An Interview with Amanda Faus author of The Children’s Tradition
For an updated view on the new Spring TCT launch, I suggest watching the recent interview between Amanda and Autumn Kern of Commonplace. For Narnia & Lattes readers, get 10% off your purchase of TCT with code NARNIA.
Can you speak to the mom who feels inadequate and unsure if she is classical enough to implement TCT? Maybe she is interested but not sold. Can this approach be combined with other curriculums she already feels comfortable with or edited, or is this all-or-nothing curriculum?
The question is not are you classical enough, but are you a human teacher raising human children? “Classical” can be a loaded word that comes with varying degrees of baggage, but at the end of the day the classical tradition is about human things that have stood the test of time. You and your children are worthy of a homeschool that honors the way God made you all: as embodied souls suited to communion with God. TCT is all about bringing the normal things of life – your home habits, music, stories, art anhed nature- into how you participate in relationship with God, man, and creation. While TCT has the scope and depth for a robust education, this is a method of education suited to all people, to students of all capacities, and can be entered into as gently as your family needs.
As to whether a mother can combine this in curriculum with others, there are a number of families who have been doing just that! While there are principles that undergird why we follow certain methods, every mother must make choices about what will best serve her family in the season they are in. There are a wide range of classical and Mason curricula that could be integrated with TCT, particularly as mother teachers are equipped by the philosophy of TCT to evaluate how to maintain the poetic mode of learning.
How does one implement the many beautiful suggestions in TCT of poetic ways of living: music lessons, nature walks, local museum visits, stargazing and more without falling into the checklist mentality or overwhelm?
One thing I seek to emphasize in TCT is that this is a way of life, not merely school. In The Death of Christian Culture, John Senior lamented that the reason so few people are equipped to encounter the Great Books of the Western tradition in college is that our cultural soil is depleted of the imaginative nutrition necessary for growth. Bodies and minds, fed on artificiality and sensationalism, will lie fallow. Many of us do not come from a background where we learned to enjoy soul-enriching leisure that can be experienced in classical music, poetry, old books, art, and the natural world, and so TCT is about restoring the cultural soil at the level of your family. Slowly but surely you create a home atmosphere that is forming you and your children to ordo amoris, love the right things in the right ways. While anything could be reduced to box checking, I have sought to frame TCT from beginning to end in a way that keeps these ends in view and helps mothers remember what is most important.
I know you’ve implemented TCT personally in your home with four children (and one on the way!) What have been some of your favorite memories of this year?
My favorite part of implementing a poetic learning environment in our home is the way it spills into every part of our day. Our lesson times are quite enjoyable as we gather to sing songs, read books, do nature study, and so on, but the moments that strike me as profound are when I find my children doing any one of those things on their own in their free time. I am thinking of how my daughter sings folk songs while she does the dishes. My son loves to grab his nature notebook to draw something he found in our yard. My daughter begs to read poetry and fables aloud to the family in the evenings. My 3 year old frequently gets out our art prints and will lie on her belly staring at them as they’re scattered across the floor. All of my little ones love to cuddle up and listen to me read Mother Goose and classic picture books on a daily basis. We are not a perfect family, and these beautiful moments are absolutely integrated with plenty of less idyllic and even sinful moments. But when I step back and see the direction we are headed, I have to thank God that He has set us on this path where a genuine love of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is being nurtured in spite of our many imperfections.
Could you speak to how one would practically combine multiple ages, grades, and learning abilities with TCT?
Because of our vision for restoring the cultural soil of the family, it is natural that many of the habits and practices we are seeking to implement would involve the participation of the whole family. The Benediction Table, with Psalms singing, Scripture memory, folk songs, poetry reading and recitation, and moral tales, can be integrated for everyone from Nursery to Adolescent students. Gymnastic activities and nature study are examples of other things that can easily be done as a family, while different students will approach them according to the depth that is suited to their age. When it comes to book-related lessons, there are natural loops for many of the books where one could combine students who are within a couple years of each other. We also can take into account that we are progressively teaching independence and self-education as a habit, so particularly around 4th grade students will begin taking on more independent reading and skills work (such as their arithmetic, copywork, etc.) that means you you will find plenty of overlap where your older students are working independently and you are freed up to give your younger students the more focused attention they need.
How did you determine the history decisions and to forgo traditional history streams? Can you give some examples?
