Why Home Education? (A Series...Part 4)

 Scope and Sequence

That's where I keep tripping up. I look over a curriculum guide and my public school teacher's eye reads it wrong every time. I look at a 3-yr cycle and see it as one. I look at a year-long cycle of only three items and I think I must've downloaded it wrong because where's the rest?

In short, the Charlotte Mason method, which is where I'm leaning as I contemplate home education covers SO MUCH LESS CONTENT. But, it covers it well. Except, I don't even know what "covers it well" really means because I've never taught that way. As much as I've bemoaned the hoppy/jumpy modern education style of bouncing from one item to the next without quiet time for reflection and learning...still, I've never really written lesson plans for this alternate schooling method.

Case in point: I learned that CM had her students doing a Composer Study and an Artist Study each year. They would study the works of famous artists in the world of painting, sculpture, and music. I read this and was enthralled. But of course we should do this! Understanding the creative works of an era is as important to understanding that era, and how civilizations have developed throughout recorded history, as studying other major events in history. 

So, I pull up a sample list of Artists in the Artist Study and...it was only 3 people. For the whole year. I kept clicking around the website trying to find the rest of the pages. Took me forever to figure out...oh, CM intended the students to do a deep dive and really look at ALL the work of each artist as well as read extensively about their life. Oh. Now I get it. 

Because if you truly and genuinely believed your students should remember the work of an artist as in, decades from now if they saw or heard that work they could name the artist or composer, then you would go that slowly through their body of work, wouldn't you? 

This is the difference: covering it for the test vs. knowing it for life. 

I heard it phrased this way by someone describing what a classical education really is. They compared modern education methods with classical education methods by saying: Is the purpose to cover the book or uncover the book? 

Is our purpose to say we skimmed it, read excerpts, memorized key facts for the test and then can check it off our reading list? Or, did we spend weeks and weeks reading slowly and thinking deeply about everything the author wanted us to experience?

This philosophy is at the same time both freeing and overwhelming. The freedom to cover less means freedom from being the perpetual entertainer for bored children. But, it is overwhelming to think about finding resources to go deeply. Where does one find a collection of every work of an artist, as well as supplementary texts about their life? And...NOW I understand why every single CM resource advertises a featured: Book List! And...NOW I understand why the first thing my SIL who uses CM sent me was a whole slew of websites where one can find difficult to find or out of print books. 

Perhaps my next purchase needs to be bookshelves.