In previous articles and talks I have discussed various approaches to teaching the different subjects and have made recommendations about resources to use in those areas. This article is going to take a slightly different tack; it is primarily about what not to use.
When I was thirteen I read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. That is, I read the words. I thought I read the story, but didn’t realize until ten years later that reading the words is not necessarily the same as reading the story. I was too young to understand Anna, because I didn’t have the experience required to read the book profitably. I knew it was about an adulterous woman, but I didn’t see the full gravity of Anna’s sin, and the kind of consequences that are only to be expected in such a situation.
In college I read War and Peace, also by Tolstoy, and thought I was in a position to compare these two works. After all, I said to myself, I had read them both. Then I went back to Anna Karenina, and found a work that had a richness I had completely missed. It was not about the external actions of a sinful woman, but about the internal and gradual corruption of a soul, and about the possible alternative behaviors, embodied in other characters.
Reading that book when I was thirteen was a mistake on my part. I should have been reading other books, more suitable to my age, that would have prepared and disposed me to read Anna well later on. Further, I thought for ten years that I had read one of the ‘great’ books, when I had completely missed the point. Fortunately, I read it again, but not before I had made some very foolish comparisons between this book and War and Peace.
This experience is something I tried to keep in mind when planning the curriculum of my children. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Eccl. 3:1) There is a right time for thinking about subjects, and a right way to think about them at a given time. This right time depends on more than the ability to perform the action. The child may be able to read the words, but understanding comes with maturity, and maturity comes from experience and a reflection on experience that requires a certain amount of time.
There is often a temptation, when planning curriculum, to include material that is too difficult. We want to see the children moving on to the next stage of development. We want them to excel, and we don’t want them to miss out on the ‘classics’. But when we include difficult material before the children are ready to do it, they won’t do it well. They may, or may not, realize that the material is too hard for them, but the chances are good that they won’t enjoy it. They are also apt to make the mistake that I made, and think that they have understood something they haven’t. This is not necessarily a question of intelligence. It is a question of experience, maturity, and reflection.
One might think, for example, that reading Plato’s Dialogues at length in early adolescence would whet the appetite for more, in subsequent years, when one is actually ready to do philosophy. Unfortunately, my experience is that doing difficult material of this kind, before a child is ready to think about it in the right way, tends to make him less likely to do it well, or at all, later on. Partly, this is because he thinks he’s already done it, and partly it’s because the work doesn’t engage his interest until it speaks to an experience the child has had himself.
The questions raised in Plato’s Meno are really interesting to someone who has considered the nature of learning. Or even for someone who hasn’t yet thought about it, but who has had experiences of different types of learning, and can reflect on how learning takes place. Reading the Meno too early doesn’t dispose a child to read it well later; he’s inclined to think it’s uninteresting or silly. Or he may like it, but he won’t yet have given much thought to how virtue is taught, and thus he won’t bring to a consideration of the dialogue the essential ingredient. If you want your child to read the Meno, intelligently, at the right time of life, you would be better advised to have him read lots of history, with examples of virtuous fathers and their offspring. Plutarch’s Lives would be fine, if you want to use classical literature, but William Thomas Walsh’s books would also do well. It’s the acquaintance with history, and wondering why virtuous fathers
do not often have virtuous children that is advantageous.
I live in a college community, one where the great books of Western civilization are read as a matter of course. Such books are taken seriously, and the general opinion is that one’s education is not complete without an acquaintance with them. Yet, the considered view among many of those who deal on a daily basis with college students is that the best students are not those who come to the college already having read the books included in the program. Rather, for the most part, the best students are those who have read history, literature, natural history, and who have done basic astronomy, as well as Latin or another inflected language. A reasonable study of these disciplines will make the harder courses easy when the time comes.
These studies are better preparation for the difficult considerations appropriate to college students than trying to do the college material itself would be. The study of history expands the experience of children vicariously, and great literature presents truths about reality that children would not be apt to see themselves. Natural history, the study of animals and plants, makes students aware of the workings of nature, which prepares them for a philosophical study of nature. These are the types of materials that we should include in our curriculum, because they equip the student to do more difficult studies by helping him acquire experience, and encouraging reflection on that experience.
We should also allow time for reflection, time for the children to wonder about reality, and to investigate their areas of interest. A curriculum can be too difficult because it doesn’t allow the student enough time to really think, as well as by using material that is not proportioned to his abilities.
One might ask, then, what happens to the classical curriculum this column is supposed to consider? How can one have a classical curriculum without reading the classics? The answer is one can’t have a classical curriculum in the fullest and most perfect sense until one has students who are capable of the kind of abstract thinking required for a study of the subjects of the Trivium: grammar, logic, rhetoric; and the Quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. To do these subjects fully one needs to be able to read Martin of Denmark and Thomas of Erfert on speculative grammar, Aristotle on the Prior and Posterior Analytics and Rhetoric , Euclid’s Elements, Plato’s Timaeus, and Ptolemy’s Almagest. Further, these studies are ordered to philosophy and theology, which involve reading Plato’s Dialogues, Aristotle’s Physics, De Anima, Ethics, and Metaphysics, St. Augustine’s City of God, the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, and various other treatises.
These are hard subjects, really exciting, but abstract. Even more than Anna Karenina, they require preparation: experience, maturity, and a
disposing formation.
It is the disposing formation which occupies our attention as homeschooling parents. This formation, because it is a preparation for a classical education, can in an extended sense be said to be classical education. It is not classical education in the fullest sense, but it may still be truly called classical, both because it leads to such an education, and because it employs the method of such an education. It is this beginning of a classical education that we should keep in mind as we design our children’s course of studies.
The Mother of Divine Grace Curriculum is designed to guide children through this beginning and prepare them to undertake the fullness of a classical curriculum, or indeed any advanced course of studies.