YMB #26 Integrating Subjects: A Conversation with Carol Reynolds

Pam: This is Your Morning Basket, where we help you bring truth, goodness and beauty to your homeschool day. Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 26 of the Your Morning Basket Podcast. I’m Pam Barnhill, your host, and I’m so happy you’re joining me here today. Well, I thought I was going to be talking to Dr. Carol Reynolds about integrating subjects, and we did and then we talked about 50 million other things as well because that’s the way a conversation goes with a person who is passionate about what they do and that certainly is Professor Carol. She is extremely passionate. We cover a lot of great topics in this interview, and it was a lot of fun to record, and I think it’s going to be a lot of fun for you guys to listen to as well. So sit back, hold on to your seat, and get ready to discover a little passion about the humanities.

Pam: Professor Carol Reynolds is a champion for art education with a specialty in the study of Imperial Russia. She has a passion for music, history, art, and culture and spent more than 20 years teaching music history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. She shares her love for the humanities by leading art tours to a wide variety of international locations. Her website, ProfessorCarol.com, is loaded with resources for families looking to dive into a deeper and more integrated study of the arts, including courses for middle and high school students, podcast webinars, and so much more. She joins us today to discuss her integrated approach to these beautiful subjects and what that approach might look like in a Morning Time. Professor Carol, thanks for joining us today.
Prof. Carol: It’s my pleasure to be here.
Pam: Well, let’s start off by talking a little bit about the arts. Why do the arts play such a central role in human experience?
Prof. Carol: Well, we are defined by many things in our role here on this earth. But one of them is our creativity and our joy, our energy. The very thing that gets all of us all over the globe up every morning, you know. Some of that is hard to describe in terms of an artistic explanation but really we are, if at all possible, very creative and expressive beings, and we see that most of all in our children. We see the joy that they have inherently in anything that remotely resembles creativity. Whether it’s singing or dancing or drawing or making up funny animal noises or seeing the beauty of something that someone else has created, they just, they go to it like a duck to water, and we as adults sort of lose a lot of that confidence in that side of our being, but we were created that way divinely created that way, and unfortunately we’re living in a time where that has been, as you know, deeply minimalized by so many factors that it seems now to be something that sits on the side as a convenience when you need it.
Pam: I agree. And that whole “convenience when you need it,” it’s almost like it’s become an afterthought as opposed to something that is absolutely central to who we are as a people and, you know, having the importance, I think it deserves to our ability to express ourselves and communicate and live fully.
Prof. Carol: I couldn’t agree more. You’ve said it all right there and everyone who is involved with your audience is dedicated to bringing up the absolute best qualities in each child and in the entire family’s life, there’s no question about that. We often forget that among the values that we try to teach and sometimes people call it The Three Transcendentals, goodness, truth, and the third, and this has been there for a millennia, is beauty. And we often forget that it is just as important to try to teach as the things we teach in the way of say honesty and duty and all of these things that we know are the cornerstones of the life of our children as they develop, we’re not always sure that beauty is in there as one of those three sister values and yet it is.
Pam: OK. So that’s very interesting because this is one of the things that 99.9 percent of my audience would tell you is that they’re worried about the right and moral upbringing of their child, but what you’re saying here is that we also need to worry about their appreciation and response to beauty, that’s just as important as the truth and the goodness that we might be trying to instill in them?
Prof. Carol: Well, that has been a cornerstone of western culture, really, truly going back to the ancients, it’s certainly Biblical as well. And yet it’s not something that you sit around and say, “OK, here’s my notebook; I’ve got my goodness section; and now, here’s my truth section; and oh, I better put a beauty section in.” But in a way, that’s also an interesting moral exercise to think about. And we had to think about what is beauty and what is beauty in our time as opposed to other times? In fact, saying that, leads me to one of the most exciting things about studying the arts, is that when we study the arts, we get a window into what was considered both beautiful and dynamic in past eras and, of course, those standards of beauty definitely change or we’d all be wearing powdered wigs and have collars of lace around our necks, right? But still part of a thing that you can say the arts is incredibly useful for if we’re going to talk utilitarian, which I try not too much to do but everybody out there is an educating family member; so we need to think of utilitarian’s purposes too. But the arts allow to you open up history, well, every discipline, but let’s just take history, they allow to you open up history, historical studies in a way that almost nothing else can. I mean, I’m going to stand by that assertion. Because through people’s conceptions of what was beauty and what was expression, again whether it’s painting, dance, theatre, music, what we might call crafts or utilitarian arts like embroidery and tapestry and wrought iron work and culinary arts (terribly important), fashion, that’s all part of this frame of the arts. It’s not just something you do at dance lessons. It’s all part of one whole and as we look at it historically and see how it has changed, we are studying history on such a vivid plane that it is really difficult even to forget and, of course, we always like to think what we teach could be remembered, right? So it turns up the volume on everything or it opens the doors and floods the light on virtually any discipline. At least that’s what I have found in my life.
