We’re planning for a new grade next year. One question that’s been on a lot of minds—How academically rigorous will this new grade be? I find the question confusing, even though it’s a question I myself have. I can think of at least four separate questions that we might actually be asking.
Before I answer these questions about academic rigor, I need to navigate a tricky bit of water. Charlotte Mason’s philosophy was “liberal arts education for all.”
Scylla: If everyone ought to have access to the good, the true, and the beautiful in their education, then we cannot design a K-12 system that only functions if we first remove “lower” students from the classroom. Everyone can develop a relationship with the good, the true, and the beautiful, and everyone should have access to those things. An “academically rigorous” school that proclaims the glories of its rich curriculum but only admits smart, self-directed, and/or advantaged people is sending the wrong message about what learning is and what it is for. Liberal arts education FOR ALL. Scylla avoided.
Charybdis: if education is a life, we cannot take a pragmatic, grit your teeth, raise-test-scores-or-else approach, even if it seems expedient for disadvantaged students. As admirable as the charter school movement is in many respects, its approach can seem aesthetically barren. An “academically rigorous” school that short-changes wisdom, that reduces life-giving learning to economic opportunity is sending the wrong message about what learning is and what it is for, although we may be grateful for its effects on individual lives. LIBERAL ARTS education for all. Charybdis avoided.
Okay, here are the four questions that I think we are asking when we ask whether to identify as “academically rigorous,” along with answers that apply to my educational practices (and what I hope to develop for our new grade).
- Will a student be prepared to transfer to some particular institution known for being selective or challenging?
Short answer? He might.
We don’t want our choices as teachers to limit students who should, stewarding their talents, go on to prestigious prep schools or high-stakes charter schools. Our curriculum is content-rich and at or above grade-level in many areas; we keep a full diet of ideas on the table. Some students consume more than others, and those who sink deeply into much of our material will easily transfer to another content-rich institution that has higher accountability for mastery.
- Will a student be exposed to some particular set of ideas, books, or concepts that we equate with “good” education?
Short answer? They will be exposed to many of them.
I have this Platonic ideal of a life-long reading list in my head, starting with Corduroy and The Very Hungry Caterpillar and moving on up to À la recherché du temps perdu, which, apart from Swann’s Way, I doubt I will ever attempt. Books that Must Not Be Missed, but we all do miss many of them, or have the experience and miss the meaning.
I try to provide lots of opportunities for building relationships with quality material. A student will experience lots of great stuff, but, depending on the student, might not experience as much as that student could in a homeschooling environment or in a faster-paced classroom.
- Will a student be held accountable for the mastery of some particular set of ideas, books or concepts?
Short answer: We take our time and read, look, and listen for appreciation.
Good materials merit lengthy contemplation. Memorizing a painting so that you can identify it later and tell what style it’s painted in may be beneficial, and certainly some students can do it quickly and move on to the next, but studying a painting for appreciation and enjoyment is an equalizer. Fast and slow learners do it in the same amount of time, each in their own ways. “Slow” learners often succeed better at appreciation than students who want to quickly pass to the next thing.
Our main goal for exposing students to “truth, goodness, and beauty” is to help them develop relationships with those things. For some, this might mean precise memory of terms and dates, but for others it does not. We do a little bit of a lot of things—a few tests in subjects where memorization of specific concepts matters, some narrations, some detailed pictures, some Socratic conversations, some memory work, some writing. My students don’t tend to come away with a lot of memorized knowledge, but do tend to come away with a delight in the “big picture” and the ability to locate details if needed.
- Will a student be challenged to the extent of his or her abilities?
Short answer: She might.
I place challenging demands on my students when it comes to time management and academic habits, because I want all of them to be able to undertake a project in a disciplined, confident way and see it through, doing whatever counts as quality work for them.
That said, some of the “higher” students, while they are challenged to manage time well and do quality work, may not be intellectually challenged. Some might have been able to move through math concepts at a much faster pace on their own, and others might be able to devour far more books in a year than I require from the class as a whole.
On the reverse side, some of what we experience in class goes over the heads of “lower” students. For most students, the benefits of working side-by-side with people who don’t think and talk just like them balance out any negative effects of not working at their own rate. I suspect they gain wisdom and compassion when the world doesn’t mold itself exactly to their personalities, desires, and abilities.
A final thought:
We need to be honest about what success in education means to us. An inclusive classroom and appreciation of beauty might sound nice, but when it gets down to it, we want our students to “be successful.” If we were honest about that, we might find that we mean economically or socially successful, closer to the top of some heap than the bottom, well-paid, able to own houses, able to earn some vaguely-defined “enough.”
Theoretically, many in the American upper-middle class would say there’s as much dignity in painting houses as there is in balancing books or owning your own start-up. But in reality, they don’t encourage their own children to be the house painters. If their children’s relationship with school indicates a house-painterly inclination, middle-class parents panic a little bit. They know from their own experience what it takes to be “successful” in the world, and that is a lot of hard work AND a lot of smarts. They want that for their children.
As a millennial, I have a bit of an “ all is vanity and striving after the wind” feeling about education for economic advantage. We were told that a college degree would be enough. Just get any degree and the world is your oyster. It wasn’t true by the time we graduated. We were told that a masters degree would be MORE than enough. That wasn’t true either. The market was glutted. We grew up listening to stories of cars bought at the age of 16 with money from summer jobs, of how easily our parents got a first job after college.We were told that it was normal to own a house by your late 20s. We believed these stories and conscientiously worked toward the same goals, sometimes putting ourselves in debt. It didn’t work out for us precisely the way we envisioned. And that was okay, a grace even.
I believed in “academic rigor” in high school and college more than I do now. Because the thing is, everything I learned in my education, along with all that time and money—it didn’t end up benefiting me precisely for economic reasons. What came out of my education that mattered, that nourished me even when the economy went all Humpty-Dumpty right before I graduated form college, was truth, goodness, and beauty. These three remained. And they in themselves are more than enough to justify the years I have spent and will spend in their pursuit.
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CC image courtesy of Reilly Butler on Flickr.