Some Back-to-School Advice for Classical Parents

The start of the school year brings equal measure of hope and anxiety for students.  And not only for students – parents sending their children off to their first day of classes often worry if they have done everything they can to set them up for success in the coming months.  Over the years, in my roles as both teacher and administrator, I have had countless conversations with parents about what they can do to help their children succeed in their studies.  But truth be told, there has always been something about these conversations that I have found uncomfortable.

The fact is that the framing of the conversation in this manner seems to suggest that it is the role of the parent to help the school out in the task of educating their children.  But this gets the relationship between parents and schools exactly backwards.  Properly speaking, it is not the role of parents to help the school educate their children; it is the school that is meant to help parents educate their children.  The primary duty of childrearing lies with the parents, who contract with the school to build on the foundations that they have sought to build at home.

So the best way for educators to advise parents in regard to their children’s schoolwork is probably to draw attention to the habits that make for academic achievement.  Educators do have the unique experience of working with large numbers of young people, and observing the sorts of habits that distinguish those who excel at their schoolwork from those who do not.  We can share that experience with parents, and partner with them in helping students forge such beneficial habits.

Of course, the sorts of habits that are going to benefit a student enrolled in a classical program are going to differ from the habits that will serve their peers elsewhere.  Regular test prep and cramming might be practices that help a student succeed in a non-classical academic setting, but they are not the sorts of practices likely to help a classical student flourish in his or her studies.  The pursuit of wisdom and virtue requires other habits for its fruition.

So here are five habits which classical parents can help cultivate at home, which will help their children get the most out of their studies at school:

Converse: When I try to sum up for parents what it is we do in classical humanities study, I usually just say, “we converse.”  The subject matter of conversation varies - we converse about significant historical events, or about moving works of literature, or about remarkable works of art – but the form of instruction remains the same.  Even when students are engaged in other kinds of activities, the conversational mode remains paradigmatic; so when they read, I encourage them to imagine they are engaged in a conversation with the text, when they write that they are contributing their voice to a long conversation known as the tradition.  The point of approaching their learning in the conversational mode is to convey to them the expectation of active engagement with the material.  They are not in class merely to hear the material, but to consider, ruminate, appropriate, and finally digest the material.  This requires an active, and not a passive, frame of mind – the frame of mind of an interlocutor.

So the most basic habit that parents can cultivate with their children at home is that of regular conversation.  By this I do not mean simply small talk, but real discussion, involving a back and forth of ideas, on topics of import to the child.  Of course, I am aware of the challenges standing in the way of this habit.  The contingencies of modern life, economic and otherwise, have eroded families’ time together, even to the point of eliminating that bastion of conversation, the family dinner.  But to the extent that you are able to – on the drive to school, while preparing for bedtime – find time for meaningful conversation with your children.  If the subject matter of your conversations arises from something they are studying at school, all the better; this will afford them the opportunity to reflect at greater length on this material.  But simply allowing students to practice the habit of articulating their point of view, and responding to the points of view of others, will fortify the active mental disposition necessary for a fruitful engagement with their studies.

Read With, and Around, Your Children:  I will not dwell at length on the benefits of reading to your children.  These have been well documented elsewhere.  Besides, such benefits seem rather superfluous when it comes to the reasons for story-time.  It would be like pointing out the healthy psychological effects of hugging your child; no doubt, there are such effects, but that’s not why anyone hugs their child.  Similarly, the reason why parents should read to their children is not because it will help them ace their English classes, but because it is one of the most enjoyable ways they can spend time with their children.  It will also allow them to experience far more of the written word than they will in school alone.  Even the best designed curriculum in the world will only find space for a fraction of the wonderful literature available to your child; by reading with them at home, you can help ensure they don’t miss a thing.

But while the desirability of reading to your children is generally recognized, less appreciated is the habit of reading around your children, which is to say, modeling a habit of reading for your children.  If you as a parent routinely reach for the remote control or the tablet to occupy your free time, then of course your children will imbibe the habit of occupying their free time with distractions as well.  But if they see you employing at least some portion of your free time on reading, then they will come to assume that the cultivation of one’s mind through reading makes up the ordinary daily practices of an adult.  And it is precisely that commitment to the cultivation of their own minds that is the overriding goal of a classical course of study.

