Writers Circle

"Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. Stanley Fish appreciates fine sentences."

I never thought I would read a book entitled How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One; even less did I think I would enjoy one. Yet, here I am and I can do no other.

Stanley Fish writes a book in which he introduces the sentence as a work of art. Not only does he succeed in convincing you that it is art, but he then succeeds at teaching you how to be a connoisseur of that art. His stated goal for the book is "to bring you into the little worlds made cunningly by as many writers as I can cram into a short book." He promises, "to give you both sentence pleasure and sentence craft, the ability to appreciate a good sentence and the ability to fashion one." He succeeds.

A man once described—I’m sure it was that guy we call St. Augustine—the world as being made up of two cities: the City of God and the City of Man. I’ve taught my children that the City of God is made up of people who belong to God and do things that pursue Him and His kingdom. The City of Man, on the other hand, is made up of those who do not belong to God and pursue that which is pleasing to them. It is true that sometimes non-Christians do things that are good for the kingdom, and sometimes Christians do things that are bad for the kingdom. I want my children to be aware that life, and people especially, aren’t always black and white. It is important, however, that they understand the two cities distinctly so that they can be sure they are pursuing the right one.

On one occasion, as this explanation of the two cities reached the ears of my two younger children, one of them piped up, “Dad is heavy metal music Satanic?” Well, now, this is an interesting question. My initial reaction was to be slightly miffed—why such a random question? But, then I realized how pertinent it was to our conversation. How can children know, when it comes to music, television, movies, books, and other arts, whether they are pursuing the City of God or the City of Man? So, we first defined Satanic. The best way to identify the Satanic, I believe, is to define the different types of stories as I first learned to do reading A Thomas Jefferson Education: Broken, Bent, Whole, and Healing.

From time to time, when I am speaking about classical, Christian education, parents express concern that the pursuit of knowledge or academic excellence is in conflict with preparation for Christian service.  These parents rightly desire to instill in their children a love of serving.   However, this is not an either/or choice.  Our children do not have to choose quality academics and thus reject Christian ministry.  Nor do they have to choose Christian service and reject demanding studies.  A classical, Christian education prepares our children to live a full, rich life of Christian service by preparing them to be leaders in any field.  So, we must consider that these two aspects of our children’s development are not in opposition.  Rather, the accumulation of knowledge, understanding and wisdom is designed to prepare them for future service in any calling.

Reflect for a moment on God’s preparation of Moses.  I was doing a little research this week on Moses and the Israelites.  Moses’ life was essentially divided into three periods of forty years.  For the first forty years, he lived in the Pharaoh’s palace in Egypt receiving a princely education.  Then, he spent forty quiet, meditative years tending sheep in the deserts of Midian.  He spent the last forty years of his life tending God’s flock—the Israelites.  It fascinates me that God did not consider Moses to be ready to lead his people until the age of 80!  Similarly, Jesus, who had all knowledge and wisdom, did not engage in full-time ministry until age thirty.

My son is a big fan of Benjamin Franklin, because he invented and discovered so many things. Last year, it seemed like nearly every night I read to him, he wanted to me to read from one of his books about Benjamin Franklin. However, some of the books had a bit of a subtle, anti-Christian bent. One author went so far as to convey that once Benjamin Franklin discovered the physics behind thunderstorms, it was moved from the sphere of spirituality to the sphere of science.

This theme is one that is highly present within our culture. The idea is that as science (especially physics) gets larger and more advanced in its description of the world, the space for spirituality will get smaller. The “New Atheist” crowd takes this one step further and says that eventually all spiritual belief will be replaced by knowledge of physics.

In How to Write a Sentence Stanley Fish quotes this opening sentence from Laurence Sterne’s ”novel” Tristram Shandy:

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were doing–that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; and for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost–had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly–I am verily persuaded I should have made a different figure in the world from that in which the read is likely to see me.

Now this is a marvelous sentence, but it was at the time a verbal bomb dropped from out of the blue on 17th century English letters. I don’t know, but I suspect that Montaigne, that French inventor of the essay (for trial or attempt, as in, “I will essay this project”) and Cervantes, that Spanish master who was able to write one of the greatest novels in all of literature with faulty structure and style, influenced Sterne. But for the English reading public, this sentence embodied a world they had not seen before in a novel.

