The Curriculum of Beauty
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” wrote the poet John Keats:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.
from Endymion (1818)
David:
Not to belabor the obvious, school
is ugly. There is just no way of getting around it.
It’s not just the exteriors, though there is that, too. Steel
gun-metal gray doors with little, wire-reinforced windows just a little
too high for little people to peer out, but well-positioned for those
looking in; concrete-slab sides with long rows of cheap aluminum-frame
windows, (they’re frosted in Hawaii;) in some communities, like those in
which I grew up, there are austere brick-sided windows with black iron
grates over the openings, whether to prevent breaking-and-entering or
breaking-and-leaving left entirely unclear.
To be sure, there are other possibilities. Yes, there is the upscale
neighborhood school in northern San Diego covered in purple
bougainvillea, or the suburban school in Scarsdale placed inside its
park-like setting. But even here, the inherent ugliness becomes evident
through the contrast between the starkness of the building and the hints
at the riotousness of nature trimmed back to what are perceived to be
permissible limits. (“Just cutting back the growth,” said the female
maintenance worker who couldn’t afford to live within 40 miles of the
place, with words teen-pregnant with meaning.)
In case you haven’t noticed, the innards are ugly, too. Oh,
occasionally, the architect hired for the job was allowed to make his
mark with an occasional skylight or a wood-paneled atrium (don’t look
for these in East Los Angeles) or a curved hallway later deemed unsafe
because the hall monitors can’t see from one end to the other. (There
are now mirrors mounted that allow the monitors to see around the
curves.) A teacher often attempts to dress up the place with children’s
art (sometimes allowed to stay up too long, becoming a source of
embarrassment rather than pride – I can recall that happening to me.)
But the “interrogation” rooms are all laid out in rectangles, with tile
floors like hospitals, miniature chairs and desks of a type and size
never seen anywhere else in the world are arrayed, eyes front, with
purposes as yet to be guessed at by their occupants.
(An aside: Lest you think the chairs are a minor issue, it is worth
remembering that Roman educators had a rule that one should never teach
either any longer than or in any way that a student couldn’t learn what
you were trying to get across while standing up. And if today you go to
the magnificent Coddrington Library at All’s Soul’s College at Oxford
University – this is the place that houses the elite of the elite, so
elite that they have no students, only fellows – you’ll quickly notice
that there are lecterns positioned around the library, but absolutely no
tables and no chairs.)
One is tempted to believe that school is ugly because the architects
and builders couldn’t get it together, or the school board doesn’t care
or they really aren’t that ugly after all. I’m willing to admit to the
possibility, though I would note that the basic design of the today’s
school was perfected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is
no accident. William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from
1889 to 1906 and probably the individual single-most responsible for the
standardization of American education as we know it today, saw the links
between poor school environments (bad air and all) and the “rightful”
purposes of education some hundred years ago. In The Philosophy of
Education, published in 1906 at the end of a long and (a-hem)
“distinguished” career, Harris wrote, “The great purpose of school can
be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the
physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop
the power to withdraw from the external world.” We could simply say
“ugly with a purpose,” – that which links the outer and inner
gruesomeness – and we wouldn’t be too far off.
There have been changes since I was in school, aesthetically ugly or
not. Back in the dark ages at Public School Number 131-¾ in New York,
during the school day, and both before and after, much of my educational
institution’s confines, as well as the inmates (whoops! students – sorry
for the slip,) were regulated by the fifth and sixth graders ourselves.
We were crossing monitors, schoolyard monitors, line monitors (for
entrance to and gathering in the school gymnasium,) stairway monitors
and hall monitors, each of us with our badges as patrolees (silver),
sergeants (green – I was one of those!), lieutenants (red) and captains
(blue) providing surveillance of our charges as some kind of cross
between spies and capos. Today, in contrast, a combination of teachers,
paraprofessionals, metal detectors and surveillance cameras have taken
up the task.
As I relate this to teacher friends of mine, they make clear that
trust has eroded since then. In one “good” elementary school, it was
reported to me that in order to exercise their natural functions,
instead of clutching hall passes, children are required to wear big
green visors on their heads with the word “BATHROOM” in capital letters
emblazoned across the front. Naturally, some kids will no longer use the
bathroom even when they need to, which must do wonders for their ability
to learn, perhaps replacing one form of retention with another. When I
mentioned this to a homeschool gathering in Woodinville, Washington
recently, a homeschooling mom, a former middle school teacher, piped up
that in the classroom next to hers, the teacher used to use an actual
toilet seat as the hall pass. (And she had never heard an objection from
a parent. Now that makes you think…) And just when I think I have found
the last word on the subject, along comes a Washington Post article
noting that there are schools that will actually give a student extra
credit for holding it in. I am not making this up!
