Black and White Boxes

A new perspective

I am in the midst of an organizing project. I have been scouring Amazon and Pinterest for ideas and inspiration so that my children who share bedrooms will be able to store their stuff better. Whether all the stuff is worth storing is a question beyond my capacity to answer at the moment, but for the time being I am focused on what kinds of boxes will do the job that needs doing.

Boxes are nice. They make things easy to sort and to organize. They come in many different shapes and sizes and no matter what we need to contain, there’s sure to be a box out there that’s just the right size.

Boxes keep things neat and orderly, even non-physical things. We can categorize and sort and impose order on our conception of the way the world works. Boxes can give a sense of security — when everything fits inside the world makes sense. Not only do we categorize our own inclinations in this way, we sort other people into our boxes as well.

But sometimes this either/or framework breaks down and we find ourselves pushed out of our black and white categories into areas of grey that we are not prepared to deal with. Sometimes we run into people and situations that are not either/or, but instead inhabit that paradoxical space of both/and.

When confronted with outside-the-box phenomena we usually make frantic attempts to restructure our boxes, scrambling to make sense of the world once more. And sometimes, for awhile, our restructuring is successful and we can go back to the familiar comfort of black and white. Eventually though, one way or another, we will be faced once more with an overflow of grey.

We reject any mixing of categories and blurring of lines. Either black or white; there is no room for anything else. Everything is safer that way, everything makes sense. It is neat and orderly and comfortable.

In the online world of education — specifically home education — we see all kinds of containers which hold the contents of our school days for us. Safe labels such as unschooling, unit studies, Montessori, Charlotte Mason, classical, eclectic, all carry very specific meanings, and most of us know whether or not we belong in one of those containers. These labels set boundaries for us. They help us to determine what we do and what we don’t do, according to our understanding of them. And I will be the first person to say that boundaries are incredibly helpful in many ways.

It seems inevitable though, that there will come a time when our boxes can’t hold the shape of reality properly anymore and things will start to get uncomfortable — scary, even. Disorder and chaos will threaten to overwhelm our orderly black and white system.

I thought I had chosen to be a classical schooler, but over time I began to understand that Charlotte Mason is classical too. I drew from Montessori principles, but found myself embarrassed to talk about it because I knew I wasn’t a “true” Montessori schooler. I scoffed at unschooling, certain that only with structure and order and discipline would any “real” learning happen, to find myself with a pair of unschooling poster-children whose drive to self-direct their learning and not have it be directed made me realize that I was no longer in the driver’s seat (which was supposed to be my seat!).

As time has gone by I have slowly begun to understand that when our boxes boundaries are rigid and concrete we keep them there so that we will be safe; so that there are no grey areas, so that lines are not blurred. When our boundaries do not demand anything from us, when we have the world sorted in such a way as to see no need for discomfort or change or uncertainty or growth, things appear to be under control. We think we have “arrived” at our destination.

But appearances can be deceiving. What we thought was orderly might actually be disordered in a more fundamental sense in that it doesn’t allow us to see beyond the limits we have placed on ourselves.

Because black and white are clearly defined and easy to recognize as opposites we want to ignore everything else on the spectrum between the two ends. We prefer not to go around trading in what is comfortable for the unknown. We label ourselves, we label others, we despise the grey areas and stick only to what we want to know. Anything that pushes beyond the known is shoved aside as an anomaly; we feel free to ignore any and all evidence that contradicts our chosen perspective.

But what if those things and those ideas and those people that don’t quite fit into our black and white notions of the way the world works (or the way we want it to work) aren’t really grey areas at all? What if they need not be scary? What if they are simply some of the many colors we haven’t learned to see yet?

What if all our attempts to define and protect and control are the some of the same things that are holding us back from pressing onward “toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus”?1

Perhaps we should all step outside our favorite boxes and sit with those questions for a time. It might do us some good.