The Slow School movement

The "Slow Movement" that started in Italy and comprises, most famously, Slow Food and Slow Cities, is now spreading to education.

The idea of Slow is to counter the rush and hurry in the modern world, and the emphasis on efficiency, by slowing things down, giving them more attention and love, and aiming at quality rather than merely quantity. You can read on Wikipedia about Slow Fashion, Slow Money, Slow Parenting, and even a World Institute of Slowness. In a recent issue The Sower, a magazine for Catholic teachers, Leonie Caldecott and I argued for the concept of "Slow Evangelization".

The application to education is an obvious one. Schools are subject to the same pressures as the rest of modern society – the pressure to churn out good exam results and employable citizens. The old ideals of a liberal arts education for freedom and wisdom have fallen by the wayside. In my two books on education I try to indicate the way this ideal might be reclaimed, and the importance of doing so. I don't explicitly link this approach to the Slow Movement, but it is an obvious next step. The Slow Movement website writes about education here. The article asks:

Where has the education system in schools gone wrong? It started with taking the responsibility for education away from parents and families and making it compulsory for children to go to school. While schools were accountable to the parents and community the education process had some chance of meeting students and community needs. But where governments have acquired central authority over education, education seems to have become a matter of outcomes – standardised test results.

The Times Education Supplement covered the topic on 2 November 2012. Teachers and parents interested in this approach will find much of interest if they pursue these leads.

We need to move away from the "fast food" model of education as quickly as possible.

Tolkien and Hopkins

You might like to compare Tolkien's "Ainulindale" (the Elvish account of thecreation of the world through music, inThe Silmarillion), with the following meditation on the Exercises of St Ignatius by Gerard Manley Hopkins, taken from The Notebooks and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins (OUP, 1937), pp. 348-51.

"The angels, like Adam, were created in sanctifying grace, which is a thing that affects the individual, and were then asked to enter into a covenant or contract with God which, as with Adam, should give them an original justice or status and rights before God. The duties of this commonwealth were, for them, to contribute each in his rank, hierarchy, and own species, towards the Incarnation and the great sacrifice. Sister Emmerich saw this under the figure of the building of a tower: it might perhaps also be called a temple and a church.

How we know

This is a golden age of scientific discovery. Nevertheless, the most basic things about ourselves remain a mystery. What is consciousness, for example? It is clearly correlated with processes happening in the brain, but that’s not what I mean. What is it, in the sense ofwhat is it made of? It obviously isn’t made of matter or energy. Matter and energy are things we think about, things we are conscious of, but they are not what we are conscious with. 

And how do we know what is true or false? Not because one neuron has triggered another. The reasons we give for our beliefs depend on logic and the laws of thought, not on what happens to be going on in our head. If another neuron had fired, it wouldn’t have changed the truth or falsity of the statement I have just made. 

Catholic philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas have a theory of knowledge. In one way, it is quite close to modern empiricism. It says we base our knowledge on what the senses reveal to us.

Technology in the Home

The latest issue of the online reviewHumanum published by the Center for Cultural and Pastoral Research (the research facility of the John Paul II Institute in Washington, DC), which I edit, is now online and has big implications for education. It is all about the impact of Technology in the Home. Not so much washing machines and vacuum cleaners (who could object?) but TV, the new information technology, and the social media. Is this stuff rewiring our brains? Is technology really morally neutral? Is it just a tool we use, or can it be said to be using us for its own built-in purposes? What are the implications for home life, for family time, for reading, for the atmosphere in which we live, for the disparity between rich and poor?

Most of the articles are book reviews, perceptively written to review the available literature, but the issue as always starts with a number of articles setting the scene and discussing the main questions. There is also a Witness piece by an English father struggling to make the best use of modern technology in bringing up his children.

Daring to imagine

Pilot of the Future

The imagination of the child is very powerful, and sometimes we can still recall the mystery with which it invested the pages of the comic books we devoured when young. There is an atmosphere, a richness, a whole universe associated with those now dulled and faded inks on cheap paper, as the fragrance of our childhood wafts from the page for a moment.

What did I see in them all those years ago? It is gone almost before I can ask the question. Yet it was something beautiful, uplifting, intriguing, amusing, enriching. Maybe even the artists and the writers don't have it any more, and maybe they – as adults – are trying to recapture it for themselves.