In the midst of our busy homeschooling lives, we can easily make the mistake of concentrating our attention on truth and goodness alone and neglecting the need for beauty in our educational efforts. John Mark Reynolds offers parents another approach in his seminar session titled “What Do Plato and Homer Have to Do With My Fifth Grader?” The director and founder of Biola University’s Torrey Honors Institute points out that “Plato was a great advocate of aesthetic value as part of education.” John Mark encourages parents to “start with aesthetics as the foundation of a K through twelve classical education.” He further explains that the main focus of K through five should be to enwrap our children’s lives in beauty, to fill our homes with serenity and peace, for “goodness and truth will inevitably follow from beauty.”

This past week, my family had the privilege to vacation together in California.  After a harried week of speaking at two homeschool conventions, we packed the car with our four children and lots of our belongings and set out for a great adventure of driving one thousand miles with a two-year-old in tow.  I did not intend to make this particular trip a “learning experience,” but I quickly saw how learning together has become a way of life for us over the last few years.

    As we pulled into the Mojave Desert (hooray, we were finally in California!), I casually asked, “Does anyone know what kind of biome this is?” One of the children looked at me as if this question was too simple for even the youngest child before replying, “It’s a desert.”  Shortly after that, the terrain was covered with shiny black rock, and I decided to slip in a bit more memory work.  “Does anyone know what kind of rock that is?”  My oldest craned his neck to see out of the back row and ventured, “It looks like igneous rock, is it?”  My heart soared.

As a homeschooling parent, I have to expect the unexpected. I may have a plan of how I want our day to be accomplished, but more often than not life gets in the way of my plan. The beauty of our homeschool is that we can use everything as a teachable moment. Here is what a day in our homeschool is generally like.

I rise in the morning, later than I would like, and knock on 3 doors. “Time to get up,” I say as I get our dog ready for a walk. When I return, I see that not everyone is up and ready for our morning devotions. I call up the stairs for the missing child or children. Once we have all assembled in the living room on the couch, we begin by singing a hymn. This is not always the best audibly as we still have sleepy voices, but it is a great way to start the morning. Today, Ada will read a chapter from the New Testament. She reads aloud as we all listen. After she is finished, we will practice memorizing our catechism questions. Then we close in prayer, taking turns. I implore the kids to then take a quick shower, get dressed, and get breakfast.

Let’s start with one of my favorite verses: “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9). We find a complementary verse more narrowly focused on the ministry of Jesus in John 21:25: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” The knowledge of God is so expansive and immense that we have yet to know the immeasurable depth of his character and works. Now, before we start to talk about the hidden things of God—the presently unknowable things—let us first assert the truthfulness of what God has revealed about himself—the things we can know. While we cannot know God fully, we must certainly know him truly. In other words, we will never know God exhaustively but that which he has revealed about himself is certainly true. 

At the end of my 7th grade year in public school, I was on the bubble for moving into the advanced math track, or staying with the average students. My mother was eager for me to move ahead with math and she intervened on my behalf. My math teacher’s recommendation would determine which track I took. Eventually my mother persuaded the teacher to send me with the advanced students. As she reluctantly agreed to make the recommendation, the teacher told my mother, “Well, maybe he’s a late bloomer.”

As a result of that encounter (thanks, Mom!), I moved ahead with math, finishing high school with AP calculus. I went on to minor in mathematics in college.

I wish that this was the crux of my article, but it is not. Latin does do both of these things, but that could be discussed at a later time.  This month, I would like to focus on exams your students may take in order to test their Latin/Roman culture knowledge.  These tests are great, because they can only benefit your students. If your student does poorly on these tests, then you can file them away (most tests have a nominal fee so if your student does badly, you do not lose much money). If your student does well, he/she can gain accolades, scholarships and increase chances of gaining entrance into the college of his/her choice. 

If your family is like mine, you are looking forward to a season of rest. Everything seems to be winding down . . . piano lessons, dance recitals, Memory Master testing, and on and on. . . Now, it’s time to reflect on what we have learned and accomplished this year—to count our blessings, so to speak. Then, we will renew our vision for homeschooling by attending homeschool conferences and practicums. Finally, we hope to rest a bit and refresh ourselves for the year to come.

