Spring and Winter Co-Mingle

Winter's nandina berries and spring's azalea.

Great Books High Schools

Winslow Homer's Country Schoolroom

This June my daughter will be graduating from Trinity School at Meadow View in Falls Church, Virginia. This is a "great books" high school. I sent my daughter here in 8th grade on the basis of the reading list. I have not been disappointed. I can vouch that she has read all of the listed material. From 9th grade on, history and literature are combined in a 2-hour daily seminar called Humane Letters. Books are read and discussed. When my daughter came home from her first day of Humane Letters in 9th grade, she was ecstatic: "I can't believe it. You sit around and drink coffee with your friends and talk about a book!" Not that my daughter is an avid reader or a zealous student.

Mostly, I wanted my daughter to go to Trinity for reason of the 11th grade reading list on the Greeks, including Aristotle and Plato. As in most Great Books schools, there is only one curriculum and no electives.

In Humane Letters, the students discuss the readings in class in the Socratic dialogue method, in which the teacher poses questions. They also write essays on each major reading. Essay writing is a major concern at Trinity--and the children are taught a very rigorous method of writing essays starting in grade 8, with the approach becoming more complicated and abstract in progression with the grade.

Trinity is a Christian school, and Catholic and Protestant doctrine is taught for each faith. The New and Old Testaments are also taught. I told my daughter early on that I could not let her go to a school in which God--the Creator and basis of all knowledge--is banned. She has always attended small Catholic or Christian schools that were intellectually rigorous and were not certified. (With Mr. Obama as President, such schools would be banned.)


Winslow Homer's Blackboard

Like many smaller Christian or non-Diocesan Catholic schools, Trinity plant and equipment is not the greatest, but the school's class size is very small (girls and boys are taught in separate classes), and each student receives all the attention and help they could possibly need.

I think my daughter has received a very good education at all of these uncertified schools. At Trinity, I am overjoyed with the struggles she has gone through to write her essays over the last years. I remember at one point, I nearly started laughing out loud at her determination to get the thesis of an essay right--not because she was in any way comical, but because I felt such joy at her ability to take ideas seriously and fight for the truth. The willingness to struggle to find the truth is what Trinity has given her.

The Great Books high school curriculum can be replicated in many environments. I hope that many more schools such as Trinity are founded all over the country. The small school with a rigorous and challenging curriculum with dedicated teachers--that's the ticket to bringing our educational system back to life, I believe, and ending the demoralizing de-schooling trends that have cut our children short.

Trinity has shown me that young people are very capable of understanding profound ideas and taking them seriously. I also believe that before young people start studying every other culture in the world they should have a thorough understanding of their own. This gives a solid basis for a child to enter college where more often than not, attacking Western civilization is the "politically correct" norm.

A fair number of graduates from Trinity at Meadow View go on to service our country, entering the Naval Academy, West Point, the Coast Guard Academy, Virginia Military Institute, and going through college on ROTC scholarships. My daughter will be entering the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in the fall.

Violence on the Playground and Against Teachers

Winslow Homer's Snap the Whip

This week two stories have drawn national attention that indicate a breakdown of discipline in public schools. One is the case of a teacher in the Baltimore city school system who was assaulted by a student. The case prompted the Baltimore Sun to probe the extent to which city teachers are subjected to violent behavior from students and what the consequences are for the perpetrator when the violence is reported.

The second is a report in today's Washington Post that a principal has been forced to prohibit children from playing tag during recess, because it had become a game of "intense aggression" resulting in injuries--this in an elementary school in up-scale McLean, Virginia.

To me both of these stories shine a light on not only the state of our schools but the kind of culture that is producing violence as a way of life for children--both poor and not-poor. It also raises the issue of the breakdown of discipline in the country's public schools. In my view, we are reaping the results of a prevailing culture that views inconoclasm, subversion, and rebellion as politically correct. By this I do not mean the probing and questioning of ideas or values that enter into the meaningful back and forth between children and parents and children and teachers. I mean the predisposition to resist and flout any rule or norm or morality simply because it is a rule and the individual wants to resist any boundaries. Of course, children who resist boundaries and find that indeed the boundaries stretch with their unruly will often push, are in fact invited to push, to the next level of misbehavior. Lack of common-sense discipline also feeds a child's insecurity, since a child is smart enough to know that something is out of whack if he or she is running the show. This insecurity, in turn, makes it very difficult for a child to concentrate--to work--because the child feels anxious and unsafe.

