​I have been reflecting about what I thought college would be like when I was young compared to what I experienced. What I thought was all fuzzy to me now, but I did think that there would be more group discussions and class discussions. What I found was those group projects were one or two people doing most of the work individually and then others getting grades they did not earn because you cared more. I knew that college would require reading and assignments, but I had this image of more group discussion. That did not happen to me. I spent a lot of time alone working, trying to balance work and school. Prepare lab reports, running tests based on those reports that I had no idea why I needed to do the experiment or what I was to gain from it. As a young person, I had an image of having discussions in class and plenty of reading assignments. I remember watching the TV show The Paper Chase. That definitely swayed my thinking.
In the book “A Thomas Jefferson Education” by Oliver DeMille, it shares a list of essential skills from Harvard School of Law:

1.  The ability to define problems without guides.
2. The ability to ask hard questions which challenge prevailing assumptions.
3. The ability to quickly assimilate needed data from masses of irrelevant information.
4. The ability to work in teams without guidance.
5. The ability to work absolutely alone.
6. The ability to persuade others that your course is the right one.
7. The ability to conceptualize and reorganize information into a new pattern.
8. The ability to discuss ideas with an eye toward application.
9. The ability to think inductively, deductively and dialectically.

 
As I compare the above list with my experience, I think I missed out of several of these skills. I think that I was able to accomplish #3,4, 5, & 8. #2 would put your grade in jeopardy. #6 would be true but the right one was whatever the professors’ thought was true.  New patterns (#7) were challenging the system and discouraged. I still feel that I am lacking an education, but I have several pieces of paper that say I am educated.
I started homeschooling with my eldest child during his kindergarten years due to some personal struggles he was experiencing. I was given the first edition of the A Thomas Jefferson Education book to read.  I read it and put it on the shelf.  I had no idea how to deal with it.  I didn’t have an education like that at all.  I was introduced to the TJE philosophy several more times before I decided to try parts of it.  I started reading the books in the back.  Finding others to discuss the books with was much harder to do.  I reached out to some online groups to help me out and then attended a seminar put on by Aneladee Milne who was with LEMI (Leadership Education Mentoring Institute) at the time.  I had some life-changing experiences and fumbled my way through implementing this in my own home.  I changed so much about who I was because of this book.  I renegotiated my core phase and started to get to know myself in new ways. One of the ways that I have changed is that I like Wythe skills better. Harvard skills are good too, but I think if I can work to achieve the Wythe skills I will have achieved an education.
  Wythe Skills:

1.  The ability to understand human nature and lead accordingly.
2. The ability to identify needed personal traits and turn them into habits.
3. The ability to establish, maintain and improve lasting relationships.
4. The ability to keep one’s life in proper balance.
5. The ability to discern truth and error regardless of the source, or the delivery.
6. The ability to discern true from right.
7. The ability and discipline to do right.
8. The ability and discipline to constantly improve.

Achieving both sets of skills, that would be pretty awesome. 

