A Book I May or May Not Give Away

The House that Wouldn't Go Away by Paul Gallico.

I got this one off the dime rack at the library because I recognized the name Paul Gallico. It's been sitting on the shelves for about a year and I decided to read it during the weekend to see if I wanted to keep it around or not.

It is an odd story, reminding me a bit of the Shyamalan movie "Lady in the Waters", probably for two reasons: because the story takes place in a tenement and because it leaves a lot of loose ends and unresolved notes. Perhaps that's something that comes with the tenement territory.

It also reminded me somewhat of E Nesbit's stories, combining the private lives of British children -- parents present but decidedly in the background -- with elements of magic and mystery.

Three children, the Maitlands, are spending the Easter holidays in the apartment building where they live with their parents. Because it is raining they can't go outside, and so they are forced to find amusement within the tenement walls.

Miranda, who is 11, seems to be able to "see" things that others can't, and she "sees" a house that formerly stood on the grounds where the apartment building stands now. Her brothers Michael and Roddy become interested in the old vanished house -- Michael constructs architectural plans based on her vision and all the children begin to investigate the flats and their inhabitants, trying to match up the flats with the old rooms of the house.

Some of the inhabitants of the building are interested, some think the children are crazy or silly, some are threatened as the childrens' inquiries seem to reveal secrets that they had kept hidden.

The unity of the story seems to be a reflection upon homes and their importance. The Maitland parents, for example, long to have a home of their own. Another couple in the tenement, an old circus act, reminisce about their seven children now grown and the home they made of a travelling caravan. Another time they get to talk to a doctor of psychology, driven to study in a public room because the crying of his newborn son makes it too hard to concentrate in his own rooms, and he tells them about the sociology of homes, how the first primitive men made their homes in caves and tents.

You get the picture. There is a seance that goes wrong, and a discovery of a locked room in the old house where a baby was hidden, but these stories come and go and don't really build up to a unified whole. The writing was good in itself but inconsistent for the purposes of the story.... for example, Mr Maitland is described as a handsome man who "gleams" at his wife for a moment, but as far as his relationship with his childrens' lives goes, he is a cipher. For the bulk of the story I was trying to decide whether it was (1) an early effort by a young talented writer (2) a tired effort by an older talented writer or (3) if somehow it was meant to be scattered, if the form matched the theme of separation within the walls of what was once a family house but was now separate rooms for very separate people leading separate lives.

I think there was a bit of the third. The children in their quest to make the house vivid and alive not just in Miranda's mind but to everyone seem to unite the separate people to some degree under the idea of a "home", whether they are threatened by the idea or glad of it. However, I wasn't surprised, either, to find that this was one of Gallico's last novels, so therefore Theory 2 was correct as well, because the whole thing remained sketchy rather than realized, though nicely done, like hallways that didn't lead anywhere but to walls.

Time is Treasure

I dropped the "Counsels of Perfection for Christian Mothers" for a while, partly because I feel like a phony even talking about perfection. Lent has demonstrated dramatically how far I am from it! (I always knew that, please believe me, but I definitely KNOW it now).

Chapter IV is about the "Value of Time". Related to what Msr Lejeune says here about the American saying, "Time is money", I found this "Know the Value of Your Time" that lets you enter your earnings, your hours of work time, your expenses, and then tells you how many hours of work it takes you to "earn" an hour of leisure. Of course, since I'm not paid for my work except in little bits and pieces here and there, my time either falls into the "priceless" or "worthless" category.

Msr Lejeune would echo all the saints by saying that EVERYONE's time is priceless. It has nothing to do with cash value. Rather, he says that time is the coin by which we purchase heaven. How do we use it? Do we "kill time"? (gruesome way to treat something so precious). Do we squander it or fritter it away?

His examples of wasting time seem somewhat quaint:

• Indulging in day dreams
• Filliing our minds with the rubbish of newspapers
• Reading dangerous novels for no good reason

If I had to come up with modern equivalents it would probably be silly fascination with celebrities, following the latest "hot story" about some colorful crime or scandal, or excessive devouring of junky TV.

Those don't really hit home for me -- what would be my substitutes? I'm afraid it would be excessive lesson planning, consuming a book in a sitting rather than pacing it out properly, and web=surfing. I can get on the internet or in a book or into a notebook and for me it's not too much different than what happens to some people in a casino. Better watch that.

More general cautions that he mentions:
.

• "passing time" not just as refreshment from work but just for the sake of getting through the day. A friend once told me about the AA warning --- HALT -- be especially vigilant when you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. Those are the times when an attachment to something can really attach and not let go. Pastimes can sometimes attach themselves in these conditions, even if they are harmless things in themselves.
  

and finally:

• By doing something that you want to do rather than what you ought to be doing. That is, something fine in itself but out of place in the moment. Say, you decide to do the laundry rather than sit at your devotions as you had planned to. You can't be accused of idleness but still you are losing your time.

His recommendation is to design a Rule for yourself. And he devotes the next chapter to this. This is what made me want to get the book when I read it, because he made the rule sound simple and yet very valuable, not a matter of regimenting your moments like little miniscule soldiers, but rather a matter of collecting them and gathering them around your true priorities.
I'll quote his suggested resolutions:

I shall never remain idle, nor lose one single instant of my time (oops, I flunk that one every single day -- is there any hope?)

I shall draw up for myself a rule of life, adapted to my state, comprising only a few articles, and capable of being applied to the diverse circumstances of my life. I shall ask myself every evening if I have observed this rule in all the essentials (more on this in the next chapter)

I shall be faithful to the following rule which, so to speak, multiplies time, and permits even the busiest person to find time for everything. The rule is this: I shall never put off what I can do now.

Blink

My husband can look at a piece of code (programming) and often spot right away whether it has bugs or problems.

It has been documented on film that some football wide receivers catch a football with their eyes closed.

In hospital days, I could sometimes tell hours before the nurses or doctors that Aidan was going to spike a temp or had something else going on with him. At home, similarly, I could often tell by morning that he was going to have to go to the ER at night.

When my son Sean was a neonate, a few hours after birth, the doctors came in and told me they were moving him to the NICU. The doctor told me he could see nothing obviously wrong, but that he saw "soft signs" that to him warranted closer monitoring and access to higher-level equipment. Half an hour later, Sean went into a state of acute acidosis and struggled for hours. Though the doctor couldn't put his finger on specific clinical symptoms, he had seen a problem before it actually went into acute form.

This intuition, though the actual word is not used, is the subject of the book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, which is very interesting reading. More on the book here and here.

The author does not use the word "intuition" because he thinks it's a catch-all term for all kinds of judgments, some of them not quite sound:

You could also say that it's a book about intuition, except that I don't like that word. In fact it never appears in "Blink." Intuition strikes me as a concept we use to describe emotional reactions, gut feelings--thoughts and impressions that don't seem entirely rational. But I think that what goes on in that first two seconds is perfectly rational. It's thinking--its just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with "thinking." In "Blink" I'm trying to understand those two seconds. What is going on inside our heads when we engage in rapid cognition? When are snap judgments good and when are they not? What kinds of things can we do to make our powers of rapid cognition better?

I have struggled with this concept of "intuition" before in trust, and the knowledge of the heart. What does it mean to say that our intuition is telling us something, sometimes when our overt reasoning process is trying to lead us elsewhere? It is undeniable that "intuition" or gut instinct has led people wrong in the past. There are examples in the book. Usually it occurs either when the judger is taking TOO much into account or when he or she is taking too little into account.

An example of the former is a study which had female college-educated types go into a car lot and try to bargain the dealer down to a reasonable price, compared with white males of a similar demographic. Consistently, the males ended up being able to finagle a lower end price. If the study is correct in showing what it was meant to show, the dealer allowed the fact of the buyer being a female to cloud other factors more worth taking into consideration.

An example of the latter is something he called "mindblindedness" sometimes brought on by a state of over-adrenaline. Cops inappropriately shooting at an innocent person often receive visual messages in a distorted way because they are in a state of hyper-vigilance which interferes with their normal ability to read a situation. In the example given in the book, they saw someone trying to pull out a wallet and actually "saw" a gun.