Pam: This was one of the things I really wanted to touch upon with you today, and this was a message I got this past spring as I was at some of the homeschool conventions, is that one of the things we need to stop doing is fragmenting our subjects out and separating them and isolating them into these little boxes in our students’ brains especially, and saying, “OK, now you’re going to sit here and you’re going to do history and now you’re going to sit here and you’re going to do science and now you’re going to sit here and you’re going to do art.” But instead that it’s much better (or now you’re going to sit here and you’re going to do literature) but it’s much better to teach all of these things as an integrated whole and see God’s role as the Creator of all of these things but also how all of these things connect and tie together. So can you talk to us a little bit about why that’s important to teach things in that way?
Prof. Carol: Well, you’ve just said it. You said it. This is great, because it’s hard to assert what you just said and you’ve come to that understanding over a lot of time dealing with an awful lot of people and, of course, some things obviously do have to be fragmented. You have to say, “Daniel, this work sheet that has to be done on your multiplication has sat here for three days and by golly Ned, we’re doing it.” That’s a fact. That’s just like getting the laundry done or feeding the cat or whatever, things have to sometimes be isolated. But this goal of showing that our human experience is integrated, and as you say, the foundations for this have been laid by God. There’s the integration of our highest natures. If we learn to see them, if we learn to identify them, if we trust the process of understanding them, but that scares the beejeebers out of people. That sounds like some kind of a graduate seminar in aesthetics. How do you make that a day to day as you say? How do you approach that on a day to day life? And most parents, particularly now, I think it’s fair to say, did not get a strong arts background and maybe we can take a minute to talk about the differences between to where we are now with that and where it used to be, so to speak.
Pam: OK, let’s do that. Let’s take this little journey of where we might be coming from and then how we can turn it around into some of these day to day practices where we can start turning the tide on this and integrating these subjects again. So what are the differences? What was it between what it is now and what it was like?
Prof. Carol: Well, I give certainly part of it obviously it’s the big picture but there was a time when education meant a very specific kind of education. It was for very few people, which obviously we are glad that that’s not true any longer and education is widely available, that’s huge in our culture. But there was a time when what we called liberal arts education was education and is it was an integrated education and it was based in traditional western culture on what some people like to call classical education today, which is a strong movement now, which I think is one of the many exciting, strong movements in the home education world. I tell people all the time. And believe me I’m in a crowd virtually most of the time where people don’t know anything about this. The travels that I do, the work I do for the Smithsonian as a study leader and speaker, I’m out all over the place, literally all over the globe, and people don’t know what’s going on in American education through the whole homeschooling movement and how it’s influencing so many even public education policies; so I love to tell them that. I love to tell the story as they say. But backing up, again, there was a time when things were taught so that you were teaching the ability to learn on the levels, some people call it the trivium, where you learned stages of learning or however you wish to start interpreting that but where you would accumulate the basic understanding and then you would begin to do comparisons and sortings and a sort of a logical or dialectic approach and then there would be the idea that a child at a certain point here and there all through integrated, however you look at it, would be able to present this material and then be ready to step into a more sophisticated (which in the ancient times was called the quadrivium) set of learning opportunities, if you will, a chance to go on to a higher level and in that quadrivium if you look back at the ancient scheme of learning with the Greeks was music. That was one of the four cornerstones along with mathematics; with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy was music and that puzzles people. They say, “Well what’s music doing in there? Why isn’t it something else?” We won’t take that whole topic on but we have to remember that people understood music as a mathematical skill as much as they did as an artistic skill and it is. Music is math. You’ve heard that before and a lot of people say math is music. It was a very different world, it was a very different type of approaching education but what it tended to produce through our founding fathers, you go back and look at European royalty who would be sometimes quite well educated (in a different world, of course) but none the less it produced at times a very high functioning person with capacities to learn what needed to be learned. I know that sounds a little idealized but let’s just stick with that for the moment. If you have a child who can assess, can accumulate, can integrate, and can present and then step forth into a higher level on any topic, that is an educated person. Is that OK to say to lay that as a ground work?