I had the distinct privilege of proofing Memory Master candidates this year in my community. This always causes me to reflect on the way we are equipping the next generation. Once again, I sat in awe of eight- to twelve- year- olds reciting such a huge quantity of information.

In order to get them to relax, I always ask them which subject they want to finish first. Some of them choose to get the “hard stuff” done and choose to recite the timeline of history. Others decide to start with the “really easy part” which is the history songs.

On this beautiful Mother’s Day

I can’t quite find the words to say

How I appreciate all you gave up

So in wisdom and virtue I would grow up

Matt Bianco, my colleague on this blog, has argued that beauty is absolute and objective - that it is not in the eye of the beholder, but, in the eye of God.  This perspective is much needed in our age: Darwinist thinkers do not accept a standard of beauty (or, indeed, of anything) that originates outside of man’s own mind, and they have very effectively taught Christians the heresy that human response to beauty is nothing more than social conditioning, or a convenient evolutionary trait - that, for example, a man is attracted to a woman only through a system of chemicals engineered so that the species can continue, and not because of any transcendent truth reflected in her nature.  Darwinists succeed when Christians are gulled into believing that beauty is a matter of opinion.  

I think a good place to continue Mr. Bianco’s discussion is by asking the question: if beauty is not a matter of opinion, why are there so many different opinions about art? Do these differing opinions mean that beauty is subjective? Following up his article about the origin of beauty, I wish to write about the effect that transcendent beauty has on the beholder’s eye, which is the receiver - not arbiter - of beauty.

Some Christians favor films or paintings that others find to be tiresome, and every individual favors some pieces of art over others. This wide spectrum of taste is not at odds with the objectivity of beauty.  The answer can be found in the very nature of beauty; beauty reflects truth. 

As a side note, this is why a man unacquainted with truth will be attracted to bad art: chaotic postmodern art and pornography are both examples - both reflect falsehood.  Artists who portray ugliness and call it beauty do so because the truth is not in them.  Conversely, the story of the crucifixion will be seen by the unregenerate reader as ugly, while the Christian will see it as beautiful: the story does not change, the beholder does.  The greater the beholder’s acquaintance with truth, the more places he can see it reflected, and the more dazzled his eyes will be. 

Does this mean that stronger Christians are able to enjoy more and broader kinds of art?  Yes and no.  Surely, the closer we become to God the more we see of Him, and the more places we see Him in.  It should always be our goal to make our eyes sensitive to more kinds of art, because in doing so we discover new ways of meeting Him (more on this later).  Mature Christians will be attracted to good art (art which reflects the truth) rather than bad art.  However, even among these, there are still vast differences of taste; taste cannot be accounted for in terms of maturity alone.

Back to the main question: differences in taste exist because just as beauty in general reflects truth in general, each particular beautiful thing reflects some particular facet of truth.  Christians (and the unbaptized too) inherently favor works of art which reflect the truths they themselves know best - and these are drawn from their experiences: a story about the struggles of a single parent will be most beautiful to someone who has experience in the area.  More often, art can also resonate with us based not on things we have experienced, but simply on the way we view the world: someone who thinks about man as warrior will favor a movie about war and wilderness, while someone who thinks about him as lover will favor a romance.  It is in this way that individuals can favor one movie over another (or even hate one of them), without changing the fact that both are good art (note that this does not mean, as the postmodernists say, that all things are true or that all movies are equally good). 

There are certain “boring,” “bleak,” or even “disgusting” movies which I perceive to be very beautiful - because the truths they communicate are ones that deeply touch my soul.  Thus beauty is not up to the individual - but every individual’s faculty for perceiving and enjoying beauty is unique, and shaped by his experiences and his outlook.

However, this is not to imply that beauty communicates truth to us only within the bounds of our own maturity and experiences.  Beyond this, beauty acquaints us with truth.  Most of us have had the experience of finding something beautiful without being able to explain why, rather like Solomon, who, because he was the wisest man alive, was able to see intense beauty in simple things - an eagle in the air, a serpent on a rock, and a ship on the sea - without attempting to explain them.  We can no more explain them ourselves because we, like Solomon, are being taught by the beauty we are seeing.  Beauty lifts us closer to Truth.