But given the proper trained awareness, and enough time and calmness for the process to work properly, people can make eerily sound judgments in the "blink" time of a couple of seconds, as mentioned in the examples above. The book multiplies the examples.

I like the thesis that our trained consciousness can sometimes come up with a snap judgment that is on target but that we can't necessarily explain verbally right away. That seems to allow me to work on "forming" my intuition about important things without discarding reason, just understanding it differently.

Perhaps it's analogous to the Catholic Christian concept of "forming one's conscience". The Catholic Catechism says:

A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. If he were deliberately to act against it, he would condemn himself. Yet it can happen that moral conscience remains in ignorance and makes erroneous judgments about acts to be performed or already committed.

This ignorance can often be imputed to personal responsibility. This is the case when a man "takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin." In such cases, the person is culpable for the evil he commits.

Ignorance of Christ and his Gospel, bad example given by others, enslavement to one's passions, assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy of conscience, rejection of the Church's authority and her teaching, lack of conversion and of charity: these can be at the source of errors of judgment in moral conduct.

If - on the contrary - the ignorance is invincible, or the moral subject is not responsible for his erroneous judgment, the evil committed by the person cannot be imputed to him. It remains no less an evil, a privation, a disorder. One must therefore work to correct the errors of moral conscience.

This seems to me to be roughly analogous to the process of forming right thinking about whatever area of life you are called to be well-grounded in. Almost all the saints and Catholic general wisdom says that moral formation isn't just intellectual knowledge but has to be carried through all the little moments of daily life. When the crunch comes and you go into "default mode" you will have good ways of operating built into your very muscle memory and bottom-line mental processes. But if this process hasn't taken place, or if it's been overly distorted by emotion or appetites, it won't be as reliable as it would have been otherwise.

Let Me Hear Your Voice

Let Me Hear Your Voice -- a thoroughly interesting account of "A Family's Triumph over Autism".

This book had a 70's feeling to me and reminded me of some of the early unschooling books like Better Than School and And the Children Played. Not that it had an unschooly feeling at all, but because it was passionately and articulately written and very personal. It also reminded me a bit of Cushla and her Books, and Karen. These are all stories of strong, creative, dedicated parents who are willing to go to great but humane lengths to help their children become what they are capable of being.

Writing in the early 90's, when autism was still largely a mystery and often treated with psychoanalysis, or thought of as a mental illness precipitated by poor mothering, the book recounts the family's successful experience with Ivan Lovaas's Applied Behavorial Analysis . It also recounts negatively the family's experience with Holding Therapy 's philosophy (though she did use some of the actual practice of "holding" and found them beneficial in combination with the behaviorial approach).

The author, a devout Catholic with a PhD, who had chosen to stay at home to be a fulltime mother of her three small children, started with reservations about the behavorial approach because it seemed mechanistic and harsh. Unlike some of the ABA proponents, she refused to use any negative aversives such as slaps and electrical shocks. In spite of her initial concerns, she found that the method brought results, helping her child to come out of her interior world and engage with her family and environment.

Her daughter's therapy involved two hours a day of behaviorial work with a therapist, one hour a day of "holding" with mother, and 3 hours a week with a speech and language therapist as well as countless hours of research and consultation with other parents and various doctors. By school age she was able to be mainstreamed into a normal school environment. I haven't gotten yet to the part where her younger son is diagnosed with autism. ... that is in part II of the book.

I particularly am finding the book interesting because I think that the Early Intervention center Aidan went to used some behavioral techniques. However, it was thoroughly inadequate for him. For one thing, he isn't autistic though he shares some behavorial traits and I often read books about autism for insights on how to approach his development. For another thing, it was for 1 hour once a week which is apparently not nearly enough time. And thirdly, since I was not on the same page as they were, and they did not really explain the approach or seem to thoroughly understand it themselves, it was sterile because I did not partake of their goals or methods and so it didn't carry over at all. So the therapy actually did him harm.

I have deep philosophical concerns about strict or mechanical behaviorism but from what I read in the book this form seems a bit more like what I'd call "deep intervention". The therapists and parents work full time to keep the child engaged and interacting. This reminded me just a bit of Charlotte Mason's emphasis on "habits" as "laying down the rails" and also stopping bad habits just as seriously as you would treat a physical disorder like measles. This is basically the approach the book's author took -- she saw autism as a disease, a progressive one that was taking her child away from her, so everything she did was trying to bring her child back from the grip of the disease.

I don't know enough about autism or about ABA to know whether it is the best way or not, but I certainly am finding the book gripping to read from the perspective of a homeschooling mother and the mother of a special needs child. Aidan flourishes so well without behavoristic training that I don't think I'd want to take that approach. However, I do see better after reading this why the therapists at his EI were doing what they did and I also see how some very targeted training can be helpful in generalizing a real and personally integrated style of behavior -- something that Charlotte Mason seeems to refer to often (as well as Montessori) and which I previously had trouble making sense of.

Montessori Manual: Avoiding Near Occasions

I wrote last time about the way Dorothy Canfield Fisher, in her book The Montessori Manual for Parents and Teachers, thinks parents can inadvertently train their children to disobey. One of the primary ways is to give them a command that they are incapable of carrying out, and that was the focus of the last post. Now for the alternative methods for encouraging obedience -- there are four that she mentioned, so I'm going to post them separately because otherwise the post would be immensely long:

First. -- To so arrange his life that there shall be few needs to issue commands.

A child's natural desire is to behave well; when he does not, there is usually some reason for the misbehavior. He is over-stressed, or there is something in his environment that is desirable but not allowed for him. He is inexperienced, and does not understand that what he wants to do hurts himself or others around him. Just telling a small child that something is not allowed is not usually enough for him to really "know" the truth, because small children are concrete and usually need repetition to understand how things work. It takes several years before they can actually pause before they act and think about what it might mean to themselves or to others.

Sure, children have fallen human natures like everyone else but young children, before school age, are not at the age of reason, which is a prerequisite for true sin. Their "naughtiness" may be a symptom of imperfection but it is not culpable in the way similar behavior would be for a given adult (and don't most adults have their moments of acting just like little kids? I know I do).

So one way to minimize naughtiness is by arranging the child's life to keep "near occasions" to a minimum. This is a reward in itself and also leads to better things. For example, a child who is playing well is furthering his own development, while a child locked in a power struggle is exhausting himself and the people around him. Aquinas says that emotion affects learning. Positive emotion enhances it, while strong negative emotion leaches it away. There are storms in a child's life that no one could possibly predict or forestall, unless the parents were superhuman. It's not our task to take these all away. But certainly parents can work towards avoiding the unnecessary, unavoidable ones that cause bad behavior.

For instance, Mrs Fisher says, it is possible to avoid a lot of "naughtiness" simple by avoiding occasions where the child is forced outside himself, outside his normal comfort zone. For example, some of the things that make it difficult for a child to behave well are: being shown off to other adults (forced to entertain at a party, for example), being dragged to activities which don't have much in them suitable to the child's nature.... that are oriented towards older children or adults, or too chaotic to handle. In other words, it's best to make sure as far as possible that the child's small strength of will isn't tested. Hunger and tiredness are two other things I can think of that make it hard for a child to behave well. And I have noticed particularly with my extroverted child that he really needs intervals of stable, reassuring "mom time" between periods of play with siblings or friends. Quiet time talking or playing little games or reading a book together restore his will and emotional equilibrium. If I don't come in and out of his daily life a bit, his behavior tends to disintegrate.

When there is no choice but to make difficulties for a child (say, if he is in church and simply needs to be reasonably quiet) then she recommends realizing the difficulty he is in and treating the problem simply and calmly. Enforce obedience, yes, but strive to avoid the emotional overtones (this is VERY difficult for me because I get humiliated by disruptions in public places). I think there is no worse way to aggravate a small child who instinctively KNOWS he is being asked for a lot, to be treated like he is a disappointment or a "bad child" just for acting within his nature.

