In my last post, I said that I’d be taking a closer look in a later post at Charlotte Mason’s views on poetry and how Ambleside Online makes use of them. This is that post.
I have to start by saying that I know very little about the home schooling movement—even less than I thought I did before coming upon the Ambleside Foundation website. Now, knowing about Ambleside Online, I realize that the few homeschooling parents I’ve previously had contact with, mainly through Facebook and other social media sites, are anything but representative. While they share the Ambleside’s discomfort with the conventional education offered in most public schools, they do so for quite different reasons: they are, by and large, worried about the limitations of public education, the lack of what they see as more significantly serious content and the lack of attention to their children’s individual characters, tastes, and interests. In other words, the home schoolers I know do it for reasons that make sense to me.
But the home-schoolers I’ve learned about from Ambleside Online are not particularly interested in children knowing more and developing more confidence in their unique personalities and interests. They claim they are, in a paradoxical statement about how “ the unique needs of each child” will be fulfilled by Ambleside Online’s “detailed schedules, time-tested methods, and extensive teacher resources.” But I have a hard time understanding how rigorous cleavage to a strict schedule and time-tested methods can simultaneously meet each child’s unique needs. Somehow, in fact, I suspect it doesn't.
I suspect that because of AmblesideOnline’s use of Charlotte Mason and what it identifies as her “classically-based principles to prepare children for a life of rich relationships with everything around them: God, humanity, and the natural world.” In the light of an insistence in multicultural (and multi-faith) countries like Canada, the US, and the UK on not teaching any one particular religious belief in their public school systems, the word that draws my attention here is “God.” It soon becomes clear that a major goal of the home-schooling parents of AmblesideOnline is to protect their children from all the many ways in which contemporary mainstream culture departs from the narrowly defined version of Christianity they espouse—i.e., what evangelical Americans identify as Christian. Rather than worrying about the limitations of public school curricula, then, these parents worry about how much it relates to, teaches about, and affirm the supposedly sinful values of the world outside contemporary classrooms.
The “large collection of original Charlotte Mason materials” it offers on its website returns again and again to how central the teaching of the right values is. For instance.
We must read novels, history, poetry, and whatever falls under the head of literature, not for our own 'culture.' Some of us begin to dislike the word 'culture,' and the idea of a 'cultivated' person; any effort which has self as an end is poor and narrow. But there is a better reason for an intimacy with literature as extensive and profound as we can secure. Herein we shall find the reflections of wise men upon the art of living, whether put in the way of record, fable, or precept, and this is the chief art for us all to attain.
Or again,
two things are incumbent upon us,––to keep ourselves and our children in touch with the great thoughts by which the world has been educated in the past, and to keep ourselves and them in the right attitude towards the great ideas of the present.
Centrally, then, education is about teaching “the right attitude” to the right ideas. It is inherently focused on affirming ideology.
With that goal in mind, Mason happily proposes that publishers have an obligation to censor anything that she herself disproves of:
They must excise with a most sparing hand . . . . What an ease of conscience it would be to teachers if they could throw open the world of books to their scholars without fear of the mental and moral smudge left by a single prurient passage!
Bad ideas are dirty, and they make their readers dirty. When it comes to poetry, then, “it is the part of parents to bring the minds of their children under the influence of the highest, purest poetic thought we have”":
They must grow up upon the best. There must never be a period in their lives when they are allowed to read or listen to twaddle.
Twaddle is what is dirty and dirties you. But what counts as twaddle? for instance, is narrative verse twaddle? As Mason says,
I saw it stated the other day that children do not care for poetry, that a stirring narrative in verse is much more to their taste. They do like the tale, no doubt, but poetry appeals to them on other grounds, and Shelley's Skylark will hold a child entranced sooner than any moving anecdote. ”
On the other hand, though, Mason is not opposed the the idea that some moving anecdotes might actually be entrancing enough to count as poetry: “There is never a time when they are unequal to worthy thoughts, well put; inspiring tales, well told.” Indeed,
There are two sorts of Truth. What we may call accidental Truth; that is, that such and such a thing came to pass in a certain place at a certain hour on a certain day; and this is the sort of Truth we have to observe in our general talk. The other, the Truth of Art, is what we may call essential Truth; that, for example, given, such and such a character, he must needs have thought and acted in such and such a way, with such and such consequences; given, a certain aspect of nature, and the poet will receive from it such and such ideas; or, certain things of common life, as a dog with a bone, for example, will present themselves to the thinker as fables, illustrating some of the happenings of life. This sort of fiction is of enormous value to us, whether we find it in poetry or romance.
The value of poetry is the “essential Truth” it conveys—how it reinforces “the right attitude” to the right ideas.
Presumably, then, the poems included in the AmblesideOnline Poetry Anthology affirm exactly this sort of essential Truth. I’ll have to take a closer look at them to see what that truth is and how they affirm it.