Pam: Sure.
Prof. Carol: Now, let’s get back to the modern times. I’m a child of the fifties, Roanoke Virginia, a mountain city, a railroad city. I never went anywhere, I never saw anything growing up but the backyard pretty much. But I still got a very good education in the public schools there because we had by, as I remember, very vividly every week, three times I think it was a week, the lady, the song lady came and every room had a piano in it, can you imagine that now? And teachers could play and out came the song books and then we had the art and then we had the folk dancing and then we had the school play and everybody was in it and it all maybe sounds a little quaint now. If that were what most six graders were experiencing now.
Pam: No.
Prof. Carol: But everyday you knew you had that component and, of course, you looked forward to that because it was usually quite fun and it also was such a sort of relief to the soul if you would put it together like that. But we came out with a pretty good understanding considering where I was. A socioeconomic level of my education which was not terribly high at that point but nonetheless I had an idea that all that was important, and that if we had May Day and we had the May Pole and we had the May songs and there was a folk dance that went into it and then we looked at May Day as a political, that we understood that it meant something else elsewhere in the world because May first is an important day historically, if you start taking European history and somehow it all swirled together more or less; so I feel that with all my limits I got a very good start in life. And then I got Latin early not because I was in some fancy academy but because it was understood back then that if a kid were really and truly college bound, they couldn’t do it before 7th grade but you better get in at 7th grade. But again, we are in a different world now with public education which is why of course so many families have taken a different route. So it is a different world where education is job training, education is, let’s just think of this: your English majors are supposed to be reading literature but the rest of us are reading rules and regulations. If you follow that kind of logic. The talented kids play music but for everybody else just put your music on your iPod, right? And we’ve fragmented ourselves and if it’s not functional it’s not going to be for in the forefront for public educators, it’s not. Even if they wanted it to be, it can’t be. And if we can’t prove its utilitarian purpose, it’s not going to be in there and it’s just a sad, sad state of affairs and it leads so many people to minimalize the arts.
Pam: You touched on my next question. So you were saying that the arts kids get to go and do the arts and only the literature kids, only the English majors get to read the literature and everybody else is kind of reading the instruction sheet but there is an importance of art for even those who stem is like the biggest thing these days. But even those kids who are going into those stem fields they really do need to experience the art so why would art be important for someone who might be going into engineering or a more technical field?
Prof. Carol: I’ll give you two scenario; one is, up unto a certain age, there’s not a parent out there who or an educator out there who will, usually when I say that you’re in trouble, I’ll just stay in trouble, I’m always in trouble, right? But when you look at a preschooler one of the most important tools for learning is the arts. Whether it’s finger painting and gluing who knows what together to be whatever kind of rabbit it is today, whether it’s the songs, think of how much is learned through songs if they are properly employed. Vocabulary, the syntax of a language, the rhythm of the language, expression, human lessons, proverbs, I mean we can fill ten pages with what you learn through the traditionally solid children’s songs whether secular or sacred. You learn something from London Bridge, you learn something from every hymn, text that you teach a child. That is solid learning and it’s done through music. You can memorize so much more if you sing it. You can express so much more if you sing it, on and on. Everybody kind of knows that and you dance this to understand it and sculpt that to understand it. Everybody seems to be on board with that until they get to be the age of what? 4th grade? 5th grade? 6th grade? And then now we’ve got to do important things. We’ve just tossed out something that you have agreed more or less is one of the things that puts learning into fifth gear. And now we’ve got to do “important things.” Oh, OK, let’s go do some important things because we’ve got to grow up now and be able to do something. We just tossed out our best fuel, really. And then I’m just trying to think where to go with this because I can go so many directions. The science world, let me just say this, the scientific world is supporting this now increasingly. There’s one of my favorite books and some of your parents might really enjoy this, it’s short, you don’t have to read it all, it’s one of those books you grab in the airport, it’s overpriced and short but have to have something to read on the plane if you will. But you can get one cent copies of it used in libraries. It’s by Daniel Pink, a Harvard MBA think-tank guy who has written a bejeeberbillion of these