Kay S. Hymowitz, who writes on family issues for the City Journal, wrote "Who Killed School Discipline" in 2000, which sheds some light on the way in which teachers and principals have been backed into the corner and forced to accept indiscipline and violence in the schools.

There is a lot to think about how to revitalize our country's schools so that we produce educated adults who are able to meet their responsibilities as future parents, and I invite any and all comments.

And Another Cheerful Note

I made this dress for another sweet niece who just turned 8 years old. Her name is Sam, and she is as smart as a whip. The fabric is a cotton knit I bought many years ago because I loved it for a little girl. The pattern is Simplicity 3866. It took a lot less time than my first dress, and the knit was very easy to work with.

On a Happier Note

I made this dress for my lovely niece Maris for her 11th birthday. It's black and white with grey. The rick-rack edging helped the look a lot. Although this dress is not at all complicated, it took me quite a long time, most likely because I was very tentative about what I was doing since this is the first real clothing sewing project I have done in a very long time. I liked the result. My niece is quite petite, so I cut the dress pretty short. I liked the fabric a lot for her. I made it from the Simplicity 5234 pattern. Now my daughter wants me to make her a dress, and we have picked out the pattern but we haven't found a fabric yet.

And Where Are the Children?

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2006 there were 73,664,000 million children in the United States (under 18). Who takes care of them?

49,661,000 live with both their parents or 67 percent
17,161,000 live with their mother only
3,458,000 live with their father only
3,383,000 live with neither parent. Of those:
772,000 live with a grandmother and grandfather
669,000 live with a grandmother only
63,000 live with a grandfather only

1,900,000 live with neither parents nor grandparents. I do not know how many of these children live in orphanages or in foster homes.

There are 10,404,000 households in which women are the single head of the household--that is, women head the household and have dependent children. Nearly a third of these had an annual income of under $10,000.

Stay at Home Moms: Not So Many

Painting by the beloved Swedish artist Carl Larsson of his wife Karin nursing one of their eight children. Karin Larsson was an artist in her own right but stopped painting when she married. However, she continued to design and weave textiles, such as the cloth on the table, in her lovely home, as she raised their children.

I was surprised to learn that the percentage of stay-at-home moms in the USA is not very high. In 2006, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were approximately 26.5 million married households in the United States with children under the age of 18. Of these married households, in only 7,923,000 the mother is not in the workforce--or 29.8 percent. That is, only 30 percent of married women with children stay at home to care for their younguns. (I do not know how the Census Bureau counts mothers who work out of their homes in all kinds of cottage industry or those who spend time helping their husbands in small businesses run from homes but I have a feeling they are included in the 7.9 million.)

This means that by far the greater number of the nation's children are living with a mother who is in the labor force--either a mother who is married and working or a single mother who is working or a mother who is working and living with a man to whom she is not married. Surely the proportions of mothers in the labor force must be far higher for unmarried women with children.

I find this to be an unfortunate statistic, and hopefully the percentage of stay at home mothers will grow over the course of the next years.

I recently asked my daughter, who is now 18, how she would feel if she were married and had children and stayed at home with them, and then went to a cocktail party or some-such function in which people were talking about their careers, and she were asked, "And what do you do?" Would she be embarrassed to say, "Oh, I take care of my kids at home"? She said, "No, why would I feel embarrassed?"

That was good news to me. I pressed her to make sure she meant it. I told her that even though I think it is far better for women to stay at home with their children, I would feel ashamed to say it in front of a group of people who were all talking about their careers. This shame is completely counter to my views about staying at home with children and counter to what I even would have liked have done in my life but did not do for reasons that need no elaboration. Such shame comes purely from counterculture conditioning over the period of the 1970s and 1980s. That's bad news about me, but it is good news to see that my daughter has no such feelings. I hope that her views are the wave of the future and not my own residual feelings.

I would like to know what other people think of the advantages of staying at home with children and also the disadvantages and difficulties. I would like to make a kind of list of these, but I would like to hear from other people first. So please don't hesitate to let me know what you think. Very much obliged in advance.

P.S. There are so many wonderful blogs written by stay at home mothers and I hope they are both inspiring and known to young women with children who are making decisions about whether to work or not.