As I have been trying to think about this book and what I have learned from it, I have been wondering about what the book is about.  I have now read the book twice.  Is this book about education or romance? Is this an incomplete hero cycle?  Did the plot change from education to romance or is there more to it?  Is this a tragedy because Miss Prim does not marry the unnamed male lead?
I read the book, so now what?  What did I learn from reading this?  In order to help me figure out what I wanted to focus on, I reviewed my notes and then focused on the title.  What does awakening mean?  The Britannica Dictionary lists these definitions: to stop sleeping; to become aware of something.   I believe the writer is using the idea of becoming aware of something.  Where do I see an awakening?
At the beginning of the book, Miss Prim is hurriedly walking through San Ireneo de Arnois where she does not notice the pretty shops.  She is already identifying herself as different from others and feeling that she was born at the wrong time and place.  
The book ends with Miss Prim is in Italy talking to the hotel receptionist requesting a check out.  The receptionist asks if she has received bad news, Miss Prim states: “Actually”, said Miss Prim, eyes shining, picturing a door being closed with infinite patience, “it’s good news.  Extraordinary news, I’d say.”  She sighed euphorically.  “It’s strange and wonderful news.”….an hour later, she [the receptionist] watched the beautiful, graceful woman walk out of the hotel toward the waiting taxi with her chin held high and a gentle smile on her lips.”
As I reflect on the word awaken and apply it to my experiences, I reviewed what I would have called an “awakening experience”.   I have had only a couple of them, but I was changed by them.  I started to do things differently and seek different ideas.  Therefore, on my second read I was looking for something that might be similar between my experience and Miss Prim’s experience.   The only place that I identified was the last page of the book.  She has ‘shining eyes’ and is excited about something.  The receptionist describes her as beautiful and graceful with her head up and a smile on her face.  That is the first time I remember hearing any of these words applied to Miss Prim.  To me that is an awakening experience.  Everything else in the book was just showing you the path it took for her to travel before she “awakened”.    You are left to wonder what she is planning to do so you can’t tell if the story is a comedy (happy ending) or tragedy (taking the path of mediocracy, quitting, or death and sadness). 
To me the whole book is about the journey she had to travel before she found her purpose.  I remember my own experiences.  I had goals and was learning.  I was growing and striving to reach my goals.  At that awakening experience though I found my goals needed to be changed.  However, those goals had led me to the point that I had enough information to see that I needed to make a change to my goals.  Each step on the path was needed to help reveal what could be.  I think Miss Prim was having those same experiences.  As she learned about education and relationships (personal, mentored, and romantic) she was getting ready for that awakening that she didn’t know she needed.  She thought she was awake but found out that she was not seeing things as clearly as she needed to.
I think there are a lot of interesting quotes and ideas expressed in the book that really get you thinking, which is what she did in Italy.  As she processed those ideas and pondered on what to do, when an opportunity presented itself (the letter), the puzzle pieces aligned, and she could now see the picture and direction of where to go.   This fulfilled the epigraph in the book: “They think that they regret the past, when they are but longing after the future (John Henry Newman).”  If all goes well Miss Prim will be entering the future ready for the next step of her progression.   She has awakened to new possibilities.    What those possibilities are we are left to imagine for ourselves.  The real question is what will we do?  Will be look to the past with regret or move to the future and act on the ideas we have?

    There are a couple of lines from Emilia that I have been pondering.  In Act 4, Scene 3, line 85, Emilia says: “But I think it is their husband’s faults if wives do fall.”   The speech talks about how woman can sometimes be treated by their spouses and ends with “Then let them use us well: else let them know, the ills we do, their ills instruct us so.” 
  I have been pondering about how we treat others.  How easy it is to hurt others when we focus on ourselves and don’t consider how our actions harm others.  It is not just words or lack of words; our actions are very important.
In this play there are a lot of reactions.  Reaction of people to Iago’s words.    Iago is the ultimate bad guy; a vicious manipulator that for some reason is out to pull everyone one down.  Why were people unwilling to see this, I am not sure.  The play is called Othello, but it is more about how people react to Iago.  But is that not just like a manipulator?  The spotlight is not on the manipulator but someone else.   We find ourselves trusting the wrong people and not relying on the evidence that we could collect for ourselves.  As in this play, Othello had the ability to gather his own information.  He was a general.  With that title comes responsibility and experience, yet he did not use that when he was struggling with his weakness.  
  As Oliver DeMille asks: How are we like Othello?   How are we showing our price or lack of security in who we are?  Shakespeare wrote to a Christian audience where pride seems to be a weakness in many of us.  What weakness do we need to reform or guard against so that we do not fall prey to the Iago’s of this world? 
Othello turned to Iago instead of Desdemona to gather information about Desdemona.  This becomes even more alarming in that Othello and Desdemona are married.  There was obviously a very big imbalance in their relationship.  Outside of our relationship with God, our spouse should be our highest priority.   The damage Iago caused could have been minimized if Othello had put his relationship with Desdemona above his reputation.  Three people would still be living: Othello, Desdemona and Emilia. 
   Ephesians 5:25 (KJV) reads: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it”.   Emilia seems to warn us what can happen when we get our priorities out of order.  In particular when we say we love someone, but our actions don’t match our words, we can find ourselves in a very hallow relationship.  Hopefully not as destructive as Othello’s and Desdemona.   

​My first time through this book, I was not as impressed with this book.   However the book as grown on me.  I have made many notes in the book.  The one that I think has to most impact on this read is the importance we place on spending time for ourselves. 
 