successful business books, but he was Mr. Business. Mr. Business publishing guy, all the methodology that you need to be a high-powered business guy. But he wrote this book called A Whole New Mind, and then the subtitle is Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future, it came out 2006 and it’s everywhere to be found. A Whole New Mind and basically what he did is he woke up one day and said, “I’m Mr. Science, Mr. Math, Mr. This, Mr. Left Brain Skills, Mr. Success, Mr. Think Tank, and I probably can’t draw a circle, you know, I don’t know anything about that part of me over my years of concentrating on these other aspects of life,” so he goes and enrolls in an art class and I don’t want to say anymore because anybody would enjoy this book and I don’t want to spoil it and he does it not out of personal curiosity only but he does it because he also understands something about the business future of this country and of the western world which is the jobs that we think are technological, we think we’re a technological culture, that we went through the industrial revolution, and now we had the technological revolution and that’s the future. He says, “Uh uh, that’s gone, that’s over. Those jobs have moved overseas. The people who are building that world now are not in Iowa and Michigan and North Carolina, certainly some things of course but the basic, that basic future has moved overseas.” I think we kind of all know that when we’re on customer service hold, right? He said what we are now in, is the conceptual age and he said this is where the exciting future is, the conceptual age and what is that? And he talked about that in the middle after he’s put you in that first art class which is quite interesting to read about and he then goes in explaining the conceptual age is where we’re going to be using the qualities that define what science knows are right brained qualities. And that’s empathy and creativity, flexibility, cultural awareness, the subtleties- all of those things that are part of the artistic side of our nature, the artistic 50 percent of who we are, if you will. And he said this is where we have a future and if we do not train our children, we will lose those job as well. I didn’t mean to go off on Daniel Pink’s thesis, it’s wonderful. I find it a very helpful book because people need to be convinced that I’m not just, oh, she likes symphony orchestra so, of course she’s saying it’s important. The scientists are saying it’s important. They can put those little EKG things on the brain and really see what happens now when a child hears music not to mention tries to make a sounding note on a violin; what happens to all those little brainwaves. How it ramps up and how when we dance what happens to our cognitive abilities. They know that now scientifically and it’s very, very helpful for those of us struggling to help get this message of the arts out.
Pam: So I’m sitting here now, and I have a child who is going to be entering “6th grade” this fall and I have another one who is going to be going into “4th grade” this fall; and so basically what I hear you telling me is that as we move forward and doing these important things we also need to make sure there is still time for the arts in our day. It’s not that you’re telling me to continue the kind of preschoolie things that I did with them where maybe pasting things on to paper but that we need to start exploring (if we haven’t been already and we have) but these classical music pieces and the hymns and you were talking about the folk dance and chalk pastels and all of these artistic endeavors that we have available to us, we do need to be doing them and not pushing them aside for learning to write a better paragraph or finishing the long division or something of that nature?
Prof. Carol: And they don’t have to be fragmentized as I know you know. Is that a verb? If it isn’t I just know I made it up.
Pam: You just made it.
Prof. Carol: Sounds pretty nice; doesn’t it? Yes. I was going to say a harder yes. And then the question, of course, is how do you do it? And, of course, people say, “Wait a minute, I have absolutely no talent, I have no background. I can’t afford all those lessons, maybe I can afford them but I don’t have anybody to drive the kids because I have the little kids. There are 80 reasons. So, first of all let me tell you I’m not talking about how everybody needs piano lessons (although a little bit of piano or instrument study is a wonderful thing). And you hear adults all the time say, I had six months of piano when I was a kid, boy I wish I had more. But you know what? That’s six months was really important to me. I mean you hear that kind. So if you can do something organized it doesn’t matter how good you are, it doesn’t matter if you know if you end up on the New York City Ballet, you’re not headed there, you don’t necessarily even want to consider a life that difficult that a professional dancer has (which is one of the most difficult lives there could ever be) but the idea if you have an ability to get into some kind of structured lessons that’s good but it is not essential and it is not really the goal which is to make the opportunities for your child, your children, your family to be arts appreciative, beauty appreciative, arts aware, and understanding historically. I kind of want to go in two direction. Can I backtrack a minute? I’m missRabTab.
Pam: Sure.
