History as Story -- "Man at the Cross-roads"

I once read a mention by CS Lewis of one of the history books used in Ambleside's early curriculum, Henrietta Marshall's Our Island Story:

I think it is possible to be strengthened by the image of the past without being either deceived or puffed up. The image becomes dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for serious and systematic historical study. The stories are best when they are handed on and accepted as stories. I do not mean by this that they should be handed on as mere fictions (some of them are after all true).

But the emphasis should be on the tale as such, on the picture which fires the imagination, the example that strengthens the will. The schoolboy who hears them should dimly feel - though of course he cannot put into words - that he is hearing saga. Let him be thrilled - preferably "out of school" - by the "Deeds that won the Empire"; but the less we mix this up with his "history lessons" or mistake it for a serious analysis - worse still, a justification - of imperial policy, the better.

When I was a child I had a book full of coloured pictures called Our Island Story. That title has always seemed to me to strike exactly the right note. The book did not look at all like a text-book either. What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or baised history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact.

I thought that was interesting.

The point, I think, is that when history is taught through narrative, through Story, it becomes personal and elevates one's thinking. One doesn't think of it as straight objective fact, though one draws a general sense of how things are from it. Whereas when propaganda is taught in standard textbook form, taught as plain fact, it can lead to a narrow parochialism that pretends to be patriotism, or to cynicism when the child grows up and realizes things aren't really that way.

Though CS Lewis assumed that books like this wouldn't be used for actual history lessons, I wonder what he would have thought of Charlotte Mason's PNEU if he had been acquainted with it. I know he rather disliked school the way it was done to him, though he got a lot out of his relationship with his tutor, a Scottish skeptic who Lewis called the Great Knock, who questioned almost everything.

Lewis was an admirer of GK Chesterton though, and his thoughts on patriotism and its attribuest had some overlaps with Chesterton's (scroll down) .

Chesterton's wife, Frances Blogg, worked as the Secretary at PNEU (editing notes, for one thing, writing articles, giving talks and so on) before her marriage to GKC (scroll down). It looks like Chesterton spoke at least once at a PNEU meeting, according to this biography written by Maisie Ward:

Gilbert.... speaks for the Richmond and Kew branch of the P.N.E.U. on "The Romantic Element in Morality"

I couldn't find that talk or any version of it online, to my regret but this is nice.

To a Christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't....

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that?--that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about, any one can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of danger, like a boy's book: it is at an immortal crisis.

CS Lewis quotes about literature for children

After I quoted Charlotte Mason on the importance of good literature for children and not "talking down", I remembered I had read some similar things said by CS Lewis (from a a collection of essays on literature by CS Lewis called Of Other Worlds., which Liam has at college with him right now, so I clipped the quotes from this interesting online essay called The Childlike in CS Lewis and George MacDonald.

"I never met The Wind in the Willows or the Bastable books till I was in my late twenties, and I do not think I have enjoyed them any the less on that account. I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story. The good ones last"

it certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then"

'for children' only in the sense that I excluded what I thought they would not like or understand; not in the sense of writing what I intended to be below adult attention"

Saving Appearances, and the Outlook of the Age

A useful discussion from The Discarded Image:

"The business of the natural philosopher is to construct theories which will 'save appearances'. Most of us first meet this expression in Paradise Lost (viii, 82) and most of us perhaps originally misunderstood it. Milton is translating (Greek script), first used, so far as we know, by Simplicius in his commentary on the Aristotlean De Caelo. A scientific theory must 'save' or 'reserve' the appearances, the phenomena, it deal with, in the sense of getting them all in, doing justice to them. Thus, for example, your phenomena are luminous points in the night sky which exhibit such and such movements in relation to one another and in relation to an observer at a particular point, or various chosen points, on the surface of the Earth. Your astronomical theory will be a supposal such that, if it were true, the apparent motions from the point or points of observation would be those you have actually observed. The theory will then have 'got in' or 'saved' the appearances.

