A girl, ploughing through the classics with a sword

CZ was never, as a child, a huge fan of ancient history. And in our case, Sonlight and Veritas Press didn't help. By the time she was eleven, she announced, "If I have to read one more book about a twelve-year-old orphaned boy lost in the midst of historical events, I'm going to scream."

Nonetheless, we're studying ancient history this year, at CZ's request. I think she thought it was going to be more about Nordic sagas and less about Babylonians and Greeks, but she's holding up her end of the bargain. As a result, CZ recently concluded, "I now know way more than I ever wanted to about how to cleave someone in half with a sword."

She's also learned that the scariest place to be in the ancient world was inside a palace, especially if you were a royal first born son with an ambitious uncle. Christendom, flawed as it is, can't help but look a little better.

But every now and then I give CZ a break and allow her to insert another type of book into her schedule. During Christmas vacation, for instance, she chose Musicophilia. Most recently, she decided to tackle the earliest Icelandic saga. But the earliest sagas take place in the 900s A.D. and are pagan, so they feel like ancient history anyway.

So this week CZ has been curled up on her chair reading about a bunch of people who drink a lot and whose names start with Thor-. Needless to say, there has been bloodshed. But I'm surprised at how often CZ breaks out into a chuckle. On Thursday, there was a chuckle that was a little louder than most, so I asked what it was about. She read aloud:

"One night the king had gone to bed, and so had Thorir and Thorolf, and Thorfinn and Thorvald were still up. Eyvind and Alf came and sat down with them and made merry, drinking from the same horn at first, then in pairs. Eyvind and Thorvald drank together from one horn, and Alf and Thorfinn from the other. As the night wore on they started cheating over the drinking, and a quarrel broke out that ended in abuse. Eyvind leapt to his feet, drew his short-sword and stabbed Thorvald, delivering a wound that was more than enough to kill him. Then the king's men and Thorir's men both leapt to their feet, but none of them was armed because they were in a sacred temple, and people broke up the fighting among those who were the most furious.

Nothing else of note happened that night."

So she's developing a black sense of humor. Perhaps it's good that she waited until she was sixteen to read this sort of thing after all.

Another side benefit of CZ not having liked ancient history as a child is that she is still fairly innocent of many of the plots to the Greek stories (she mostly knows the myths), and she's now reading them for the first time with a fresh eye and in their original forms. One evening two weeks ago, for instance, she was ploughing through Grene's translation of Oedipus the King. She was very quiet for a long time, and then:

"He did what?!"

That was definitely worth the wait.

Screwtape on education

More C.S. Lewis from "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" in The World's Last Night and Other Essays. I promise I didn't copy this idea from Cindy, as I've been meaning to post it for two days, but it certainly is a striking coincidence, and if you read it, really does remind me of the current attitude towards education:

I hope, and believe, that each one of you has the same uneasiness tonight. Your career is before you. Hell expects and demands that it should be--as Mine was--one of unbroken success. If it is not, you know what awaits you.

I have no wish to reduce the wholesome and realistic element of terror, the unremitting anxiety, which must act as a lash and spur to your endeavors. How often you will envy the humans their faculty of sleep!

After that welcoming introduction, which reminds me of the way we treat our high school juniors, Screwtape gets down to details about the reason why souls in Hell these days are of such poor quality:

It would be vain to deny that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality...The difficulty lay in their very smallness and feebleness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible...They do not understand either the source or the real character of the prohibitions they are breaking. Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them. And of course we have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur...

Of course, Lewis eventually gets around to explaining how these muddled souls finally became capable of making a choice worth damnation, but that's a much more serious subject that makes me instead want to quote his book The Great Divorce. My point in posting these was merely to point out some parallels with education.

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?

The naturalist impulse*

CZ feeding a Queen butterfly, 2007

In honor of the SAT II Biology test that CZ took yesterday, here is a quote from Anne Fadiman's essay, "Collecting Nature," from At Large and Small:

"Her conception of nature was incorrigibly romantic; she was painfully affected by beauty; she was a compulsive arranger; she focused on small details--the precise curve of a mourning cloak's forewing, the exact shade of the red spot on a zebra swallowtail's hindwing--rather than on larger and more important questions of behavior and habitat."