It should always be our desire to grow closer to God so we can see more of His beauty - and this is not done only through factual knowledge of God (though this indeed opens our eyes to more and better kinds of art), but by exposure to beauty.  Understanding of beauty births understanding of truth, births understanding of beauty, forever - just as an inexperienced taster may not enjoy coffee or wine the first time he meets it, but learns to desire it more and more as he comes to understand.  The more we understand, the more we are able to understand.  Let us be like Solomon, surrender to beauty, and by it be conformed to Truth.

Bio:

Tobin Duby graduated Patrick Henry College with a B.A. in Classical Liberal Arts after being homeschooled through high school. He currently works at Classical Conversations, producing videos and managing media. His one wish would be go to back in time and convert Ayn Rand.  In his leisure time he writes essays about theology and postmodernism. He fancies himself a film critic and short story writer. He likes the high church; he likes home-brewing beer, camping and bicycling. He also likes semicolons.

Growing up in the 90’s, homeschooling through high school was not as popular as it is today. One of the biggest detractors at the time was the unique challenge of college admissions. Recruiting faculty was unfamiliar with homeschooling in general and ill prepared to process home-educated students’ applications. As a result, additional paperwork and entrance exams were required. Fortunately, the number of schools with more stringent requirements for homeschoolers is dwindling. In fact, many colleges today actively seek to recruit homeschoolers and have even added web pages designed specifically to attract them.  

Among Christians, there is general agreement on the objective nature of truth:  a truth is true, whether you believe it or not. We like to hear our postmodern friends (who deny the existence of absolute truth) say, “There is no such thing as absolute truth,” because when they do, we get to ask, “Is it absolutely true that there is no such thing as absolute truth?” Of course, they cannot answer, because a yes affirms that there is absolute truth, while a no affirms the same thing.

What is not so obvious among Christians is whether or not beauty is objective and absolute. We are all likely to affirm beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It seems an indisputable point when you consider the differences in taste from one person to another when determining the beauty of another person, a song, a book, a meal, or a painting. Our differences in taste surely appear to prove the subjective nature of beauty.

International Perspectives and the Refinement of Mathematics Instruction in the American Home
By Andrew Elizalde

www.neoclassicalthinktank.org

In addition to focused studies on Christian and classical education, my recent studies have also included a consideration of the curriculum and methods of leading international ministries of education. I believe that every public, private, and home educator would do well to contemplate the findings of recent international research. In this article, I offer, first, a characterization of the strengths and weaknesses of mathematics instruction in the United States and second, possible refinements of our instructional methods in the home.

Many parents happily take on the task of homeschooling their children in the early years, but when it comes to high school, they simply lose heart and send their children off to school. Several years ago, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine conducted a survey of our readers and discovered that 81% planned to homeschool through high school, yet at the time only 26% were actually homeschooling in the upper grades. And the figure was only slightly higher (31%) for junior high. Why is there such a big drop-off rate when it comes to homeschooling through high school? Far too many parents fear they just don’t have adequate skills to homeschool through high school. They worry that they cannot properly prepare their children for college and a career by educating them at home. But the facts show that homeschoolers do quite well in academics and in adulthood.

“I have vigorously defended contextual learning in my book because I believe that it is the key to how we learn as well as to the delight we find in learning. Children learn to speak by hearing words used in context, not by memorizing their definitions or studying their etymologies.”

David Hicks, Norms and Nobility

Contextual learning, called by some synthetic learning, is the learning that comes out of the whole to engage the part and it asserts that the context of a thing about which one is learning is what makes learning interesting, delightful, and profitable.

“Write me a story,” I said to the girls in my junior high composition class.  “It is due next Wednesday.”

Each of them.  

When Wednesday finally came, the students marched proudly to the front of the room and placed their stories on my desk.  As the stack mounted, my heart sank into my shoes.   The overwhelming mass of paper in front of me would take three weeks to read.  Then and there, I firmly resolved never to make such a foolish assignment again.