Plus, as Charlotte Mason says, small children have a very active sense of sin. Some children put up barriers when they know their behavior is not pleasant in the eyes of their loved ones. They seem indifferent, but I don't think they generally are. So helping them be pleasant is a worthwhile occupation. Children who have "difficult" personalities often get less positive feedback from those they love. This can become a factor in discouragement and resentment which makes the child less likely to try in future. To me this seems like a reason to quickly isolate unpleasantness. ... to deal with the behavior quickly and decisively and in whatever style comes naturally to the parent, but to keep it as concrete and geared to the immediate occasion as possible. A bit of sympathy along with the firmness can be helpful. After all, being good in times of trial is a heroic achievement and even if the young child doesn't quite succeed, any effort is a positive sign.

Strategy

• avoid when possible occasions where the child is stretched beyond endurance. This will differ somewhat from child to child, so studying your child is important, but generally hunger, tiredness, over-stimulation, boredom, or lots of temptations in the environment (say a place where normal child activity can't be allowed) are triggers for misbehavior.

Possible Application:

• Look for a "problem spot" in your child's life.... some area where he has a pattern of misbehaving. Then try to figure out how to proactively avoid the problem (this is mostly talking about children below the age of reason, as you've noticed).

A Personal Example:

In my 6 year old's life, one trouble spot is that he gets wrapped up in playing and then doesn't notice his hunger signals until he is VERY hungry. Then he either lashes out at his playmate, or runs to me and imperatively, sometimes in tears, demands food right NOW. This recurrent habit could possibly be minimized if I paid attention to the time and had his snack ready to eat already, or if I set the kitchen up so he could fix a snack for himself and then reminded him at the proper time. So I'll give that a try and see if it helps.

A Note:

Remember that there are some things that are just going to be tough no matter what. For example, I used to have to take all three of my small children -- ages 4, 2, and 1 -- grocery shopping. It's unlikely that this will become an altogether pleasant, serene experience for most people no matter what. Dorothy Canfield Fisher would say that this is just the sort of situation to try to avoid if possible.

If you can't avoid it, you can generate strategies to make it a bit easier depending on what the "triggers" are. I used to shop with a friend who didn't have children. She didn't mind helping me out in dealing with restlessness, cravings and that sort of thing. Other strategies were: keeping it short, keeping snacks in my purse for the baby and toddler, getting my older child involved in the shopping procedure, and making distinctions between "normal" child rowdiness vs real problem behavior that involved defiance.

The task with these activities is to
(1) review principles of good behavior ahead of time
(2) recognize that this is very hard for the children
(3) make it as easy as possible for them to be obedient
(4) try to stay engaged and positive
(5) and try to get over it as fast as possible, if it was bad... spend some time reconnecting later (kids are good at doing this themselves, but some moms have a hard time forgiving and letting go -- I am a melancholic myself so I have to consciously remind myself to move on.)

Reading -- carrying on the conversation

We saw Liam off today at Amtrak. By now he is back at college. As soon as we got back into the van, Aidan said, "SO -- we'll pick Liam up in two days, right?" He has learned to channel his feelings towards the positive as quickly as possible. He does it with his regular post-transplant blood draws, too -- "So, after labs I get a 7-Up, right?" I don't manage to do this as quickly as he does.

You know, I was thinking about the 52-Book Challenge, and I realize I don't really need to challenge myself to read a book a week. That would be somewhat like challenging myself to eat 2 desserts per day, or sleep 9 hours a day. It is my default. My challenge with books is to read them slowly enough to have them actually do some good.

So I think a better challenge for me would be to read slowly ... and actually remember what I read. Maybe even narrate?

...slowing down can produce a deeply profound quiet that can overwhelm your soul, and in that quiet you can lose yourself in thought for an immeasurable moment of time. Lindsay Waters, Time for Reading.

I do see value in quick reading, especially for the first time through a new book. Like many visual/spatial learners, I do much better getting a sense of the whole forest before focusing on individual trees. And with some books, once is enough; you don't have to revisit that copse tree by tree, at least not right away. I quoted once before in Lectio: Extensive and Intensive, Cursiva and Stataria: (from a book called Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic)

"Accommodate the intensity of the reading to the importance of the work. Some books therefore are only to be dipped into; others are to be run over rapidly; and others are to be studied long and sedulously." All books are not to be read with the same attention; and accordingly, an ancient distinction was taken of reading into lectio cursiva and lectio stataria. The former of these we have adopted into English, cursory reading being a familiar and correct translation of lectio cursiva. But lectio stataria cannot be so well rendered by the expression of stationary reading. "Read not," says Bacon in his Fiftieth Essay, "to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. "

(The whole quote from Bacon is here) ...

In other words, some books you have to read through in order to see if they're worth becoming part of your interior bookshelf. You can't always tell just by the fact that it's on a Great Books list or alternately, not on one. I can't find the quote right now, but CS Lewis talks about how a real course of reading has to be more personal than a simple 5-foot shelf of Great Books of the Western World, convenient and praiseworthy as such collections are as a starting place or summary.

So that's one of the values of a quick reading, lectio cursiva, to me -- once a book is read, I have a sort of mental schema of that book, similar to the general idea I have of the European map or the layout of a city I've visited only briefly. I can visit it again some other time, or cross-reference it with other reading, or have enough familiarity with it at least to distinguish between the literary equivalent of the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building.

But that's not enough for a real intimacy with a book. ... and that is where slow reading, lectio stataria, comes in. I don't have to develop that kind of relationship with every book I read, but there are some that I end up conversing with throughout major points of my life.

And of course, since most of the deeper books, whether Great Books precisely or not, deal with big ideas, there are overlaps between them, so the books end up dialoguing with each other inside my head. Scary thought! Yes, my interior bookshelf is no static piece of furniture, I'm afraid. When I remember that books are essentially forms of Logos, words, a form of speech, I guess I can get more comfortable with the thought of an internal literary Smeagol-Gollum conversation. Perhaps it's a bit more like sitting at a dinner table or at a fireside listening to greater people than I am talking about things that really matter.

Incipit vita nova

Acedia and Me is the title of the Kathleen Norris book I have out of the library right now, a book you said I would probably like, Lissla, and of course you are right, though I am only on the first pages. The book starts with the story of the monk who, according to St John Cassian:

wove baskets as he prayed, and subsisted on food from his garden and a few date palms. Unlike monks who lived closer to cities and could sell their baskets there, Paul

"could not do any other work to support himself because his dwelling was separated from towns and from habitable land by a seven days' journey through the desert . . . and transportation cost more than he could get for the work that he did. He used to collect palm fronds and always exact a day's labor from himself just as if this were his means of support. And when his cave was filled with a whole year's work, he would burn up what he had so carefully toiled over each year."

By coincidence, Wall-E arrived from Netflix yesterday, so we all sat down and watched it together (and you probably shouldn't keep reading this if you haven't seen the movie -- I tried to avoid real spoilers but still....) . The charming robot protaganist with his simple (seemingly futile) diligence -- endlessly compacting and stacking seemingly infinite heaps of trash left by the people who had abandoned Earth after ruining it --reminded me of the remedy for acedia of St Anthony of the Desert:

When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert he was beset by accidie, and attacked by many sinful thoughts. He said to God, 'Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts do not leave me alone; what shall I do in my affliction? How can I be saved?' A short while afterwards, when he got up to go out, Anthony saw a man like himself sitting at his work, getting up from his work to pray, then sitting down and plaiting a rope, then getting up again to pray. It was an angel of the Lord sent to correct and reassure him. He heard the angel saying to him, 'Do this and you will be saved.' At these words, Anthony was filled with joy and courage. He did this, and he was saved.