Our approach to history is based on a few factors, all of which are based on my studies of historic pedagogy and the work of John Senior on education in the poetic mode of learning. First, knowledge is integrated and is misunderstood when approached narrowly as strictly divided subjects. We read a wide range of history books, but we also emphasize the centrality of experiencing history through exploring your local town, taking field trips, and participating in the liturgical life of the church calendar. We sing folk songs and read poetry about historical events. We encourage children to ask their grandparents about stories from their childhood. In this we understand that history lessons are happening all the time, whether or not they would fit in a box to be checked.
Second, in the Nursery and School Years, history is best engaged from the perspective of cultivating the child’s imaginative soil where they come to know a time and place through the eyes of particular people, both real and fictional. Charlotte Mason articulated this so well when she wrote in Home Education,
“The fatal mistake is in the notion that he must learn ‘outlines,’ or a baby edition of the whole history of England, or of Rome, just as he must cover the geography of all the world. Let him, on the contrary, linger pleasantly over the history of a single man, a short period, until he thinks the thoughts of that man, is at home in the ways of that period. Though he is reading and thinking of the lifetime of a single man, he is really getting intimately acquainted with the history of a whole nation for a whole age. Let him spend a year of happy intimacy with Alfred, ‘the truth-teller,’ with the Conqueror, with Richard and Saladin, or with Henry V.—Shakespeare’s Henry V.—and his victorious army. Let him know the great people and the common people, the ways of the court and of the crowd. Let him know what other nations were doing while we at home were doing thus and thus. If he come to think that the people of another age were truer, larger-hearted, simpler-minded than ourselves, that the people of some other land were, at one time, at any rate, better than we, why, so much the better for him.”
Against that backdrop, it is important to understand that we do have history streams, though we are not following a chronological timeline. Why do we not follow a chronological timeline? Because there is no principle of education that necessitates children be taught history in such a scientific manner. History is a world to be explored, not a timeline to be mastered. We begin in the first couple years of formal lessons giving children the stories of their people, figures from American history and the encouragement to learn about local figures. We then incorporate more and more world history from around the world, with a special emphasis on ancient Greece and Roman and the European tradition that is our western heritage. The key history stream for all seven years is time-tested historical fiction, because those are best written to appeal to the imagination of children. As the years go on, we then expand to include more classic history texts like the medieval chroniclers and Plutarch, and this culminates in Year 5 where we introduce our final stream, historical accounts, which is a combination of memoirs, autobiographies, and historical essays. In all of this, the books we read for children are living, full of interest and food for their imagination. I do encourage students to keep a Book of Centuries, a timeline book where they can write down figures they are learning about, and slowly but surely you will find that students form their own relationships between people who lived around the same time, and they will come to develop ideas of time and place through how people ate, dressed, and lived.
I know there are many mother-teachers with little ones in the younger years who are eager to learn your philosophy. Do you have any words of wisdom for these moms, the five and under crowd who are eager to offer a poetic atmosphere to their children?
I have a soft spot for those eager moms because that was certainly how I felt when my oldest was pre-school age. The first time I ever did Morning Time (what we now call our Benediction Table thanks to the inspiration of Autumn Kern of The Commonplace) was when my oldest was just three years old. She sat there with her big brown eyes and curly hair, full of excitement that she was getting one-on-one time with Mommy while her baby brother napped. We sang a hymn, practiced a Scripture verse, and read a picture book. And the rest is history! What I want to encourage moms in that season is that the poetic mode of learning is for their little ones just as much as it is for School Children. In the classic Ages of Man, the formation of a person begins in the Nursery! This is why I ultimately chose to weave pre-school Nursery Years suggestions throughout TCT. I am a big believer in preserving what Charlotte Mason calls a “quiet growing time” before formal lessons begin at 6, but I also know that that does not mean waiting until then to immerse them in nature, art, music, and stories. The best thing you can do in the early years is establish poetic habits as a family that communicate that you are lovers of truth, goodness, and beauty. Going for walks, poetry read-alouds during snack time, learning to keep their room clean, reading classic picture books, cooking together, exploring nature, visits to art galleries, and so many other rhythms can be forming your child in organic ways that will make the transition to the school years even more delightful!
What would you say to parents who feel TCT is too Eurocentric or whitewashed wanting to give their children a more diverse view of the world?
