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DYOCC is quite a bit different from the other books on Catholic Homeschooling. Instead of simply discussing homeschooling, as the other books do, Mrs. Berquist outlines an entire homeschool curriculum you can use with your children or adjust to your liking. She includes suggestions for putting together your own curriculum and a grade by grade outline which includes recommended texts, sample weekly schedules, a number of study guides, lists of important dates and people, poetry suggestions and extensive lists of appropriate literature and history stories. I found her introduction very helpful in fine-tuning my educational goals for my children. Even parents who are happily using another curriculum will find this book a very valuable source of supplemental resources and tips for making homeschooling more interesting and more successful. Some homeschoolers consider her to be much stronger in the history, literature and religion areas and a little weaker on Science and Math. To learn more about the classical liberal arts curriculum as described in her book, you can also read Dorothy Sayers' "The Lost Tools of Learning."

The focus of this booklet is on the method of teaching. Mr. Crotty goes through the timeless and time-tested Jesuit philosophy of education and applies it to homeschooling. He has put together an outline that could be successfully applied to any curriculum. The ideas will be especialy helpful for parents who are homeschooling their teens, but it is useful to consider such important goals even when our children are very young.. Although it's a short booklet, the reading is rather heavy. I think you'll find it well worth the effort. Mr. Crotty recommends that reading The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius will make the booklet much more understandable. He recommends the translation by Anthony Mottola which is published by Image Books. The booklet lends itself to group discussion - and such a discussion would help to hash out some of the meanings and details.

Poetic Knowledge, by James Taylor, is a difficult read. He wishes to present, from both history and philosophy, a solid argument for an education that is more intuitive and interior than what we find in the schools today. His background and bibliography are impressive, including a period of study with John Senior in the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, famous as an early ferment in the revival of classical education.

However, Taylor's argument is flawed both as a whole and in several of its parts. He resists making clear definitions, he is very negative about science and technology, his historical perspective is distorted, and his writing is problematic.

Resistance to clear definitions is a serious problem. From the start, Taylor speaks of poetic knowledge both as a "degree" of knowledge and as a "mode" of knowledge. By confusing these definitions (and others) Taylor undercuts his central argument with equivocation. As a "degree of knowledge," poetic knowledge is immediate to the knowing person, and may be likened to the lowest rungs of a ladder, the first rungs we climb and the ones we use to climb higher. Understood as a degree of knowledge, poetic knowledge makes a constant contribution to all other forms of knowledge, including scientific knowledge.

As a "mode of knowledge", the poetic is the spontaneous knowledge of an interior view, rather than the measured and outward knowledge of rationality. The poetic as a "mode" of knowledge is the opposite of the "scientific mode". Of course, just as one would be impoverished by looking only east and never west, one would be impoverished if one were to employ only one of two possible modes of knowledge. But they remain opposites.

There are good philosophical reasons and good historical precedents (many of which Taylor produces) for either definition of the term "poetic knowledge," -- and even for using both definitions in various ways. But the definitions cannot be interchanged during an argument, and this is what takes place in Taylor's essay. Simply put, his argument is that poetic knowledge (definition 1) is a form of knowledge essential to humanity. But poetic knowledge (definition 2) is the opposite -- and the antagonist -- of scientific knowledge. By equivocation, poetic knowledge is essential to all knowledge and a powerful human good in opposition to science.

While Taylor does not actually call science an evil, he spares no opportunity to disparage both science and technology. This negativity about science would be comic if it were not encased in an erudite argument for the poetic approach to knowledge in education. Unfortunately, the intuitive and poetic approaches to knowledge are naturally open to romanticism and gnosticism unless they are properly balanced with rationality. Taylor has no balance in this matter. His negativity about rationality overflows even onto sentence diagramming and phonics. He quotes with approval the assertion that "authors teach children to read," and that reading is "imitative". If he merely pointed out that phonics is not enough; you need to have authors that children will enjoy, I would agree. But to scorn phonics? The depth of Taylor's impracticality is simply breathtaking.

A note on history is also in order, for Taylor makes repeated reference to the time of the Reformation and Renaissance, before which the poetic was accepted in Western thought. The correct association for the negative attitude towards intuitive knowledge is the seventeenth century, starting with Descartes, 1596-1650. This is the "Enlightenment" or the "Age of Reason", two names for the time that followed the Renaissance and the Reformation. (Taylor does refer to Descartes as the culprit, but never clarifies his place in history.)

First of all, the Renaissance long preceded the Reformation. It was not a single event, of course, but the starting date sometimes given is 1250, sometimes earlier. Certainly the architectural triumphs of the cathedrals belong to the Renaissance, as do, for example, Dante (1265-1321), Buridan (1300's), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and Copernicus (1473-1543). The early Renaissance is the time of the birth of modern science. It predates by hundreds of years the problem that Taylor speaks of. This fact alone should make clear that the rise of science is not the culprit in the loss of respect for poetic knowledge. Something else happened. This is not the place to say what, but only to urge in the strongest terms that no implication against science be received from Taylor's references to the Renaissance.