The little robot Wall-E does not pray, precisely, but his cheerful orderly work of containing and arranging garbage that somebody else had made centuries before, his careful respect for life even in its humblest forms, his admiration for human ingenuity and liveliness (he endlessly watches Michael Crawford's Put on Your Sunday Best on DVD and carefully sorts and arranges artifacts of civilization such as spoons and hinged boxes), his reverence for the beauty of the robot Eve, and even the several-times-repeated motif of clasped robotic hands evokes Love, an abiding thing that goes beyond the limitations of engineering and becomes something close to embodied prayer. And in the end comes a kind of new life that one could never have imagined, not just for himself, but for the Earth itself and its children.

In the review of Wall-E linked to above, Stephen Greydanus writes of the change that comes to Wall-E's life:

The words of Dante catching his first glimpse of Beatrice apply: Incipit vita nova, “Here begins the new life.”The new life is irrevocable; to go back to being no more than a salvager of curiosities and compactor of trash would be unthinkable. When, to his alarm, WALL‑E realizes it could come to that, he unhesitatingly turns his back on his whole world, risking everything for what he has found. Love has opened the universe to him, in all its splendor, terror and ugliness.

Advent is always a hard time of year for me. It would seem accidic for me, somehow, to try to solve the mystery of why that is by delving too much into my own inner self. After all, if any season is the time to "lift my eyes to the hills" rather than turn them inward to my own psyche, then this is it. Nevertheless, I find myself struggling every year, feeling like one of the descendants of Earth in the movie -- swollen and helpless and weak and on a track I can't quite control. So Wall-E and Kathleen Norris's Abbot Paul helped confirm to me that at least for now, the pain of tedium ought to be bypassed by prayer and hopeful attention to the minutiae of work, without worrying about the outcome of it.

After all, Advent celebrates the beginning of a new life for a people in darkness. Incipit vita nova. It isn't unreasonable that I should feel a bit of the pain of that darkness every season, in my own soul especially, while I am waiting. Again, I feel that Wall-E is a good role model, patiently repairing his incidental hurts without complaining, gazing on a dangerous beauty with love, and finding love which in the end repairs him.

Reading Reconstruction for August

Yesterday, we drove my oldest back to college with all his gear for his senior year. On the drive, I finally got a chance to finish Brideshead Revisited.

"...he had, too, the exhausted but resentful air of one who fears he has failed to do himself full justice on the subject of Pindar's Orphism."

Just had to write that one out. ... a description of a classmate in the book... so I can say it to myself every now and then. Anything I say about his style would be heavy-handed, so I will just keep quiet. He is one of those writers like Wodehouse, Belloc and someone else I can't think of right now, who made me feel extremely American, very much like a new California winery. Here is an article about Evelyn Waugh.

I also got a good start on Becoming Attached, which turns out to be (in the first half at least) a sort of history of the theory of attachment, starting back with classic psychoanalysis and Freud's theories, and going up from there to show how difficult it was for early theorists to convince their peers that maternal deprivation did affect little children deeply and often permanently. It is an extremely interesting book to read.

Another book I just read was Do Hard Things -- I had been reading about it in various places, and when I found my library had it, I couldn't resist requesting it. My daughter read it too, and I agree with her take on it.

There was one more thing.... that's right! I finished the Spiritual Exercises. This probably doesn't count as a book reading, precisely, but if it did count as a book, it would be two books, since I also read Fr Hardon's Retreat with the Lord alongside.

I am still reading Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things by Madeleine van Hecke. I thought this would be like Sway, but it's more like a self-help book. Basically, the message is that understanding one's own blind spots and other peoples' should induce humility and understanding towards other people that do and think things that seem almost incredible to oneself.

One book I have requested, but which hasn't arrived yet, is Time and the Art of Living. I requested it because of Laura, who in turn got it from Susan. This raises the question of journalling -- every August I go through this questioning process, wondering WHY I think I want to maintain (however irregularly) four separate blogs. But I do think it's about journaling, and it is interesting to me that while I was pondering this, I came across Laura and Susan's posts, and also the final advice of Father Hardon in Retreat with the Lord:

Writing one's thoughts in a journal is highly recommended.

Still pondering though whether this means blogging, or whether there is really any purpose in having four separate blogs. Susan writes:

Over the years, I've often thought that I should keep separate journals for separate topics. That I should keep my spiritual ponderings and prayers separate from the journals of daily life. I've actually attempted to do that on occasion, but it never works. And as I read through this journal last night, I'm so glad it didn't. My journals reflects the reality my spiritual and daily life, the fact that they are interwoven and can't be separated into neat categories. They shouldn't be separated because it's all sacred.

I agree, and I feel the drain sometimes of setting up artificial categories between things that are basically integrated. And yet.... I have distinct purposes for each of my blogs, even if there is lots of overlap, even if I sometimes can't completely define each of the separate purposes; and I am afraid of muddling myself, I suppose.

One more half-thought. Susan quotes Robert Grudin, the author of Time and the Art of Living:

In writing your journal give primary attention to detail; for it is detail which organizes and preserves experience for your future self or some other reader. General statements like "We had a wonderful time" or "It was a dismal morning" make a mockery of the whole procedure, for they evaluate experience without recreating it. I kept long jurnals from ages ten to twenty-two, chronicling events and describing emotional states, but again and again missing they physical immediacy of experience, the tiny hooks by which experience could have been caught and held. I failed to record how we looked, what we saw, the minor eccentricities of circumstance which gave special character to a day. I ignored these elements not only through lack of training but through misplaced priorities. I mistakenly assumed that one could discuss the heart of things without discussing the surface of things.

I am wondering if this speaks to how difficult it usually is to make myself write out book responses, even though I'd really like to? I think what I most REALLY want to remember after I've read a given book is the meaning and context it had for me. But this is often difficult to organize or describe in a coherent way.

I think I write to try and GET to the particulars and their significance. The particulars themselves are endless, it's their selection that reveals the undertow. I suspect that that's why my writing is so often lacking in immediacy; because I am so often trying to struggle up to the surface and recognize what is meaningful, in order to record it.

Flannery O'Connor says something very much the same as Grudin, though about fiction rather than journalling -- that fiction writing is the art of the particular... .the universal has to be embedded or incarnated. Liam and I often discuss this, but I don't have time right now to find her exact words... off for Aidan's GI clinic and blood draws. This is a tangled mess to leave, but at least I wrote out that August reading list, and I guess the tangle reflects some of the tangle I'm trying to sort out under the surface right now ;-).

Rewards as Short-Circuits

" I have a little boy, younger than you, who knows six Psalms by heart: and when you ask him which he would rather have, a gingerbread-nut to eat, or a verse of a Psalm to learn he says: 'Oh! The verse of a Psalm! Angels sing Psalms,' says he: 'I wish to be a little angel here below;' he then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety." Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre.

I haven't read Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards, though I've heard lots about it for years -- there is an extensive book response by Marie here, and a post about a DC cash incentive in relation to Punished by Rewards, at a new blog I found courtesy of Faith.

Marie writes:

Even in the short term, numerous studies show that children and college students tend to be less interested in meeting a new learning challenge when there is a reward attached, and more interested in activities which attract them simply by the nature of the thing. He demonstrates that rewarding people for “doing good” is psychologically identical to punishing people for “doing bad” (which moderns are more likely to reject as benighted); that rewards insert alienation and resentment in the relationship between the giver and receiver of the reward; that rewards ignore the needs of the human heart (or the reasons why behavior is being exhibited that others deem in need of modification); and that rewards discourage risk-taking and creative growth.

I just read an interesting parallel to this in a book called Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior . My husband requested the book from the library, and I accidentally read it before he even got to see it had arrived, being irresistibly pulled by the attraction of a new book and also behaving irrationally due to my middle-aged memory -- I thought I had requested the book, because it looked familiar and I KNEW I remembered hearing about it somewhere. It turned out I had heard about it from my husband. Anyway.... the book is a fast, breezy, interesting read, sort of like a book-length glossy-mag feature article, packed with studies and stories illustrating the ways in which people react unexpectedly due to hidden psychological factors.