Thus Ms. Fadiman, who was describing herself as a child, became a writer and not a biologist.

That quote may apply more to me than to CZ, who shows few signs of being a compulsive arranger, but I think we're both delighted that she can now leave off test prep and go back to learning in a way that lends itself to enjoyment.  We are perhaps slightly appreciative of the impetus the test gave her to master the basics of the subject, but crammed in this way over two months, they are mostly devoid of beauty.  

We have raised butterflies, but we have spent more time birding, and this quote touches not only on the appeal of watching birds, but also on the appeal of keeping a notebook of birding lists (when she started she could barely write) or a life list on a site such as eBird, sponsored by Cornell's Lab of Ornithology.  CZ accumulated over 150 birds on her list before the spring concert season and her shoulder injury overwhelmed any desire to crane her neck looking for warblers.

Instead, yesterday afternoon, CZ watched a documentary on Jacqueline du Pre' and then spent three hours practicing violin. The sounds coming from her room were not unlike those of a bird or butterfly set free.  But in the evening, she picked up The Physiology Coloring Book, took out a set of pencils, and colored in the title. "See? These are the colors of the letters for me," she explained. Then she started reading and coloring the text--for fun.  

The last butterfly of 2007, a Monarch, going free in Riverside Park

*I wrote this title thinking I had heard the phrase somewhere before, so I looked it up.  Not too suprisingly, it was the name of a book on painting.

Italiano ancora

Each Wednesday morning, our family has our Italian lesson. We think our tutor, Paola, is the greatest! She has a great sense of humor with Bob's impertinent questions ("Are you sure you're pronouncing that right?") and she teaches the language with the subtlety of a native speaker. Most of which subtlety, of course, is lost on us.

Why Paola, who teaches Western Civilization at Columbia and is writing a book in English on Russian literature, would want to teach us, is a mystery. Teaching us Italian is like having breakfast with toddlers, only we're not nearly as cute! And not only does she speak with us patiently and give us worksheets that are much more interesting than the ones in textbooks, she even encourages us to e-mail her during the week. There's just one catch: Our e-mails have to be in Italian, she corrects them, and we have to send them back with proper grammar. As a result, I'm about three e-mails deep in corrections right now. Seems I can't resist trying to talk like an eight-year-old instead of a three-year-old, and I mess up a lot!

Earlier this week, I finished up an e-mail with:

"Ora devo comprare del cibo per la cena," which I thought meant, "Now I should go buy some food for supper."

But Paola responded, "Da mangiare--Per favore, dimentica la parola "cibo," si usa quasi esclusivamente per i cani, gatti, ecc.!" ("Say 'something to eat'--Please, forget the word 'cibo;' It's used almost exclusively for dogs and cats, etc.!")

Thank you Paola, for teaching us not to buy cat food for dinner! Ms. Stone*, as we affectionately call our old tutor, left us in the dark on that one.

And speaking of three-year-olds and cats, the clip below is sweet in a way that TV rarely is nowadays. I love the way the little girl smiles when she sings "gattini." (Kittens) And the boy and girl in the background are pretty entertaining, too:

*Someone at Bob's office heard him talking about the Rosetta Stone program and thought he was referring to a woman!

The Education of Henry Adams

I've been meaning to read The Education of Henry Adams for a long time, and I've finally waded in. I don't think it's going to go very quickly, but I think I'll be glad I've read it.

Henry Adams was the grandson of John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of John Adams. He grew up in what he calls an "18th century" Boston, one that still lived in the atmosphere of the Boston Tea Party. As I read, I am amazed that how many influential streams branch out of the Boston of that time (Longfellow, Emerson, Webster, Horace Mann, etc.), and how many seem to have been personally acquainted with the Adams family. What a way to grow up! Yet I gather by the tone of the book that Adams felt that his childhood prepared him poorly for his life, as he looked back on it in the early 20th century.

Was he right? I can't tell, at least not yet. In one early passage, he expresses surprise at the impotence of the Boston Unitarianism in which he was raised. The atmosphere in which he grew up was not only devoid of strong theology, but also of interest in philosophy. Only literature and politics remained worth discussing. Through his eyes, one gets a picture of an American city which has thrown off what the Old World had to offer, but doesn't know how to embrace the new, either. I guess I'll find out more as I read.

