Shared Learning and Cherry Pies

By now, school is in full swing all over the country – but it’s not just teachers and college professors who are teaching. Charity Singleton Craig writes at The High Calling about learning from her mother.

I possibly could have discovered canned cherries on the Internet. In fact, when I decide on a recipe, it says right there in the instructions, “can use 4 cups sweet or tart canned or bottled cherries” as a substitute for fresh. But learning about cherry pie from my mom was not just a fact-finding mission. It was a revelation: I, too, am now a pie maker.

“Much of what we know comes to us that way, passed on from person to person, age after age, surviving in muscle and bone,” Scott Russell Sanders writes, in his essay, “The Common Life,” published in Earth Works. “I learned from my mother how to transplant a seedling, how to sew on a button; I learned from my father how to saw a board square, how to curry a horse, how to change the oil in a car. The pleasure I take in sawing or currying, in planting or sewing, even in changing oil, like my pleasure in making bread, is bound up with the affection I feel for my teachers and respect I feel for the long, slow accumulation of knowledge that informs our simplest acts.”

This shared learning is something that doesn’t just teach us – it brings honor to our work. Read more here.