Mon 7 Aug 2006
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.
16 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I liked your notes - they made a few connections for me, like what “active love” is. We “know” so that we can do. It’s knowledge that stays stuck in our brains without entering our hearts and out through our hands and feet that puffs up.
But when we act on the knowledge the Lord has given us, that is wisdom.
Comment by Kelly (August 7, 2006 @ 10:03 am )
Now that was confusing - I should have said “…without entering our hearts and coming out through our hands…”
And I should probably clarify by saying that I don’t mean that every bit of knowledge has to be practical or else it’s useless - that’s what he meant by education not being efficient. The particular connections I mentioned in my post above are a kind of correction to a personal imbalance, and it isn’t meant to be normative.
Balance is the key.
“It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.” It is an honor and it’s glory to God to know things that don’t necessarily have any practical application. I tend to be imbalanced in that direction, so I have to remind myself to do what I know to do. Others might have to learn the beauty of inefficiency and of knowing a thing simply for itself, not for any utilitarian purpose.
Comment by Kelly (August 7, 2006 @ 10:09 am )
Cindy,
I apologize for this comment that has nothing to do with your post but I wanted to let you know I just got off the phone with a good friend of mine. She lives five minutes away from me but is moving to Alabama over Labor Day weekend. She was down there last week and she told me the temperature was a good deal lower than here, the humidity was less, AND the people were hundreds of times friendlier! I guess you were right and I was wrong. I always think of people around here being very friendly but she said everywhere they went the people were so extremely friendly she could hardly believe it. So there you have it.
Comment by Jeannine (August 7, 2006 @ 3:53 pm )
The realtor just left our house and the sign is out front..
Y’all would probably really like it
I am afraid I will be leaving my heart in Alabama.
Comment by Cindy (August 7, 2006 @ 4:56 pm )
Awww, I’m sorry.
Comment by DeputyHeadmistress (August 7, 2006 @ 9:27 pm )
{{{{Cindy}}}}, I’m sorry you’ll have to move, and I probably would love your house–except–I’m afraid the interfering neighbors would drive me crazy. My little boys would really give them things to worry about.
I’m often really tempted to want to move south but our neighbors here are all so ideal and I don’t know if we’d ever have that again. We really have a nice little community and I’d miss it. Plus, I do like snow, and not just a little bit.
At least you’ll still get to live in the South. My friend Chris’s husband is already in Alabama. He left Saturday so he could start his new job. He drove down through Tennessee and he mentioned what a beautiful drive it was. Chris had been worried that it wouldn’t be as pretty as Pennsylvania and he assured her that Tennessee and Alabama were just as beautiful.
I’m still really astonished at the hundreds of times friendlier thing. I questioned her later in our conversation because it seemed such hyperbole but she gave me specific examples of store clerks, people on the plane with them, and basically everyone they met. In retrospect, I guess we do have a lot of unfriendly store clerks, particularly cashiers.
I will pray for you during this time. If I hadn’t been reading your posts I wouldn’t have even thought about Alabama. You made it sound so delightful, and I’m sorry you’ll be leaving.
Comment by Jeannine (August 7, 2006 @ 9:28 pm )
After living in NJ for 13 years I had to retrain myself to notice and talk to store clerks. I can vividly remember the first time I went to Walmart and I was in my usual daze and the girl started talking to me. That was so shocking. Now I talk to everyone in line with me and the cashier all at the same time. Checking out at Walmart has become a nice little social time and I have learned important things there too. It also keeps me from finding out that the world’s tallest man married the world’s fattest woman or Elvis’s future plans.
Comment by Cindy (August 7, 2006 @ 10:24 pm )
I have been reading and studying about classical education for several years, and it has been borne home to me more and more than humility of mind is absolutely necessary to truly acquire one. If you are puffed up by your classical education, then you probably don’t really have one.
Charlotte Mason said, “Education is the science of relations,” and that’s a wonderful beginning for classical education, too.
I’ve always wanted to attend a Circe conference, so I’m reading your notes with enthusiasm and a tinge of envy.
Comment by Krakovianka/Karen (August 8, 2006 @ 12:27 am )
Well, well, well…..moving, huh? But not your blog, right? And just one state north…to Tennessee? You’ll be fine.
A while back you asked in the comments of my blog about how I liked living up north. I tolerated it and learned a lot
I dont know that being on Hillsdale’s College campus really gave me the feel that you must have had living in NJ. There were many Southern sympathizers there!
At any rate, blessings on your move.
I look forward to future posts on what I call the *three R’s*…your remembrances, your recognitions, and your realizations.
Dana in GA
Comment by Dana (August 8, 2006 @ 6:17 am )
Still reading here, and even following the links back to and through the Circe website. I didn’t realize that James Taylor was actually part of the conference! Funny, I didn’t even think of him as a classical educator (in the sense of the modern movement, though of course he believes in classics). The reason I didn’t think he was classical was that he emphasizes poetics and direct experience early on, more like Charlotte Mason. Maybe I need to re-examine my definitions.