Prof. Carol: Let’s look at what we do with sports in this country. And I love sports by the way. I love baseball. When I first became a graduate student, Michael Jordan was a freshman at the University of North Carolina, do think I learned about basketball? You better believe I learned about basketball. I love sports, I’m terrible at them but I love them. But look what we do as a culture, we say that it is good for almost every child to have some experience in some kind of sport. Is that not true? Even if it’s one semester that they go out for something. And we take them to some sports, we want and we teach a lot of vocabulary. We teach all; we want them to know the rules of baseball, we want them to understand how tennis works, we watch it at times on TV, we don’t say to every child, you’re going to be a professional sportsman, correct? Or you have to do this for eight years. We find ways for them to be active as a culture because we value sports in our culture today hugely. Would you agree with that?
Pam: Yes.
Prof. Carol: Hugely. And we don’t see that as taking away from anything. We don’t see that as hard, it’s just something that as a culture we think is helpful for their development, helpful for teamwork and sportsmanship and learning how to deal with relationships and good for their physical health and good for the enough said. Compare that with how we look at the arts as this kind of unattainable, difficult, hard to figure out, how to do thing. I think that contrast is an interesting one to draw. And I think when parents lay that out for themselves they can use what we do culturally about sports to help inform them how they might more easily and naturally approach tackling something about the arts. And to go to the other side of it, the resources now are everywhere. Even if you live in the utter boonies. So much marvelous stuff is available online. There’s a lot of garage as we know but there’s so much available online that it’s staggering, yes?
Pam: Yeah, it really is.
Prof. Carol: You don’t want them glued to the computer all the time but you see, if you’re doing some kind of, let’s say you’re studying Louis the 14th, right? Trying to do French history, right? The way you do French history is through the arts. OK, you need some battles, you need a few things but, boy, you want to tell the story of the 17th, 18th, 19th century French culture, you do it through the arts because by golly, Ned, that’s what they valued. Look at Louis the 14th, what was valued at Versailles? In our course discovering music we do a whole unit on, unit four is on Versailles because the entire concept of the monarchy in modern European history through the 18th and 19th century until World War I was built on the same model that Louis the 14th put together. It wasn’t completely new. The medieval kings had it. The ancients had it but he put the system – it’s like setting up a sports system at a college would have been, right? He set up a system of the arts that defined his kingdom and his number one art was court dance which was drilled almost excruciatingly by his courtiers, under force by the way, and the arts of music and of painting, his first institutions, they were called academies where many of them were dedicated to the arts, the money went to the arts, the grandeur, and again, I’m including everything, chandeliers, parquet floors, fashion. All of it integrated as a gesture, as a symbol of power; and so it’s not something we have reach out and pay lessons for to find examples of. Boy that was really a long sentence, wasn’t it? I’m going to stop for a minute, OK? I get a little wound up about this.
Pam: So what do I do as a homeschool mom and I’m sitting here and I have these moving into the preteen years and the resources that I’m finding for myself are these basically segmented resources, so what can I do to help pull these together and foster this understanding of the arts and use the arts in order to tie some of these subjects together?
Prof. Carol: Well, of course, depending on the age, I’m going to say one thing is that if your student’s ages are appropriate which for us is middle school, high school, some upper elementary, we have some resources that we’ve created just for this reason – that’s one thing that we can talk maybe about that in a minute or two, but I think the most important thing is a spirit of inquiry because you can be in any room, any place and you can start, let’s go back to beauty, you can start inquiring or asking your kids to inquire about what they see, feel, and hear around them. And if you’re at the Sonic Drive In or if you’re in the dentist’s office, there either is beauty or a lack of beauty. There either is blessed stillness or there is racket going on over the loud speakers that’s passing itself off as music. There either is an object of beauty in the room, some kind of, maybe it’s ugly or maybe it’s not ugly, a flower arrangement or there is a cool looking stripe down the carpet or there is an interesting design above the door jamb or there is something we’re not used to looking. We do this with nature studies fantastically, right? We teach our kids to see every leaf, every bug but we forget from a very early age to also start asking them to hear the soundscape which could be the dump truck but it could also be the sound of a violin of a child practicing out the window, less and less of that these days but sometimes still becoming aware of the soundscape. Becoming aware of the color schemes, the textures, the materials. You don’t have to buy a thing or do a thing to ask those questions. Now that, may feel silly at first but these are skills. Because what we’re really looking at is building appreciative adults. So that’s one thing. Does that make my sense at all?
