A pattern language for homeschooling...and life

 An example of an architectural pattern language in Amsterdam.  (Photo credit: Bob)

One of the books that caught my attention at Susan's house this time was The Timeless Way of Building.  It's part of an architectural series by Christopher Alexander.  I was once an office designer, so was interested in Alexander's ideas about architecture for their own sakes.  But his books also remind me of homeschooling, and of life generally.  And that's what he's after, I think:  Life

He talks about pattern languages, which are ways to structure our spaces from the inside out to encourage a nameless quality, which he describes in many ways--full of life, whole, comforting, free, exact, egoless, and eternal--but none of these words quite captures what he's after, not because the this quality is too vague, but because it's too precise.  And isn't that exactly like what we try to do when we homeschool?  We try to adapt to our growing children, and their days, in just the right away to create "life" in their learning, but we really don't know how to describe what we're doing.  And sometimes we doubt ourselves and try to adopt someone else's system, which often creates less harmony in our family than if we'd just gone on with doing our own thing.

Here's a quote, or a series of them, from the beginning of the book, that further describes what he's talking about.  See if you agree:

"We may gradually improve these patterns which we share, by testing them against experience: we can determine, very simply, whether or not these patterns make our surroundings live, or not, by recognizing how they make us feel...

...Within this process, every individual act of building is a process in which space gets differentiated.  It is not a process of addition, in which preformed parts are combined to create a while, but a process of unfolding, like the evolution of an embryo, in which the whole precedes the parts, and actually gives birth to them, by splitting...

...Indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages.  The language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us.  They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves...

...as things are, we have so far beset ourselves with rules, and concepts, and ideas of what must be done to make a building or a town alive, that we have become afraid of what will happen naturally, and convinced that we must work within a 'system' and with 'methods' since without them our surroundings will come tumbling down in chaos...

And--greatest irony of all--it is the very methods we invent to free us from our fears which are themselves the chains whose grip on us creates our difficulties.

For the fact is, that this seeming chaos which is in us is a rich, rolling, swelling, dying, lilting, singing, laughing, shouting, crying, sleeping order.  If we will only let this order guide our acts of building, the buildings that we make, the towns we help to make, will be the forests and the meadows of the human heart."

Some people may think this sounds too loose, but to me, it sounds like grace.  And though I can't speak for Susan, I suspect that she knows this already, and thinks so, too.

P.S. I'm posting this on my other blog, too.