On Educating for a Provisional Future

I’ve been listening through and re-reading Wendell Berry’s fantastic essay “The Work of Local Culture,” which can be read online here or is included in the books The Unsettling of America and The World-Ending Fire (and you can listen to both read aloud by Nick Offerman of Ron Swanson fame—!!). It’s a long and far-reaching essay, not all of which I think I’ve fully unpacked, but today I want to turn an eye to Berry’s thoughts on education.

As he plumbs just how far America has wandered from a respect for local culture, Berry notes, “The schools are no longer oriented to a cultural inheritance which it is their duty to pass on unimpaired, but to the career, which is to the future, of the child.” Because my husband teaches at a nominally liberal arts college that frequently advertises its job preparation chops, because I attended an actual liberal arts (Great Books) program, and because we are leaning toward at least some elements of classical education in our homeschool, this is an idea we discuss often in the Bowers household. What’s more, a respect for cultural inheritance goes hand-in-hand with Catholicism, I think — Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead” and all that. Though our children may find themselves alone temporally in a cohort where no one else adheres to their faith, they can, with a proper education, remember all those who came before them as practitioners in the faith: Charlemagne and Gregor Mendel, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Beethoven. (It is worth noting here that Berry is at least partially — maybe predominantly — referring to passing on a “cultural inheritance” that is inextricably local. And I have no idea how to pass that on, having transplanted myself hundreds of miles from the [suburban] woods I walked as a child.)

Berry points out the value-neutral methods of education currently employed, an atmosphere in which the greatest good is not human flourishing or the care of a place or community, but rather to “earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community.” It’s the whole marrying-for-money-and-career-prep argument all over again.

The educational system as it exists now is designed so that parents may

“find themselves immediately separated from their children, and made useless to them, by the intervention of new educational techniques, technologies, methods and languages. School systems innovate as compulsively and eagerly as factories. It is no wonder that, under these circumstances, ‘educators’ tend to look upon the parents as a bad influence, and wish to take the children away from home as early as possible.”

This alienation is often introduced with good intentions — to break the cycle of poverty, to equip a child with better opportunities. But the separation is also an expression of our cultural obsession with what is new and hip, in this case the newest pedagogical tricks or newest technology. Every child a laptop! we decree, as if concrete improvements have been documented. Instead, what is needed is this:

“There must also be love of learning and of the cultural tradition and of excellence. And this love cannot exist, because it makes no sense, apart from the love of a place and community. Without this love, education is only the importation into a local community of centrally prescribed ‘career preparation’ designed to facilitate the export of young careerists.”

Let me offer the disclaimer that these values of course are not unique to homeschool or embodied in every homeschooling family. But the values do require a knowledge of this particular child, of what will be demanded by him by a local community — which often has less to do with skill mastery and more to do with how he understands his place in the world, how she cares for the lives with which she’s entrusted.

The past year should show us what is really important in education and family life. By now we should realize we cannot prepare our children completely for an unpredictable world, because who among us predicted this? What we have learned to value, instead, is the strength of family affections that, depending on their presence or absence, have made the last few months tolerable or miserable. We cannot educate our kids into safety, but we can love them and equip them to love others through the storm.

Your Eco-Friendly Friendships

Recently, I’ve been revisiting Radical Homemakers almost ten years after it rocked my world back in grad school. Parts are brilliant and parts a bit flaky, just like I remembered, but the overall effect is to fire me up. And I came across a cornerstone of X’s vision for domesticity: Save the planet, make a friend!

“Solid and satisfying relationships are beyond a doubt the primary step in building a sustainable home.”

This was good news to me. I don’t recycle anymore and I have a list as long as my arm of domestic skills I should probably cultivate, but I do invest in friendships.

When I think about the claim, I sort of see it. There aren’t all that many days anymore when I don’t feed someone outside my immediate family or get fed in return. I don’t buy many children’s clothes. We do very few formal cultural events –good and wholesome though they are–because much of our time is spent in pleasure and duty to our network of friends: just passing time and sharing meals at one home or another. All of this reduces consumption and waste.

We also are able to sidestep some childcare costs by swapping care for appointments and other one-offs. When we do have to pay for services (childcare, lawn care, tailoring, etc.) we can also often keep it within the church or homeschooling community. We are keeping our money hyper-local and practicing frugality while we’re at it.

J, vanquished by the children of our community of friends

Here is a fairly typical day:

• At preschool drop off, I pass one bag of Pip’s hand-me-downs to a friend who passes me two bags of her daughter’s for Scout. (Everyone needs a friend with children the same ages as her own but opposite genders.)
• I go through an IKEA bag of stuff from another friend who’s in the process of moving. I set aside the things I can’t use to find homes for.
• At naptime a friend’s high school daughter brings by the duvet she finished making as a commission for me.
• In the afternoon, I work out a complicated childcare scenario where a friend piggybacks on my mother’s helper, who subcontracts with her little brother. It ends up costing us $10 each for two hours of childcare, during which time I listen to an audiobook uninterrupted and wrap birthday presents. On the phone, I also walk a friend through setting up an evite for an All Souls prayer potluck.

• A young friend’s husband is finishing up work on our back deck. She drops him off, grabs an apricot and leaves some vases I’ve left her

• Dinner is pasta and homemade meatballs from our yearly cow. I double the recipe and drop half off at the home of the farmer friend who raised the cow, who’s having a difficult recovery from surgery.
• When I get home J is having a beer on the porch with the wife of our deck repairman and the father of the extra kid our mother’s helpers watched.
• After kid bedtime, I eat a brownie baked by one friend and enjoy a cup of tea from the hostess, when I meet to plan our Blessed Is She Advent retreat.