Pam: It does. And I think where a lot of parents might feel caught up in this or feel like they’re not feeling comfortable with the process, is how do they know they’re not the person standing in front of the waterfall saying, “It’s pretty”? How do they know that they’re feeling the right thing or saying the right thing, because maybe I like the racket on the radio. So how do I know?
Prof. Carol: So you like the racket on the radio. So let’s talk about what the racket on the radio functions as and is it the same thing as the music you listen to, Martin, on your iPod or on your whatever, I don’t know what anybody listens to anything on anymore, I’m sure it’s not a phonograph. Is it the same thing as the music that Aunt Mary Lou loves to sing when she goes to the Sunday night church thing? Is it the same? What is music? Just even asking that question is a pretty important thing. There isn’t a right or wrong in the arts. There are different messages. There are different media. And most people standing in front of a big waterfall are not going to call it pretty, they’re going to call it terrifying. So, let’s say you’re standing right in front of that waterfall and you have the opportunity to do a family trip, what that opens up, of course, is every landscape painting. These we can find on the internet now. We don’t have to own the big, beautiful, expensive art books anymore or travel to the museums, although, that’s wonderful. What does this sound like in music? And you don’t have to know the answers by the way. Questions are what we try to teach with. The kids love the questions. They want to hear their answers. Now, I’m not saying preform, “Oh, I think this waterfall sounds like peanut butter.” “Well, what do you mean by that?” Again, I’m not trying to advocate that this all becomes an exercise in hilarity, I’m not. But we are being touched visually, orally, tactilely, every moment of our lives and we shut most of that out. So I do think that parents worry too much about whether they’re putting the right music, it’s got to be Mozart for babies or is it supposed to be Haydn? Is it Bach for babies? How much Bach should this baby have? Or should it mostly be Mozart? Was is all that about? Mozart was just a composer who struggled to make a living and did a pretty bad job of it, in most cases. Who the canon of western culture, I think correctly, anointed as possibly the greatest composer ever. Lots of people will disagree with that. That’s another conversation. Beethoven, oh, yeah, I know Beethoven. Well, why do you know Beethoven? We do a little free mini course called Seven Days to Beethoven and one of the things I try to do is say, Why is it people who don’t know a note of music hardly in terms of classic so called classical music, why do we still know the name of Beethoven? How did that happen? This one guy who was also kind of a mess in his own ability to function in his career, how does he become the great icon? That doesn’t happen overnight. That happens through history and that happens because of very specific historical cultural reasons. And no, the parent doesn’t know that yet. That’s why you do need to use some of the resources that are out there. Someone like me spent a lifetime gathering that together. But you see what I am saying, it’s not this menu that if you just pick the right things, you get the right qualities and then you get the right stuff and then we’ll all be OK. Bad art can teach you as much as so called good art. People say, “Well, I’m going to have to look at a lot of ugly art.” OK, good. Let’s figure out why it’s ugly. A lot of it’s ugly because it was painted in the decades leading up to World War I, when the world was turning fairly ugly and I think we can relate to that today, can’t we? Again, I’m touching on a awful lot of subjects but again it’s hard for me not to see this as such a whole. And I know how frightened parents are of doing this. I don’t know if what I’m saying is reassuring or if it’s going run them off the other direction.
Pam: What I think I hear you saying is that by having these conversation with our children about the things that are even just around us; so not special records that we go out and buy or CDs or downloads or not even finding special art prints but just about the things that are around us in the doctor’s office and in other places. We start tuning their eye and their ear toward discernment about what is around them.
Prof. Carol: You just picked the noun I couldn’t get myself to come up with. Thank you so much: discernment. That is one of the major goals, spiritual, moral, and artistic discernment of education. Discernment, and they are very discerning until we teach them to stop being discerning as a culture.
Pam: And so we’re honing that little skill of bringing that back, saying, “OK. Now do you like this? Why is it this good? Why is this beautiful? And just even in the things around them. And so just like nature study teaches you observation this kind of artistic study that you’re talking about now and we use the term artistic appreciation but this kind of artistic study that you would be talking about in the world around us is bringing, honing our skills of discernment.
Prof. Carol: Beautifully said. See you get to that in a nice amount of words, and I go and go. So what you’ve just said is perfect because again we’re dealing with a parent not confident but so what? You do a lot of other things you’re not confident about when you have children, don’t you?