I have a question: I looked all through the Circe website, and although I found a link for buying CDs for the entire conference, I haven’t found one for the individual CDs. Can you help me find it, or is it perhaps just not up yet? I’m interested in purchasing the Exordium 1 speech, but I think I’ll wait and read all your notes, because I may want to buy more than one CD.
Also, I’m a little puzzled about the following sentences: “Vigon 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 think the bit of info I must be missing is who the “dinosaurs” are. Are they the universities in the current college system? That would make sense.
I think that making connections between ideas is one of the most fun things a person can do, and I’m enjoying reading about the connections you’re making, Cindy.
One last thing: I’ve noticed that phenomenon about the checkout clerks, too, at least in chain stores. I persist in talking to clerks in NYC anyway, but it almost brings tears so my eyes to go back South and have the clerks be so friendly. Once a clerk in Canton, GA apologized to me because my credit card didn’t scan correctly! Can you imagine??? Of course, “mom and pop” operators will talk to you just about anywhere. Hurray for the mom and pops!
Comment by Laura A (August 8, 2006 @ 7:29 am )
Laura,
You are right I did mean that the current univerities are the dinosaurs.
Comment by Cindy (August 8, 2006 @ 7:56 am )
I’d suggest that anyone interested in classical education read the first few chapters of CS Lewis’s Surprised by Joy. Actually, I’d recommend the whole thing, but for the purposes of this discussion, his first nine chapters cover his education.
I’m not in any way advocating everything there, least of all the deplorable boarding schools he went to, but his life story was my first introduction to classical education and there are elements of it that I think are much better than what you generally see in the modern classical education movement. Lewis’s early childhood was spent in play, listening to and reading lots of excellent stories and poetry, inventing an imaginary land with his brother and making stories about it, learning French from his mother - kind of Charlotte-Mason-y, I think.
He went to school for the first time when he was ten years old, and then went to study with a tutor at age sixteen.
This pattern of a real childhood, followed by more rigourous schooling in the middle years, and then personalized study from the mid-teens on, is not really much like what the modern classical ed movement describes, but I like it much better.
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
Y’all’s talk about differences between store clerks in the north and south remind me of the day we moved back to the south after living in upstate New York for a year. Upstate NY was not an unpleasant place, but on the trip to Montgomery where my husband had been assigned, we happened to stop for gas at a 7-11 in Georgia. When we went into the store, there was a black woman working there and she took one look at my 5 month old son, and said, “Look at that fat baby! I just looooove fat babies.” He really was fat - so cute. And she wanted to hold him and hug him and couldn’t say enough about how much she loved fat babies.
And I stood there crying, so happy to be in the South again.
Comment by Kelly (August 8, 2006 @ 8:52 am )
Thanks, Cindy!
And Kelly, I totally agree about *Surprised by Joy.*
Comment by Laura A (August 8, 2006 @ 9:08 am )
Real classical education and Charlotte Mason have much more in common than most people realize, and James Taylor’s understanding of the classical mind is a perfect case in point. His description of classical thinking is much closer to the truly classical educators (those of antiquity) than a lot of the modern re-interpretations of classical education.
Forgive my intrusion…I just so enjoy the Circe notes and this is one of my favorite topics.
Comment by Krakovianka/Karen (August 9, 2006 @ 2:00 am )
I am tickled to have you here, Karen. It is taking me a bit of time to get the notes up because we are in the process of moving and selling our house.
Comment by Cindy (August 9, 2006 @ 6:52 am )
Karen, this is addressing what you said about humility. I absolutely agree. I think though, and this is one thing that made attending the conference so great, is that because we like to talk about a lot of “heady” stuff, we can seem more pompous than we know we are. We can usually talk about things with complete abandon because we know how relatively little we know compared to what there is to know. I don’t think it’s necessarily that classical educators are being arraogant–but it can be the way they are perceived just because they like to talk about intellectual stuff. I’m going to quote from Neil Postman’s The End of Education:
(I’ve debated with myself whether I can excerpt this without losing something–so it may not make the case as well as Postman does)
“But worse than this, textbooks are concerned with presenting the facts of the case (whatever the case may be) as if there can be no disputing them, as if they are fixed and immutable….There is no sense of frilty or ambiguity of human judgment, no hint of the possiblities of error. Knowledge is presented as a commodity to be acquired, never as a human struggle to underand, to overcome falsity, to stumble toward the truth….
To renew a teacher’s ense of the differnce between teaching and learning, to eliminate packaged truths from the classroom, and to focus student attention on error are part of an uncommon but , I believe, profound narrative capable of generating interest and inspiration in school…..
…most people engage in a rigorous and ‘natural’ defense of their own beliefs, not so much to explain their beliefs as to justify them….is there not something strange about this–this idea of education in which everyone is encouraged to justify, fight for, and defend what they believe, as if we did not know that our beliefs are flawed, imperfect, badly in need of improvement?….We are all in need of remedial work, all the time.”
Comment by Patti (August 10, 2006 @ 12:44 pm )