Help! Have I done enough to prepare my child for a Classical School?

Relax! It will be ok! (Probably...) Comfort Food, Issue 2

Dear All and Sundry,

Whether you have been sending your child to a traditional school or homeschooling them, sometime around the end of your child’s 7th grade year, the shadow of high school stretches forth an icy finger and touches the parent’s soul and a chill wind blows for a moment as accusatory thoughts unbidden form a ghastly parade through your mind:

       There’s no way Phyllis is prepared for high school.
       Derrin hardly reads now! He’ll be buried in homework.
       Rhonda has such terrible penmanship. No one will understand her.
      Cletus is too shy to ever succeed in a Socratic classroom. 
      When was the last time Belinda asked me a deep question? Has she ever?
      Who speaks Latin anyways? The children of parents who care, that’s who!
       Oh, Sweet Mercy! Math! What about math!?! What have I done!

I know this dear Sundry, because I too find myself in this predicament with a rising teenager. But we needn’t worry! Most of the parents I encountered as a headmaster who have these qualms worry unnecessarily. In fact, the parents who do worry are often the ones who need to worry least.

There are lots of ways to prepare, but most parents begin thinking immediately of content and skills: what content or skills does my child need to have mastered before they enter a classical high school? What have I given them? What are they lacking?

While skills are important (and there are three skills to focus on—I’ll touch on them later), what is far more germane to your children’s success is their disposition toward their own education.

Are they invested in their own education? Do they see learning something new as a hoop to jump through or are they interested in knowing the thing for the sake of the knowing? Are they actively excited to learn something new? Do they wonder? Getting to know those realms of thought that intrigue your child is a good first step.

Do you know:

What is your child’s favorite time in history?

Does your child gravitate towards fiction or nonfiction?

Does your child have a favorite topic that they are “experts in? Do they know everything there is to know about ants, dinosaurs, mechanics, airplanes, tree houses, ancient Egypt, birding, or explosives? That is good! Ask them about it—share in their interest. Blow on the ember, so that the fire spreads!

(If your child knows everything about Star Wars, Frozen, Hamilton, Harry Potter, and The Lord of the Rings, those are still of value, (especially LotR —yes dear Sundry, I too am a nerd) but realize he or she may be ingesting more popular culture than reality. Find topics grounded in real things.)

If you don’t know what your child’s preferences are, find out!

How NOT to prepare:

One thing you’ll notice: most of the items on this list below seem to be only incidentally related to Great Books, or Classical education, if related at all. Yet, these factors seem to be the major ones separating those students who fail out of classical schools and those who thrive because they are the factors that affect the student’s disposition towards reality and how they approach it.

There are more ways to thrive at a classical school then you might think, and this type of education benefits many different kinds of students from many walks of life. But the common factor for those who derive the greatest benefit from it is that they bring themselves honestly and fully to the class, and actually engage with the texts, their classmates, and the teacher. They learn this by engaging with their family, by engaging with reality around them, and by engaging with texts at an early age.

The biggest difference is this: successful students will understand that learning happens outside of the classroom. They will carry their intellects with them, in the hall, the lunchroom, in the car on the ride home, and at the dinner table. Their intellects will bump into all manner of people and things and learn from them. The unsuccessful students put their intellects in their lockers at the end of the day and leaves it to wither in the dark.

But if you really want to set your child up for failure at a Classical School, prime their intellect first by doing the following. (And a massive hat tip to Anthony Esolen’s 10 Ways to Destroy the Imagination of your Child-for the sardonic structure and the inspiration for the following list. It is a good book for seeing through the ways the culture corrodes your child’s capacity for wonder. The Banquet recommends it.)

These are the best ways to help them FAIL:

1)Don’t ever read anything yourself—children watch you carefully, but trust them to do as you say, not as you do. Don’t ever dare to read some of their schoolbooks with them. Tell them you are too busy, and it is not possible to know or care what they are reading.

2)Have no books in the home—like the first rule, this communicates that your house is imprisoned in your own narrow time and place. There will be no windows into other times, other places, other worlds.

3)Have a screen in every room, including your child’s bedroom. Distraction, distraction, distraction. It keeps each person from annoying everyone else with their presence. After all, as Sartre maintained, hell is other people.

4)Give your child an iphone for their 8th birthday. At 8, the child enters the age of reason. Undermine that by giving them a device that precludes the exercise of reason. They will never even know what they missed.

5)Have dinner separately — let them think that food is only fuel for the body, and not the basis for a communal ritual where humans make friends of enemies, or even of siblings; where they find lifelong companions-those they break bread with.

6)Don’t do normal things—like go for a walk, go shopping, prepare dinner, or garden — together. Do these things alone, and let them alone, so they learn that every person exists in isolation.

7)Never have a discussion of death, and what happens afterwards. Let them think they will live forever, so they never have need of sympathy for the dead. Nor will they ever reflect on the knowledge that they will one day be forgotten after some length of time in this world. The dead can all advise us with absolute certainty: “Eram quod est, eris quod sum"; What we are, you will be. Better to eat, drink and be merry.

