|
From the Appendix of Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum by Laura Berquist |
||
|
For those of you contemplating
reading Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum, by Berquist, I recommend reading her Appendix first. It will lay the philosophical groundwork for her book. In part, she states the following: "In Ecclasiastes 3:1 we read, "For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven." This experience, [she writes] is something I try to keep in mind when planning the curriculum of my children. 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 student 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. She continues: "There is often a temptation, when planning curriculum, to include material that is too difficult. We want to see the students moving on to the next stage of development. We want them to excel, and we do not want them to miss out on the "classics". But when we include difficult material before the students are ready to do it, they will not do it well. They may or may not realize that the material is too hard for them, but the chances are good that they will not enjoy it. They are also apt to make the mistake that I made and think that they have understood something when they have not. This is not necessarily a question of intelligence. It is a question of maturity. "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 collge 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 and natural history and who have done basic astronomy, as well as Latin or another inflected language. A reasonable study of these disciplies will make the harder courses easy when the time comes. "The study of history expands the experience of young people vicariously, and great literature presents truths about reality that they 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 by encouraging reflection on that experience. "One might ask, then, [she says] what happens to the classical curriculum this book is supposed to consider? How can one have a classical curriculum without reading the classics? The answer is that one cannot 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, Aristotles'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, they require preparation: experience, maturity and a disposing formation. ***"It is the disposing formation that 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. "This is the classical curriculum for children as Dorothy Sayers envisions it in her landmark essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning." Such an education is about formation rather than information and depends more on the method used with the texts than on which particular texts are used. "Patience is a virtue that is employed in many ways in the raising of chldren, including the devlopment of their curriculum. The tools of learning are acquired by concentrating, at each stage, on the areas of development that are appropriate to that stage. It is not essential to use ancient authors to have this kind of a classical curriculum. What is essential is that the children do what is appropriate at each stage of learning. They should memorize at the grammatical stage. This strengthens and makes docile their imagination so that in the next stage of learning, the logical, they will have the help of a trained imagination in following and constructing arguments. In turn, it is essential to this education that when the children are capable of grasping and marshaling arguments, they should practice doing so. If they do, then the last stage, the rhetorical, can be given to articulating those arguments elegantly, in the service of the truly noble. This formation will give them the tools of learning, a formation that may be truly called classical and that will dispose them to a formal study of the highest and best subjects at the proper time." End quotes. She gives lots of examples to support her points. I've just touched on a few highlights. The Appendix is 7 pages long. Even if you don't want to buy the book, find it in a bookstore and read the Appendix. Her approach is quite different from TWTM, and the comparison is worth thinking about. |