CMP Review 2025-05-08

May 8, 2025

If there’s one thing in life that has made me keenly aware of my limitations, it’s homeschooling my children in high school. There’s so much to the banquet in these final years, and it’s hard to be adequate for every subject. It has stretched me like nothing in my experience.

In moments of doubt I ask myself whether in this day and age my children would be (or would have been) better served by specialized instructors who were each able to deliver the most seasoned instruction and heart-felt enthusiasm in their respective subjects of expertise. In those moments I can go subject by subject and think of how someone with better training and experience could do a better job.

I recently found unexpected encouragement when reading Charlotte Mason’s “School Education.” On page 170 she wrote:

We cannot expect a school to be manned by a dozen master-minds, and even if it were, and the scholar were taught by each in turn, it would be much to his disadvantage. What he wants of his teacher is moral and mental discipline, sympathy and direction; and it is better, on the whole, that the training of the pupil should be undertaken by one wise teacher than that he should be passed from hand to hand for this subject and that.

Perhaps I am not a wise teacher, but at least I am one teacher. Hour after hour and day after day my son learns from a person who loves knowledge and who loves him. Could someone else do better? Perhaps. But there is no one else who would consider it more of an honor… and no one else would more gladly cherish the memories of these precious years that no one will ever be able to take away.

@artmiddlekauff