An epiphany this week: I just realized that I’ve been homeschooling for twenty years.
Twenty yeeeears. It’s a milestone made all the more significant by the fact that I have never owned a denim jumper and just recently had to be reminded what a “scope and sequence” is.
(“Wait wait wait, you mean the stuffy instructor’s material that I always throw in the bin so I can get to the good stuff? Oh…yeah, I knew that…” *nervous laughter*)
So hey, twenty years, eight kids, three down, five to go. Craziness. But it explains why my mind is often in fourteen literary directions and experiencing bookish spasms of attention deficit disorder. It’s just an occupational hazard of being a homeschool mom; we’re always reading great books.
I don’t ask the kids to analyze or dissect them. We don’t dig around for meanings and implications that were never intended by authors and only planted by dry language arts classes. Books are fun and fascinating and stand on their own without any picking apart, so we enjoy them and the stories they tell.
Rather than leaving us cold, education should produce the warmth of interest and pleasure in the knowledge we meet.
– Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony
But still, reading takes time. How do we justify all the hours put into reading pages and volumes and shelves full of great books – especially classic literature?
Here’s how.
We learn about bravery, and cowardice, and consequences, and human nature, and relationships, and responsibility, and maturity. We get to know heroes we want to emulate, and we are repulsed by villains who sometimes remind us a little too much of ourselves. In complex characters we see bits of our own tendencies, and we don’t usually even realize it’s happening, but as we read, we’re confronted with questions about if we want to keep those tendencies.
We learn about the world around us, and the world far away from us that we’ll never experience otherwise.
We think we’re reading the story of an epic disaster but we learn about Indian culture and the British Empire. We grab a fun mystery and end up learning about the tradition of bell ringing in churches. We open a novel from the 1800s and think we’re in for, maybe, an old-fashioned romance and dusty glimpse of village life – but no, by the time you’re halfway through you’ve learned to translate a bit of Scottish and you know that “I dinna ken whaur I cam frae” means “I don’t know where I came from” and you don’t even have to think about it.
We learn how to communicate and articulate, and how to attend and listen. We learn the nuance of different phrases and vocabulary so we can express how we really feel and what we really think without resorting to vague generalizations. We use language that demands a response from those who might otherwise blow us off, and we get our point across to a society who needs better content to think on. We lengthen our attention span and expand our understanding, and we’re not tuned out by complex language. And we are saved a multitude of misunderstandings, conflicts, inconveniences, and embarrassments by doing so.
We preserve culture and strengthen our communities by acquainting ourselves with great classics. Why have scholars and writers been persecuted in “cultural cleansings” by tyrants throughout history? Because they know and figure out things.
Those who read classics have a common language filled with short phrases that have complex, full meanings that are shared in just a few words. We say, “There is a tide,” just four words, and those who have ears to hear know the time has come to act before the opportunity is gone. We quote, “War is peace” and the sarcasm is understood by everyone who’s read 1984. We quote, “It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done” and to anyone who’s read A Tale of Two Cities, we’ve distilled the 374 pages of repentance, sacrifice, restoration, and victory in just fourteen words, because readers have their own code.
Great children’s books are enriching for all ages, and many of us missed them when we were younger anyway. And even if we already read them (or they were read to us), we get new experiences and insights out of them years later – and many of those insights lead to maturity and perspective that we want our kids to have.
Life is too short to learn from only our own mistakes, so we need to learn from Frodo and Scarlett and Jane Eyre and Tom Sawyer and Mr. Darcy and Robinson Crusoe and thousands of others. We see multiple facets of human nature and learn how people respond to their circumstances, and how those responses do and don’t work. As we read about struggles and triumphs and flaws and heroism, we learn compassion and wisdom and bravery and self control.
Or at least, the seeds are planted. What we do with them afterward, when we are tested, is up to us.
P.S. Want to join us for our next book in Gaining Ground? It’s a biggie and will last us a while…we’re starting Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell on October 28 and we’ll be reading about 50 pages a week through the end of March. Join us on Telegram anytime as we wrap up Emma.
