Living With Live Wires

The path of mastery is what we walk whenever we want to initiate change in our lives and when we want to master any area of expertise. It also encompasses the learning process.

The path of mastery involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it. Leonard states, You have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.

If you have pursued sports, art or music, you feel this intimately.

“If our life is a good one, a life of mastery, most of it will be spent on the plateau. If not, a large part of it may well be spent in restless, distracted, ultimately self-destructive attempts to escape the plateau.

The question remains: Where in our upbringing, our schooling, our career are we explicitly taught to value, to enjoy, even to love the plateau, the long stretch of diligent effort with no seeming progress?”

George Leonard
Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (1992)

I’ll tell you where- some of our days  in home school.

I can relate deeply to the experience of the plateau. For many years, rather than embrace the plateau, I tended to get impatient living on the plateau, which led to a lot of  burnout.

Within the past few years, I began observing how this path of mastery naturally took on this shape in our home school experience. I wondered if my children had forgotten everything they had learned when we reached a plateau. But, I would unexpectedly see a sudden spurt of growth and the pattern would start over. The plateau is the time in which new learning is assimilated and integrated by the child. They also have many different learning curves and developmental tasks happening all at once that need regular integration.

One of the challenges to creating a path of mastery is the societal influences that seem to pop up everywhere.

“The modern world, in fact, can be viewed as a prodigious conspiracy against mastery…We’re continually bombarded with promises of immediate gratification, instant success, and fast, temporary relief, all of which lead in exactly the wrong direction. This mentality that pervades our society, not only prevents us from developing our potential skills but threatens our health, education, career, relationships, and perhaps even our nation’s economic viability.”
George Leonard
Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (1992)

I see this everywhere and have become more conscious of this influence in my own life and hope to help my children understand this culture we live in as they grow. This is one area where home school can really help cushion some of those effects.

[excerpt from my Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented State Conference presentation: Don't Fence Me In - Mastery, Creativity, and Adventure in the Home Education of Bright Children]