In the second chapter Henry Adams gives an appraisal of his schoolboy education. That's why I'm posting about the book--because this passage interested me. Although he says "the boy" throughout this quote as though he means it generally, it soon becomes evident that he's talking about himself in particular:

Home influences alone never saved a New England boy from ruin, though sometimes they may have helped to ruin him; and the influences outside of home were negative. If school helped, it was only by reaction. The dislike of school was so strong as to be a positive gain. The passionate hatred of school methods was almost a method in itself. Yet the dayschool of that time was respectable, and the boy had nothing to complain of. In fact, he never complained. He hated it because he was here with a crowd of other boys and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him. He memory was slow, and the effort painful. For him to conceive that his memory could compete for school prizes with machines of two or three times its power, was to prove himself wanting not only in memory, but flagrantly in mind. He thought his mind a good enough machine, if it were given time to act, but it acted wrong if hurried. Schoolmasters never gave time.

In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school days, from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away. Perhaps his needs turned out to be exceptional, but his existence was exceptional. For success in the life imposed on him he needed, as afterwards appeared, the facile use of only four tools: Mathematics, French, German and Spanish. With these, he could master in very short time any special branch of inquiry, and feel at home in any society. Latin and Greek, he could, with the help of the modern languages, learn more completely by the intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school...

...Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given him half an hour's direction very day, he would have done more for him than school ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught men and boys looked down on home-bred boys, and rather prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school.

Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at fifteen were worse than none. [Here he names many amusements common at the time.] From none of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of use to him in the world. Books remained as in the eighteenth century, the source of life, and as they came out--Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest---they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Dcouments in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and "The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole he learned most then.

Considering how generally negative Adams is, I'm not sure we should take his word as wisdom, but as a firsthand description of the extraordinary life to which he was born, the Education is very interesting reading.

Parenting is its own reward

Julie Bogart of Bravewriter posted an excellent article this morning on "Parenting principles that foster happiness."  I've been thinking specifically on this idea for the past week and half or so, so the post was timely.  

Perhaps you too have noticed that sometimes we Christian parents ignore the question of happiness, just because we know that joy does not always equal happiness (which we equate with the easy way out) and because we know that God often sharpens us through suffering. That's true, of course.  But it's a pity when we ignore our need to enjoy our children, because when we do, we lose perspective, and if it goes on for long enough, we risk losing our children's hearts as well. 

Nothing that Julie is talking about in this article is anti-Christian, or "hedonistic," as she says. Nor is she saying to let the kids run the show altogether.  What this article is suggesting is similar to what Charlotte Mason suggested, that children are born persons.  Sure, it's harder sometimes dealing with children minute by minute than implementing a perfect system, but in the long run, creative and individual consideration is what makes kids thrive.

Here's a related quote that I've had in my files for years, and revisit from time to time.  

Are we doing what the Bible commands when we force our children to do something they hate when, with a little creativity, we could make it enjoyable to them?

It's from one of the first homeschooling sites I ever read, back when my teen was a toddler, called "Thoughts on Homeschooling" by Jim Muncy. The article, and Muncy's approach, are refreshingly low tech. We do well to revisit old homeschooling articles now and then, the ones that were written before homeschooling got as competitive and busy as any private school.  They are written by people who have now finished the homeschooling course, and so they help to bring perspective.  

I'm thinking about happiness in the home partly because with the end of this year we only have four more official years of homeschooling left.  And Julie's principles have always resonated in our home.  Here are a few ways we've followed them that I quickly jotted down:

Affirm you child's quirky voice: I kept a journal of things C.Z. said when she was little.  I'd do it still, but I think it would embarrass her! Now I just laugh at her jokes.  And I've looked for years for ways to bring out the creative writer that I know lurks inside.  These two things are both aspects of affirming your child for who she is.  

Pay attention to pain: I wish I could say that I was always attentive to C.Z.'s cries of academic pain, but I've always at least considered alternatives.  I guess this one is a balancing act of having them stick with something for long enough to see if they get over a hump, and finally acknowledging that something just isn't working.  

Discipline is not done to a person: We've always acknowledged the phrase "standing up on the inside" where it applies to discipline, and have tried to reach the heart, not merely modify the behavior.  

Eye contact and physical touch matter:  I'm delighted to still have an affectionate teen!  