The latest in classroom management strategy apparently now has the
teacher’s desk sitting behind the students, whereby, as if the
surveillance cameras weren’t enough, the teacher can see all without
being seen herself. No longer can little Susie attempt to hide in the
closet, Mikey throw a spitball or, heaven forbid!, Kenny actually read a
book while Mrs. Gorsenberry’s back is turned.
The strategy is reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a
new-fangled penal institution of the late 18th Century (several were
actually built in the U.S.) whereby inmates were isolated from one
another but subject to constant scrutiny by an observer who could remain
unseen. The Panopticon, this “seeing-without-being-seen,” represents the
essence of power, according to the French philosopher Michael Foucault,
for, ultimately, the power to dominate – both globally and individually
– rests, he states, on the differential possession of knowledge. So much
for free inquiry – watch for a ban on handheld mirrors coming to your
neighborhood school soon.
The sixty-four thousand dollar question (adjusted for inflation) is
whether unquestioned childhood acquiescence to constant surveillance,
while seemingly innocuous, is a telling prelude to a life of servility
and subservience, to an existence where one’s freedom can be liberally
trampled upon. Since I do not wish to be accused of conspiracy theories,
let me just ask the question and leave the answers to you.
Now the surveillance is directed at the teachers as well, and they
are not very happy campers. The new “scripted curricula,” such as those
being utilized in Chicago Public Schools, have teachers reading
instructions to children at preset times of the day in all schools for
the identical subject matter for that particular grade. An administrator
can know precisely what is happening in every classroom in the program
at any time on any particular day and deviation from the script can be
severely punished. Teachers’ understanding of, and response to, any
particular child’s learning needs is considered irrelevant or, worse, as
taking away from the application of the “education technology.”
School is ugly because it is, at bottom, an industrial process. It
can be gussied up and prettified in various ways, of course, but
basically the tool and die are used to stamp and shape the raw material
as it makes its way down the conveyor belt, with the imperfect or
miscast ingots kicked off the line to be reprocessed again (in ways
eerily reminiscent of the button molder in Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt) or
simply discarded as so much waste. When there is too much waste, there
is need for greater calibration of the machine, each moving part tested
and retested, honed so that the lathes can cut to finer and finer
tolerances.
Modern schools and industrial processes grew to maturity together,
alongside great military establishments, colonial and imperialist
enterprises, penal institutions and…Wal-Mart. If you desire to
understand the vernacular of schools and the culture of schools, you
don’t really have to look much further. They all speak the language of
domination and control, of extraction of resources, the shaping of raw
materials, standardization and process, inputs and outputs, and the
protection of God, the destiny of the nation and the pursuit of profit.
They work, too! If the ugliness of school makes you feel uncomfortable –
and it does me – or even talking about it makes you feel uncomfortable –
and it does me – it is because it should.
Don’t misread me. There are beautiful things in school. Children, of
course and, in many cases, teachers as well. Almost none of the latter
are in it for the money, but because, at least initially, they loved
children, or so they believed. The saddest truth I know about the
ugliness of school is how, over time, in the process of socialization,
beautiful children and beautiful teachers often begin to take on the
character of the institution itself.
* * * * *
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
John Keats, from Ode on a Grecian Urn
My older daughter Aliyah is a second-year student at Smith College in
Massachusetts. She recently returned from South India, documenting our
efforts at building houses with flood and tsunami victims, work that
began last December/January. (You can read about our work at
shantinik.blogspot.com). She would seem to be in training to be a
Renaissance male. Her studies have consisted of: music theory and
composition; intensive Italian; medieval philosophy; Renaissance and
Baroque vocal and chamber music; Dante; logic and, of course, that
without which no Renaissance male could possibly feel complete –
fencing. Beautiful things. If anyone knows of any job openings, please
let us know. Honestly, we are not really worried on that score – some of
the best minds in the country are working on time travel; and the lack
of Y chromosomes is just one of those nasty little details yet to be
worked out, and I doubt will prove disabling.
