Dominion Family

The Circe Conference is not a curriculum fair. It is not even mainly for homeschoolers. I think this was the 6th Circe conference and they have names like The Celebration of Beauty, The Celebration of Order etc. This year’s conference was The Celebration of Knowledge.

Andrew Kern is the president and founder of Circe. He has written The Lost Tools of Writing. He is also the definition of grace. He seemed to know every person’s name at the conference. When he speaks he does not use the serrated edge. When I walked by Andrew the first day of the conference he looked at my name tag and said,
” Hi, Cindy. Did Tim get to come?” I was dumbfounded. I had only spoken to him briefly on the phone a couple of days before the conference.

Andrew’s definition of classical education speaks volumes about the man and the conference.

“Classical education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness and beauty so that, in Christ, a student is better able to know, glorify and enjoy God.”

The reason I felt so refreshed by the conference was that I came away feeling I needed to do less with my children not more. I didn’t get the usual conference panic that I was totally failing and would need to buy an entire catalog worth of products to fix the mess.

One evening in the hotel lobby, The Wild Bunch, was discussing what homeschool moms discuss: how we had all utterly failed with our older children, or something along those lines. Andrew came up and reminded us that our failures were pathways to God’s grace. Failure is a part of life and a part of school and a means of grace.

The conference was truly an epiphany for me. For years I have been hanging out at the edges of classical education and yet I didn’t feel I was truly classical in my approach. I didn’t really like the whole idea of the stages being rigid. I didn’t like reducing the early grades to singing silly songs. The Dorothy Sayers’ essay was discussed frequently at the conference and not denigrated in any way but it was acknowledged that perhaps in our search for a system we had missed Dorothy’s meaning.

The day I left for the conference Rick asked me a question that became the focal point of the conference for me. Somewhere in our conversations on Wednesday he asked me something like, “How do you fit classical education, especially Latin, in the agrarian model?” At least that is what I heard with my global brain.
When I left for the conference I knew there was an answer, I just didn’t know what it was. By the end of the first session, the universe in my mind quit tottering.

I have never wanted to put myself in the classical box. I have always felt that while I was drawn to classical ideas my homeschool wasn’t truly classical. Also if you label yourself classical or Charlotte Mason or anything of that nature, people conjure up all kinds of erroneous pictures of what you are doing. I came home from the conference more fully agrarian and more fully classical, and the dichotomy in my mind was gone.

I will be out of town again for a couple of days. When I come back I hope to make the agrarian classical connection and blog through my notes.

One of the main conference themes was leisure. Another was educating boys. I hope that I can encourage you by sharing my notes. I will also tell you what books I bought.

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Can you believe I am still doing preliminary stuff from the Circe Conference?

Another member of the Wild Bunch, Lynne S is blogging through her notes. I don’t want to read her newest post until I get my notes up. Then we can compare. I can’t figure out how to use links in this new setting so just check out my sidebar for Lynne from Classed [Edit: Link above helpfully added by the administrator]. Every summer I do extensive homeschool planning. This summer I was so discouraged about a few homeschool issues, I decided to totally drop any planning and wait on the Lord. I am so glad that I didn’t come home from Circe with a whole slew of plans to scrap or change.

In the meantime, it looks like we may be moving to Tennessee quickly. Maybe, maybe not, which does rather complicate homeschooling.

Here is the list of items I bought, without links, at the Circe conference.

How to Behave and Why by Munro Leaf. This is a reprint of an older children’s book. This is a book for children about how to be honest, fair, strong and wise. My 2 little boys love it already.

The Way of Ingnorance by Wendell Berry

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. A book I have been meaning to read forever.

Home Economics by …….Wendell Berry.

Poetic Knowledge by James Taylor. I am terribly excited about this book. Dr Taylor was not the head-in-the-clouds type I imagined him to be. I expect this book to be infinitely practical and inspiring. Although, I am brimful of inspiration right now.

Climbing Parnassus by Tracy Lee Simmons. I hope as I read through this we can open up the discussion of: why Latin.

I also bought the complete conference cd’s and hope to relisten to many lectures and also hear the ones I missed. Only problem, there are 30 lectures on my set. I am not likely to fit that in any time soon.