But if we demanded no more than that from a theory, science would be impossible, for a lively inventive faculty could devise a good many different supposals which would equally save the phenomena. We havce therefore had to supplement the canon of saving the phenomena by another canon -- first, perhaps, formulated with full clarity by Occam. According to this second canon we must accept (provisionally) not any theory which saves the phenomena but that theory which does so with the fewest possible assumptions. Thus the two theories that (a) the bad bits in Shakespeare were all put in by adapters, and (b) that Shakespeare wrote them when he was not at his best, will equally 'save' the appearances. But we already know that there was such a person as Shakespeare and that writers are not always at their best. If scholarship hopes ever to achieve the steady progress of the sciences, we must therefore (provisionally) accept the second theory. ....

In every age it will be apparent to accurate thinkers that scientific theories, being arrived at in the way I have described, are never statements of fact. That stars appear to move in such and such ways, or that substances behaved thus and thus in the laboratory -- these are statements of fact. The astronomical or chemical theory can never be more than provisional. It will have to be abandoned if a more ingenious person thinks of a supposal which would 'save' the observed phenomena with still fewer assumptions, or if we discover new phenomena which it cannot save at all.

This would, I believe, be recognized by all thoughtful scientists today. It was recognized by Newton if, as I am told, he wrote not 'the attraction varies inversely as the square of the distance', but 'all happens as if' it so varied.

It was certainly recognized in the Middle Ages. 'In astronomy," says Aquinas,' an account is given of eccentrics and epicycles on the ground that if their assumption is made (haec positione facta) they could also be saved by some different assumption'. The real reason why Copernicus raised no ripple and Galileo raised a storm, may well be that whereas the one offered a new supposal about celestial motions, the other insisted on treating this supposal as fact. If so, the real revolution consisted not in a new theory of the heavens but in 'a new theory of the nature of theory.'*

(*AO Barfield, Saving the Appearances)
More on the Copernican Revolution, and Saving the Appearances, here:

But in reality Copernicus's book marked a sea change in human thought, one that caught the universities even more off guard than the Church. Owen Barfield, in his fascinating book Saving the Appearances, calls it “the real turning-point” in the history of science: “It took place when Copernicus (probably—it cannot be regarded as certain) began to think, and others, like Kepler and Galileo, began to affirm that the heliocentric hypothesis not only saved the appearances, but was physically true...It was not simply a new theory of the nature of celestial movements that was feared, but a new theory of the nature of theory; namely, that, if a hypothesis saves all the appearances, it is identical with truth.”

Copernicus had delayed the publication of his book for years because he feared, not the censure of the Church, but the mockery of academics. It was the hide-bound Aristotelians in the schools who offered the fiercest resistance to the new science.

The Boy Scientist, which I was going to have Kieron read next year, has a similar perspective on the Galileo affair. It regards the change as a good thing, however, while Lewis seems to have mixed feelings.

One more idea in this line, from Lewis' epilogue -- I wish I could quote the whole thing, but I shall have to clip out excerpts that don't represent his entire process of thought:

"The nineteenth century still held the belief that by inferences from our sense-experience (improved by instruments) we could 'know' the ultimate physical reality more or less as, by maps, pictures, and travel-books, a man can 'know a country he has not visited; and that in both cases the 'truth' would be a sort of mental replica of the thing itself. Philosophers might have disquieting comments to make on this conception; but scientists and plain men did not much attend to them."

(he goes on to summarize some of the ways that this idea of the past century is not quite accurate, and then goes on)

"Without a parable modern physics speaks not to the multitudes. Even among themselves, when they attempt to verbalise their findings, the scientists begin to speak of this as making 'models'. It is from them that I have borrowed the word. But these 'models' are not, like model ships, small-scale replicas of the reality. Sometimes they illustrate this or that aspect of it by an analogy. Sometimes, they do not illustrate but merely suggest, like the sayings of the mystics. An expression such as 'the curvature of space' is strictly comparable to the old definiton of God as 'a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.' Both succeed in suggesting; each does so by offering what is, on the level of our ordinary thinking, nonsense. By accepting the 'curvature of space' we are not 'knowing' or enjoying 'truth' in the fashion that was once thought to be possible.

It would therefore be subtly misleading to say 'The medievals thought the universe to be like that, but we know it to be like this'. Part of what we now know is that we cannot, in the old sense, 'know what the universe is like' and that no model we can build will be, in that old sense, 'like' it.