It may be that Taylor has confused the Renaissance with the Enlightenment. This would explain why he constantly pairs Reformation and Renaissance in the opposite of their historical order, which was Renaissance first, and then later on, the Reformation.

Finally, though it may seem trivial to close on a grammatical note, I shall complain about Taylor's sentence structure. The topic is difficult enough without the distraction of errors of grammar and construction which appear throughout his book. Usually, when a reader is confused about the structure of a sentence, it is his clue that he has not properly followed the author's argument. But in Taylor, it is just a reminder that this author regards analysis as an inferior mode of thought, and wants his argument accepted intuitively.

Because I love science and feed my wonder on the delights of a well-crafted physical argument as much as on violets and poetry, and because I strongly desire that science and faith be understood harmoniously, I cannot recommend this book as a resource for the classical revival in education.

(Additional Review, in response to the one above)

"There are relatively few persons who can analyze as clearly and as lucidly the writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Aquinas as does this author. Like Taylor's educational philosophy, he seeks to move his readers' affections and will as well as their intellects, and he does this successfully." - Richard Harp, University of Nebraska

When discussing "poetic knowledge" (which is not the knowledge of poetry "but rather a poetic experience of reality"), we are entering into the realm of an intuitive, obscure and somewhat mysterious way of knowing reality that therefor does not lend itself to strict analytical dissection. Nevertheless, in Poetic Knowledge Taylor has managed "with pithy brevity...to provide a history of the treatment of poetic knowledge and to develop his own very persuasive account" -- Ralph McInerny (U. of Notre Dame). He cannot reasonably be faulted for failing to make human emotions and intuitions as readily understandable as an isosceles triangle or an elementary rule of grammar - there is more to it than is "dreamt of in our philosophy."

Ironically, it is precisely that relentless demand of modern man (since Descartes) - that all be broken down into parts and pieces for study under a magnifying glass - that Taylor is warning against in his book. A flower loses its beauty when it is hacked into tiny pieces for too close observation; "whatever the sun is, it is not just a mass of burning gasses", though strict analysis might yield just that answer.

Indeed, in writing this book for a modern audience drunk on statistics and mathematical calculation, Taylor assumed the risk of betraying the very thing he was trying to save - the rest of man: his sense, his intuitions, his love of beauty, his integrity and very ability to love. Happily, like a good diagnostic physician,Taylor managed to poke and probe only deeply enough to give us the outlines, to reveal the essentials of the matter without killing the patient in the process.

Like a multi-faceted diamond, poetic knowledge may be viewed from different perspectives, with differing results. Thus it can be considered as both a "degree" of knowledge and as a "mode" of knowledge. As a "mode" of knowledge, poetic knowledge differs from "scientific knowledge" in that is it non-analytical, nor is it about the "outside" of things as observational science is. Rather, it is sensory-emotional, intuitive and deals with the goodness or "inside" of things. It begins with the immediate, direct apprehension of reality that inspires wonder and awe. As a degree of knowledge, it is less certain that mathematical knowledge, but more certain than a mere guess or coin-flip. In short, it is of one certain degree or order, and not of another. A mere review such as this cannot do justice to those distinctions, but that should suffice to account for the fact that Taylor may reasonably approach the matter from different angles without being guilty of the charge of causing needless confusion. No diamond-cutter would do less before striking the blow, and Taylor is writing about more than a mere diamond, he is writing about why women love the beauty and "poetic" meaning of diamond gifts and why men love certain women enough to buy them diamonds.

Taylor makes the point that we live in a world dominated by scientism, by mathematical formulae, which knows the price of all things and the worth of nothing.

He rightly traces this domination back to Descartes, who was a superb mathematician. But Descartes, in promoting his liberal arts of preference - the quadrivium, neglected the rest - the trivium. In stating the obvious - that our world is terribly imbalanced towards the empirical sciences and away from its heart and soul (which is closer to the subject of the trivium) Taylor does us no disservice, nor does he thereby libel the sciences. He is merely trying to restore the balance before science and math bereft of love and beauty calculate us into greater mechanistic slavery or thermonuclear oblivion. One who rights a tottering man ought not be accused of favoring the right over the left, or up over down. Indeed, for left or down to have any meaning, right and up must be preserved as well. Science and math have no future if man has no future. Taylor seeks to restore our future as men and women, not merely as "consumer units" or "human resources".

The Renaissance is a vague term, with a vague start. But out if it did indeed spring modern empirical science as a reaction against the domination of the early Renaissance by rhetorical teachers of the trivium such as Petrarch. Descartes, building on Galileo (1564-1642), and his mathematical arts of the quadrivium, were the ultimate victors in the Renaissance Battle of the Arts, which therefor did triumph - not in the early Renaissance - but in the period of the late Renaissance and Reformation when the trivium and poetic knowledge began to be neglected precisely because of the rise of the quadrivium at that time.