“If one sets aside time for a business appointment, a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement or a shopping expedition, that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange.  What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it – like a secret vice!” (p. 43-44)
 
I think this can still be true today.  If I said, “me time” it is much more acceptable than to say, “this is my study time”.   I can’t tell you how many times I have violated the scheduled study time because I feel bad for saying no.  Or even when asked what I am doing the response can be ‘oh only study so you are free to help me’.
For me the lesson I need to learn, and practice is to just say ‘I am busy right now’ because it is important that I set time aside to do the things I like instead of trying to sneak it in late at night when I am tired.

I do agree with the idea that we have made a mess of the education system.  The question to me is really what do I do about it for myself, my family, and my community?

According to Sowell what of the biggest problems is that American children are missing thinking skills because of the institutions and the attitudes within the institutions.   So the system is broken.  Institutions are not going to educate children in order to help them think because they have a different agenda.   "All across this country, the school curriculum has been invaded by physiological-conditioning programs which not only take up time sorely needed for intellectual development, but also promote an emotionalized and anti-intellectual way of responding to the challenges facing every individual and every society" (p. ix). 

I think this leads back to the reason we have created schools.  Why did and do we think children going to school is important?  What value should schools provide to the individual?  There are many books out there that try to answer these questions.  

I believe the biggest problem of the school is that it "undermines the parent-child relationship and the shared values which make a society possible" (p. ix).  

The family is the foundation of a society.  If we destroy the family, we destroy society.   The best way to create a great society is to have great families.  Therefore the parent-parent relationship and the parent-child relationship is the most important within any society.    Building a principled, moral home culture is something we should take great time and effort to create and maintain.  

Families however can't do everything in a society alone.  That is why we work to create communities.  So that we can create a community where our family thrives.  In Freedom Matters by Oliver DeMille, the author talks about the state of balance needed between seven kinds of leaders to maintain freedom.  One of the seven leaders is educational leaders.  When any of the seven leaders combine their power with another's power imbalance is created and then their purpose in the community is skewed creating problems for the society.  We have definitely seen this happen.  In this case it seems that the government (one of the type of leaders) and teamed with several kinds of leaders to expand their power.  In the process we have weakened the power of the family hugely.  In this particular case the government leaders has combined with the educational leaders to expand their influence, changing the purposes of the education system.  The education systems' purpose is not to teaching thinking but to promote their personal agendas.    

Many people have pointed out the problems in the education system but nothing really has been done to restore its original purposes?  The original purposes are rarely even discussed.   Today's system is set up to hold and contain students for as long as possible.  Very little effort is spent on teaching reading and thinking skills.  If you don't believe me spend a couple of days in the classrooms and count up the minutes spent on teaching students to read especially those that struggle.   Then compare that with how many minutes they are away from home.   Of course that is Thomas Sowell's opinion that education programs should teach thinking.  Is there something more or better that we should be focused on?  I think so. 

Do we have clear guiding principles to lead us?  Are they the correct principles we should focus on or are they distractions from the best principles?  Do we know what success looks like for each of those guiding principles?  Did you know that education systems have worldviews also?  Which purpose do you think is the most important to support and why?

The education system has not failed because of lack of money!  The education system is a huge business with a lot of money flowing through it.   Any person who believes more money should be given to the system has not looked into how much money is being spent and measuring it with the results that are given.   

My belief at this point in time is that public (and charter) school is the last place you want to send your children.  It creates so much harm and so little good.     

For our book discussions we decided these definitions: 

​*Virtue was doing the right thing for the right reason or the habit of choosing to do the right things.  An internal state that may or may not be recognized by others as it is hard to measure well.   

*The vices are either an excess of the virtue or a deficiency. 

*Anti -virtue is defined as doing the wrong thing purposely but knowing the right thing. 

*A monster is a person that deviates from acceptable behavior.  Virtue>Vice>Anti-Virtue>Monster

This as been a very helpful way to look at decisions as we read and discuss.  What would you add?

As we are starting to wind down our discussion year it will be interesting to see how we incorporate these ideas further.  Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and Dracula are famous monster stories.   Now I have a whole new level of understanding about how these books influenced me and why there are valuable books to consider reading. 