He goes on to discuss how the main change in the "Model" wasn't the phenomena so much as how the phenomena was regarded. For an example, Darwin's theory of evolution was not, in itself, new. It was the empirical data he collected and described vividly and intelligently, and the way his presentation bore out the new Model of the rationalist age, that accounted for at least some of the influence he has had on our age.

Lewis says that the Great Minds of each age tend not to be affected as exclusively by the "Model" of the age.

"The great masters do not take any Model quite so seriously as the rest of us. They know that it is, after all, only a model, possibly replaceable."(p 14).

And later (p 222):

I am only suggesting considerations that may induce us to regard all Models in the right way, respecting each and idolising none. We are all, very properly, familiar with the idea that in every age the human mind is deeply influenced by the accepted Model of the universe. But there is a two-way traffic; the Model is also influenced by the prevailing temper of mind.

This is a theme he also express in the famous Introduction to "On the Incarnation", which is famous because it so nicely expresses what is the goal of liberal education -- a mind which engages with truth, but does not jump too early to conclusions based on its own natural and temporal bias:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook - even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united - united with each other and against earlier and later ages - by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

The Discarded Image

I just finished reading CS Lewis's The Discarded Image. Very good read. I promised myself the happiness of typing out this quote from Chesterton, which Lewis uses to front his chapter on the "Longaevi", or the "faerie folk":

"There is something sinister about putting a leprechaun in the workhouse. The only solid comfort is that he certainly will not work."

But that is a bit of an incidental in this post, which is more about Lewis' "Short Course" (really, a series of lectures) on the Medieval "Model". By "model" he means how things looked from the perspective of the medieval author and thinker. He traces the thinking from the classical days up to how it manifested itself in the medieval and Renaissance literature. Maybe putting the leprechaun in the workhouse is a bit similar by analogy to the common fallacy Lewis describes and tries to get us past in the book -- the fallacy is taking some image or expression of times past and trying to understand it strictly in terms of our modern sensibility and intellectual context. This fallacy is almost the mark of ignorance -- parochialism, defined as "narrowly restricted in scope or outlook; provincial" -- and we are all subject to it, but ought to try and acknowledge it and at least attempt to get beyond it. I'm preaching a bit here, but Lewis does not preach in this book, though he does try to make a point about the advantages of the more respectful approach -- more about that later. The bulk of The Discarded Image deals in a scholarly, meticulous fashion with the details and big picture of the medieval "Model", so much like a cathedral with the abundance of detail and the soaring vision. With the background given in this book, it is much easier to understand allusions and themes in Chaucer, Milton and Spenser, among others, which simply pass by our radar without the understanding of the context which Lewis gives.

As he writes:

Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest--trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The "space" of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.

I requested the book because of the Seven Liberal Arts couplet and so found that chapter the most directly interesting to me, though the section on the medieval universe was also absorbing. Here's a bit on the subject of "Grammar" -- he states that Grammar meant Latin grammar, of course, but:

"While Grammar was thus restricted to a single tongue, in another way it sometimes extended far beyond the realm it claims today. It had done so for centures. Quintilian suggests literatura as the proper translation of Greek grammatike, and literatura, though it does not mean "literature", included a good deal more than literacy. It included all that is required for "making up' a 'set book'; syntax, etymology, prosody, and the explanation of allusions. Isidore makes even history a department of Grammar. He would have described the book I am now writing as a book of Grammar. Scholarship is perhaps our nearest equivalent.

In popular usage Grammatica or Grammaria slid into the vague sense of learning in general; and since learning is usually an object both of respect and suspicion to the masses, grammar, in the form grammary comes to mean magic. Thus in the ballad of King Estmere, 'My mother was a western woman learned in grammarye.' And from grammary, by a familiar sound-change, comes glamour --- a word whose associations with grammar and even with magic have now been annihilated by the beauty-specialists."

As for Dialectic:

"Dialectic in the couplet 'teaches words'; an obscure saying. What is really meant is that, having learned from grammar how to talk, we must learn from Dialectic how to talk sense, to argue, to prove and disprove. .... Everyone who has tried to teach mere Logic knows how difficult it is, especially with an intelligent pupil, to avoid raising questions which force us into metaphysics."