8)Worry about college, jobs and money, and the looming terrible future of responsibility, and let them share your worry. Let them think that we live in a merely practical world, and that we are glorified robots made for work procedures and output. Our worth is defined by our production value.

9)Have your child do no chores around the home. Why should they waste time doing anything that doesn’t please them immediately?

10)Don’t ever be excited to see your child pursuing a goal for the sake of doing something difficult. If it doesn’t come easy, better to let someone else try. If you can’t be the best immediately, it probably isn’t worth the effort.

These ten rules will guarantee that the landscape of your child’s imagination is always disrupted by the traffic of cheap characters, neon brand names, tradesmen’s jingles and the faces of strangers looking to sell him something—a veritable Pottersville of the brain.

The child with a Pottersville brain is almost unteachable. He is always distracted by entertainment that habituates him to passivity. His ignorance is a universal solvent that destroys even the strongest idea, and he dismisses the most moving, most portentous, and most miraculous events of his life with a dismissive shrug and keeps scrolling.

Education for him is meaningless beyond its transactional nature. It has no value in itself, but only as a currency with which to purchase that piece of paper that opens doors to jobs which earn other pieces of paper. He is a shark—he moves to eat, and eats to move: an endless and meaningless struggle.

Chances are, if you value this education, this is not your child, and this is not what you have done. But if it is, there is still time! In case of emergency, break the glass, and follow the following instructions:

How To Prepare your Middling Middle Schooler with one year left:

1)Read out loud at home together as a family- start now. Don’t stop.

What should you read? Try Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury—It will grab their attention at the beginning and inspire them to read and know the great books by the end.

2)Create parameters around screen time—limit it and have a place to put the phone at night, away from your children. You may have a struggle on your hands, but draw a line in the sand now. It only will get harder later. The mind needs time away from the incessant distraction machine of an iphone. The first step of many a creative endeavor was a phase of inescapable boredom. If your kid says they are bored, give them duct tape and cardboard. Add rope, a hammer, nails, and spare lumber as needed. Or give them a sketchbook. Or a diary. Then give them Swiss Family Robinson to read.

3)Dial down how much media your child ingests. Dial up how much reality they ingest. Do the same yourself. Go camping. Buy a new food you never tried and attempt to cook with it together. Do a craft together that involves the skill of your hands. Draw poorly. Visit a farm. Go look at bugs-this week I saw an imperial moth in my neighborhood for the first time. Then read some Jean-Henri Fabre or James Herriot.

(It’s huge—this is actual size even though this isn’t the actual one I saw.)

4)Look at something intensely for at least 20 minutes. This is more easily done at museums or zoos at first (or in the quiet of a church before mass). Later on, try it in the backyard and the library. Then draw that thing or ask them to write a description of it for someone who is blind. Try it first and have them critique it. They will do it much more willingly after they see the results—for good or bad— of your own hand, (and the fact that you asked their opinion about something you did, instead of always hearing our opinions on things that they do, makes a surprising difference!)

5) Make time and space for one-on-one conversations. Go for weekly walks, take a car ride to Goodwill, go fishing, or mini-putting, or browse a used bookstore. Talk to them — use the everyday to talk about the universal. Looking at clothes? Talk about how different cultures arrive at the idea of modesty, style, and costume. In used bookstores, place a few books before them, and have them categorize them from least to most interesting, and then talk about why.

How to Prepare from the Beginning

The three most important skills are the old 3 R’s: Readin’, ‘Ritin’ and ‘Rithmetic:

1)Strong reading comprehension. Read to them when they are children. Read out loud, read together, read apart. Read fiction, read poems, read plays, read. See my last post to get a few more ideas of what to read beforehand in Help! I am about to attend a Classical School

2)Algebra—get to algebra I and give them lots of practice problems. There are many resources. The stronger they are in this foundation, the more easily they will ascend through the next steps-- algebra II, precalculus, trigonometry, and calculus, and the easier science will become as it gets more mathematical. Does math belong in a Great Books or Classical school? Just ask the Alexandrian philosophers. (The short answer? Yes, it does.)

3)Have your student work on writing—letters, notes, diary entries, stories, plays etc. Have them write it first by hand, THEN transfer it to digital print. As they rewrite, they will learn the skill of editing. Have them do their school papers this way.

A Last Encouragement

Dear sundry, it is not as bad as it seems—remember too, your child is resilient, and childhood wonder itself is resilient. It is a flame best preserved, and if lost, it may take time to recover, but we were built for wonder, and the intellect at the high school age changes many times.

Remember Emily Dickinson’s poem on what it takes to make a prairie:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

If your child has wonder, it may be enough.

Your child will slough off many skins in her growth to adulthood. There is time. Surprise your child today—take her for a walk around a few blocks and ask her a few questions. You won’t regret it.