Pretty potatoes from our farm share, run by a parishioner, some of which were delivered to a friend of a friend recovering from a concussion

These friendships are different, more demanding and deeper, than those friendships when you get together when your life is under control for a night that feature fancy food, sparkling conversation and clean countertops. Sometimes we have those things and they are good things to be sure. But this life of ours paradoxically requires more mess and more order. When your child outgrows her wardrobe, you can’t just bag it up for Goodwill or simply toss it; instead, you divvy and deliver it between friends, and you accept hand-me-downs in advance that you’ll have to store. You invite people into the nooks and crannies of a busy family life and hope they don’t walk away when you run late because of a diaper blowout or you offer them half of the non-gourmet thing you froze weeks ago. It’s harder and more vulnerable than the independent suburban way I think a lot of people live, but its porosity and clamor and warmth are a comfort in times of trouble (and morning sickness) and a fortress against the materialism of the world in which our children can flourish.

PS–Would it be helpful for anyone if I did a detailed post on my system for storing hand-me-downs?

The Chesterton Society and Having It Made

There is a club I’ve never attended and it takes place under my own roof while I’m sleeping upstairs. It’s the Chesterton Society, and I think I love it, even though I’ll never be a member.

Through other people’s shrewd behind-the-scenes maneuvering, this fall J became the leader of a Chesterton Society of Catholic men who meet, sometimes in our living room or at our fire pit, sometimes at one member’s downtown restaurant. The club’s goals and identity are still evolving, but it seems to center around Catholicism, the life of the mind, manliness, beer and meat. I like to think G.K. Chesterton, for whom the group is named, and who I discovered, like most people, through a college obsession with C. S. Lewis, would approve.

The group is Catholic men, some still in college, some as old as my father. There are married men and unmarried men, Catholic fathers with children of all ages. There’s a professor, a missionary, a restauranteur, an insurance man, and others who drift through the house with their books, their tobacco pipes. This club is their story, not mine, to tell, and yet — the comment of one of its members, whose wife is a dear friend, really struck me.

He said that the group is special for him because there aren’t a lot of opportunities for Catholic husbands and fathers to hang out and see how other people are doing it. This group provides that for him, one late, late evening a month.

Certainly stay-at-home motherhood is often seen as lonely work, and that’s absolutely true, when your coworker is a four-year-old who chews up his toothbrush during nap time. But on the other hand, I think of all the riches of companionship I’ve found, especially since moving here to Virginia: friends from church, some with children much older, one just starting out on her first pregnancy, some of us cradle Catholics, some converts and reverts. These are people I can text during a kid’s meltdown, who watch my kids when I run to confession, who talk about the nuts and bolts of marriage as our kids slug each other on the playground.

There’s also the Internet, of course. Catholic mom blogs are a thing (though I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say mine is), but I haven’t run across more than a handful of sites speaking to the Catholic man’s domestic experience. So my husband has the comfort of a department of comrades who love his subject as much as he does, and I’m reasonably certain none of them are prone to chewing up toothbrushes (at least during work hours). But he encounters many fewer opportunities throughout his day to think about his vocation as a husband and father in the context of community, and I have to admit that’s a real poverty, even on my most trying days as a stay-at-home parent.

The American Chesterton Society considers itself a contributor to the “revival of common sense, laughter, beauty, faith, and other good things.” So even if it leaves beer bottles on my kitchen counters, that kind of community seems like something worth building.

Here’s to you, G.K.

On Moving

A partial list of things about which I am capable of feeling guilty:

• entering a restaurant within 30 minutes of closing time
• never making pie crust, and never making pie at all if it can be avoided
• those face wipe things which I secretly love but find inexcusably wasteful

Big belly, backyard strawberries, late June

So it’s no surprise I feel way guilty about moving. We’ve lucked upon the dearest little slice of suburbia imaginable, and I will miss it terribly.

We have loved this backyard like no other place I’ve ever lived. Part of it is Pippin’s age — it makes getting outside imperative — but so much is the beautiful place we’ve found ourselves. We have the best view in a pretty neighborhood, and situated on the top of a hill, the mosquitos are beat back by the same winds that whistle cruelly through the house in winter.

After six years of basement living, we have a lovely, light-filled space. We could really expand, and with the arrival of first Scout and then my in-laws’ U-Haul of hand-me-down furniture, we did, joyously.

And our neighbors — well, I’ve gushed about them before. They’ve been dear presences at birthday parties and blizzards, Christmas and the baptism. People stop to talk to us in the neighborhood, and we can walk (if I can bear the hills), to a little park not far away. We told one set of neighbors about the move over a home cooked dinner; we told the others when we went to pick up Bonnie after they’d watched her for us. Both times made me feel queasy.

The truth is, this house isn’t perfect, though, and after some soul-searching, we didn’t consider it, even though it’s technically up for sale. It’s drafty, and carpeted, and most importantly, we just don’t see ourselves living forever as a one-car family this far out of town. So we found a little Craftsman in the city limits we love, and we’re in the process of some very scary financial stuff I only vaguely understand, and every time I look out our bedroom window at That View, I’m heartbroken all over again.