In one of the chapters, called Compensation and Cocaine, the authors tell the story of an alternative school founded in 1972. It sounds like the one I went to in middle school. ... few rules, a focus on alternative methods of learning. Anyway, the school was thriving; the teachers were poorly paid, but very creative and dedicated. The school decided to take part in a pilot program to increase attendance -- which was good by general standards, but could be improved. To encourage increased attendance, the teachers who had a better than 80 % attendance rate in their classes would get a 12% increase in salary.

The results were surprising -- while the attendance rate got no better, the average GPA in the classes fell dramatically -- from 2.78 to 2.18. Without meaning to, these teachers had undergone a shift in their goals, methods and attitude because of the incentive program, even though they were idealistic types who had not sought for the cash incentive for themselves.

There are other, similar examples in the chapter. Apparently, according to the book, there are separate sections of the brain devoted to separate types of activity. When we are engaged in altruistic activity, one part of the brain lights up; but when we are engaged in reward-getting behavior -- like gambling, or doing something in return for pay -- there is another part of the brain that overrides the altruistic part. So in a study done in Switzerland, when people were asked to host a toxic waste facility near their town, 50% agreed; but when they were offered a cash bonus in an attempt to raise the number of willing people, the percentage actually fell by half to 25%. Similarly, in a study where people took the GMAT test for a cash bonus per correct answer, their average scores were actually quite a bit lower than the control group who just took the test for the purposes of the study.

This is interesting to me -- Charlotte Mason says that rewards should not be overused, though she does not condemn them wholesale. I wrote once that I thought rewards sometimes had some significance as tokens, at least. The book Sway says:

"Now, the problem isn't with rewards per se. It's only when you dangle the possibility of a reward ahead of time -- creating a quid pro quo situation -- that these destructive effects arise. An extensive review and analysis of motivation studies found that the prospect of a reward excites the pleasure center even more than the attainment of the reward itself. Taking a kid to Disneyland because she won the science fair is one thing, but telling her ahead of time, "If you enter the fair and win it, I'll take you to Disneyland" is another. It's that anticipation factor that drives the addictive behavior and suppresses the altruism center."

a far-off gleam or echo in the real world.

A few movies I've seen recently:

Galaxy Quest
Enchanted
Artificial Intelligence

These movies were all similar in that they explored the nature of reality as it blends with what is imaginative or "not-real". They were all in some way about Love, though only one was really about romantic love -- the others were about relationship and the importance of that in a life worth living.

Other than those similarities, the three movies were just about as different as you can get.

I don't watch very many movies, so I thought I would memorialize these ones.

I have been reading several books by Daniel Siegel recently -- I requested a whole batch of them from the library and they have been trickling in slowly, which suits me since they are by no means quick skims:

The Mindful Brain
Parenting from the Inside Out

and most recently,

The Developing Mind

These books are not easy going. Probably Parenting from the Inside Out is the most accessible of the three, but I think The Developing Mind was the one I'd be most likely to buy for my home bookshelves. I think his theory of mind and attachment is quite fascinating. This book also included some more scholarly information on the "right brain/left brain" ideas that have been popularized in learning styles books.

I am going to type out a passage to show you what I mean by "not easy going" -- I started to type out a more extreme example, but chose this one instead because it's actually related to the subject of this blog post (whatever that is -- I'm trying to figure out a title):

The narrative process in this way attempts to make sense of the world and of one's own mind and its various states. In some individuals, however, one sees narratives that reflect upon a particular self-state without creating a more global coherence of the mind as a whole. The narrative process is thus a fundamental building block of an integrative mode, but insufficient by itself to create coherence across self-states through time.

Got that? And yet it's not jargon -- it's not word-ese without substance. He is making a fascinating point about the importance of Story in comprehending and composing an understanding of relationship across time and space. In other words, something to do with what those three movies, listed above, are trying to deal with as well.

It is enough to make one wish Latin was still the language of scholarly discourse, because I think that if one were writing a treatise in medieval Latin, it would be a lot easier to get this kind of thought out on paper without barbarisms like "self-state" and phrase-clumps like "global coherence". From the very little I know about German, from taking a German for Reading Knowledge undergraduate level class, I imagine that this kind of thought process would come across better in that language.

I am thinking of blogging this book chapter by chapter, because it really was interesting, and I would probably remember more of it if I made the attempt to paraphrase into ordinary English.

(Note: While I was searching online I found this Madeleine L'Engle book: The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth. My library won't let me request it for some reason, but it looks interesting. If any of you have read it I'd love to know what you thought)

The Right Questions

From Robert Hutchins, The Ways (and Whys) of Reading:

"Deluged as we are with a welter of printed words, we tend to devaluate all writing, to look at every book on the shelf as the counterpart of every other, and to weigh volumes instead of words."

and a bit on the questions to ask of a reading:

"The art of reading a book or piece of writing consists in asking the right questions in the right order. They are as follows:

1. What is this piece of writing about? What is its leading theme or main point? What is it trying to say?
2. How does it say what it is trying to say? How does the writer get his central point across? How does he tell his story or argue for his conlcusion to produce the effect in us that he is aiming at?
3. Is it true -- factually or poetically -- in whole or part? HAs he won our assent or sympathy? And if not, what reasons do we have for disagreeing with or rejecting his view of things?
4. What of it? What meaning does it have for us in the shape of opinions or attitudes that we are led to form for ourselves as the result of reading this piece?

Now, I typed these out because I thought they were good questions. These are the sort of questions that a serious reader goes into a work trying to find answers to. It is helpful for me to keep them in mind as I prepare for teaching my 5th 12 year old next year.

HOWEVER -- and I am not sure how to say this, so it will be interesting to see how it turns out on the screen ;-) -- judging purely by myself, since I don't have access to anyone else's head -- they are not the kind of questions that you fire at the author. You don't go into the book demanding answers; rather, you put yourself into a receptive though not credulous mode; you listen and attend. Hutchins talks about the respect owed to an author, elsewhere. Nor are they the sort of questions you scribble answers to, quickly and simply, on a worksheet. If you do it that way, if you are like me, you will get the feeling of bored horror I get when I look at many literature study guides. Or worse, you may think you understand the book, but that would be like giving a personality questionnaire to a visitor to your house and imagining that now you know everything about him.

They are good questions to keep in mind, but they are not as good to bring to the forefront, like a scripted dialogue rather than a real conversation.

Talking to myself here, and there's a bigger application than just literary analysis. I have been thinking recently about how much "philosophy begins in wonder" as Socrates said. My daughter commented recently how much she dislikes having answers given to her before she has formulated the questions (just to make the context clear, we were talking about Plato's Republic which we are reading together, and how Socrates often seems to raise issues that he doesn't really settle). David Hicks said that much the same thing is the problem with modern teaching methods, often... the answers are given before the questions are asked -- a multitude of answers. I feel like last homeschool year, though it went pretty well in many respects, was a little bit too much about giving the answers before the questions were really thought through. Anyway, I thought I would write that out to remind myself!

Notes on "Three Instruments of Education"

I'm still progressing through the Charlotte Mason's Philosophy of Education and am on the chapter on Three Instruments of Education.

These three instruments are described thus:

Seeing that we are limited by the respect due to the personality of children we can allow ourselves but three educational instruments––the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit and the presentation of living ideas. ...

I should mention that I am having trouble figuring out the best way to approach these book discussions so I think I will first write notes and then later talk about whatever I please as a spin-off from that : ), in a different post.

First, about the "atmosphere of environment" --

When we say that education is an atmosphere we do not mean that a child should be isolated in what may be called a 'child environment' specially adapted and prepared, but that we should take into account the educational value of his natural home atmosphere both as regards persons and things and should let him live freely among his proper conditions. It stultifies a child to bring down his world to the 'child's' level.

So she is saying that an "atmosphere" shouldn't be contrived, or it will be stifling and opposed to freedom -- another one of the improper "influences" she mentioned in the last chapter.

