The [1] 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. [2] 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 [3] 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.