Enjoy the Silence:  The spread of school-wide prohibitions on cell phone usage is a welcome, if belated, development this school year.  The publication of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation has undoubtedly led to a rising awareness of the pernicious emotional and psychological influences of these devices.  But if anything, Haidt severely understates the effect they have on a child’s powers of attention.  To anyone who has spent time in the classroom since 2009, when cell phone access started becoming commonplace for young people, the erosion in students’ ability to focus and self-regulate has been painfully obvious. 

We forget now, but the cell phone is only one outlet of electronically mediated distraction assaulting the developing mind of our children.  While Haidt was right to point out that its portability makes its power to distract far greater than other forms of technology, this is not to say those other forms are not without their deleterious effect.  Hours spent watching garbage on Netflix or listening to garbage on the ride to and from school similarly wear down the mind’s ability to think and absorb.  Most children in America pass the day without twenty minutes in a row free from the intrusions of “popular culture,” which serves as nothing more than a spiritual anesthesia applied relentlessly to ward off the potential discomforts of thought.

If you want to know what classical educators are trying to do in their buildings, they are trying to ween their students off that anesthesia.  They are trying to clear six or seven hours in a child’s day that can be free from distraction, and devoted to the discomforting labor of thought.  One of the best ways you can help your children is by clearing as much time at home from such distractions as well: take the phone away certainly (or better yet, do not give it to your child in the first place), but also, limit television time, turn off the radio on the ride to school.  In the place of exposure to these devices, spend time reading and conversing with your children instead (see above), take walks, draw pictures with them, or just send them outside to play.  Quiet the unceasing din of technologically enhanced vapidity in their minds, and let the momentous chorus of reality reverberate there instead.

Deck the Halls:  Classical educators routinely refer to the transcendentals of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty to capture the telos of the course of study they prescribe for their students.  Of the three, I have no hesitation asserting my belief that it is beauty which can play the most decisive role in the sound development of a child’s psyche.  Well before they are able to wrestle with the conceptual conundrums of ethical or metaphysical thought, children’s sensory apparatus can receive the call of beauty, from which there is no satisfactory return to vulgarity and nihilism.  By inviting students to memorize poetry and study ancient works of art, to sing Gregorian chant in chorus or perform Shakespearean monologues in drama, the classical school is trying to allow young people to hear that call.

So habituating your children to the contemplation of beautiful things is one of the best ways to facilitate a child’s entry into a classical course of study.  Take them to museums and concerts as often as possible, for sure, but also, hang posters of classic works of art around the house or play classical music while preparing dinner.  Demonstrate the pull that beauty has over your own heart in front of your children, and they will be eager to inquire into the source and nature of that power themselves.

Practice Etiquette:  Manners are sometimes referred to as petite or little morals, which means they are the kind of morality that children will spend the most time practicing.  Their lives and actions still remain on a small scale for the most part, and so their moral development will depend less on the navigation of dramatic circumstances, and more on dozens of routine interactions that can be carried out in more or less humane ways.  Attending to manners teaches children that there is a right way and a wrong way to interact with their fellow human beings, and it calls attention to the inherent dignity of those fellow human beings, both of which intuitions are foundational to moral behavior.  Good school citizenship is overwhelmingly a matter of etiquette: how a student speaks with his teachers and his peers, how he comports himself in the classroom, how he dresses, how he eats, and so on. 

By inculcating a concern for etiquette at home, a parent is therefore providing their children with a key attribute that will lead to a positive experience in the school building.  This is not a matter of rebuking a child for placing his elbows on the table, as the idea of etiquette is routinely parodied and dismissed.  It is about asking children to show respect for the household by doing certain things one way rather than another: rising to greet a visitor, sitting at table without distractions, avoiding calling siblings names.  Once they have absorbed the idea that there are certain communal expectations of behavior prevailing in the home, they will readily adjust themselves to the communal expectations of behavior prevailing in the school building.