Anyhow, Aliyah shared with me that in her medieval philosophy class
they began the semester by reading Plotinus. Plotinus was an Egyptian
living in Rome in the Third Century, writing in Greek. He is very
important in the history of thought because he provides the bridge
between the philosophical worlds of medieval Christian Europe and the
Muslim Arabic world, where for many centuries his work was thought to
have been written by Aristotle. What I was reminded of (from way back in
my college days) was how Plotinus thought of the knowledge quest (to
understand Truth, or “The Principle,” as he called it) as, among other
things, an aesthetic one, a quest to understand the nature of beauty in
the process of becoming so oneself. He writes: “Beauty addresses itself chiefly to
sight; but there is a beauty for the hearing, too, as in certain
combinations of words and in all kinds of music, for melodies and
cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm
of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life,
in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is
the beauty of the virtues.”
The ancient neo-Platonist philosophers – Christian and Muslim alike –
believed that things were beautiful to the degree that they conformed to
some unseen ideal or “form,” whether it be the shape of an object or the
pattern of a life, or as Plotinus wrote so beautifully, “Harmonies
unheard in sound create the harmonies we hear, and wake the soul to the
consciousness of beauty.”
The philosophers – ancient, yes, and many of the more modern ones,
too – seem to agree that for the soul to be awakened to beauty, there
must already be imbedded in the soul that which can be awakened.
The contrary is true as well. A soul constantly confronted with
ugliness is, to quote Plotinus again – only because his words are so
magnificent – “trafficked away for an alien nature…If a man has been
immersed in filth or daubed with mud, his native comeliness disappears
and all that is seen is the foul stuff besmearing him.” But when the
soul sees anything of which it is truly kin, it thrills with an
immediate delight and is stirred to a sense of its own true nature.
Above all else, beauty embodies within itself a yearning, just as
knowledge represents an inner metamorphosis.
Our children have within themselves, or so I am led to believe by my
experience of them, an inner yearning for the beautiful, a potential
wonderment and a delicious longing and love and trembling waiting to be
empowered on its quest. This yearning is not likely to be fulfilled in a
high school hallway or on the shopping mall checkout line.
So what if we were to set as our task – as parents and as educators –
acquainting our children with the beautiful without and the cultivation
of the beautiful – the yearning – within? How might we go about our
homeschooling lives differently if we were to conceive of what we are
doing as primarily an aesthetic task?
Our children do need some basic skills to get along in the world.
Understanding and filling out a job application, adding up the grocery
bill and doing the laundry would likely rank high on anyone’s list.
Though I am sure the kids need to learn all three, I have grave doubts
as to whether, other than the last, they actually need to be taught
them. That could be the subject of another essay, or several. But what
if, even in the context of skill-building, we saw ourselves actively
attending to that yearning within?
First, perhaps, we can relearn with them to see beauty in the
creations of the human mind. No, I don’t mean art and music – or at
least not yet – but what would, on the face of it, seem more mundane,
such as mathematics. There is that beautiful space where children as
young as three, four, five or six come to realize that numeric
depictions – little squiggles etched on flat surfaces – can stand for
sounds (virtually all of your kids learned to read them without, and
prior to, phonics;) signs (Room #12 might not have anything “twelve”
about it, and it might just as well have been called “Room Gladiolus”;)
a series in time or in space (as in the first, second, and third day of
Christmas, or the six days of Biblical creation or the six serial but
not parallel wives of Henry VIII;) relationships theoretical (two is
half of four) or practical (half a candy bar is not as desirable as the
whole thing;) the names of quantities (as in two sisters or five
cousins) or in combining or unpacking groups in the arithmetic
operations – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
Often, the early confusion children experience in mathematics is not
about the arithmetic at all, but in coming to terms with knowing which
domain of signifiers the little squiggles are representing. How often I
remember classmates of mine who could compute baseball players’
batting averages in their heads to the thousandths of a point but seemed
totally stymied by the long division problem on the printed page.
If one survives the basic computational stages, there is even greater
beauty to be found in the higher order of things – the conception of the
number zero, the invention of base 10 and the design of geometric
solids, the elegance of proofs, the mystery of the Fibonacci sequence.
My experience has shown me that if I can help my children appreciate the
beauty to be found as they continue the travel excursion of the mind,
the computational difficulties that plague them from time to time
eventually simply disappear, virtually without resort to any of those
workbook pages whatsoever.