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In Exordium 1, I was immediately aware that I had not spent my money in vain. Andrew Kern kicked off the conference with a stirring talk. Here are a few highlights:

• Knowledge is transformative.
• We are created to know God.
• Adam knew Eve. This was not merely physical.
• The solution to life: Active Love.
• Active love embraces reality.
• Education should not lead to cynicism.
• Cynicism equals death.
• Classical education can produce cynicism and arrogance. It should produce humility.
• The modern mind cannot know since there is no connection between thinking and living.
• Nominalism is the idea that ideas cannot be known.
• Will Durant ” Men ceased to dispute and started to search.” Abandoning authority.
• Knowledge is what the 5 senses give us.
• Education is not efficient.
• Relationships are not efficient.
• Embrace wth the soul the world God has given us.
• Science is now the slave of politics.
• Plato ” Grace and Harmony are the twin sisters of goodness and virtue.”
• Do what you can.
• Embrace limits.

Suggested reading: Wendell Berry Standing by Words.

Whew. No wonder I loved that session. I was reminded of Richard Weaver’s notes on generalization in The Southern Tradition at Bay.

It is useless to argue against generalization, a world without generalization would be a world without knowledge. The chaotic and fragmentary thinking of the modern age is due largely to an apprehensiveness, inspired by empirical methods, over images, wholes, general truths so that we are intimidated from reaching the conclusions we must live by.

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The question immediately arises: If I educate according to the principles of true classical education will that look anything like what currently passes for education? If I choose to prepare my children for life, can I afford to ignore current preparation standards for college?

My heart tells me that I must break free of societal norms in order to achieve a truly classical education. My current position is to do what I want to do with my children and when the time comes learn how to translate that into educationese if the child desires to attend college. I do not feel our current home education will keep them from learning in college but I must be able to communicate that to colleges.

In visiting Bryan College this weekend, the financial aid officer suggested that the boys take 3 SATs and 3 ACTs for financial aid purposes. This immediately made me think that my best bet for college financial aid was to make high school a time of test preparation. And so on the wings of the Circe conference I am escorted back down to these troublous times.

And then I read in Jayber Crow:

“The school had eight grades. If it had taught the grades all the way through high school, maybe it wouldn’t have interested me so much. The future presses hard upon a high school, and somehow qualifies and diminishes it.”

Don’t we all feel it?

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Ok, I am going to take a short break from notes to beg you to go over and read Dr Richard Hawley’s article, A Man’s Life: When Men Are Free to be Good. Richard Hawley was the Circe Institute’s Paideia prize winner this year.

As a mother of 8 boys, the first sentence reached out and grabbed me.

The most passionate working men, the most devoted fathers and husbands, the men most willing to serve without material reward, have been those who, as schoolboys, were most inclined to press safe boundaries.

Both of my older boys pressed safe boundaries and we let them. I can’t tell you the frustration other parents expressed to us as we let our boys grow up. When our 18 yos moved to NJ and then Ft Lauderdale in order to do what God had clearly called him to do, we faced opposition. When our son drove off into a hurricane we wondered if we were crazy. According to all the current principles of raising sons, we were insane. To tell the truth it was extremely difficult to let go of our sons but it had to be done. Hindsight is helpful. Both of my older boys are thriving Christian men, while many of their peers are still living at home, asking dad if they can go to the movies. It is not rebellious for a son to desire to make his way in the world. You won’t read a biography of a great man where that didn’t occur. We should not let fear drive our relationships.

We have, by no means, arrived in our raising of sons. It is a tricky business in this culture. A mother’s best tool is prayer. Her worst fear should not be that her boys will get hurt or dirty but that she will be what Andrew Kern calls a helicopter mom, hovering over her children, most especially her sons.

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I realized something last night. My epiphany at the Circe Conference was not because I was hearing new ideas or ideas I had never thought before, the epiphany came in that I was hearing Classical educators say what I had been thinking for so many years. Classical education is not about which college you go to.
I had been quite aware that the 12 agrarians in I’ll Take My Stand were speaking of Classical education.

I knew that agrarianism was non-utilitarian and education should be also.

Wendell Berry says in the preface to Home Economics,” I keep returning to it, I think because the study of connections is an endless fascination, and because the understanding of connections seems to me an indispensable of humanity’s self-defence.”

Ignorance is the inability to make connections.

