When one of the boys was little, I read Story of the World aloud to him one chapter a day. I was in the throes of homeschooling. My kids were ages 1, 3, 5, and 7—and he was in kindergarten. It was a recipe for anxiety. Like puppies, I’d get one kids settled in my lap and the others would immediately start out in an opposite direction, tearing up the house, wrestling, searching for food/trouble. I lived in a perpetual state of stress, worrying I wasn’t getting enough done or doing anything the right way.
Still, I was willing to give it a go, and armed with a library card and four kids to wreak chaos on shelved books, I began my noblest pursuit.
Who knew reading was fraught with so many pitfalls? Do this, don’t do that. Advice and self-help can be the worst, but I dove in again and again like it were a research project. If I just collected enough data I’d be able to assimilate the best way to do a thing.
By the time I read the Michelle Duggar parenting book, I knew I was already too late on indoctrination; I hadn’t trained any of my kids to sit on a blanket quietly for hours like I should have when they were tots.
But I pressed on, committed to the higher cause of educational excellence. Nevermind the kids couldn’t sit still.
Some sagacious homeschooling mom who had written a book on homeschool recommended reading aloud to non-readers and then having them dictate a short synopsis back to you (she also pushed the rote memorization of poems and the Declaration of Independence as well as introducing basic Latin). I was impressed. It sounded lofty. I bought into the method.
This is where I began: I’d read SoW and my little boy would listen to the chapter and then wait patiently (or very impatiently) as I wrote down his dictated book report, word for word.
Our Story of the World experiment turned into a precious notebook full of 5 and 6 year old musings. I’m not sure it set him on a path far and ahead of his peers at his tender age, but I muscled through it and bribed him along with Cheezits.
By the end of the first SoW he was reading on his own and was interested in a variety of picture books. Meanwhile, another boy had commandeered SoW and was devouring it like a novel. This to say—I didn’t follow the good mothering/homeschooling advice from the books. There was no temperance. No workbooks, no higher thinking. Books—any books became a drug to get my children to sit still for more than five minutes. And I allowed it, if for nothing more than an excuse to wash dishes in peace.
I was already falling into the dark gray perimeters of (gasp) unschooling. My children were out of bounds, untethered. They didn’t read a chapter, stop, and fill out a worksheet. They didn’t read a chapter, stop, and do a chore. They just read. And read. And read. For hours. For days.
It should have felt freeing, I guess, but it felt like failure. All those bowls of grapes, wheat thins, and hot chocolate on the couch didn’t lead to kids wanting to memorize the Declaration of Independence. No, what they were and are to this day, is incurable bookworms.
That was six years ago. We have public schooled. We have homeschooled. We have public schooled again. We are on our second set of Story of the World because the first was torn apart by years of heavy reading. Even now I find them randomly throughout the house, in a bathroom, on the table, splayed covers turned upside down to mark the spot they left off. Who doesn’t love a good Middle Ages-Charlemagne jaunt as they brush their teeth at night?
These boys are now reading Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, Dumas, H.G. Wells. They know about the gae bolga and Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and Sisyphus who had to roll a big rock up a hill for all of eternity. They come home from school, consume pounds of Cheezits, and stick their noses in books. One kid has even sustained a neck injury from reading. Ha!
I’m starting to believe, thru empirical evidence, that modern methods of learning are pretty much tied to how much a parent is willing to foster curiosity. Schooling—public, private, at home—is irrelevant if there is no intrinsic hunger to know.
Benjamin Franklin was 26 years old when he began learning French. Once mastered, he turned to Italian. This he acquired by losing chess matches to a friend (the winner got to assign translation homework to the loser, which had to be completed by the next day’s chess game). After Italian, Franklin began to focus on Spanish.
He mentions in his autobiography that he attended Latin school for one year as a boy and it did him no good. But after he’d learned French, Italian, and Spanish as an adult he opened a Latin Bible and surprisingly understood it.
From these circumstances, I have thought that there is some inconsistency in our common mode of teaching languages. We are told that it is proper to begin first with the Latin, and, having acquired that, it will be more easy to attain those modern languages which are derived from it; and yet we do not begin with the Greek, in order more easily to acquire the Latin. It is true that, if you can clamber and get to the top of the staircase without using the steps, you will more easily gain them in descending; but certainly, if you begin with the lowest you will with more ease ascend to the top; and I would therefore offer it to the consideration of those who superintend the education of our youth, whether, once many of those who begin with the Latin quit the same after spending some years without having made any great proficiency, and what they have learned becomes almost useless, so that their time had been lost, it would not have been better to have begun with the French, proceeding to the Italian, etc.; for, though, after spending the same time, they should quit the study of languages and never arrive at the Latin, they would, however, have acquired another tongue or two, that being in modern use, might be serviceable to them in common life.
The Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin
His direct advice is this: compel young students to learn by means that are useful, namely a language that is not (ahem) dead (those are fightin’ words to a classical educator), but one that can be useful for, say, ordering food at the Mexican restaurant or traveling out of the States. The Latin will come, the higher thinking will come, but sometimes we waste the years of curiosity by aiming too high too early.
Rote memorization might just kill all sorts of child-focused, natural learning. Hand them a book; watch their hunger develop.
For most educators, this is out of the question. Teachers at my school throw out boxes and boxes of books and curriculum. We are forever chasing complete worksheets and high test scores, if not—and here I’m talking parents and parent educators—hoping our little Einsteins will prove they blow their peers out of the water with their intelligence. (And the sooner, the better!)
States and school districts require some accounting for a method to the madness, and hard data streamlines the process and determines how future funding is distributed.
If we could just let go a little on the methodology madness. No kid is a master at efficiency. Grownups are —and how quickly grownups get out of touch with children! But if a parent studied their child—really studied them, they could begin feeding their mind a diet that expands their academic palate. More interestingly still, one might apply boredom as a type of fasting so that hunger increases.
What Franklin doesn’t say, and I think history lives to support, is this: curious, self-motivated achievers in academics pursue excellence. Franklin was a founding father of what became the greatest nation in the world.
Look at us now—a nation of violence, greed, hyper-sexual, divisive. Look at where our kids’ eyes are fixed, look at how satisfied they are in greedily gobbling entertainment. Is there a correlation?
Will they ever be hungry to learn? What will the future hold?