Just as in the late Renaissance, the Battle of the Arts rages and the mathematical sciences still hold the upper hand. They hardly need any more defenders. But like the teacher Keating in the movie Dead Poets Society, Taylor calls us to arms against the tyranny of modern science:

"This is battle...War! And the casualties could be your hearts and your souls...One reads poetry because he is a member of the human race and the human race is filled with passion! Medicine, law, banking - these are necessary to sustain life - but poetry, romance, love, beauty! These are what we stay alive for!"

Restore the balance and the war ends. Then science and faith can indeed be understood harmoniously, but they certainly are not so understood by those in the thrall of modern scientism. In Poetic Knowledge Taylor shows us the way to restore the balance - in the recovery of authentic classical education.

This book, originally published by Ignatius Press (with ecclesiastical approval) is available in print once again from Roman Catholic books. John Senior, an eminent great books scholar and Catholic writer of the recent past, here addresses what Christian Culture is, why it has nearly disappeared (particularly in America today) and what is required to bring it back. According to Professor Senior, society's removal from nature and manual labor, and particularly our heavy dependence on technology, have removed man from the most basic processes of learning and understanding that God planned for man to acquire by his natural surroundings. Humanistic philosophies are rooted in an emphasis on the greatness of man and his "creations" (i.e. technology) rather than glorying in God's Creation. According to Mr. Senior, a truly Christian culture requires a return to a basic understanding of the "stuff of life" by a far lessened and more controlled use of technology and other changes such as a return to the beauty and truth of the liturgy as it was celebrated in the past (the author respectfully argues that the traditional Latin Mass is a superior alternative to the Novus Ordo as it has commonly been implemented in the U.S. since Vatican II).

Even if you find his contempt for modern technology somewhat extreme, I would recommend reading his ideas in order to make yourself aware of how significantly our lives are impacted by technology today. Although it's not often talked about, I think it's vitally important for parents to understand that the problems with television for children go beyond simple concerns with regard to morally offensive content. People were not designed to sit in front of a box (be it a computer or a television). Although movies and computer games can enhance a child's education, they should be used in moderation or avoided. (You may also be interested in following this link in order to read Pope John Paul II's address on Television and the Media.

The author also addresses, in some detail, certain educational philosophies from a Catholic perspective. In particular, parents may find interesting a discussion of what literature is appropriate for Catholic children to read. I was particularly fascinated by his discussions of St. Benedict and traditional monastic life. I've always had a certain admiration for and interest in the idea of cloistered life (and even more so since reading Saint Benedict by Mary Fabyan Windeatt). I would like in some way to imitate the order, the motto of oro et laboro (I pray and I work) and the genuine sense of community within my own family. But I digress...

His remedy, involving a certain amount of good old-fashioned common sense and a return to a simpler life, is crowned by a rather splendid explanation of the necessary and central role of a return to a culture of Mary, the Mother of God and a strong devotion to her. He explains how this would be in imitation of the devotion of those simple people of the Middle Ages who spent their lives working to honor God through his Blessed Mother with beautiful cathedrals and artwork. The author contrasts this with the modern humanistic focus (if not "worship") of man-made objects (technology) which often reach no higher than utility and a glorification of what man can do.

I found this book surprisingly readable and delightfully filled with truth. Although parts of the book have a somewhat pessimistic flavor (and I don't agree with absolutely everything in the book), this is always tempered with a proper sense of hope and trust in God's providence. As a point of interest, John Senior's philosophies were apparently quite influential in the development of two of today's Catholic homeschool programs - Kolbe Academy and the Angelicum Academy.

This little gem was used as a freshman college course after the author met philosopher Mortimer Adler and understood the importance of teaching basic language skills as the foundation of other learning. After some years of study, she put together this course in the Trivium, the three language arts -- of word relations (grammar), concept relations (logic), and composition (rhetoric). The result is a primer in Aristotle's Categories, a demanding course in logic, and a prerequisite to good composition. It is not, mind you, a course in grammar conceived as the study of commas, periods, and subjunctive verbs, though it might lead to insight into these matters. Not is it a course in "symbolic logic", the modern logic stripped of thought and studied simply as a form of mathematics. Rather, Sister Miriam offers a prerequisite to philosophy and writing, for this is a course in clear thought and the right use of language.

With all this, The Trivium is demanding, yet it is very accessible. Despite its original use as a freshman college course, it reminded me very strongly of my high school logic text, which, like this, was the work of an obscure nun who had studied Aristotle and wanted his clarity to form the minds entrusted to her care. I look forward to the opportunity to use it at the high school level.

Not only is the volume accessible, but one must delight in its literacy. The illustrations are taken from the great literature of western culture -- so the mind is always lifted. It is a pleasure to read, and study is always rewarding, because every step sparkles with beauty and interest as well as clarity. Many of Sister Miriam's examples were originally taken from great literature; her loving editor Marguerite McGlinn has taken the liberty of replacing those illustrations which were time-bound with even more good literature so as to move the book into its rightful place as a timeless resource.

For those who know and love Dorothy Sayers' little essay on the trivium, it may be appropriate to warn that this is not in any sense a resource for primary or middle school children.