A bit about Rhetoric:

"Chaucer's apostrophe to 'Gaufred, dere mayster souverain; has kept alive the memory of Geoffrey de Vinsauf who...wrote the Nova Poetria, a work whose value lies in its extreme naivety.

He divides "Ordo" (which some call Dispositio) into two kinds, Natural and Artificial. The Nature follows the King of Hearts' advice by beginning at the beginning. The Artificial is of three kinds. You ccan begin at the end (as in the Oedipus Rex or a play by Ibsen); or in the middle (like Virgil and Spenser); or with a Sententia or Exemplum. Chaucer begins with a Sententia or maxim in the Parlement, the Hous of Fame, the Prologue to the Legen, the Legend of Phillis and the Prioress's Tale. I cannot remember that he ever begins with an Exemplum, but no one needs to be reminded how frequent they are in his work...

And I like this section:

Here Geoffrey is dealing with a real problem, which we have all faced though few of us would pose it so bluntly. The Natural Order will not always serve. And the plan of beginning with a Sententia, or something like it, is still an unlaid ghost. It 'walks' in that fatal opening paragraph with which schoolboys are apparently taught to begin their essays.

On Amplificatio he is almost embarrassing. He calls the various method of 'amplifying' you piece, quite frankly, morae (delays); as if the art of literature consisted in learning how to say much when you have little to say. That, I suspect, was how he really regarded it. But this means not that the morae he recommends are all necessarily bad but that he misunderstands -- I do not profess to understand it fully myself -- their real function.

There is a bit more about Geoffrey de Vinsauf here, and here.

Personally, I wonder whether "delays" as an artifice weren't a matter of pacing.... of suiting the delivery to the occasion. I see that mora is a linguistic and metric term, and I don't see why it shouldn't extend out to the actual syntax and substance when the occasion calls for it.

Elsewhere Lewis writes (in The Influence of the Model, the last chapter):

Rhetoric recommended morae -- delays or padding. Does all this science and 'story' come in simply longius ut sit opus, 'that the work may be longer'? But this perhaps overlooks that fact that Rhetoric explains the formal, not the material, characteristic. That is, it may tell you to digress; not what to put into your digressions. It may approve Common Places; it can hardly decide what shall achieve the status of a Common Place.

OK, I had better stop now because I keep finding more things to quote. Anyway, the book was interesting in more ways than I can find time to describe here.

I thought the examples of morae and sententiae brought up to today's schoolboy essays had applicability to some of the criticisms of the SAT essays.

SAT essay test rewards length and ignores errors

Receptive Reading & More

In reference to those Right Questions I just wrote about --

I just received CS Lewis's The Discarded Image from ILL and this bit of the preface spoke to what I was trying to say about putting yourself into the receptive but not credulous mode -- he is talking about researching to get help with the more difficult older books:

"Frequent researches ad hoc sadly impair receptive reading, so that sensitive people may even come to regard scholarship as a baleful thing which is always taking you out of the literature itself. ....to be always looking at the map when there is a fine prospect before you shatters the 'wise passiveness' in which landscape ought to be enjoyed."

James Taylor writes similarly in Poetic Knowledge:

Unlike the scientific mode of learning that proposes methods and systems for acquiring knowledge, the tradition that has been thus far reviewed reveals rather a way of knowledge, like a path or winding road, with interesting detours off the road, more than the superhighway of modern education. It is a way more akin to the natural human response to discovery of the world. It is a way of leisure and reflection of what is there, the way things are, and when one is considering the kinds of knowledge, it is seen that there is a natural order after all that corresponds to the learner and his universe..

I wonder if CS Lewis's point about the scholarship possibly leading out of the literature is the reason that I have always hesitated to impose on my kids those "look up vocabulary words in the dictionary" type exercises that seem to be common in literature unit studies. For "hesitated", read "never had the heart to even try."

It's interesting that Charlotte Mason used the term "wise passiveness", too. Of course, it is from Wordsworth.