I am slowly trying to shed the ignorance of missing connections.

This weekend I relistened twice to Andrew Kern’s Exordium 1 speech. I am feeling dreadful that my anonymous commenter thinks, from my notes, that truly knowledge puffs up because what Andrew said was not a bunch of intellectual gobbedly-gook. I think my commenter would have been very happy with Andrew’s original talk. After hearing the CD again I am convinced my notes are more confusing than helpful.

I am now sure that I am unable to capture what Andrew did say. I can heartily recommend buying that particular CD.

The last 15 minutes of the tape on embracing limits is worth the price of the CD. Andrew does say on the CD that knowledge puffs up. He says the only thing worse than classical education is the other kind. He even jokes about living on the farm instead of classically educating, then he says he is joking, then he says, “Sorta.”

During the course of the conference at least 2 college professors called our current university system a wasteland. Vigen Guroian stunned the audience by offering no hope for the current system. All these things are why it is so frustrating when the newborn Christian classical movement fights for recognition by these dinosaurs.

I hope to discuss Professor Guroian’s lecture next. He was a hobbit with a twinkle in his eyes.

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Don’t miss this repost at MMV.

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For some reason, my summer has been just as busy as Carmon’s. Since returning from Circe I haven’t had the time that I had hoped to have to write out my notes, re- listen to the lectures and read my new stack of books.

Today we are out the door again. This time for a quick trip to Tennessee to let the boys meet the baseball coach at Bryan College. I am taking the little guys over to look at the house a family has offered to rent to us. We weren’t expecting this development but we hope to be renting this house which is smack dab in the middle of a huge farm, smack dab in the middle of nowhere. We can hardly wait for our 5 year old to meet the 3 dogs that live on the farm.

I may yet win my agrarian bona fides.

I will be listening to The Abolition of Man by CS Lewis in the van and hopefully Vigen Guroian’s wonderful lecture on why business majors should take literature courses. Did I tell you that Vigen wore a pink shirt, wrinkled pale suit, navy blue socks and green & yellow striped bowtie? He has a mass of silver hair which he ruffles appropriately when speaking. He looks to be a cross between an absent-minded Professor and a hobbit.  Which reminds me: John Mason Hodges looked like Gimli or at least John Rhys-Davies. You won’t find this sort of reporting  from Circe anywhere else on the web.

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Patti from Classed had an excellent post tying the Circe conference into her reading of The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul.  Patti mentioned Jacques Ellul at the conference where several other Jacques were also discussed

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So far I have re-listened to Andrew’s Exordium I, Vigen’s Exordium II and Laura Berquist’s Last Things First. Neither Andrew, Vigen or Laura are rhetorically superior speakers even though they have pleasant voices. Nevertheless, I highly recommend all 3 talks to anyone thinking of purchasing individual CDs. Judging from the discussion on Classed, Laura’s talk would be the most controversial in that she suggests delaying many things that classical educators hold dear, most especially The Great Books. Still I have always respected Laura and love both editions of her Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum. She comes from a Catholic & Charlotte Mason background and she is the infinitely practical mother of a large family.

I am quite sure that I will be listening to all 3 talks over and over again and plan to listen to Vigen again today or Monday. I think I will live blog my notes while I am listening.

We started school this week. Day 1 I had meetings with each child, Day 2 we had a field trip to TN and day 3 the children began reading, writing and arithmetic. The Circe talks have definitely affected how I plan to go about things this year. We hope to start school in earnest on Monday.

• I do not plan on pushing Latin or grammar on my 3rd grader but plan to fill his mind with stories in both Morning Time and Ambleside Time. My 5 yo will join in all stories and memory work. I will do light phonics with my 5yo.
• I plan to move Morning Time back an hour or so. I hope that my 3 middles can complete Math, Latin and English Grammar early followed by Morning Time, those 3 subjects being the heart of their skill work. Then after lunch they can read and write.
• I do not plan to fret over science. We will continue to read widely in the genre and trudge through our Apologia books but formal science will not be a priority this year.
• I plan to slow down on math. Instead of pushing to complete the books on time I am going to encourage the children to learn each lesson well. I want them to learn to take their time in math and not just feel that the goal is to get done. This has been a serious deficiency in our home when it comes to skill work. Getting done has taken priority over real learning.

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