Create opportunities for fun: When the going gets dull, we go outside, go to a museum, or cook something.  And we've never been sticklers about using anything for its intended purpose!

***

Today, happiness in our home consists of a big new box of sheet music.  We had a busy weekend, with two final concerts, some class parties, and a visit from Bob's mother.  It was a comfort to C.Z. and me, as we helped Grandmommy into a cab and turned back to an empty home, to be able to bring next year's music out for perusal. So for the next hour, C.Z. sight read Bruch, Kreisler, and Sarasate. 

Apparently five hours of playing on Saturday didn't flare up C.Z.'s shoulder, so it looks like we're going to get to go back to one-hour lessons for her make ups during June. I'm really looking forward to hearing more music, and spending less time in the physical therapist's office. A proper reward for a music well played is, of course, more and better music.  And it looks like C.Z. will be enjoying her reward.

Books on "another sort of learning"

Every now and then, one discovers a new source of wisdom that makes connections between what one already halfway knows and what one hasn't yet imagined.  With my attention lately pulled this way and that by everything from the logistics of running a household to the brain changes of middle age, I particularly appreciate any book or essay that can help me make these connections and bring the half-digested ideas lying around in my mind into a coherent whole.  

I think I've just discovered one of those sources:  The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) Student Guides.  I bought the whole set of them a couple of weeks ago because, knowing how long it takes me to develop my thoughts on any subject, I have begun collecting articles and books on college for C.Z.  Though I've only been reading about college at a leisurely pace over the past three months or so, I've already found my ideas on the subject sharpening.  So it pays to seek out books that help develop one's purpose, whatever your stage of life.

As is clear from my last post, I would like for other students, including my daughter, to have a better idea of why they're going to college than I did when I went to art school--to be able to form, and then to have the courage to live out, their convictions.  And that is exactly what the first volume I've read, A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning, by James V. Schall, S.J., helps to accomplish. It's really more of a long essay than a book, but it provides a whole framework for how and why one should educate himself in the classics, the books that help one think about what life is about in the big sense. Schall's premise is that there is something wrong with liberal learning as it is presented in colleges these days, especially in elite colleges, so students needs to take matters into their own hands and find an overarching purpose through reading on their own. 

Schall writes:

Eric Voegelin, in his book on Plato, said that after the death of Socrates in Athens, philosophy fled from the city to the Academy. We live in a time evidently when truth is fleeing the Academy.

...While uneasily following, probably for an eventual job, whatever curriculum he has selected or is given, [a perceptive student] will nonetheless begin to look about on his own.  He needs a certain practical good judgment.  At a deeper level, he searches for some way to go; he must, in other words, find "another sort of learning."   

I remember doing just that in college through reading the Bible and the works of C.S. Lewis repeatedly. Disturbed by legalistic street preachers who provided hours of entertainment for the beer-swilling set, I remember discovering Isaiah's passage about the Messiah not snuffing out the bruised reed. Harassed by classmates and professors who espoused a conveniently materialistic worldview, I remember exactly where I was (in a bus barreling down hairpin turns in Tuscany) and how merrily relieved I felt when I read Lewis' argument that miracles are, by definition, not typical according to the laws of nature, so the argument that they're impossible because they break the laws of nature is a straw man. Like people in the first century didn't know the the Virgin Birth was unusual? That much is in Mary's reply to the angel!  

If reading Lewis did this much to help me, what more might I have learned if I'd know about a few other sane authors as well? For I had no idea as yet about the host of other voices out there waiting to be discovered--Chesterton, Belloc, Walker Percy, Russell Kirk, and so many others. They are a cloud of witnesses, not hiding from difficult questions, but confronting them head on and then passing down their wisdom to others.

Schall's book, and all the other student guides on various subjects, are short guides to what the life of the mind should ideally be, but in a framework that isn't likely to be presented in the modern college. Schall's book contains many inset boxes with suggestions for other books "to keep sane by." He says that good books almost always beget other book suggestions. He talks about how valuable re-reading is, because questions that perplex one at 20, 30 and even 40 might become clear at 50 or 60. He even forgives the reader for accumulating more books than he can realistically read. (This is my kind of author!) I wish I'd had these guides when I was 19, but I'm happy enough to have them now. I hope through them to bring together a few more thoughts that will help keep me on the right track, as much in middle and old age as they might have during youth, because my view is to eternity.