Here are some of the examples she gives:

The cult of aestheticism in Germany -- remember that she wrote this in the early part of the 20th century, after World War I, and a lot of the book indirectly seems to deal with the problems she saw in German and English education that led to a poor showing in that war. I do not know much about early Germany except what everyone knows -- that the eugenics and aesthetic ideal combined into a kind of toxic stew that influenced the Weimar Republic and set the conditions for Hitler's exploits.

By the way, I found this book The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890-1930. Gee, this is interesting and sounds rather familiar, doesn't it?

From the 1890s to the 1930s, a growing number of Germans began to scrutinize and discipline their bodies in a utopian search for perfect health and beauty. Some became vegetarians, nudists, or bodybuilders, while others turned to alternative medicine or eugenics......

Hau argues that the obsession with personal health and fitness was often rooted in anxieties over professional and economic success, as well as fears that modern industrialized civilization was causing Germany and its people to degenerate.

OK, back to Charlotte Mason now. That was context and fits into some of the reading I've been doing recently about eugenics and Darwinism -- science of relations! : ).

She also mentions HG Wells' "inconclusive" educational treatise (actually, apparently a sort of novel called Joan and Peter, here in full on Google Reader). Part of the book contains a description of all the aesthetic grace and beauty surrounding Peter from infancy. She goes on to say:

It is an accurate picture of the preparation for 'high-souled' little persons all over the world. Parents make tremendous sacrifices to that goddess who presides over Education. We hear of a pair investing more than their capital in a statue to adorn the staircase in order that 'Tommy' should make his soul by the contemplation of beauty. This sort of thing has been going on since the 'eighties at any rate and, as usual, Germany erected a high altar for the cult which she passed on to the rest of us. Perhaps it is safe to say that the Young Intelligenzia of Europe have been reared after this manner. And is the result that Neo-Georgian youth Punch presents to us with his air of weariness, condescension and self-complacency?

She goes on to quote an Indian scientist (you can find the actual quote in The Life and Work of Sir Jagadis Bose online) to the effect that hothouse plants grow up feeble and lax. Electrical stimulation can actually benefit them and increase their vigor.

(It would not be good to press the plant analogy too far, because in other places, Charlotte Mason has said that a lot of educational follies (like the "Kindergarten" or "child garden") come from carrying out the plant/child comparison past its point of usefulness. Here she seems to be using it just to show the living creature's need for a bit of adversity in order to develop to full strength).

So here is the substance of what she is saying-- that an "environment" shouldn't be like a cloak or padding, beautiful or not, around the child, but more like a bracing air that you breathe. The etymology of the word "atmosphere" is as follows:

1638, from Mod.L. atmosphaera (1638), from Gk. atmos "vapor" + spharia "sphere." First used in Eng. in connection with the Moon, which, as it turns out, doesn't have one. Figurative sense of "surrounding influence, mental or moral environment" is 1797.

Atmos, you see, means vapor. And again and again, she uses metaphors of "air" and "wind" to point out the differences she sees between a child-environment and an atmosphere friendly to nurturance of a child. At home:

It is not an environment that these want, a set of artificial relations carefully constructed, but an atmosphere which nobody has been at pains to constitute. It is there, about the child, his natural element, precisely as the atmosphere of the earth is about us. It is thrown off, as it were, from persons and things, stirred by events, sweetened by love, ventilated, kept in motion, by the regulated action of common sense.

...no compounded 'environment' could make up for this fresh air, this wholesome wind blowing now from one point, now from another.

At school:

The bracing atmosphere of truth and sincerity should be perceived in every School; and here again the common pursuit of knowledge by teacher and class comes to our aid and creates a current of fresh air perceptible even to the chance visitor, who sees the glow of intellectual life and moral health on the faces of teachers and children alike.

When the atmosphere is too vigorous, ie when there is too much emphasis on achievement and moral strenuousness:

When this is the case there is too much oxygen in the air; they are breathing a too stimulating atmosphere, and the nervous strain to which they are subjected must needs be followed by reaction.

Here she sums up the difference.

There are two courses open to us in this matter. One, to create by all manner of modified conditions a hot-house atmosphere, fragrant but emasculating, in which children grow apace but are feeble and dependent; the other to leave them open to all the "airts that blow," but with care lest they be unduly battered; lest, for example, a miasma come their way in the shape of a vicious companion.

("of all the airts the wind doth blow" comes from a Robert Burns poem called Jean)

And here are some practical suggestions, based on common sense, as you can see -- the normal circumstances and protections of life:

We all know the natural conditions under which a child should live; how he shares household ways with his mother, romps with his father, is teased by his brothers and petted by his sisters; is taught by his tumbles; learns self-denial by the baby's needs, the delightfulness of furniture by playing at battle and siege with sofa and table; learns veneration for the old by the visits of his great-grandmother; how to live with his equals by the chums he gathers round him; learns intimacy with animals from his dog and cat; delight in the fields where the buttercups grow and greater delight in the blackberry hedges. And, what tempered 'fusion of classes' is so effective as a child's intimacy with his betters, and also with cook and housemaid, blacksmith and joiner, with everybody who comes in his way? Children have a genius for this sort of general intimacy, a valuable part of their education; care and guidance are needed, of course, lest admiring friends should make fools of them...

But due relations must be maintained; the parents are in authority, the children in obedience; and again, the strong may not lay their burdens on the weak.

There is nothing really distinctive in this picture -- it is the sort of life children have in ordinary circumstances. It's interesting to me to see how her main concern seems to be that children should not be over-shielded or cossetted. Probably the Victorian age was one of the first times when a society COULD or had the inclination to control a child's environment. She was pointing out that just because we CAN, doesn't mean that we SHOULD.

John Senior seems to warn about something of the same thing when he talks about raising "Catholic panty-waists" -- that term has stuck in my mind for years, though I haven't picked up his book recently. His point is that over-protection from the natural challenges of life (specifically talking about a wide, eclectic reading of the Good Books, here) leads to an enfeebled mind and character.

Pope Benedict said a similar thing (HT Leonie)

Even suffering is part of the truth of our life. Thus, trying to shield the youngest from every difficulty and experience of suffering, we risk creating, despite our good intentions, fragile persons of little generosity: The capacity to love, in fact, corresponds to the capacity to suffer, and to suffer together."

Some people think that homeschooling is a hot-house. So I just want to add here that I think it is almost the opposite. If you look at the natural challenges Charlotte Mason describes above, these are exactly the kind that a family has an abundance of. Sure, a home environment can become too soft, too controlled, but a major solution to that seems to be making sure that the children get to participate in the normal crosses and adversities of daily life -- the mom and dad bearing financial burdens or health issues, the baby needing to come first, the siblings clamoring for attention. Charlotte Mason doesn't think children should be "parentified" and made to bear adult-sized burdens, but she does think that dealing with these little problems at a safe and essentially stable level helps develop strength of character and mind.

(ETA: Love2LearnMom has another quote from Benedict on suffering here)

OK, you can see that I couldn't help spinning off into my own little thought processes. Sorry about that.

Getting back to the cult of personal health and beauty in Germany, doesn't it seem we are in a bit of the same boat nowadays? That is interesting. Health and beauty are GOODS, of course -- but an excessive preoccupation with the *personal* aspects of these things always seems to me to correlate with a fear of death, and becomes strangely entangled with a fascination for death. I am not sure how it works but you tend to see them together. That is WAY off the point but I do think Charlotte Mason's books can be better understood if you see what she was seeing around her -- the problematic aspects of the philosophies of her time.

Books about Better, Best, and Perfection

I just finished reading two more books: The Case Against Perfection and When Your Best isn't Good Enough.

I requested the first one from ILL, but when it came I couldn't remember why, at first. After a while I remembered that one of the commenters on barefoot meandering's video game blogpost had talked about the difference between accepting love and transforming love and had mentioned this book.

The two kinds of love turn out to be defined by someone called William May in The President's Council on Bioethics:

Parents find it difficult to maintain an equilibrium between the two sides of love. Accepting love, without transforming love, slides into indulgence and finally neglect. Transforming love, without accepting love, badgers and finally rejects. E.B. White captured nicely the difficulties of balancing the two contending passions as they pervade daily life:

"Every morning when I wake up, I am torn between the twin desires to reform the world and to enjoy the world and it makes it hard to plan the day."