For me it was Dan Dare to begin with, the very "R.A.F." hero developed by Frank Hampson, who started life as a chaplain to the Interplanetary Patrol before being successfully relaunched as chief pilot of Earth's Space Fleet. Later I prowled the streets looking for American superhero comics, beginning with Batman and moving on to Marvel, where fantasy and humour were fully alive, thanks to the fun-loving personality of Stan Lee ("Nuff said"). I have 

Reign of Quantity

Reign of Quantity refers to the title of a book by Rene Guenon, the Sufi convert from Catholicism. It was written in the 1940s, a book that played a seminal role for many people in the rediscovery of "metaphysical" thought outside the mainstream intellectual culture (just at a time when the logical positivists and analytic philosophers were destroying its last traces in Oxford). I have mentioned it several times, not for the trivial reason that it influenced me, but because there are insights in it that remain important, not least for educators. An article has recently appeared in Sacred Web journal by Patrick Laude looking back at Guenon's book.

One may bracket out the historical theory about repeating cycles (further developed by Robert Bolton in The Order of the Ages), or Guenon's tendency to confuse logic with ontology or Islam with Vedanta, while still retaining the thought that in today's world we are seeing a grand reversal or inversion that places Matter over Form, "quantity" over "quality" – amounting already in many places to the apparent disappearance of quality altogether. 

Image of God

Catholic schools have a big problem when it comes to teaching about sexuality and ethics. Society at large, and the government that helps to determine the curriculum, have absorbed the modern view of body and soul as essentially separate from each other, and the body as an instrument of the mind that can be treated as we wish. This view is false, but has been accepted as common sense. The task of the Catholic school is now partly to show why it is false, and to offer an alternative – an alternative beautiful and coherent enough to convince, and strong enough to provide the foundation for a Catholic way of life. This is what Blessed John Paul II tried to do with his "Theology of the Body", founding a John Paul II Institute in each continent (under the Pontifical Lateran University) to teach and develop further his rich vision of Christian anthropology – in a sense tackling head-on one of the strongest forces behind the Culture of Death.

Since then many people have tried to simplify and express the basic principles of the Theology of the Body in more accessible, less academic terms. Dr Christopher West has become well known for this, although his approach has been criticized by some of the faculty of the John Paul II Institute, partly on the grounds that it lays too much emphasis on sexual experience per se. I do not propose to survey all the alternative resources available in the field of sex education or marriage prep, but here are two examples of courses based specifically on John Paul II that readers may find interesting.

Desolation of Smaug

Here is an interview I did for a Spanishconference on Lewis and Tolkien scheduled for 2014.

Q: How can your book The Power of the Ring help us to prepare for our cinema experience with the forthcoming film The Hobbit II: The Desolation of Smaug?

A (Stratford): Obviously the film can be enjoyed simply as an adventure or action movie, with lots of fighting, magic, monsters, and heroic deeds. In that sense it is not essential to read about the film or the book before going to the cinema. But my book is designed to explore the deeper meanings of the story and the intentions of J.R.R. Tolkien in writing it. These meanings and intentions add another layer of interest and enjoyment to the story. Unless you know them you will miss some of the pleasure you might have had in viewing the film.

My book aims to explain why Tolkien’s “Middle-earth” – the imaginary world in which the story is set – is relevant to us today. Tolkien created Middle-earth out of real-life places and experiences. His vivid descriptions of nature, which inspired Peter Jackson to design the world of the movie, draw on real life but help us to look at the world in a new way, with a keener appreciation of its beautiful qualities and a stronger love of nature. In the 1960s Tolkien’s writing even helped to inspire the ecology movement. 

Education open to God

A new book has gathered together Pope Benedict XVI's statements and writings on education in one place. Read about ithere. "The editor has grouped 63 addresses on education by Pope Benedict under seven themes: the relationship between faith and reason; the compatibility of freedom and truth; education and love; pedagogy and learning; education in faith and community; culture and the university; and the relationship between science, technology and theology." Sounds important to all readers of this blog.

Remembering the present

In Beauty in the Word, I based my philosophy of education on three pillars or elements: Remembering, Thinking, and Communicating (roughly equivalent to the ancient categories of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric – the "Trivium"). The connection between these is not always obvious, but I think it can be explained in the following way.