A bit more from James Taylor:

An education that appeals only to the intellect at the expense of the senses and emotions results in teaching mainly to the problem-solving intellect, the active intellect, neglecting at great peril the receptive heart and soul that knows for certain what it knows, and wonders and dreams about what it does not know. The risk in all this denatured teaching is to make one “narrow of heart”, as Dom Gerard explained to me. And John Senior used to say it is the heart and intuitive mind that knows the good, it is not a problem to be solved, but like truth and beauty are realities to be admired and shared, not analyzed and dissected.

Now we must remember that the light of the intellect is always at play throughout the soul and avoid the error of the Romantics who seemed to think that the emotions were the seat of wisdom. However, the light of the intellect does not confine her illumination to just the reason, but also in some mysterious manner to the exterior and interior senses, the emotions and the will in one complete wash of light.

My love for connecting quotes is running away with me, again... I meant originally to mention how CS Lewis's point might also connect with my ongoing slight hesitation about narration. For years, I've heard that it is essential to a CM education; but urgency usually raises my adrenaline level without actually affecting my actions, UNLESS I can see why.

I have thought for many years that narration right after a reading could short-circuit the reception process -- bringing it too quickly to a rational, verbal-linguistic level. So in that way, almost taking the child "outside" the literature and into his own verbal-linguistic brain, which might actually shut down some of the other attributes of intelligence that are used for understanding and assimilating "the best that has been thought and said."

Now, I am pretty sure that my reasoning has taken a wrong turning somewhere, but until I've solved the problem I'm likely to go on muddling through with narration as a half-measure.

Intuitively, the Waldorf "breathe in -- breathe out" approach appeals to me more because it seems to add the element of time to assimilate, especially with my crew of introverts who need their space. The way I grew up, I would read something and think, and think, but the thoughts didn't become words of my own till much later, sometimes years later.

Still, I have so much respect for CM's thinking which has often proved correct even when my intitial reaction was a bit hesitatnt. And she was emphatic on the value of the immediate retelling. So one of my mental projects for this summer is to try to figure out this narration thing enough to be able to actually use it. I know I've said that before, but then, anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- or over and over again, until I get it right ;-).

speaking, singing, weighing, numbering and tending

This Parent's Review article -- Greek in modern education -- gave me this little description of the Seven Liberal Arts:

Gram loquitur, Dia ver docet, Rhe verba colorat,
Mus canit, ar numerat Geo ponderat As colit astra.

and searching for that gave me this Seven Liberal Arts post from the Common Room. It is part of a whole series and the comments on the article are interesting.

Christine Miller at Classical Christian Homeschooling says that CS Lewis quoted the couplet in The Discarded Image, and translated it this way:

Grammar talks, Dialectic teaches words, Rhetoric colors words,
Music sings, Arithmetic numbers, Geometry weighs, Astronomy tends the stars.

ETA: Drew pointed out that the Latin from the AO article didn't match the English translation (see comments). Apparently CS Lewis remembered the tag as "Dia verba docet" and translated it accordingly. I didn't notice the difference between the two versions when I pasted them in.

Other sources, like the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Liberal Arts, had it as

Dia vera docet

The whole mnemonic there is:

Lingua, tropus, ratio, numerus, tonus, angulus, astra.
Gram. loquiter, Dia. vera docet, Rhe. verba colorat
Mu. canit, Ar. numerat, Geo. ponderat, Ast. colit astra.

That's different again. (By the way, that's a typo I found above in the CE. It ought to be "loquitur", and it is written that way in the original CE text. )

I need a librarian emoticon ;-).

Lectio -- Extensive and Intensive, Cursiva and Stataria

The following are quotes from Francis Crotty's book called Implementation of Ignatian Education in the Home. Bear with me because this is groundwork for talking about lectio cursiva and lectio stataria. Funny, when I go Googling, the only things that come up with regard to those terms are my own posts and a few texts written in German or Latin ;-). So here are the quotes and then I've tried to paraphrase them in my own words since I know it's really difficult to read quotes taken from context:




Selective Emphasis

In respect to the treatment of subjects in the curriculum, home teachers must avoid attempting to cover wide areas of subject-matter with equal emphasis on all of its phrases. They must rather select salient aspects for intensive treatment and cover subsidiary phases in summary form. For example, general courses in history and literature are of little or no educational value unless they are conducted on this basis of selective emphasis... p 24

The short version -- it's effective to combine in-depth treatment of a topic with a survey-level approach. This is particularly true in courses like history and literature, because you want both an awareness of the "big picture" AND a method of delving more deeply into particular aspects of the whole. A century book or timeline is a nice way to do this with history and for literature, a cluster of books on a topic can be a good way to go.

