Home to School

The language arts. How would you go about introducing that subject to the middle schooler you’ve decided to homeschool? A friend of mine in that position asked me this question recently. We are inclined these days to just jump in to something, believing that we’ll understand the why of it later, if we ever do at all. Our bias now leans toward the practical at the expense of the theoretical. But if we don’t understand the reason we’re doing or studying or saying something, then how might we ever know whether what we’re doing will add up to anything that makes sense in the end? Futility can exact an existential price.

This need to know why is especially important when it comes to the liberal arts, the foundation of which is the language arts. An art is a skill. That is its first meaning in its original Latin (the Old English synonym is craft). Skill is not simply an attempt, not simply doing what one wishes as one wishes; it is a making in keeping with the nature and limit of the materials one is using, creating something within those restrictions but according to reasons and principles. The criticism often made against the liberal arts—of what use are they?—is really a bit beside the point: no one takes the time and trouble to learn how to do something skillfully if there is no point in doing it. No one. So the question is not whether the liberal and language arts are useful, but what they are useful for. Coming to an answer to that better question takes us straight into anthropology: what do we believe human nature is, for that answer will direct what we do and how we do it. This, in fact, is the basis of the traditional understanding of integrity, of wholeness.

Those thoughts, put that way at least, are for us, not for our middle schoolers, but both we and they must have some sense of the whole which the language arts are meant to serve if we hope to stay motivated. First and foremost, these language skills are preparatory; they are not the end of our education, but means to a means, the first part of the larger body of studies called the liberal arts. The totality of the liberal arts includes literature and mathematics, much of what we call the humanities, but the classical curriculum begins with grammar and logic and rhetoric; these are the subjects which specifically comprise the language arts. The Roman Stoic Seneca said the liberal arts are to push us off in the direction of virtue, a word which in the classical world did not carry the moralistic freight it often does now, but which meant something like a special strength, something similar to the way we might speak of the virtue of exercise, meaning its beneficial qualities. The first three language arts are directive or navigational; they are about learning how to think—not what to think, but how. Gaining facility in that skill makes it likelier that we can find our way to virtue less scathed and battered by life, indeed that we might begin that journey at all.

A good case could be made that to be human is to ask why. Animals accept their place, humans do not. We always want the next thing, and if behind that unsatisfied energy is not the skill to perceive and define and compare and contrast the choices before us with clarity and reason, we risk drifting unmoored in societies as complex and complicated as now cover the world. The fascia of human societies is language. Our consciousness arises in language, we think in language, we encounter one another in language. And the quality of our awareness and thought and sociability—the qualities of our living, our real standard of living—depends on the ease and mastery we enjoy in being able to give form and expression to what is going on in our mind, our interior life. We abhor, and rightly so, the individualized isolation that is so much a part of the modern world, and which is so unlike the rightful solitude from which, as the poets know, true and thoughtful language arises in a reflective life.

The language arts are not about self-expression, but the expression of the self or mind (or even Self, perhaps) of which we are all a part, or to which we all stand in some ultimate relation. We take the trouble to learn the language arts because they make it possible for the human mind to understand itself, and with that understanding, make it more probable, as Emerson said, to bring ourselves safely to port. The literary critic Lionel Trilling has said that the “mind does not move toward its ideal purposes over a royal straight road but finds its way through the thicket of its own confusions and contradictions.” Such difficulties can begin early, and to explain even to middle schoolers that reading and writing and thought and style can bring order and understanding to their lives is to give them the means to real confidence—because it’s real knowledge—about themselves and about the world they will find their way through.

***