It's not either/or, but both!

Cindy at Ordo Amoris is holding a book club discussion for Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. I'm not at all confident that I'm going to be able to participate regularly or thoroughly, but I did figure I could type out a quick response to the first section.

The first section (not one of the ten ways yet, so I won't call it a chapter) is called "Why Truth Is Your Enemy: Or Gradgrind Without the Facts." I think the subtitle is a good summary, once you understand what it means.

Gradgrind was the utilitarian schoolmaster in Dickens' novel Hard Times. He drilled his students in rote methods, but missed teaching the essence. In an early chapter, he praises the student Bitzer's definition of a horse as, "Quadruped. Gramnivorus. Forty teeth, namely..." (You get the idea.) Meanwhile, there's a circus performer in the room who has "failed" the assignment, but she knows horses backwards and forwards, literally. Dickens wanted to show us that the Gradgrinds of his day (there really were such people in Dickens' time) missed something important about the nature of education.

Meanwhile, yesterday at skiing I heard some women discussing a hot (at the moment) WSJ article called "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." And today I saw that Cindy linked to the article, so I read it. I have many caveats about the article, especially that I think it's a publicity stunt, but I do know mothers who use the sorts of hard-nosed tactics Ms. Chua mentions. One could say, with some qualifications, that the Chinese mother (at least as defined by Ms. Chua), takes the Gradgrind approach: What counts is what's measurable, what's on the test. Creativity doesn't matter so much. Asking why something is on the test doesn't matter either. These are sidetracks that get in the way of success. Both the "Chinese mother" and Gradgrind are exaggerations, but useful ones in that they illuminate certain logical conclusions.

Our society is in a reaction to Gradgrind, even though it's a schizophrenic reaction. Today's "Western" parents are concerned with protecting their children's intellectual confidence. We don't tend to contradict our children. We don't tend to teach facts or memorization. We'd rather think we and our children are creative geniuses who don't have to memorize or work hard, but conquer the world through "critical thinking." (I put this in quotes because I think there is such a thing, but many exercises by the name don't really teach it.) Given the fear-based, teach-to-the-test pressure of high stakes tests, I really can sympathize with this reaction, but I think it goes too far. It often dispenses with facts altogether. We end up with the worst of both worlds, what Esolen calls "Gradgrind without the facts." Taken to this extreme, we end up with kids who neither understand the earthy essence of a horse, nor know how to describe one through definitional analysis.

What I'd like to propose, and what Esolen does propose, is going beyond the facts. Sometimes I am not so sure in my personal homeschooling journey which needs to come first, the work or the creative inspiration. In truth, I think we all go back and forth. But I'd let intrinsic motivation take a bigger part than either Gradgrind or Ms. Chua would (seriously or not) advocate.

I do see Ms. Chua's point that "nothing is fun until you're good at it." Some "Western" parents act as though they have no choice what their kids do, even if it hurts the kid in the long run. Sometimes you do have to lay down the law with a small child on matters behavioral and academic. But you can lay down the law in small doses, and (though it takes effort, and sometimes lots of effort) you can do it without the parental temper tantrums and guilt trips that Ms. Chua describes herself as having. A parent's job is to be a boundary, but a calm, kind one. And you don't have to emphasize success at all costs, or comparative success.

I also see Esolen's point that skills are tools. Much of twentieth and twenty-first century culture is a reaction to too much rote emphasis, but I think we are rediscovering belatedly (now that we've destroyed so much cultural capital) there is a place for skilled beauty. Cooking, carpentry, sports, academics, and yes, many of the arts, are richer if carried out with finely-honed mental and physical habits. In fact, many of my favorite activities are those that combine creativity with skill.

Esolen makes perhaps his best the point of the chapter under the section headed "Memory, What Memory?" He gives an anecdote about a farm boy in Saskatchewan who used to recite Paradise Lost as he plowed the fields. He then imagines a bureaucrat coming up to the boy, with the intention of arguing the boy out of his freedom. The boy, in turn, forms a moral response by remembering,

"So farewell hope, and with hope, farewell fear;

Farewell remorse, all good to me is lost;

Evil be thou my good: by thee at least

Divided empire with Heav'n's King I hold

By thee, and more than half perhaps shall reign,

As man ere long, and this new world shall know."

This is a student prepared to defend his liberty with a deep and calm confidence, because he has a true liberal arts education.

The extreme position that we have to have either facts or boundless individual freedom makes one of two errors: That a boy would memorize Milton only to make a good grade on a test and get into an Ivy League school, without stopping to think about what Milton has to say about liberty, or he disdains to memorize Milton at all, or even to read him, in which case the default is that he memorizes trivial bits of pop cultural trivia which, without his understanding why, signal his place as a cog in the wheel of the larger society. Either way, the student misses the larger, liberating point of education.

Esolen ends this section with the lyrics of a Rice-a-Roni commercial, while elsewhere John Taylor Gatto makes the same point by telling us that modern schools teach us that the difference between Coke and Pepsi is a subject worth arguing about (actually, my daughter's peers like to argue Mac vs. PC instead). The point is that we all talk about, learn about, worship, and even memorize something--it's just a matter of what.

One of the the more poignant versions of this Gradgrind-without-the-facts phenomenon I have seen was in a CVS pharmacy in Manhattan. The girl behind the counter who was checking me out was, as usual, having a conversation with her co-workers instead of paying attention to what she was doing at the register. Indeed, the job is rather boring, and I'm not sure I could resist zoning out sometimes myself. But the whole time she was checking me out, she was also reciting the lyrics to "Meet the Flintstones," in their entirety, to her friend. Even before reading Esolen, I couldn't help but think, "What if she had memorized Milton instead?"

This question had less to do with the so-called "Chinese" definition of success as defined by a Yale professor, even at that time, than it had to do with liberal education. Plowing is hard work, and possibly boring too, but who would you rather be, the boy in Saskatchewan or the girl in CVS?