Lectio Cursiva and Lectio Stataria:

Depending upon the stage of the lesson, the teacher may develop a few aspects of the lesson thoroughly (lectio stataria) or go into many aspects by way of introduction to a new subject of preparation for a review or wide and rapid teaching of subject matter (lectio cursiva).

My short version -- decide what is best in a particular lesson -- either a "big picture" survey or approach, or a more in-depth treatment. What you decide on may depend on many factors -- I decide based on what we have available, what I know about the subject personally, whether the little ones are cranky that day, or based upon whether one of the other assignments for that day is cursory or in-depth (I like to balance those things so the kids are using different parts of their intellectual equipment for different lessons -- as Charlotte Mason says, variety in lessons during a day).

More on Intensive and Extensive Treatment of Subjects

In view of the pedagogical problem created by the immense growth of knowledge, there is needed a principle of selectivity of subjects, of limitation of subject-matter, and a technique for both intensive and extensive treatment of this subject matter....

The principle of the limitation of subject-matter is based on the formational function of education....

..The principle of intensive-extensive treatment of subject matter rests on the fact that merely extensive treatment would lead to superficiality and too restricted treatment would prevent a sufficiently broad view and result in lack of student interest and stimulation. Hence, there must be both intensive and extensive treatment of subject-matter: intensive within the home-class, to fulfill the formative function, and extensive, in required and independent reading, apart from home-class, for the adequate knowledge appreciation, eg of literary works and their historical setting.

This part explains the disadvantage of too shallow or too in-depth an approach and suggests that "teacher-time" ought to be spent conveying a method -- analytical or synthetic. Analysis is breaking things down into parts -- categorizing or parsing or translating. Synthesis is putting things together -- discussions or compositions or narrations. Reading aloud is definitely a premium use of teacher time since there are few ways to better set an example for comprehension, enjoyment and even elocution than by reading with a child, and if you can cuddle up on a couch together while reading that is even better, truly an almost- perfect "whole" way to educate.

Education is meant to be formative -- that is, teaching habits and methods and an attitude that will last throughout life. When in doubt, that is the aspect to consider first, so it doesn't usually work to push through the checklist at all costs to the point of tears and bitterness (this is my paraphrase of what he is saying).


Types of the Whole

A practical solution for the teacher (who is short of time) ...is to combine the intensive and extensive system in teaching the matter for the first time. Some parts of the subject, some periods of history, some scientific principles, warrant careful and detailed explanation and study, while other phases can be summarized, or typical segments can be treated thoroughly and shown to be representative of the whole.

Personally, what I do is try to glance ahead at my children's reading to see what areas I would like to consolidate in their minds and which are less key. A more relaxed way to do this is to "discover" together and go on rabbit trails based on interest or availability of resources. To be honest, this is my default mode of operation and it does work but ideally, the Ignatian method calls for a bit of preparation ahead of time.

Now to leave the Ignatian Education and move onto the one other place I found the terms "lectio cursiva et stataria" mentioned in a book written in English online. Here is a bit from a book called "Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic" and this is the relevant section:

The third rule under this head is "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) ...

You will notice that when this Hamilton is discussing "reading" it looks like he is talking about the kind of reading a person does when he is already educated. But in Ignatian education, the way I understand it, a large part of the coursework was based on "readings", so the terms "cursiva" and "stataria" in that context referred to how the material was studied and taught. (of course, the goal for the teaching was that the student would eventually be able to carry this out on his own). Basically the class would go through a book and study specific sections in great detail, while reading larger sections at home in their own time and then reviewing/discussing their independent reading in class. They also memorized sections of the works they were studying, and wrote themes -- compositions -- based on them. There is a lot more detail about the process in this excellent article by Robert Schwickerath called The Method of Teaching in Practice. I think I have mentioned it before but it really is a great resource.