The process of science is one of those beautiful creations, though it
is sometimes easy to miss. Yes, there is a kind of beauty in the
explosion that results from shaking up the vinegar and baking soda, in
observing the butterfly garden or, for some, in dissecting a frog or
sheep’s brain, though I must admit the last one never did much for me.
There is beauty in the very multiplicity of the natural world in all its
glory, and learning the simple ecology of its parts – one can think of
it as nature’s symmetry – and how one fits into it.
But at the core of science is its childish character. There is
observation and, especially, the attempt to understand phenomena with
new eyes. And there is wonderment – as many scientists have noted, a
holdover from childhood – which provides the prime impetus for the
scientific quest. Most of all, however, the scientific method itself is
a celebration of errors, a religion of learning from one’s mistakes.
Without error – sometimes hard won – there is no progress in science.
The beauty of science lies not in the amalgamation of facts or in
attachment to them (to be regurgitated on demand on bubble tests, a
tried-and-true method for destroying scientific creativity) but in the
playing of hunches in constructing hypotheses, and in the sometimes
frustrating, sometimes rollicking, game of trial and error.
Einstein once said that more than 90 percent of the physics a person
ever learns, is learned before the age of three. I like to think of this
experience of learning as the beautiful scientific symphony of the
sandbox.
There is the beauty of the arts or, rather, one might want to say,
two kinds of beauty – that inherent in the processes of creation and
that of the creations themselves. The key here is to ensure that our
children have the experience of both before them. Many children decide
they want to learn music or dance (or sculpture or painting) because
they have heard beautiful music or seen beautiful works of art. A
problem I have often witnessed in practice, however, is that once
children begin what is often the long and slow process of acquiring
musical or artistic skills, not enough attention is paid to continuing
their exposure to the best of the domain. After all, that is where they
hope they are headed! Lessons may be important, although remember that
it is not all that common that children will continue this experience on
into adulthood, and the number who seek to do so as a profession is a
tiny fraction indeed. So the experience of beauty, and the knowledge
that it requires time, energy and effort to produce, is what is
important. If there are music lessons, ask the teacher to end each and
every lesson with her playing something that is beautiful. Go to
concerts; purchase compact discs. I even think it is a good idea to have
your child choose a piece of music that is well above her level of
playing and just have it around the house. If your child is a budding
visual artist, bring art books home from the library and read them
together. And visit not only museums, but galleries, where the living
traditions are alive in the marketplace.
When I was growing up, however, the imbalance for me went in the
opposite direction. I was taken to many museums (hey, I’m a New Yorker!)
but I had no clue how the paintings and sculptures were fashioned – how
the pigments were applied, colors produced, perspective created, stone
worked. There was nothing human about them; they might just as well have
been artifacts from Mars.
The same was pretty much true for music as well. As those who are
familiar with me either personally or through my writing will testify, I
have spent much of our homeschooling days correcting this oversight for
myself, and I can assure you that it takes a courage and a fortitude
that I might have had greater capacity for when I was younger. (I might
have proved more adept as well, but that’s beside the point.)
There is beauty also to be found in human relationships. It starts
with the beauty of families, of each individual playing an utterly
unique role in that whole which should always be greater than the sum of
its parts. As a sub-group within the entire society, this is something
at which homeschoolers should be particularly adept. Or at least we try.
But there is so much more. The beauty of relationships transcends
chronological age. Indeed, if there is a violence, an inherent ugliness
at the heart of school that goes beyond its compulsion, it lies in the
arbitrary and enforced grouping of human beings by chronological age. It
is a social practice that, in former times or in other cultures, we
would dismiss as downright silly, if not also ugly, though the
proliferation of “adult communities” may to some extent represent the
seepage of this unnatural notion into our collective lives. (Note that
anyone under 55 – “pre-adults!” – does not qualify; we are, or were, at
least as it applies to me, simply post-pubescents, though I find
something strangely satisfying in the notion that we are still children
until our own kids are grown.)
Our children need the opportunity to experience the beauty of
relationships with people unlike themselves – with elders who can share
with them stories of what has gone before and who imbue objects from the
past with meaning; with people from different racial and ethnic and
religious communities who bring their own histories, culture, rituals
and ways of being and seeing to a present moment that is shared; with
people with different abilities and disabilities who have found through
courage and perseverance ways to move forward in a world that often
seems ill-constructed for them; with older children and youth who can
provide role models into which our kids come to understand they can grow
and with younger children with whom they can share what they know.
