Iambic Pentameter

“Let’s make rhymes!” she said. So we made up some silly ones of the “roses are red” variety. Mine followed a pattern in which the 2nd and 4th lines rhymed.

Roses are red.
My tea is hot.
I burned my tongue
‘Cause I forgot.

And Lucia tended to favor a different pattern with 2nd and 3rd lines rhyming.

Roses are red.
Daffodils are yellow.
I am a fellow,
And I love you.

The importance of patterns should not be underestimated. One of the great discoveries of childhood is that patterns are all around us. We find them in language, art, music, dance, math, games. Children seek out patterns because they help us make sense of things. In a world that can often seem arbitrarily complex, patterns give children the power to extrapolate and infer, to know what’s coming next.

Like most children, Lucia enjoys creating and identifying patterns. So we talked a little about the patterns in our rhymes. At some point I uttered the words iambic pentameter. This led to a quick internet search of Shakespeare’s sonnets to find a suitable example. I showed Lucia the ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom pattern, and we clapped it out together while reading some lines.

After clapping out a couple of sonnets together and discussing their meanings, I got up to cook dinner. Half an hour later I came back to find this:


It called to mind something I’d read recently during a meandering search of unschooling on Amazon.com. One of the books that came up was The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise, not because it has anything to do with unschooling, but because the authors, in at least one featured excerpt, went out of their way to distinguish classical education from unschooling. Apart from, "How incredibly snooty!" I didn’t think much of it at the time, but it came to mind today as Lucia spent the entire afternoon reading 32 of Shakespeare’s sonnets independently and of her own volition. On page 617 they say,

“…you may find that your local home-school group is populated mostly by “unschoolers.” Classical education is diametrically opposed to “unschooling,” which is immensely popular among many home schoolers. “Unschooling” is child-centered. It assumes that the child will learn all that she needs to know by following her natural impulses and that any learning that is “imposed” on the child by an authority figure will prove unproductive.
Classical education is knowledge-focused, not child-focused. It attempts to teach knowledge in a way that awakens the child’s interest, but the child’s interest is not the sole determining factor in whether or not a subject should be followed. How does a child know whether something will interest and excite her unless she works at unfamiliar (and perhaps intimidating) material to find out what it’s all about?
Unschoolers also tend to denigrate “book” learning in favor of “real” learning. Many unschoolers claim that the day-to-day realities of family life provide plenty of opportunities for learning. For these unschoolers, taking care of the house, grocery shopping, cooking, car repair, working in the family business, writing thank-you notes and so on provide enough opportunity for children to learn real-life skills without “doing school” in a formal way.
While this may be true, a child’s education shouldn’t be limited to “real-life skills.” Classically educated children should be able to cook, write thank-you notes, and tie their shoes. They also know where their country came from, how to construct a logical argument, and what puella means.
…If you end up in a local group of unschoolers and you want to follow the curriculum we’ve outlined in this book, you may need to switch groups.”

Yes, by all means, run screaming in the other direction.
But seriously…

The problem with the authors’ position is that it’s based on several false assumptions.

The first is that children have no innate desire to learn. That the authors consider a child-centered approach to be diametrically opposed to acquisition of knowledge indicates a naive and insulting regard for children. The authors assume that unless education is “imposed” (and I love that they put “imposed” in quotation marks. What “exactly” does that mean?) the child will not learn about books – and certainly not the classics. But if a child is raised in a family culture that values books, then it is only natural that she will develop a relationship with books as well. As for the classics, well, the reason they’re called classics is because they’ve historically been central to the development of our western culture and literary tradition. So it’s only natural to expect that a child will, at some point on her journey through the world of books, encounter them. If they’re as important as the authors believe, then they’d be almost impossible to avoid! The authors’ statement that unschoolers “denigrate ‘book’ learning in favor of ‘real’ learning” illustrates their ignorance of the unschooling philosophy. For an unschooler, all learning is real learning whether it stems from a book, a film, a friend, or a walk in the woods. The learning is real because it was chosen and embraced by the child herself, not “imposed.”

That leads us to assumption number two, that cultural literacy should be defined solely by the culture of power in a society. Sure the “Great Books” are great. But they’re not the only ones. It would be a shame to limit a child’s literary experience to the Western Canon. Great books are found in literary traditions from cultures all around the world, and many of our own greatest writers and thinkers are not a part of the dominant culture in America.

Puella, by the way, means “a brief stage in female life treasured by the Roman male (especially her father), between childhood and her passive journey into marriage.” I somehow managed to graduate first in my high school class, attend Bard College on a full academic scholarship, receive a teaching fellowship, and earn a Master’s degree without ever having encountered that word. E.D. Hirsch would be appalled. Still, I feel pretty certain that I know a few things ol’ E.D. doesn’t know. (And if you’re not culturally literate enough to know who E.D. Hirsch is, then shame on you! Just kidding…)

The next assumption is that children do not wish to be challenged. But every unschooling parent who has watched her child advance through progressively more demanding pieces on a musical instrument, tackle increasingly ambitious obstacles on the playground, or reach for a more difficult book at the library knows that this is simply not the case. Thank goodness my child has never had to feel “intimidated” by the material she was working with because she’d selected it herself at the time that was appropriate for her. Everyone learns best when they feel comfortable, relaxed, safe, and happy. Intimidation should have no part in the learning process.

And lastly, the authors assume that family life exists in a realm separate from that of books, knowledge, and culture. It’s rather amusing, and totally condescending of course, that the authors think we spend our days doing nothing but cooking, writing thank-you notes and tying our shoes. Certainly those things do happen, and they are important whenever we feel the need to eat, show gratitude, or keep our shoes from falling off. But the authors seem not to even consider the possibility that our family culture is rich and varied, that we each bring to it our own interests and passions, and that we share these with each other daily. I once said that it’s a hopeless view of life to think that people must be forced to make worthwhile use of their time. I think it’s equally hopeless to view one’s family culture as so empty and devoid of intellectually stimulating discourse as to merit the force-feeding of a classical curriculum.