraciously. We take field trips to museums and other attractions. We watch movies and educational films.
2. We are a Catholic family. We read Magnificat together. We read the Old Testament together. We pray novenas and rosaries together. My wife takes my daughter to weekday Mass often, and sometimes I join them. The CLAA Catechism course is refreshingly content-oriented. We take my daughter to catechism classes at our parish (taught by an able friend), and she also attends sacramental preparation classes I offer to older kids and to adults. We close the day with Catholic prayers.
3. She is learning Latin. She is very able in languages, and CLAA is teaching her the basics of grammar: the declensions, the cases, parts of speech, etc. We are pleased with her Latin program. We are also pleased that her memory work so far has been from John's Gospel.
4. She is learning to use mathematics to organize the universe. Her arithmetic curriculum is geared not towards engineering, but towards the study of logic and philosophy. Our utilitarian culture struggles to justify the teaching of mathematics for any other reason but to balance a checkbook or construct a bridge. Saint Augustine never designed a ship, but he understood higher mathematics for its greatest good.
5. She can already discuss the history of the world from the ancients to the classical Greeks and Romans to Medieval Europe to modern times. The World Chronology course traces the threads of Western culture and the Church back to the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans in a way which would please John Henry Newman. The course begins by discussing the great epics and subdivides the epics into grand events and lives.
6. She can find places by latitude and longitude. Thus, World Geography serves as an introduction to Geometry. She is learning physical geography, but I can see how it will develop into lessons in cultural geography.
7. This year she has read C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, L.M. Alcott, L. Frank Baum, Jules Verne, Charles Dickins, Jack London, Mark Twain, Bernard Evslin, Walter Lord, James McPherson, and others in addition to her Trivium and Quadrivium. Her reading lists are not made by a committee or some curriculum supervisor whose literacy we doubt, but by us. She is imagining through the authors who taught us to imagine. When I want to make a point, I can use our common readings as a reference.
8. She has an excellent play group of homeschoolers and has made two close friends. These girls are healthy and wholesome, as are their parents. My wife enjoys the mothers and their children.
9. She continues to study piano and art, and she does gymnastics, shoots BB guns, and plays softball. (We will get her back to swimming and tennis this summer. Because she is a one and only child and we live in town, we sign her up for lots of activities.) Art remains her favorite. We try to teach her art history through tours of churches and old houses, and we also like those pieces on art history in the back of the monthly Magnificat.
10. We give her a rich life with boundaries and order. I used to ride my bicycle all over my neighborhood. My mother hired babysitters she did not personally know. I spent nights at homes of people my parents scarcely knew. That was before the very idea of propriety was abolished by the inmates who now run the asylum. I will be frank: We don't trust our own baby-boomer generation with our child. The institutions which the counter-culture claimed were corrupt in 1970 are now "reformed" and almost worthless. We have forgotten the Permanent Things, and until we quit suppressing them and their echoes, our children will not be safe from many of their neighbors. In the meantime, we will have to look to the Benedictines and others to teach us how to live within boundaries, a loving order, and a sacramental lifestyle.
So what is for next year?
We want to build on what we have started. We believe we have the foundation for the sort of education we hoped to give her within the family life we wanted to share when we married.
We will continue with CLAA. There is no perfect curriculum, just as there is no perfect preparation for war. We believe Latin is fundamental to a proper education, yet cannot adequately teach it ourselves. CLAA is the solution. We have good educational resources and experience in the other subjects, but so far we are happy with CLAA.
CLAA is growing and will get increasing attention and scrutiny. William Michael, the founder, writes about dozens of topics from classical education to parenting to organic farming and is willing to draw fire and return fire. I do not know him and have never met him. In substance, I agree with most things he writes, though I come from a school of diplomatic Southern Episcopalians. He says things in ways I would not, but he has his vocation, and I have mine. He is active in his parish and diocese and with the Missionaries of the Poor. He just announced he is pursuing a vocation as a deacon. We pray for him because he wants to be a warrior for the Church. He has a great desire to serve and to rear a holy family.
When our daughter has completed this first homeschool year in a few weeks, we will look carefully and critically at each part of her learning. We desire two things: that she be grounded in the sacramental life and history of the Church, and that she be prepared to rebuild Western civilization as those advance who seek to destroy our patrimony.
[Picture above of Saint Augustine of Hippo, 354-430.]
2 comments:
I have to say, as someone who was educated in the public schools for K-12, this curriculum you have implemented for your daughter sounds wonderful. I wish I had had such educational opportunities when I was in my formative years. You are providing her with a treasure greater than any mere material object. Great work!
Thanks TQ.
As fate, or perhaps God, would have it, one of our fellow pilgrims to the Holy Land knows Bill Williams personally, he tutored their children prior to launching CLAA, and three of their five children are in CLAA this year. His wife is a home schooling mom of fifteen years and has used a number of curriculums including Kolby and Seaton. I’m hoping to pick her brain too.
“We desire two things: that she be grounded in the sacramental life and history of the Church, and that she be prepared to rebuild Western civilization as those advance who seek to destroy our patrimony.”
This so resonates with our hopes for our son.
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