Memory is foundational. On it is grounded not only our sense of personal identity, but our ability to think and communicate. One of the most profound comments on memory I have come across is in Pavel Florensky's The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. In it he writes, "That which in God is called 'memory' completely coincides with God's thought, for in God's consciousness Time is identical to Eternity, the empirical identical to the mystical, and experience is identical to creativity. God's thought is perfect creativity, and His creativity is His memory. God, remembering, thinks, and, thinking, creates" (p. 149). Thus for man, too,remembering is the highest form of thought. Education begins and ends with the awakening of memory – get that right and the rest follows.

It is not that we already know, or knew, every detail of what our teachers want us to learn. Rather, to remember the Being from which we come and on which we depend – to recall the Principle of existence – is to establish a context for learning everything else. It is to give thinking and communicating a place to stand. Again, in God, thinking is identical with remembering, and so, for us, to think correctly we must remain faithful to the memory of our origin and build upon it. Thought, science, argument, must be soaked in wonder to be authentic. Communication, too, must come from the heart where our most fundamental memories are pondered and treasured. The Beautiful, Ethics, and the Arts can only flourish when heart speaks to heart, which is when hearts stand on the same universal ground, the ground of Memory.

Grammar Graphics: Horse vs Hoarse

We know that mastering the English language and all its quirks can be tricky, so we’ve rounded up some commonly mixed-up words and invented some silly scenes to go along with them. Use our Grammar Graphics to help make these words’ definitions — and differences— stick

Wait, that’s not right.

Try as we might to avoid getting sick, it just seems inevitable this time of year—it starts off with a cough or a sniffle, and one morning you wake up with a hoarse throat that doesn’t go away. There’s a sticky “ack!” in the back of your throat. That’s one way to remember the difference of this homophone pair: Being sick puts the “a” in hoarse. Get it?

Have you avoided catching a cold this year? What’s your secret?

Sound it Out with Phonics Games!

The Education.com staff is still having a great time with Brainzy, our new educational games for early readers! Some of our favorite Brainzy sequences are the interactive phonics games. Phonics games are perfect for teaching young readers about the sounds that letters make and how to sound out simple words. Preview our fun phonics games below!

Each phonics concept is introduced to Brainzy players with a video full of charming melodies, engaging lessons, and dancing letters! Kids will learn the vowel sounds with a song to the tune of “Ten in the Bed.”

Muggo needs help finding the word that will power his friend-making machine! Kids will need to use their phonics skills to find words that start with the given letter. This phonics game helps kids identify the onset rime, or first sound, in a word.

Brainzy players learn phonics through engaging exercises and colorful characters. Kids will learn about phonics through monster letters that appear in teaching moments and storybooks. Kids can listen to the stories to gain familiarity with letter sounds through alliteration, or read at their own pace to practice their new skills.

Brainzy not only makes reading practice fun, but it also helps young children work on the skills that teachers believe are critical for future academic success. Each phonics game reinforces a specific English Language Arts Common Core skill, and allows kids to practice each ELA “building block” in an engaging way until they fully grasp it.

Blogger Spotlight: Hanukkah Crafts

It’s almost time for Hanukkah, and we’re preparing for the Festival of Lights by making fun and festive crafts! We’ve rounded up some amazing and unique Hanukkah crafts from parenting and education bloggers that you and your child can make together this holiday season.

This Hanukkah gift calendar from Busy in Brooklyn is a beautiful and simple craft that kids will look forward to eight days in a row!

Did you know that Thanksgiving and Hanukkah coincide this year? ‘Thanksgivukkah’ hasn’t occurred nationally since 1918, and it won’t happen again until 2070! Celebrate this rare mash-up of winter holidays with a ‘Chanacopia’ like the one on Jew It Up!

How cute is this sparkly rhinoceros menorah from Aunt Peaches? Substitute a toy dino for the rhino and turn it into a perfect Dinovember accessory!

Grammar Graphics: Desert vs Dessert

We know that mastering the English language and all its quirks can be tricky, so we’ve rounded up some commonly mixed-up words and invented some silly scenes to go along with them. Use our Grammar Graphics to help make these words’ definitions — and differences— stick!

Speaking of dessert, let’s take this week to tackle desert vs dessert.

A classic mnemonic device to differentiate the spelling of these two words is to tell yourself that when it’s dessert, you want to ask for seconds (because there are two S’s in dessert…get it?). We just wanted to top that off with a delicious desert scene and definitions.

What dessert do you want a piece of this holiday season?

Stuff We Like: Dinovember!

What? How are we, Education.com, only JUST NOW finding out about Dinovember?