If you are not spending as much time thinking about ways to help your
children develop these beautiful relationships as you are about their
reading, chances are you may be robbing them of one of the great gifts
of homeschooling. Take this as an invitation to enlarge your home (and
your heart) not simply by adding rooms but by adding people to inhabit
it.
Finally, there is moral and ethical beauty. Only so much can be done
by lecture, even aided by our churches, mosques, synagogues and meeting
houses. The beauty of the virtues is best realized through the
experience of those who personify them. Seek out not only opportunities
for service in your community or your world, but contact for your
children with those who work, in their own ways, big or small, for
peace, justice and equity, often at risk to themselves or in sacrifice
of their own creature comfort.
You can find them in books; 10- and 11-year-olds often love
biographies about those who will break beyond the social norms of their
society and culture in striving for a greater good. But such people are
frequently to be found in your community as well, if you keep your eyes
out for them.
I suggest tea parties, lots and lots of tea parties. Not dinner –
you’ll think too much about the food and not enough about your guest.
Make it a rule that the tea party is not to be used as an excuse to
clean the house! Invite for tea the person from your church who leaves a
comfortable job to work among AIDS victims in Africa. Meet up with the
people who organize the Muslim-Christian (or Muslim-Jewish) dialogue
group in your town. Befriend those who are striving to sustain native
cultural heritages. Seek out the “giraffes” – those willing to stick out
their necks for the public good – and make sure your kids learn to seek
them out as well and learn to appreciate the beauty of risk-taking and
sacrifice.
Where do you find ‘em? Well, they are all around you. But if you feel
really stuck, gather three homeschooling friends and regularly watch the
“communities” or “neighborhood” section of your newspaper. When you find
one you think you’d like to have tea with, if all else fails, either
call the newspaper or use your phone book. This will take a little extra
nerve, but once you’ve done it once or twice, you’ll find out how easy
it really is.
You don’t have to make your children sit through it (though, chances
are, your 10- to 12-year-olds will love to participate.) Just make sure
they are around the house and see you doing it. You’ll be modeling
behavior regarding what you value, and worst come to worst, you and your
friends have had some nice tea parties with some interesting people whom
you might never have met otherwise. Who knows? You might end up running
a salon (not a “saloon” but a “salon”) and become known as the Gertrude
Stein of the neighborhood! Who knows where else it might lead you or the
kids?
This, then, is the curriculum of beauty: beauty in the creations of
the human mind and the pursuits of the intellect; in science and the
natural world; in the world of the arts; in human relationships; in the
conduct of life and ethical values and actions. Plot them out for
yourselves and in your homeschooling lives, and see what you can do to
enhance them, not only for your children, but for yourselves as well.
The curriculum of beauty will add dimensionality to our lives. If our
children become acquainted with the forms of beauty, they will learn to
freely quest after them, because they conform to an inner yearning, or
as Plotinus would say, “the soul seeking after itself.” They will find
the beauty that is within and enshrine it in that temple, which they are
in themselves, for all to see.
One last thing must be said about the curriculum of beauty. Unlike
the ugliness of school, it can know no coercion. Whether you witness the
great works of art or listen to music, or examine the processes of
science, or look to the beauty of relationships, or of character or of
virtue, you quickly come to recognize that there is no beauty that is
not born in, and does not embody, the spirit of freedom and the
expectation of it.
And what’s in it for you? Simply the recognition that the great
teachers have always had, to quote the inaugural address of Ruth Simmons
on assuming the presidency of Brown University: “Nothing is so
beautiful, nothing so moving, as the observance of a mind at work.”
The kids might get to teach us a thing or two and, in the spirit of
freedom, we get to bask in the afterglow. And so they join us in the
great journey, to quote T.S. Eliot:
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we
started.
And know the place for the first time."
~ T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”, The Four Quartets
* * * * *
Joyce:
Thank you so much, David, for this deeply moving piece. I so
appreciate the way you lay forth information, layered between and laced
with vibrant experiential tales, entrancing your reader and making your
points unforgettable (that poor lad wearing the green visor with
“BATHROOM” on it, walking the endless school hall!) Telling stories is
vitally important, because each one finds its own resonance in
individual listeners.
