And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.
-Ezekiel 37:3
Image Credit: John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, “The Vision of Ezekiel.” 5234d97d-b493-4b25-80eb-eeae9cf7862e.Jpeg (767×1200)
One of the distinctive features of a Classical Conversations[1] approach to homeschooling is that you quickly discover that your life has a default soundtrack. Every week, students memorize a set of basic facts: science, math, history, geography, English grammar, Latin, Bible verse. Each set of facts is only about a sentence—or, at most, a short paragraph—long, so it is imminently memorizable, especially from the sponge-like young brains of elementary-aged kids. Then, after learning the facts together and practicing with motions or games with their friends at co-op on Monday mornings, the rest of the week, those songs are reinforced by ridiculously catchy songs, generally set to familiar tunes. We learn to skip-count the 6’s to the tune of “We Three Kings.” We memorize the seven continents to the tune of “America, the Beautiful.” We even learn how “Sargon, the military dictator, forcefully united city-states such as Ur (the home of Abraham) into his kingdom called Akadia” to the tune of “Father Abraham.” For everything, there is a song, chant, or very white-sounding rap.
This memorization-heavy approach to education has provoked some understandable pushback. After all, it seems a bit odd to expect an illiterate five-year-old to memorize a single, acontextual sentence about Hammurabi (“the fifth ruler of Babylon, who desired just laws and wanted to protect the weak, [who] created the Code of Hammurabi”) when they don’t yet know their alphabet and have barely learned proper toileting etiquette. Why attempt to stuff their heads with facts they can’t possibly understand? Why not focus on something a little more developmentally appropriate?
These are good questions that had also occurred to me when we started doing this approach with our co-op. Nonetheless, over the past few years, this model has grown on me (possibly having something to do with the songs burrowing their way like worms into my brain). In the first place, as it was explained to me, we are creating “memory hooks” for future learning. The Classical Conversations model of curriculum is cyclical, so that every three or four years the same facts come back again. The goal is that, when as student hears the facts a second time around at the age of nine or so, they will be more easily understood and retained by dint of their familiarity. By the third time around, they are ready to start tying these disparate facts together into a comprehensible pattern or story. Like Ezekiel’s bones that had to be knit together, the dry facts form a cognitive superstructure around which to give shape to the rest of their acquired knowledge.
That’s the long-term plan at least.
However, in the meantime, I have found even with my early-elementary aged kids, this approach can be a wonderful seedbed for conversations. The disembodied, acontextual, and somewhat random-seeming nature of our memory work prompts kids to push for explanation and has turned our commutes to and from swim lessons, gymnastics, and the grocery store into mini symposia, where we try to better understand the wonderful world we live in: why are “just laws” important? What does that even mean? Why are some organisms animals, while others are plants, fungi, protists, or bacteria? How do we tell the difference between these life forms, and how do they all work together to form the biosphere that sustains us? The full answers are going to be beyond the grasp of my six-year-old—as they are beyond the grasp of anyone—but the questions can start doing their magic work at any age. That goes for parents as well as kids.
For the past week or so, our catchily upbeat history fact song has been periodically marching through my head, inappropriate as a polka at a funeral: “When barbarians invaded Britain, the Celts summoned the Angles and the Saxons. Augustine became Archbishop of Canterbury.” From a historical point of view, I have several quibbles with this framing of the story. In the first place, at least as I recall, the barbarians who invaded Britain were the Angles and the Saxons. Second, the appointment of Augustine to the See of Canterbury—a significant early step in the re-Christianization of Britain—came around a century after the Germanic invaders had effectively wiped out Celto-Roman civilization and Christianity on the island. At best, my inner crotchety old man objects, this week’s history song foists a series of foreign names on uncomprehending young minds. At worst, it creates a false sense of what happened. The cheery tune and framing of the story belies the cultural genocide that it glosses over.
As a statement of historical fact, this week’s history memory lesson leaves a lot to be desired. Yet, as a prompt for meditation and discussion, it highlights the peculiar nature of the Christian faith. As historian Andrew Walls—one of my intellectual heroes and the inspiration behind my Master’s thesis—has noted, Christianity is unique among the great missionary religions (the other two being Islam and Buddhism). Where Islam and Buddhism—or Hinduism, or Zoroastrianism, or Greek paganism—are rooted in particular places and particular cultures, and flow outward from that central heartland and carry its cultural imprint wherever they go, Christianity is an inherently nomadic religion. It was first a Jewish sect centered in Jerusalem, then one of many cults setting down roots in the Levant, then an imperial religion centered in Constantinople, Damascus, and Ephesus in the east and Rome, Paris, and London in the west. In the civilized east which was once its heartland, it was overrun by Islam beginning in the seventh century AD; in the barbarian west, it was able to take root and from there to spread to the rest of the world. Today, the areas that were once great centers of Christendom are now all but devoid of Christians, being replaced in the east with Islam and in the west with secularism. Yet their dying embers have been replaced by other vibrant places where the gospel flame once again burned bright. As Walls stated, Christianity is always dying, and always in the process of being reborn. Britain’s conversion, invasion, and reconversion offers a microcosm of this pattern. The Roman Britons had accepted Christianity as good Roman subjects. They had every reason to expect that this new faith, if true, would protect them under the aegis of both divine and imperial favor. And yet scarcely had this new faith sunk roots in British soil than it was destroyed as the British Celts were overrun by pagans and wiped out or turned to slaves in their own land.
This pattern of death and rebirth was illustrated graphically in this week’s Bible study. God takes Ezekiel—the exiled prophet of a conquered people—to a valley of dried bones, and asks him, Son of man, can these bones live? Ezekiel’s answer is the perfect blend of faith and humility: Oh Lord, you alone know. Nothing natural can make dried bones come alive. Nothing Ezekiel can say or do can breathe life into decay. But Ezekiel does not allow his limitations to limit God. The story of the God of Israel—of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God who raised Jesus from the dead—is one of resurrection, not just once, but over and over again; not just in a bone-filled Middle Eastern valley, but in the green hills of Britain. And for this reason, there is always hope, even if we find ourselves in our own valley of dried bones.
[1] Technically, we are using Claritas Classical Academy this year, which is like CC’s less-expensive knockoff version, but the idea is the same.