We discovered this post on Medium.com about Dinovember (click through for clarification on what that is — we don’t want to spoil it!), and we instantly fell in love with the idea and the message it promotes: ”In a time when the answers to all the world’s questions are a web-search away, we want our kids to experience a little mystery…Childhood is fleeting, so let’s make sure it’s fun while it lasts.”

We know not all moms and dads have time to stage such elaborate productions for their kids, but if you do, we’d like to encourage you to try something similar with your kids. It doesn’t even have to be dinosaurs: Use something that’s symbolic of whatever they’re into, be it fairy princesses, construction vehicles, or 18th-century history. Refe is right: every kid deserves to wonder a little while longer.

Introducing Brainzy!

All of us at Education.com have been having a lot of fun with Brainzy, our new educational games for early readers. We’ve had a great time seeing kids enjoy Brainzy’s humor-filled teaching moments, fun songs and colorful cast of characters!

Brainzy has a bunch of games that help kids build a foundation for a lifelong love of reading and writing, including a great selection of alphabet games. Alphabet games help young readers practice letter recognition, letter-sound matching, and reading engagement. Check out a few of Brainzy’s fun alphabet games for kids below!

Backpack Sort helps children identify different vowels in decodable words as they pack Floyd and Tutu’s backpacks for school! This alphabet game gives kids great practice with letter recognition and vowel identification.

Grammar Graphics: Peace vs Piece

We know that mastering the English language and all its quirks can be tricky, so we’ve rounded up some commonly mixed-up words and invented some silly scenes to go along with them. Use our Grammar Graphics to help make these words’ definitions — and differences— stick!

Here’s the first of our super-shareable Grammar Graphics: Peace vs Piece.

I find  peace in sipping a cup of coffee while reading a book, and I wouldn’t turn down a piece of cake to go with that.

Where or when do you find your piece of peace?

Blogger Spotlight: Handprint and Footprint Crafts

We’ve seen some very cool activities, games, and crafts floating around the blogosphere recently! To celebrate all of the great things that parenting and education bloggers have been posting, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite handprint and footprint crafts from recent blog posts.

This hand and foot print peacock activity from Rockabye Butterfly is cute and simple for young artists! Squishy paint between toes and fingers is wonderful for sensory play, too. Handprints and footprints would also make a very cute Thanksgiving turkey with a full and colorful tail!

These prints of Frankenstein’s monster from Frogs, Snails and Puppy Dog Tails are adorable! A tiny footprint add just the right amount of whimsy to the title monster from Mary Shelley’s tale of horror.

This canvas handprint tree from Glued to My Crafts is a great keepsake for parents, and it acts as a perfect autumnal decoration! It’s also a nice way to preserve your child’s little handprint in a polished setting that will look good every fall.

What Was Your Best Halloween Costume?

Everyone who has ever suited up on October 31st has a favorite Halloween costume, or at least one that makes for a good story. Wondering what the big kids at Education.com wore on Halloweens past? Here’s a look at the staff’s best Halloween costumes from their childhoods.

Power RangerIn third grade, I was a Power Ranger. My mom was one of, like, 1% of moms at my school who knew how to sew, and she usually made my costumes. She found a pattern for the Power Rangers suit at the fabric store and made it for me … out of felt. I don’t begrudge her being sensible by buying cheap fabric, but man … felt does not breathe. At all. And this was a full, head-to-ankle suit. I wore that thing all day. I also brought a toy dagger with me and it got taken away at after-school care because it too closely resembled a real weapon. –Jody

Rubik’s CubeThe Rubik’s Cube came out when I was in elementary school. I must have been about 9 years old. It became my obsession and I decided it would be my Halloween costume. My mother and I found a cardboard box. We cut a hole in it for my head and cut colored construction paper into perfect squares and pasted them on the box. The paper was pasted on randomly to resemble a Rubik’s Cube in the process of being solved. I was proud of our creation and walked to school with my head high, full of confidence. That pride quickly dissipated when I got to school and realized another kid had the same idea, but his Rubik’s Cube was store-bought. Suddenly, my beautiful creation became a messy collection of muted colored squares slapped onto a floppy brown box. His Cube was vibrant, colorful and it may have even worked. –Todd

The Hunchback of Notre DameSee the dark form with the faux-dirty face and black skull cap, smack dab between the teal fairy and the poodle skirt? That’s me playing the Hunchback of Notre Dame in third grade. I guess none of my girlfriends knew that Halloween costumes are supposed to be SCARY! –Johanna