In lieu of Chapter 6

A personal commentary on Chapter 6 of Ken Myers's All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes is not forthcoming anytime soon. And since both Wednesday and Friday promise all-day outings, I'm not sure Chapter 7 is in the works for this week, either.  In fact, I seem to have overloaded my brain to the extent that I need to take a deep breath and straighten out some of the tangle that's in there already. That happens from time to time.  So I'm cooking instead.

Regarding Chapter 6, I attempted in two different drafts to write something more than a mere synopsis of the chapter, whose subject is how pop culture and the liberal arts are not just different tastes, but different experiences altogether. And both times, even though I clearly stated the difference between quality of thought issues and salvation issues, I ended up feeling as though I were personally critiquing my fellow Christians.  Moral of story:  I suppose it doesn't work for the neighborhood Luddite to preach on the mental advantages of turning off pop culture, no matter how wonderful, or even important, those advantages may be to said Luddite.  

In my state of mental knottedness, however, I did discover a young writer, Matthew B. Crawford, who seems to have a gift for making many of the same points I would like to make if I were half so talented as he at writing insightfully (a big if!).  It probably helps that he isn't trying to make an appeal to Christians, but to young people generally, particularly college students.  That way, there's no question of any implications in his appeals for acceptance by God.  With Myers, it's much harder to separate the two.

Here's a sample of Crawford talking about the importance of liberal education, echoing what Myers (via C.S. Lewis) calls receiving a work, which an requires effort to see beyond one's limited perspective, as opposed to using it:

The humanities might be understood simply as s record of the best that has been thought about the human situation. Acquaintance with this record has the effect of freeing us from the present, with its necessarily partial view, and opening us up to the full range of human possibilities. Further, to enter truly into the great works of the past, or of other cultures, requires an effort to free oneself from the present and its certainties. A cultivated willingness to make that effort is perhaps the cardinal intellectual virtue.

That is an excellent summary of Chapter 6, with the exception that Myers postulates that for Christians, our imprisonment in the psychological familiarity and present-orientation of pop culture may make it harder for us to grow not only intellectually, but spiritually as well.

I found Mr. Crawford via Rick Saenz of Dry Creek Chronicles, who in turn found him on Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons blog.  After reading the linked article, Shop Class as Soulcraft (which will be published as a full-length book in May), I was so enthused that I Googled several other articles by Mr. Matthews, all equally enjoyable. Though he writes on everything from physics textbooks to mood medication on campus, the common thread is always the destructive effect of modern society on the liberal arts.  And that's a subject I could read about all day.  

So, for Chapter 6, I suppose my comments will be limited to:  1) Instead of reading Myers, go ahead and read An Experiment in Criticism, the excellent C.S. Lewis book on which most of the chapter is based, and 2) print out a few articles by Matthew B. Crawford and read them when you have time.  Among the current mass of internet articles, they stand out as well worth our attention.

Roberto parla Italiano

Chapter 1

Bob's interest in Italian, contrary to rumor, did not begin with an Italian supermodel. It started with ice cream. It was the summer of 2003 and we were somewhere in Italy. Bob was ordering gelato and became frustrated that he knew exactly two phrases in Italian: "Mi chiamo Roberto," and "Gelato mi piace." ("My name is Bob," and "I like ice cream.") So he used his creative mind and limited knowledge to fashion a new saying, "Mi chiamo gelato." This soon ballooned into "Mi chiamo cinque gelati," ("My name is five ice creams.") but for the next five years, his Italian knowledge stagnated, much to the annoyance of friends and family who wished that he'd learn to say something new. Bob really, really likes repetition.

Chapter 2

Sometime last August, Bob felt that it was time to take on a new challenge. He wondered at the fact that he lived in a city where most people were bilingual and some spoke many languages, yet he remained monolingual despite some high school and college Latin. It was time to acquire a new language. But which one? Having the Latin base meant that Romance languages would be his best bet. There were some distinct advantages to not learning Spanish, as he would probably only understand more of the swearing going on in our neighborhood, and French was just too hard to pronounce. But Italian--ah, there was a language of simple beauty and phonetic integrity! And they had that nice landscape, legendary art, and good food and wine. And he already knew three whole sentences of it. And, what do you know, we just happened to have an Italian Rosetta Stone CD lying around. (I'm afraid we have more than one Rosetta Stone set lying around. Our apartment is a virtual Rosetta Stone graveyard.)