Pam: Yes.
Prof. Carol: And that doesn’t stop you. You’re not confident about virtually anything when you bring them home. And if you understand there’s not a right. I don’t care how much Mozart your baby hears. It’s fine. It’s also fine that they hear Appalachian Valley, it’s also fine if you put on Verdi Opera Arias. It’s also fine if you put on Fanny Crosby Hymns but the main thing is you sing to them that they hear singing and in our world that’s much harder than when I grew up. When I grew up there wasn’t probably a person on our street who didn’t either play his guitar, play the banjo, play a pump organ, sing in the choir, play the trumpet, not because we were fancy but because we weren’t fancy. You see. It’s much harder for kids to see somebody whittle, it’s much harder for kids to see somebody doing weaving or knitting or all of these things that or decorating cake, really decorating a cake (not just buying a squeeze thing out of the, although I like those squeeze things too), or making a Jell-O salad. Do you know how beautiful Jell-O salads used to be in the 50s? That was your credential as a homemaker – was your beautiful Jell-O salads. We just put some old Jell-O molds up on the wall. Can you tell that that’s on my mind? My mother’s. But the point is the world now seems that it’s got to be slick, it’s got to be fancy, and it’s got to be picked out by specialist. And I’m saying to you we are constantly hearing, seeing, feeling, touching, and moving and that is our artistic side and a powerful tool for learning.
Pam: Yeah, so just think about those old domestic arts, they’re really lost these days.
Prof. Carol: Yeah.
Pam: Yeah, I agree.
Prof. Carol: Did you ever really watch a relative really iron a shirt starch and iron a shirt? Really, like a work shirt? I had a neighbor, her husband worked for Greyhound Bus and man, watching her do those shirts, that was an art. Is that as much of an art as dancing on point? It’s a different art. But children need to understand craft skill art are coming out of the same well of passion, if you will, and being aware of it and learning to respect it and we want our kids to respect that; don’t we? To me one of the things the arts teaches is respect, just as we do with sports, right? We use sports to teach respect, for discipline, for teamwork, for cooperation. The arts offer exactly those same things.
Pam: Okay, well let’s talk a little bit about what you offer at ProfessorCarol.com for those parents who still may be a little intimated about the idea of integrating art into their history studies, their literature studies, and things of that nature. So tell me a little bit about what I could do with a middle or high school student and your programs.
Prof. Carol: I have to tell you that I did not homeschool. I never heard of such a thing. Homeschooling in my generation meant that a child was hit by a bus and the public school sent a teacher around once a week, right? That’s homeschooling. In our day, I learned of homeschooling really through my own students at SMU starting about the early 90s I remember very specifically and it’s not, I need to answer your question, but I will tell you I had a violinist who was homeschooled, who was just spectacular, and I could not figure out where did this child learn to write, where did she, a child she’s 20 but, you know, to me she’s still a child. Where did she learn to think like this? Where did she learn to integrate her ideas like this? And finally one day I grabbed her and after I turned back a paper and I said, “What high school did you go to?” And she put her head down kind of, you know, it’s early 90s, right? And she said quietly, “I was homeschooled.” And I couldn’t hear her and I said, “You what? What school?” And she said, “I was homeschooled.” And of course I made the most ridiculous statement in the world, and I said, “You look pretty healthy now.” And she cracked up laughing. And then she said “You don’t know anything about what this is; do you?” And I said, “No, I have no idea.” And she sat me down and told me how the cow ate the cabbage basically, and I was astonished. From that point on I began looking for my homeschooled students and as I got, and I did a lot of work in the summers in Germany with our summer program, which I founded in Weimar; so I looked forward to having homeschoolers particularly to be on this program because they were so interested and so dedicated. You know, they were so much frequently, not always, but frequently better versed than anybody else, right? So I became very interested in homeschooling. I retired in 2006. In 2009 I decided to make a course for any high schooler but particularly thinking in terms of those clever homeschoolers that I had had at SMU, right? They were my models, they were the kids I was designing this for, because I knew they could do it. And so we came out with Discovering Music, which is our signature course which covers the arts. It says discovering music but it’s art, literature, drama, everything we could pack in, history at the core obviously, from 1600 to the First World War, 1918 approximately. So it’s in 17 units with DVD class lectures and audio cassettes and a text or it’s all available in an online streamed format and from then we began doing more because that began to work. And we thought, ‘Well, let’s do some more.’ People asked us for an American music course; so we have actually done two of those on American art history, literature, architecture, et cetera, and everything we could cram in and both of those covers from the pilgrims and the founding of this country and to basically the 1950s and then I did a course on Imperial Russia, which is my specialty, which is a rather beautiful course, I have to say, because it’s Russian czars and all of that crazy, wild stuff that we associate in Russian history up until the beginnings of Bolshevism and Lenin. So that’s what that one covers. And then we just came out with a course called Early Sacred Music that goes from temple times to 1400, and we spent three years on that, and I tell you it was worth every minute of it because if you spend enough time on something, you can do something. And all of our courses, Pam, we’ve had the help of colleagues, former students, people I’ve taught with and known over the years, some of my own instructors even that I’ve gone back to. There’s dozens and dozens of people who appear in our courses explaining, performing, demonstrating, and much of it’s filmed on location partly because of the work I do for the Smithsonian I get to go to these places; so that’s what we’re doing is build these resources and make them as vivid. Parents say, “What do I need to know? “And I say, “Well, do you have electricity in your house? Can you turn on the DVD player?” And if you can do that, let me do the rest of the work. You know, let me do the work because I’ve spent my life doing this so that’s what I’d say.