So now, because of your “Curriculum of Beauty,” I have a confession
to make. I have always told my children and my students, and even
written in homeschooling articles, that I personally had loved my
school experience! But reading your words prompted me to reflect about
why and how I had loved school…and frankly you forced me to realize (to
my shock) that I hadn’t. I didn’t love school; I loved learning. I was
just another school survivor, albeit very successful in terms of grades
and honors (my self-defense mechanism,) who fled the clanging
steel-reinforced doors each day gasping for air and nutrition. These I
found in the dusky library next door, or in the stacks of borrowed books
piled on my desk or by the bedside in my comfortable bedroom. That green
room housed my pride and joy: my father’s walnut desk, which flipped
open to reveal cubbyholes that I neatly filled with my own poetry...and
(blessings) then locked it with a key!
For me, solace lay in escaping the dark brick walls and that peculiar
school smell of William Hall High School in West Hartford, Connecticut –
yes, still almost 50 years later this old edifice is considered to house
one of the best high schools in the nation. The smell, the dim halls
(always slightly threatening) confined my lungs and gave me my first
taste of asthma and the fear of being unable to breathe.
Almost daily and as often as possible, I ran away to the library to
sink down on the floor in the stacks, smelling the books, finding my
dearest friends there, waiting for me – Sophocles and Sappho, T.S. Eliot
and Bucky Fuller. As clearly as I know my present room, I remember the
sweet, dusty smell of the old books, the sound of my shoes in the stacks
(which I tried to stifle) and the crisp new feel of each month’s edition
of Poetry magazine, which seemed to be there just for me – no one else
seemed to crease the cover. Truly, young people find their friends and
compatriots without regard to age grades!
So I have to comment that you chose to end your “The Curriculum of
Beauty” with my favorite four lines of poetry – ever since I heard T.S.
Eliot read them aloud in his dry, scratchy voice back in the late 1950s,
in a hall at Brown University. In spite of all the barrenness that Eliot
saw in the late ‘30s and through World War II, he affirmed the hope that
we would at some point arrive where we could “know the place for the
first time.”
Wait a minute now! Isn’t this what we are all yearning for? Surely
this was my constant longing throughout my teen years when I felt
distinctly as though I had ended up on the wrong planet, that I must
have gotten off the elevator on the wrong floor, that this messy
place/business/life couldn’t be where I belonged! Now I recognize that
many young people (indeed, perhaps most) have this same sense of
horrible disconnect with life as they are required to live it during
those daunting, dislocated years.
Yet somehow they/we survive. Somehow in spite and not because of
these institutions of “learning,” our culture produces (some) creative
individuals willing to undertake responsibility for discovering and
developing a “self” and for the consequent need to acknowledge and
respect the “other,” whomever that may be. What a miracle a fresh person
is! How many are wasted!!
Doesn’t Plotinus’ “Principle” still hold sway? I think so. I have
worked with young people ages 15 to 25 all of my life, and the
percentage of them who have expressed to me an intense yearning to
discover the depth and passion and purpose of life is extremely high.
When I think back to some of my most exquisitely and, indeed,
sensually satisfying moments, they are those rare but powerful, really
really BIG experiences when thought went so deep that I could literally
feel the synapses firing off in my brain. For me, that was ecstasy. It
defined being alive.
After reading and rereading your article, David, I have to admit to
myself that I have no recollection of one of those major synapse
explosions happening in a classroom...not even at Brown. It was in that
old library, or sitting up late in bed reading in an utterly quiet room,
when those synapses fired off. And that experience is what I loved, and
which motivated me to graduate first in my class in order to earn the
scholarships to allow me to continue my secret rites of relationships in
a university library.
This was a heavy realization for me, David. You forced me back into
William Hall High, back even to my elementary school in Toronto Canada,
back into the lines, the suspicions, the jostling and the oh-so-rare
moment of inspiration or compassion from a teacher! My joy in learning
had nothing to do with those schools, and everything to do with my
secret life outside their walls. This was a profoundly important
personal realization for me, David, and I am grateful to you for
prodding and prompting it.
David Albert is a homeschooling father, writer and speaker. He
is the author of a number of books, including And the Skylark Sings with
Me, Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery, and Have Fun. Learn
Stuff. Grow. Homeschooling and the Curriculum of Love. He lives, works,
and writes in Olympia, Washington.
Joyce Reed is the parent of five
successful home educated college grads. She served for 14 years
as Associate Dean of The College at Brown University where she
reached out to homeschooled teens. After retiring, she began
consulting with primarily international and homeschooling
families seeking to attend college.