So, he popped in the CD and got started. One thing to know about Bob is that he is very goal-oriented. Once he starts something, he lays out a schedule and works diligently, whatever anyone else is doing, and wherever we go. He started a study notebook, bought a dictionary and grammar book (or had me buy them) and set himself a goal of four lessons per week. He did the computer program on nights and weekends, and studied the curriculum text on the subway going to and from work. On Mondays, he asked a Venetian co-worker to help him with the weekend's idiomatic phrases and other confusions. On Wednesday nights, he had me quiz him at dinner. (I have a very elementary understanding of Italian.)

But perhaps most memorably for all involved, there was always an Italian phrase of the week. One early example was "Il cavallo sta mangiando una carota blu." ("The horse is eating a blue carrot." When in doubt, be silly!) And then there was the week he memorized the familiar notice on our local subway train: "Dovete trovarvi in uno dei cinque vagoni di testa per poter scendere alla stazione di South Ferry. Grazie." ("You must be in one of the first five cars if you want to get off at the South Ferry Station. Thank you." It's given in six languages.)

Slowly, the Italian began to stick. In December, I realized that he was going to finish the program soon, and I ordered him levels 1-3 in the new Rosetta Stone version for Christmas. (Unfortunately for continuity's sake, the program was completely reworked. As the sales rep put it, "We found out that people don't want to learn about boys standing on picnic tables or under them." But it was actually cheaper to get three levels than two.)

This week, Bob clicked on the last screen in Unit 8, Lesson 12, thus completing Level 1. Unfortunately, in his days of sometimes maddening perseverance, his daughter has run screaming from the room more than once, and his co-worker has quit helping him altogether. But recently when he popped his head in her office and asked, "Chi sta sentendo piu freddo di tutti?" ("Who is feeling the coldest of all?" which was a phrase of the week in early January) she forgot that he was speaking Italian and answered absent-mindedly, "Chi?"

Complain as we might about sheer repetition, success is when you forget that someone is learning a language, and you actually begin to speak it with them.

I don't know what Chapter 3 holds. Let's hope it includes a nice vacation in Tuscany, with five ice creams for all.

But for now, we're going to begin with a celebratory spaghetti dinner.

An excellent article on education

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education by William Deresiewicz is from the summer issue of The American Scholar, and although I've already seen it quoted several places, most of the citations emphasize the first paragraph, in which the Ivy-League-educated author realizes that he can't hold a conversation with his plumber.  But the really meaty content is weighted towards the end of the article.  I positively beg you, if you are interested in education, to print the entire article out and go read it in a quiet corner somewhere. It's the best explanation I've ever seen of why Ivy League universities can't offer a deep education.  While I don't share an interest in the particular examples of genuine thought that Deresiewicz gives, I absolutely agree with his description of how a curious mind should work and what it should feel like to think. He links education with genuine friendship, with solitude and with leisure, and explains in realistic and pragmatic detail just how Ivy League students are hobbled in pursuit of these qualities.  

Is the article accurate?  Let's hope some of the characteristics that Deresiewicz is describing are simply his own reaction to his education.  I don't know first hand, as I went to a state school.  But having lived in Manhattan for the past ten years, I can see how he got the idea, and think that, in a general way, it's accurate.  It's not that self-satisfied people go to Ivy-League schools.  Most of the Ivy-Leaguers with whom I am acquainted are kind, socially conscientious, and of course, incredibly smart.  It's more that the preparation that leads to the Ivies, the college years themselves, and the life expected of a graduate, all emphasize competition and achievement, and competition and achievement simply aren't conducive to thought.

Oh, and by the way, I have some links over to the right in the form of shared items and Delicious bookmarks.  While my posts are often more daily fare, I try to make sure most of the bookmarks are articles that interest me more because they're thought provoking.  Often they are about education or some other cultural issue. So, if you like that kind of thing, check them out.  I just thought I'd mention it because I can't get the Delicious gadget with tags to load, so you can't see what the topics are unless you click on the link.