I Will Work Harder?

Animal Farm was unexpectedly one of our all-time favorite schoolbooks. “Four legs good! Two legs baaaaaad!” my daughter began chanting through the house. She loves animals, and my boys are of an age that delights in finding hypocrisy in others. And I, unexpectedly, was chastened by Boxer the workhorse. As the pig Napoleon, leader of the farm, demands yet another senseless rebuilding of the windmill, Boxer sacrifices himself for the “good” of the farm:

But the spring came and Boxer grew no fatter. Sometimes on the slope leading to the top of the quarry, when he braced his muscles against the weight of some vast boulder, it seemed that nothing kept him on his feet except the will to continue. At such times his lips were seen to form the words, “I will work harder”; he had no voice left.

Like Boxer, I attempted to solve every problem of the school year by simply working harder. While I didn’t develop a wasting disease, I did fall prey to a constant stream of viruses. As I dragged myself through the last few weeks, I considered what went wrong.

Last summer when I planned our school year, I had a grand list of things that “had to be done.” As the difficulty of the work multiplies, so does my children’s need for individual attention. Yet I have not found a way to multiply myself. What “had to be done” did not conform to the reality of time. I bent the schedule to my will, adjusted and shortened and squeezed and moved until it all fit. I was careful not to work my children too hard, but my schedule was daunting. At the time, I told my husband that if a headmaster handed me that schedule I would quit on the spot. But I couldn’t see any other way of getting the job done. I would just have to work harder.

It wasn’t until I heard a discussion on the podcast What God is Not that I realized the problem. The co-host Mother Natalia commented that expecting perfection in this life is nothing other than pride. As I planned, it didn’t seem like pride. After all, no one is watching me homeschool. No one is impressed. I was just trying to be faithful. But it turns out that pride is not quite what I thought.

Saint Thomas Aquinas describes a proud man as one who has an inordinate desire for his own excellence. The proud man wishes to overstep beyond what he is. Right-ordered excellence is a good thing. Our word virtue, from the Greek arete, means excellence. A life of virtue is a life of excellence. The difference between sinful perfectionism and godly excellence, according to Aquinas, is one of proportion. “Now right reason requires that every man’s will should tend to that which is proportionate to him.”[1] The humble submit to God and his limitations, doing that which is proportionate to him.

Every homeschool mother I know is haunted by the same questions: Is this enough? Am I doing enough? It is good to want to homeschool well. Yet, I have never found these questions to lead to a desirable outcome. The “doing enough” question is especially unhelpful if applied only to specific areas of education. Am I doing enough writing? Probably not. Are our discussions going well enough? Probably not. Are we spending enough time on phonics? Probably not. Will it ever be enough? Probably not. These questions often result in a doubling down and working harder.

What sort of excellence then should we work toward? In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ tells us to be perfect as our Father is perfect. But when he speaks of perfection, he is using a derivative of telos. Telos is our final cause, our end, our purpose, our completion. This perfection is not skill without error but a path toward our highest end. When I began homeschooling six years ago, I made a vision list for my children. Nowhere on the list were spelling mastery, math fact speed, or Latin declension memorization, the sort of things I worry about being enough. Instead, it was a vision of who I wanted them to be when they left home. A few examples from the list are:

• Literate in the Great Books
• Possessing an inner gallery of art and poetry
• Responsible in household management (cooking, cleaning, laundry, budgeting)
• Disciplined in holy habits including prayer and Bible reading
• Confident to try new things
• Able to self-educate
• Friends with parents and one another
• Voracious readers
• Aware of personal strengths and weaknesses

Through God’s mercy, they continue to be shaped toward the vision of who I hope them to be. In Desiring the Kingdom, James K. A. Smith notes that education should not be informative but formative. The question should not be whether a child is well-informed in phonics or science or math. Rather the question is whether she is well-formed through these things. What if we forget about doing enough and begin to ask these questions instead: How are my children being formed? Am I wisely forming my children to the best of my ability right now?

[1] Summa Theologiae, II of II, Q162, a1