Over the weekend I spent some time thinking about education and home learning. I have always had a lot of anxiety about whether the things I do at home with my children will result in educated people.
I know that a lot of home schoolers these days call themselves unschoolers--a very ambiguous term that can mean anything (and so to me, means nothing). However, back in the mid-nineties when I began home schooling my children, the term had a more definite meaning, typically a rejection of planned curricula and direct instruction. Under that definition, I decided not to unschool my children. As a parent, I felt a responsibility to fill my children's days with good things in a steady, predictable manner that would help them learn to control their wills.
In considering what it means to be an educated person, we often think in terms of college degrees and literacy: someone who keeps abreast of politics and current affairs, who is well-read, has sharp writing skills, and speaks more than one language. Sounds pretty good. But, what if this same person flies into a rage every time things don't go her way? What if she is unreliable? Dishonest? Impatient? Envious of others to the point of contempt?
The American poet Robert Frost said, "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
If he's right, then the educated person possesses first and foremost control over her own will.
I want my own children to grow to be wise, empathetic, creative, and engaged, and to be masters of their bodies and minds. In a society where the most frequently used drugs by 18 to 44 year olds are antidepressants, and with teen suicide on the rise, learning to govern the will may be the most important thing I can teach them.
I am still enjoying Dale Carnegie's book How To Win Friends and Influence People which is just as relevant today as it was when it was first published in 1936. I liked this passage which touches on the benefit of controlling the will:
Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy. Here is the way the psychologist and philosopher William James put it:
"Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
"Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there..."
Everybody in the world is seeking happiness--and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn't depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.
It isn't what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it. For example, two people may be in the same place, doing the same thing; both may have about an equal amount of money and prestige--and yet one may be miserable and the other happy. Why? Because of a different mental attitude. I have seen just as many happy faces among the poor peasants toiling with their primitive tools in the devastating heat of the tropics as I have seen in air-conditioned offices in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.
"There is nothing either good or bad," said Shakespeare, "but thinking makes it so."Here are my puppies Elvis and Edna enjoying a nap in the winter sunshine. : )
Abe Lincoln once remarked that "most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." (pp. 99-100)
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