​In his book ‘Dumbing us Down’ John Taylor Gatto shows how networks “drain the vitality from community and family” (p. 52).   In pondering his writings, I have come to believe that schools and networks are counterfeits of family and community.   Building strong families and communities is the most important work we can ever do. 
So much good occurs when families and communities are strong. People have purpose and belong.  Work serves people we know and love.  People have names, not numbers. In a strong family and community, every person matters and the whole person matters.  
The United States was established based on family and community.  We have since moved away from that home-centered focus. We have largely replaced families and community with networks.   
The results are devastating.  Isolation, loneliness, and depression have become more common than not.   We are fragmented, divided and often desperate.   Why is this so?
It is because Institutions and networks do not truly care about healthy, strong families and communities, but on what they can get from us. Their purpose is to ‘survive and grow’ (p. 65).  Their intention may not be destruction of the family and the community but that is what has happened. 
We are so focused on being part of the right networks and institutions that we have neglected the places where we find real worth and belonging.  We isolate ourselves in these networks. And we require our young children to isolate themselves! 
Starting with pre-school children are often isolated from their families and trained to stay with their group. They are regulated to compete with each other, to follow the rules and to receive their validation from their school networks.
If they “succeed” in school, they are promoted and sent to institutions of “higher education” whose primary purpose is to survive and grow.  If they do well in these institutions, they are promoted again. Their reward is to get to buy more stuff than those people who don’t perform as well.  Finally, once these superior achievers are worn out, they are isolated again in retirement “communities”. These are mostly pseudo communities composed of transients. 
A defining characteristic of these networks and institutions is this: we may believe we are part of a community but when we move out of those “communities” the people we know rarely continue to socialize with us. 
As a nation, we have tried to socially engineer “better families and communities” through school, networks and institutions. But those efforts have failed.  People are not better off; they are not happy or better educated.  They have not become their best selves.  Instead, we encounter many wounded and lonely people. 
It is time to return to family and community; time to read those books that show us how to build family and community; time to replace social counterfeits with the real thing. 

​“Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.”
To me, it is so much harder to practice this belief than state it.  I have wondered often how people have the courage to do such hard things.  Even through all Corrie’s story she shows this is a fundamental belief that she holds. 
Near the end of the book, Corrie shares a story of how a story in which ad bandage from a gangrenous foot was put on her face: “I ran sobbing down the corridor and washed and washed beneath the wall spigot in the latrine.  I would never step into that aisle again!  What did I care about the wretched bedpans!  I couldn’t bear…But of course I did go back.  I had learned much in the pat year, about what I could and count bear.”
What an amazing story of courage and trust in God.  This is a book that I just keep rereading.  There is so much wholeness of soul and healing of souls within a very broken world.  It does my heart good every time I reread this classic.

​I found this book a very helpful and challenging read.   I started this on Audible but there were so many things that I wanted to go back and re-listen to that I bought the book.  The format of the book made it very challenging to keep ideas straight.  It was challenging to keep the ideas straight in my head as the author moved back and forth between the two major visions he addressed.  So many ideas. I needed to summarize the main points at the end of each chapter.  Then I could reflect on those ideas and see where I personally fell.    Unfortunately, I don’t think that we can categorize the political struggles into just two categories.  We are too complex.  Experience and education change our thinking and beliefs.  It also changes how we view the world.  I think I can straddle both lines (the constrained and the unconstrained) in some situations, especially in areas where I don’t have a deep understanding of the factors and influences involved.   For the constrained vision the big idea is that human beings are flawed.  So, to best help society we need to understand the fundamental laws of nature, government, and economy and then constrain man in order to maintain a healthy society.   This is very different from the unconstrained vision that believes that we can perfect society if we have the right conditions.   I guess we all want to live in a utopia.  However, by definition utopia is an “imagined place of state were everything is perfect” (Oxford Languages).   
So, what if you believe that man is flawed but is perfectible through Christ?   It makes it hard to completely land in one group or another.  The book does not address this idea.  The focus is how man believes that he can perfect society if the conditions and teaching are right.  For me that is a flawed belief since I believe that man in his current condition is not omniscient enough to make decisions that will lead to a perfect society.  We just don’t understand ourselves, our world, or others well enough to begin to believe that we have the right to determine how everyone should live.