The Children's Tradition

“The seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas only properly grow in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, romances, adventures- the thousand good books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas, and the rest.” (John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture)

Today is the day that my curriculum The Children’s Tradition launches into the world! Based largely upon the works of John Senior and his student, James Taylor, this is a curriculum of the good books that will prepare students to love the Great Books later. It is a curriculum that teaches the poetic mode of learning, where students are immersed in sensory-emotional experiences through nature and books.

John Senior spent his life leading students to drink deeply from the well of western literature. He was deeply concerned with what it means to be a human and how we help students live well. But as he describes in Restoration of Christian Culture, he found that many college-level Great Books programs fell flat when given to students who did not have the proper preparation. This deeply resonated with me. As a homeschool student of the early 2000’s, I had seen firsthand the joylessness of high schoolers enrolled in Great Books programs. At the time, I thanked God that my parents weren’t subjecting me to similar torture! Through the intuitive wisdom of my mother, who had a deep love of Charlotte Mason, I graduated with my love for knowledge still intact. Later, when I encountered the beauties and delights of classical educational philosophy, I knew I wanted to give my children the riches of the western tradition. At the same time, it weighed heavily on me to do so in a manner that captured their hearts. 

I wanted my children to know the joy of learning that I had experienced, which led me to spend the early years of our homeschool asking how I could join the possibilities of engaging with the Great Books and sustain their love of knowledge into one integrated reality.  With this background, my imagination was immediately captured by the ideas of the 1,000 Good Books as preparation for the Great Books articulated in The Restoration of Christian Culture. I knew by experience that Senior was right, and I found his proposed solution of the Good Books, clothed in the educational philosophy I had read described by his student James S. Taylor in his book, Poetic Knowledge, to be brilliant. Just as the right books are an essential piece of a classical Christian education, so is a proper atmosphere. The embodiment of the principles through experiences and a culture of love is even more important than getting through a certain number of books in the canon.

A faithful classical elementary curriculum is a humanizing, embodied education in wonder. It is delight-driven even as it calls students up to do hard things. The Children’s Tradition will help parents leave all their modern categories, systems, and assessments in the dust as they set out on a path to transmit the riches of western culture, nurture soul-expansion, and cultivate rightly-ordered loves for the whole family. By helping parents understand the educational philosophy of a gymnastic and musical education, they will be equipped with simple, practical ways to cultivate an atmosphere that abounds in love and poetic habits that are life-giving for the whole family.

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