Pam: And then when my student takes one of these courses, they’re not just getting a credit in some kind of art, it’s credits across the board for a lot of different subjects. A lot of humanity subjects; correct?
Prof. Carol: Absolutely. We have people that use it as history credit, part of their European or completely their European history, humanities, religious studies, of course, fine arts if you want it. Part of other disciplines. I can’t tell you how many different ways people use our courses; everything from an occasional vignette out of a course, to their co op, a totally 20 minutes in length perhaps, to devoting an entire semester to 2 or 3 units out of one of our courses. I hear we’re in public schools, we’re in private schools, but I love the different ways that our courses are used because that’s the arts. They should be flexible and I’m grateful that they can be used in a flexible manner and parents seem to find that it helps. The kids definitely seem to find that and that’s our goal, is we want to be able to help. I know it’s intimidating; so I want to take that out of the equation.
Pam: By integrating them this way, do the students respond really well to this?
Prof. Carol: They seem to. They sure seem to. Based on what I hear and of course all ages, I mean, the 6 year old might be watching the 15 year old doing this unit on 19th century American art and music, or you might have the sequence in one of our courses that we shot at Mount Vernon where the miller is actually talking about the soundscape of George Washington’s world and how he is the current miller of the reconstructed mill at Mount Vernon has to learn to think in those same terms as the miller would have done in the 18th century and you say, “Well, wait, that’s not music.” Oh, yes it is. It’s the music of a village. It’s the music of industry. It’s the music of life. If you go back to most of western history, the mill was the center of a town, right? Or it was critical to life. So, I mean when we focus on those kinds of integrated approach to the arts, we’ve got something that visually and really substantially any age child up, not any age, but you know, even a 6 year old can find that interesting even though academically the resources, the text, the questions, I have testing materials, exams, projects, you’ve got to have all that stuff for the high school credit of course but that part set at the appropriate age for the high schooler or the middle schooler but your 6 year old is going to go, “oh, that’s cool” and that’s what we want.
Pam: Yeah, that’s exactly what we want. Well, Professor Carol, thank you so much for joining us here today and just being so passionate about the arts and the integration of these subjects and how we can bring that discernment back to our students. I really appreciate it.
Prof. Carol: Well, it was my pleasure and just don’t doubt yourself parents. Any time you point out what is in their world and make them think about it, you are engaging them, that right brain, that artistic part of their being, their souls. You are helping them fulfill that and turn it into a very powerful tool.
Pam: Well, thanks.
Prof. Carol: Thank you, Pam.
And there you have it. Now, if you would like links to any of the books or resources that Professor Carol and I spoke about today, you can find them on the Show Notes for this episode of Your Morning Basket. Those are at PamBarnhill.com/YMB26. Also, in those Show Notes we have some helpful directions for you. If you would like to leave a rating or review for the Your Morning Basket Podcast in iTunes. The ratings and reviews you leave in iTunes helps us get the word out about the podcast to new listeners, so we thank you very much for taking the time to do that. We’ll be back again in a couple of weeks with another great interview. And until then, keep seeking Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in your homeschool day.