It may not overreach to observe that modern science exhibits the two sides of love suggested here. On the one hand, science engages us in beholding; it lets us study and savor the world as it is. On the other hand, science and the technologies it generates engage us in moulding, in the project of transforming, amending, and perfecting the given world.

Coincidentally, this theme is present in the other book I read, which I picked fromthe Temporary Book Collection in our tiny local library. Dr Leman doesn't use the words, but he also discusses how parents can sometimes try so hard to improve their children that they implicitly seem to reject the child as he exists.

Now, back to science and the Case Against Perfection. Michael Sandel discusses the new possibilities for genetic enhancement that exist in our society now. He makes an analogy to the kind of low-tech enhancement that parents already practice. Expensive SAT prep classes, to the tune of thousands of dollars; preparation courses for 2 year olds, in order that they can compete for the "Baby Ivy" prep schools; help with homework and college apps. Where does it stop? He makes the excellent point that an increase in the possibilities brings with it an increase in responsibility, and guilt, and "ownership". When genetic enhancement of a child's height, or memory, or muscles, is a possibility, when does it start becoming an obligation, a duty? How much of the achievement can be considered the child's, when the parents are the ones designing the genetic possibilities?

He says you already see this a bit in Down Syndrome cases. Now that there is a possibility of genetic screening, there is also a possibility of termination of unwanted Down children. When there is that possibility, then the parents who choose not to test or terminate end up holding the bag -- it is almost "their fault" that they have a disabled child. (it's not in reality, of course, but I definitely have seen this reasoning in our society).

In a future where genetic tinkering is an option, will there be even more divisions between privileged and unprivileged, and will parental responsibility for bringing up "designer children" become all-encompassing? These are the questions the author asks, and they are not easy to answer. As he says, they are the kind of questions that "science" tends to avoid, because they seem to have "religious" implications, but in fact they can be addressed without specific religiosity.

I thought when I was reading the chapter on "low tech" enhancements like prep-testing for 2 year olds, that these things have a tendency to backfire. Children who have been extensively prepped for tests may not develop in other ways that are more important in the long term. The author does not mention this-- to make his argument against enhancements clearer, I think, he focuses only on the troubling aspects of genuine improvement. Only as an aside does he comment that improvements like eagle-eyes for golfers might have costs for the player's ability as well as benefits. But you do see that the success record for most "helicopter parents" and "hurried children" is mixed at the very least. This brings the problem back to the issue he mentioned -- that what humans seem to value in achievement is the natural gift plus what the person makes of it. We admire Achilles for his natural gifts, but are disappointed by his character flaws. We regret that Hector was defeated, yet in the long run admire him more for his defeat than we do Achilles for his victory.

Maxima Reverentia Debetur Pueris

Charlotte Mason quotes this Latin maxim in her chapter on The Sacredness of Personality in Philosophy of Education. It is a quote from Juvenal, and means something like "great reverence is owed to the children". John Locke quotes it in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (for clarity, I'll put quotes that AREN'T Charlotte Mason's in italics):

That he that will have his son have a respect for him and his orders, must himself have a great reverence for his son. Maxima debetur pueris reverentia. You must do nothing before him, which you would not have him imitate. If any thing escape you, which you would have pass for a fault in him, he will be sure to shelter himself under your example, and shelter himself so as that it will not be easy to come at him, to correct it in him the right way.

Charlotte Mason notes that the maxim ought to apply in a positive as well as a negative way:

We take it as meaning that we should not do or say anything unseemly before the young, but does it not also include a profound and reverent study of the properties and possibilities present in a child?

This chapter proceeds to explain both some of the ways that a child's personality can be encroached upon, and then some of the ways its possibilities and properties can be regarded rightly.

Our business is to find out how great a mystery a person is qua person. All action comes out of the ideas we hold and if we ponder duly upon personality we shall come to perceive that we cannot commit a greater offence than to maim or crush, or subvert any part of a person.

What are some ways that a child's personality can be maimed, crushed or subverted?

One is by the tyranny of fear. You see this, she says, in David Copperfield, with the home tyranny of Mr Murdstone and the school tyranny of Mr Creakle.

Then there are some more subtle but just as pervasive forms of tyranny:

• The tyranny of love.
• The tyranny of suggestion.
• The tyranny of influence.

These all seem to me to be summed up as what my Scottish mother would call "manipulation". She hated it. She hated to use it and she hated it used upon her. The examples Charlotte Mason uses to demonstrate these are mostly taken from school. For example,

Supineness before a single, steady, persistent influence is a different matter, and the schoolgirl who idolises her mistress, the boy who worships his master, is deprived of the chance of free and independent living. His personality fails to develop and he goes into the world as a parasitic plant, clinging ever to the support of some stronger character.

This is subtle, but the danger she warns against is the same with all inordinate influences -- a stunted, too easily-led child who does not grow up with an upright independence, but is weak and vacillating. Maybe we are talking here about what we now call "lacking boundaries"? We see parents who are not openly tyrannic but seem not to establish separate personality zones and this leads to "co-dependency". Perhaps this is the kind of thing she says is harmful to a child's developing self.

I wonder if Davey's mother, and little Dora in David Copperfield, could be some examples of this kind of personal influence? Though it is difficult to assign any evil intent to either of them, they do seem to impart a kind of yielding to his personality which leads him into mistakes.

Charlotte Mason does allow that the natural influence of what a person IS, is a healthy type of influence. The harm that can be done has more to do with a conscious bending of the child by means of personality. It does not have to do with the proper influences of love and integrity of example. In other places she has discussed the idea of teaching a child to do well "because it is right", and this seems to be part of the same theme.

No doubt such influence is inevitable; we must needs affect one another, not so much by what we do or say as by that which we are, and so far influence is natural and wholesome. We imbibe it from persons real and imaginary and we are kept strong and upright by currents and counter-currents of unstudied influence.

Examples of natural influence of character, to keep up with the David Copperfield theme, might be Clara Peggotty and Betsey Trotwood? They are good influences not because they suggest or wrap themselves around Davey but because of their sturdy actions and characters and most of all their steadfast love for him.

The idea of doing good because it is right and not because of influences brings me to the next part of the chapter. Here she lists some of the natural desires which have a healthy element, but which can be taken to an extreme particularly if exploited as a motive for learning. These are:

• The desire for approbation (wanting approval, praise from the schoolmaster -- can easily turn to desire for approval from the stableboy, etc)
• The desire for emulation, or excellence (grades, "first rank" in class, honors)
• The desire of avarice (material benefits such as scholarships from learning, prizes)
• The desire for power (the schoolchild who wants to dominate his peers)
• The desire for society (makes a child conformable at school, but also often weak and vain and idle)
  

She says these are "natural" desires but that they must not be allowed to become the horses that drive the pursuit of knowledge. They will all misdirect the true appetite for knowledge in various ways . It seems to me that there is a right object for these desires -- desire for power might be a form of responsibility and leadership, etc -- but that using them as secondary means distorts what they are truly about.

We have considered the several desires whose function is to stimulate the mind and save us from that vis inertiae which is our besetting danger. Each such desire has its place but the results are disastrous if any one should dominate. It so happens that the last desire we have to consider, the desire of knowledge, is commonly deprived of its proper function in our schools by the predominance of other springs of action, especially of emulation, the desire of place, and avarice, the desire of wealth, tangible profit. This divine curiosity is recognised in ordinary life chiefly as a desire to know trivial things. What did it cost? What did she say? Who was with him? Where are they going? How many postage stamps in line would go round the world? And curiosity is satisfied by incoherent, scrappy information which serves no purpose, assuredly not the purpose of knowledge whose function is to nourish the mind as food nourishes the body.

