Introduction Part 1: Homeschooling the Humanities

Welcome to the very first post on Dayla Learning! This is an introduction of sorts, and in this Part 1, I’d like to spend some time exploring the foundational purpose of this site: homeschooling the humanities.

What do I mean when I talk about the humanities? Let’s go with the definition from the Stanford Humanities Center:

The humanities can be described as the study of how people process and document the human experience. Since humans have been able, we have used philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history and language to understand and record our world. These modes of expression have become some of the subjects that traditionally fall under the humanities umbrella. Knowledge of these records of human experience gives us the opportunity to feel a sense of connection to those who have come before us, as well as to our contemporaries.

When I think about the humanities, I think about the fields of study and ways of looking at the world that connect us, define us as a species, and help us seek out purpose and meaning. The areas contained within the humanities are broad, but what they have in common is that through them we attempt to know one another and ourselves, past and present. We attempt to place our own individual sense of self within a larger context, and we do so by recognizing our differences in those traditions as well as our similarities.

The humanities, in short, allow us to forge an identity, and that allows us to then do everything else.

Why did I start a site about homeschooling the humanities?

Well, I have studied the humanities for my entire life. I was writing poetry on the back of napkins in elementary school, sneaking Vonnegut books into my lap in my high school math class, and eventually got a PhD in rhetoric and composition before going to teach composition, literature, and interdisciplinary classes to students ranging from elementary age to adult. The humanities are my passion.

But things haven’t been so great for the humanities. In fact, looking at what is happening in educational institutions across the United States, it’s easy to see that the humanities are under attack. Whether you believe (as Francine Prose suggests) that this is because the humanities teach us to think and those in power would rather not have too many people doing that or simply that the economic forces surrounding an educational system that has become steeped in capitalism have forgotten what it is we’re supposed to be doing, the result remains the same: the humanities are losing an educational foothold.

I think about how so many educational programs are promoting STEM as a focus. Undoubtedly, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are crucial educational fields. We need them both as individuals if we hope to find a place in the modern economy and job field but also as a society if we hope to solve the huge problems that come with living together as a species (global warming, transportation, hunger, housing, the list goes on and on).

Too often, the discussions about what’s important to study fall into binaries. It’s as if talking about whether we should teach STEM or the humanities has become a teeter totter where putting an emphasis on one necessarily drives the other one downward. While I admire the efforts to add an “A” for Arts to the acronym (STEAM), my own experience as a parent and educator has seen it do little to fully integrate the approaches, and many fields in the humanities remain outside our colloquial definition of “art.”

Here’s the thing. Teaching itself is part of the humanities. To teach is to share knowledge. To teach is to communicate using words, images, and sounds. When we teach, we bookend our particular lesson with the history that came before it and the unknown future we hope it informs. Without the humanities, there is no way to share an understanding of the other fields, no way to make them useful to actual human beings living actual lives.

It seems to me that some people see that fact (that the humanities are necessary to make everything else make sense) as a flaw in the pursuit of truth rather than a feature of it. They see the human as unnecessary haze that needs to be wiped off the window so that we can see clearly.

As we run toward a world that makes sense without the humanities, we run toward a world that doesn’t make sense for humans. Everything we know and everything we do is centered in our lived experiences. It is messy. It is often unpleasant, uncomfortable, and full of mistakes. It would be easier to simply wipe away what it is to be human and look through a streak-free window at some objective truth on the other side, but it would mean wiping away ourselves in the process.

This site starts with a simple premise: the humanities matter.

From there, it aims to help people find ways to make them matter in their own teaching practices. I focus on homeschoolers because that’s who I am and where I am putting these principles into practice in my own life. I hope you will join me in the journey.

Photos by SushiFugu , Thibault Valjevac