“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 1:7)

I know you think I only read fluff. So now I am going to trip all over myself trying to describe my personal thoughts on Dr James Taylor’s Poetic knowledge. I brought this book home from the Circe Conference rarin’ to read. I loved listening to Dr James Taylor and had always been intrigued by the title of his book.

I also came primed to learn more about Descartes. Several times panel members at the Circe Conference spoke negatively about the effects of Descartes’ ideas on modern educational thought. I, on the other hand, had never given Descartes a second thought, possibly not even a first thought.

The first 3 chapters were a little rough. I liked what I was reading but I got bogged down and was anxious to get to the chapter Descartes and the Cartesian Legacy. I could just image myself blogging about the cartesian legacy. Maybe I could even throw the phrase “cartesian legacy” around at parties while talking to skinny women who don’t read. Well, I finally got to chapter 4 and I have to say I am only just beginning to understand some of these ideas…..maybe. Oh, well I am only 44.

“Basically, Descartes has isolated one mode of knowledge, of the four described earlier- that of mathematically certainty, or dialectic- and imposed it on all the others.” James Taylor

“John Dewey taught that schools are instruments of social change rather than of education, and that is one reason why Johnny neither reads nor writes nor dreams or thinks; but real schools are places of un-change, of the permanent things.” John Senior

Now for the good news. Chapter 6 & chapter 7 of my copy of Poetic Knowledge
are almost completely underlined. Dr Taylor describes in those chapters what I would be tempted to call the marriage of Wendell Berry to Charlotte Mason. If the truth be told, in this cartesian world, I am failing miserably to educate my children but in the world of poetic knowledge I am at least holding my foot in the door.

If you are an agrarian interested in education then you will certainly want to read Chapter 6 The Integrated Humanities Program . Of course, this is what Charlotte Mason was saying a 100 years ago. I know the words “Charlotte Mason” make some of you nervous and I understand why….I really do…but she really was a genius at bringing life to content. Somehow we have got to understand that education is lifelong. This is an especially important concept for the homeschool mom.

I am just like most other homeschooling moms that I know. One day I am blasting systems and programs and the next I am scrambling madly to join them. I am always trying to get up the courage to follow the way of wisdom while fending off the demons of practicalities. It is a precarious undertaking and all the while I am having to fight my own laziness and sin.

I hope to add a myriad of quotes from the last couple chapters to my quote box. In the meantime instead of trying to regurgitate the book I will whet your appetite with a few quotes:

“According to Herhoeven, what passes for general education today is actually a barrier to knowledge in the absence of the poetic element of wonder.”

“General education is….a substitute for knowledge among people for whom that knowledge is too dangerous and too demanding….it creates and preserves mediocrity. It does not demand that contact with things, the piercing of man’s self-righteous subjectivity which is precisily the beginning of knowledge….At best it displays mountain peaks, but saves one the trouble of climbing them.”

“Plato and Cicero, for example, were always read and commented on in the literary mode, never in terms of argument or debate. The atmosphere was intended to be meditative, not disputatious. Thus, the conversations replaced the modern sense of lecture and were closer to the medieval idea of lectio where teachers spontaneously delivered a commentary on some text.”

The above quote is one good reason a mom and a teacher should seek to be well-read and well-versed in Scripture. If our children are going to learn from our spontaneous outflow we must have something inflowing.

“Poetry is not an advanced thing; it is as Latin is, a first thing. It is a child’s thing.”

“When one has cultivated the habit of seeing in the poetic mode, science loses its privileged and usurped position in the nature and order of knowledge.”

I will end with a quote and a question. You can read more quotes in the sidebar if you are interested or you can buy the book and read the last 2 chapters or if you are really smart you can read the whole thing!


“…..the question is: Is such a life possible in a highly industrialized, technological society based on the idolatry of materialism?

That, friends, is the question.

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