Vis inertia means "force of inactivity" and here it seems related to the defect of the virtue of "studiousness" -- that is, a kind of indifference. From this Catholic Education article on Temperance:

The defect of this virtue (studiousness) amounts to an indifference to truth, which, as was said earlier, is the fruit of an inordinate attachment to the pleasures of touch. The excess is the vice of curiosity, which is certainly an offspring of pride.

So this idleness and quest for trivial knowledge she describes above are perversions of the real, virtuous desire for knowledge.

Now, this brings her to the solution for the problem. We are too inclined, she says, to think of "knowledge" as a bitter pill to be sweetened with jam, rather than a delectable thing in its own right. This leads us to the temptation to manage and manipulate a child inappropriately.

Knowledge is to us as our mother's milk, we grow thereby and in the act of sucking are admirably content.

The work of education is greatly simplified when we realize that children, apparently all children, want to know all human knowledge; they have an appetite for what is put before them, and, knowing this, our teaching becomes buoyant with the courage of our convictions.

She says that many schools have had the experience of finding "gold" in the appetite for knowledge common to all people.

The finding of this power which is described as 'sensing a passage,' is as the striking of a vein of gold in that fabulously rich country, human nature. Our 'find' is that children have a natural aptitude for literary expression which they enjoy in hearing or reading and employ in telling or writing.

So she recommends many good books written in a literary manner, and reflected upon.

Most schools give from eleven in the lowest to eight hours in the highest Forms to 'English' that is, from twenty to sixteen consecutive readings a week might be afforded in a wide selection of books,––literature, history, economics, etc.,––books read with the concentrated attention which makes a single reading suffice. The act of narrating what has been read might well be useful to boys who should be prepared for public speaking. By a slight alteration of this kind, in procedure rather than in curriculum or timetable, it is probable that our schools would turn out many more well-read, well-informed men and convincing speakers than they do at present. Such a method, even if applied to 'English' only, would tend to correct any tendency in schools to become mere cramming places for examinations, would infect boys with a love of knowledge and should divert the natural desire for acquisition into a new channel, for few things are more delightful than the acquisition of knowledge.

To try to make an analogy, if there is a yearning for goodness in human nature which can only be satisfied with practice of virtue, there is similarly a yearning for knowledge which can only be satisfied with real knowledge, not the scrappy trivial or "deadwood" kind, but the great ideas and thoughts of the best writers and thinkers.

I am thinking along this path that the object of knowledge is Truth and if this is so, then the love for the Good is part of the same thing (see this Fairy-stories, the Good and the Beautiful):

At the deepest level the Good and the Beautiful are transcendental properties of Being, along the the True and the One. They are interchangeable and differ only in notion.

Of course, we can be misled and diverted by our fallen nature, as mentioned above. Which is probably another reason why Charlotte Mason tries in her child-educating philosophy to avoid some of the pitfalls that can mislead and divert the children and cause them to be motivated by desires which ought to be ordered rather than indulged. By removing hindrances and distractions to real learning, and by reverence for the childrens' unique personalities, she hopes to accomplish more than by trying to play upon childrens' immaturity to "make" them learn.

It seems to me to be worth considering. I can see that though we've had our challenges through the years with pursuit of knowledge and virtue, much of the good fruits that have come out of our family life and educational attempts have come from example, good habits formed, and a demonstration of the value of knowledge -- not "value" in trade for praise, or power, or prizes, but the value of it for its own sake.

What I've Been Reading

I've been reading a lot recently so I thought I had better make a quick list -- I resolved to keep track this year, but as usual it always slipped to last place.

First, here are some book reviews Clare wrote for The Robe and for Out of the Silent Planet.
(note 5/30 -- and one more The Great Escape.)

That is what I'd LIKE to do with these, but in the meantime, the quick list.

Here is what I've read during May 2008:

• IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea by Stephen Murdoch. Very interesting reading indeed -- much about the history of the testing, how it linked to early eugenic theory.
• Childhood Speech, Language and Listening Problems -- What Every Parent Should Know -- good read, doesn't assume specialized knowledge but is not condescending "parent-speak" either. Since I'm taking over Aidan's speech therapy I thought I had better get in touch with the general big picture.
• Quotidian Mysteries -- Laundry, Liturgy and Womens' Work -- by Kathleen Norris. I loved this book -- it's very short, very perceptive, written by a poet.
• Education at the Crossroads-- by the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain.
• Savior of Science -- by Stanley Jaki, Catholic scientist and philosopher -- about how only Christianity could set the conditions for the development of science.

In the Middle of at Present:

• Parenting from the Inside Out by Daniel Siegel. A book about attachment theory and how recognition and dealing with your personal "trigger issues" can lead to better parenting.
• Summer for the Gods -- by Edward Larson -- about the Scopes trial and "American's Continuing Debate over Science and REligion"
• Joining the Literacy Club by Frank Smith.
  

Note 5/30 -- I finished the first two. I have also started rereading Charlotte Mason's Philosophy of Education.

Books I read bits of but haven't finished:

• The Mindful Brain by Daniel Siegel -- I found it hard going.
• History of Philosophy vol 6 Wolff to Kant by Frederick Copleston SJ. I only read the section on Kant.
• Descartes to Derrida -- An Introduction to European Philosophy. By Peter Sedgwick. I only read the first chapter on Knowledge and Reason because that was the section that concerned Kant.
• Straight Talk about Reading: How Parents Can Make a Difference in the Early Years--I skimmed this to see if I could find anything that would be useful for my struggles with Aidan, but didn't read every word.
  

Not much fiction on there. The last fiction I remember reading is East of Eden by John Steinbeck, but that was in April. Oh, yes, and I forgot:

• Jenny by Sigrid Undset. Definitely an immature "minor" work of one who went on to become a great woman writer. Plenty of promise, but still wrestling with her creative angel.

Kind of the opposite of East of Eden which struck me as an elderly type of book, with the excesses of garrulity of a great one who is past his prime. Excesses of verbiage, both in the philosophical vein and in the "fondly remembered past exploits" vein. Some of it fit into what the story was about but some of it went on too long. I should add that Clare had a much better opinion of it than I did.

Oh, and how could I forget! Two more I read:

• Becoming Jane Austen by Jon Spence
• Jane Austen by Carol Shields

Clare read these too. We had watched the movie Becoming Jane and both of us were curious how much of the movie was "fact" and how much "poetic license".

avoiding the difficulty of understanding

Right after I wrote about Immanuel Kant and my difficulties in understanding his book on my homeschool journal, I found this mystery book Critique of Criminal Reason. And my library has it ;-). Leonie calls this serendipity.

I found it on the blog The Grail Code -- John Donne and the Case of the Missing Toilet Paper -- and it links to a very interesting article on reductionist literary criticism -- The Neuroscience Delusion. From the article, which is by Raymond Tallis, a professor of geriatric medicine:

The key point is this. The range of “mental objects” Changeux’s theory encompasses is hardly unique to mentally demanding and enriching experiences such as those associated with reading poetry. The processes leading up to mental objects – if they really do correspond to distinctive realities and are anything other than artefactual dissections of consciousness – are ubiquitous. Bellowing in a rage when one discovers that the toilet paper has run out, and someone has neglected to replace it, would involve the very same processes Byatt invokes to explain the particular impact of the poems of a genius, if such processes do occur. The mental objects constructed under such irritating circumstances also involve percepts, memory images, abstract concepts, and an extraordinary confection-by-association of them, as one justifies one’s rage and allocates blame, and deploys sophisticated neural algebras that simultaneously locate oneself in an unsatisfactory toilet and a careless world populated with thoughtless people.

That is, by adopting a neurophysiological approach, Byatt loses a rather large number of important distinctions: between reading one poem by John Donne and another; between successive readings of a particular poem; between reading Donne and other Metaphysical poets; between reading the Metaphysicals and reading William Carlos Williams; between reading great literature and trash; between reading and a vast number of other activities – such as getting cross over missing toilet paper. That is an impressive number of distinctions for a literary critic to lose. But that is the price of overstanding.

Overstanding -- as opposed to understanding -- is a nice word. I like it for lots of reasons.