Robot
My best Halloween costume as a kid was a robot costume my dad made me out of tin foil-covered cardboard boxes, some kind of collapsible tubing (for the arms and legs) and leftover electronics parts for facial features and buttons and knobs. It looked so cool! –Kat

Minnie Mouse
A lot of my Halloween costumes when I was a kid were princess outfits. This was before Disney started telling stories about Pocahontas, Mulan and girls of the Scottish Highlands, so they were pretty typical frilly, sparkly princess dresses. But my fave costume was probably Minnie Mouse. I went through a phase as a kid where I was all about her. She wore polka dots, she liked the color red, she laughed a lot — we had a lot in common. It was a store-bought costume with mouse ears and hair bow. Quintessentially cute and perfectly Minnie. –Candice

CinderellaMy sister and I were Cinderellas for Halloween, and our triplet siblings were pumpkins. My dad pushed the two Cinderellas in a buggy that served as our carriage. I loved being pushed in the carriage even though I was well beyond the age of needing a stroller. –Ashley

SkunkAs soon as autumn descended, and when she wasn’t otherwise occupied, you’d find my mom hunched over her sewing machine, carefully constructing elaborate costumes for me and my sisters. In third grade I decided to be a skunk. The finished product, thanks to Mom’s mad skills, was a masterpiece. And the best part, by far, was the ridiculously poofy tail. My friends were dumbfounded and I was laughed at all day long. As they haughtily paraded around in fairy wings and South Park masks, I was mentally spraying all over their unwarranted contempt. –Katherine

BelleWhen I was in first grade, Disney’s most fantastic movie ever, Beauty and the Beast, had been out for almost a year by the time Halloween rolled around. So I, like every other elementary-age girl at the time, was Belle for Halloween. But my Belle was by far the best Belle of all Halloween Belles because my awesome grandma, who could sew a perfectly tailored grown man’s three-piece suit out of three tufts of sheep shavings because she was of a generation where that was part of every grandma’s Rolodex of skills, made my Belle costume. My grandma sewed the bejeezus out of that dress. It fit me to a T, moved like the water, draped and gathered intricately and in all the right places, and sparkled and glowed a gilded yellow that seemed to radiate even when I was completely still. I was on Cloud 9 when I was wearing that dress (and believe me, I did not just wear it for Halloween), and at school, I put all those other dress-in-a-bag imposter Belles to SHAME. And they knew it, too. To top it off, I had a pair of matching gloves, my mom did my hair just like Belle’s (I had the curls already down pat), and the best part was that my Gram let me wear one of her prized pieces of costume jewelry from her younger days — a crystal-encrusted necklace that made me feel like a real princess. –Carlee

PumpkinIn first grade I was a pumpkin. It was impossible to use the restroom. –Andrea

FiremanI didn’t care much about Halloween as a kid. So, naturally, my best costume was one I had no hand in choosing. In kindergarten, my mom had me wear a simple fireman’s outfit with shiny rain boots and a gigantic red plastic hat. People went crazy for it while I acted like it was just any other day. –David

Authors We Like: Ransom Riggs

Education.com’s introduction to Ransom Riggs was kind of an accident. During our last year of Summer Reading roundups, we found ourselves with a complete list for high school…until we noticed that one of our picks wasn’t going to be released until November. With only about a week to go before we the list went live, we summarily dispatched an editor (i.e., me) to the nearest Barnes and Noble, armed with Amazon’s top-ten for teens that year. The book I came back with? Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.

At Education.com, we strive to make our content friendly and inviting for all kinds of kids, so we try to stick to happy stuff. However, there’s a small contingent of kids out there who actually like to be scared, and go largely underserved every month of the year that isn’t October. I was definitely one of those kids – I always loved the thrill and suspense of ghost stories; of creeping mysteries and tales of the supernatural. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, or Miss P as it’s often abbreviated, helped me reconnect with the kid in me that loved listening to scary stories under a blanket at sleepovers; that slightly woozy sensation of suspense that I still chase to this day. Honestly, I often wonder if Riggs even wrote Miss P with kids in mind: I likely would have never known it was intended for tweens if I hadn’t first seen that eerie cover in the children’s section of my local used bookstore. Still, the fact that it is strictly known as a children’s book is what made Miss P that much more refreshing: It’s scary, but not insulting. It doesn’t assault kids with horrific imagery, but it doesn’t attempt to shield them from scenarios that others might automatically proclaim “too scary” for kids’ delicate sensibilities.