I'm attracted to Charlotte Mason and Classical styles of home education because I believe in the value of encountering the timeless achievements of human culture; because I value the vanishing virtues of abstract reasoning and careful logic; because, in short, I want them to be able to think and not to be bound by their own time and place.
I also want them to be able to communicate to their own time and place. Increasingly, I think this requires a new kind of literacy: the ability to make an idea look good. It is not, I'll admit, as virtuous or vital of a skill as the ability to construct an airtight argument. But it is necessary.
Trying to communicate in all caps, centered, black-on-white text is the modern equivalent of signing your name with an X. Loading up your website with tacky graphics and fonts because you mistakenly thought they looked cool is considerably more likely to lose you an audience than any incoherence in your thoughts.
Fortunately I was able to learn quite a bit from my mother and older sister, because doing design work became a significant part of my job in later years. (I fear this website is not a very good example; I don't have the time to tinker with HTML anymore and I never did get very fluent in it.) I would like to make it a more deliberate part of my children's education--almost as if it were handwriting.
A good introduction to the topic is The Non-Designer's Design Book, by Robin Williams. This could be used as a reference book all along, and perhaps a short course in the early high school years. Unfortunately, at least in the original edition, it only addresses print publications, and not websites, which are slightly different. I don't know of an equivalent reference for web design.
Notebook pages, project display boards, a family newsletter or website can all be approached with an eye to developing this skill. Taking the idea of copywork to a new level, a student could deliberately design pages based on layouts from a well-designed book or magazine. I've stolen ideas like this many times.
Of course, on the flip side, they should be learning to see through artistic layouts just as they learn to see through emotional appeals. The ultimate question must be the truth of what is being said. But just as the ancient student had to learn to speak truth eloquently, the modern one must learn to display it elegantly. | 