Part of our educational philosophy is that you cannot know other times and places until you have first come to know your own. A child’s knowledge of the world and imagination will naturally expand, like an ever-widening circle, to include more and more of the world. But you must start somewhere, and your own people and history is that somewhere. Now on the level of the family, this will take on unique flavors. Our family’s history of Norwegian farmers and Mexican immigrants means a deeper connection and interest in those countries by virtue of our biological heritage. I would expect no less from a family whose roots go back to China. I also greatly sympathize with African Americans with a darker history whose relationship to their past is tainted by their ancestors being stolen, sold, and purchased as part of the transcontinental slave trade. There might understandably be a deeper need to recover a connection to that past expressly because it was stolen rather than given up freely. But with all the nuances and diversity that will play out in how each family preserves and passes on their personal history, the fact nevertheless remains that the United States as a country is irreplacably downstream of European culture, even as it is also the Great Melting Pot where people of every ethnicity and background now live. The reality is that for those of us who have been born and raised in America, we are more culturally connected to European history, all the way back to Greece and Rome, in a way that we are not equally connected to the place of our biological origins. American culture is profoundly shaped by the Western canon of literature, history, and ideas, and American people ought not to be ashamed of this.
As John Senior tells us in Death of Christian Culture, “Western tradition, taking all that was the best of the Greco-Roman world into itself, has given us a culture in which the Faith properly grows; and since the conversion of Constantine that culture has become Christian. It is the seedbed of intelligence and will, the ground for all studies in the arts and sciences, including theology, without which they are inhumane and destructive.”
Is there not also much to admire in, for example, eastern or African traditions? Of course there is! But those traditions are not the traditions of our country insomuch as they are not the cultural air we breathe, and so we cannot begin there. We are only fooling ourselves if we think we can encounter other cultures or traditions from anywhere but from within our own.
Now, that said, it just so happens that the 1,000 Good Books are incredibly diverse, and I would reject any silliness about calling them whitewashed. These books are the “fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, romances, adventures–the thousand good books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas and the rest,” that will take you on a hundred trips around the world. The Western tradition, full of the very human stories of “whiter” Europe or “browner” Greece and North Africa, comes down from a history deep and long enough to have transcended mere skin color. These books are “the best that has been thought and said” that is available to us in the English language, and as such there is no better starting point for your children’s education.
What would you say the end goal is of a student who has embodied a poetic education in wonder with TCT?
The end goal of an embodied education in wonder is nothing less than a life of communion with God, where His glory and love are experientially near. Modern people generally live with a fragmented, sacred/secular divide between their Christian walk and the practical aspects of the rest of their life, but historic Christianity understood our faith to be a Way, a knowledge of God that comes through participation in the life of His Church and the overflow of that Life as it redeems all things. In the classical tradition Socrates famously said that “Wonder is the beginning of all philosophy.” Philosophy comes from two Greek words philo, to love, and sophia, wisdom. The Christian life is one where we are led by wonder, a sense of awe-full fear at what we do not know, to love and grow in wisdom. A proper understanding of the Ages of Man means that this is our goal specifically for as our children move towards adulthood. In the meantime, we seek to lay poetic habits and cultivate loves in our home that will point them towards Christ, who is the Wisdom of God.
A Few Q/A’s from TCT’s General Catechism
What is the credenda of your education?
God exists, God reveals, God saves. The curriculum is a course to be run that will lead me from wonder to worship.
Students, what are you?
I am an embodied soul, made in God’s image. I am endowed with reason and suited to communion with God, man, and creation.
What is wisdom?
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the supreme wisdom is the knowledge of God. The rest of wisdom is to know my own ignorance and to be an eager student of God’s Word and God’s world.
What is the soil in which knowledge grows?
A humble heart that is willing to receive, and a disposition to love God in and through His world.
Finally, what would you say to the mom who feels she is just trying to get by day by day, where could a parent start on their self-education of the poetic mode and slowly transition even this week to living more poetically in their home?
If you are in survival mode, I would encourage you to begin with the habits that you can do together with your children. Singing Psalms enlivens the soul. Taking a walk is as good for your body as it is for your theirs. Reading quality literature will lift your hearts up in laughter and delight. Nurturing life-giving habits as a family will refresh your soul and grant you a deeper capacity over time, and then you can begin incorporating more self-education as your energy allows. The goal of the poetic mode is to love and enjoy what your senses experience, so there is really nothing to do but to open your eyes, ears, and heart to the beauty that is in front of you! A few ideas that you could implement today:
- Read a book from John Senior’s 1,000 Good Book list
- Play folk songs while you clean up
- Take a hike
- Put classical music on in the evening
- Read poetry
- Draw or watercolor something you find on a nature walk
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A huge thanks to Amanda for taking the time to share their life through photos and to answer my questions. Do you have follow up questions for Amanda or Kate? We’d love to hear below!
For Narnia & Lattes readers, get 10% off your purchase of TCT with code NARNIA.