Oh, and that reminds me that I finally found the CS Lewis quote I've been looking for for the longest time -- here it is, since it seems to relate a bit to the quote above:

“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristaram Shandy or Shakespeare’s Sonnets: But what can you do with a man who says he ‘has read’ them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter? … We do not enjoy a story fully at first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness."

But I'd better stop now, I see. For one thing, Paddy wants me to read to him... again! More on this lectio subject another time.

The Value of Rereading

I'm still looking for that quote by CS Lewis -- I can almost write it out by memory, but I can't seem to find a way to Google it so it comes up, and I don't remember which of Lewis's essays it was in. So frustrating! Anyway, the way I reconstruct it from memory has it that CS Lewis thought a book that was worth reading once was worth reading many times. He talked about pulling great books down from his shelf and browsing through them, revisiting them as if conversing with an old friend.

On a similar line, I know he says, in regard to living books:

"it certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then"

found on Into the Wardrobe

I also found a couple of posts on Iambic Admonit:

On Reading and Rereading
one of the comments by one of the IA blog contributors said this:

The benefits of rereading are many. C.S. Lewis said something along the lines of this: when you buy a book you're actually buying six or seven books, because you can reread it every decade, and you'll be a different person each time, so the book will say something new to you.

(Yep, that's kind of how I remember it, but I still wish I could find where he said it)

A Year of Rereading

(this is a sort of liturgical year of rereading -- great idea! an obvious one is Dickens Christmas Carol and also O Henry's The Gift of the Magi; I always tend to read Dickens during the Christmas break, and for years and years I would read Flannery O'Connor during Lent)

Charlotte Mason of course, said that one reading ought to suffice, and if more than one reading was allowed, it would not develop the faculty of attention. More on this some other time. But I don't think it contradicts Lewis entirely. She was talking in the context of school readings. I remember reading that she herself reread the Walter Scott books every year so this kind of revisiting is probably the fruit she hoped for in the child educated by her methods -- that favorite, high quality books should be companions throughout life. But as a child dealing with new books one should acquire the habit of attention, and not read in a desultory way.

The first, faint whisper of the wind from beyond the world

I went looking for a quote by CS Lewis about the value of rereading. Didn't come up with it in a google search, but I did find this blog Iambic Admonit which led me to this other favorite CS Lewis quote -- this is from a letter Lewis wrote to a friend, not long after he converted, I gather:

“ I think the thrill of the pagan stories and of romance may be due to the fact that they are mere beginnings―the first, faint whisper of the wind from beyond the world―while Christianity is the thing itself: and no thing, when you have really started on it, can have for you then and there just the same thrill as the first hint. For example, the experience of being married and bringing up a family, cannot have the old bittersweet for first falling in love. But it is futile (and, I think wicked) to go on trying to get the old thrill again: you must go forward and not backward. . . . Delight is a bell that rings as you set your foot on the first step of a new flight of stairs leading upwards. Once you have started climbing you will notice only the hard work: it is when you have reached the landing and catch sight of the new stair that you may expect the bell again.”

".....the first, faint whisper of the wind from beyond the world." I think that stands in for Poetry Friday for today, don't you?

On Critical Reading

From CS Lewis An Experiment in Criticism

I have also refrained from describing the sort of reading I approve as "critical reading". The phrase, if not elliptically used, seems to me deeply misleading. I said in an earlier chapter that we can jduge any sentence or even word only by the work it does or fails to do. The effect must precede the judgement on the effect. The same is true of a whole work. Ideally, we must receive it first and then evaluate it. Otherwise, we have nothing to evaluate. ....

...In later life, we can hardly help evaluating as we go along; it has become a habit. We thus fail of that inner silence, that emptying out of ourselves, by which we ought to make room for the total reception of the work. ...

But here's the part which particularly seemed to connect with something I've written about before: how a schooly approach to literature studies can actually impede a child's approach to literature:

"All this activity impedes reception.
For this reason I am very doubtful whether criticism is a proper exercise for boys and girls. A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation. The necessary condition of all good reading is 'to get ourselves out of the way'; we do not help the young to do this by forcing them to keep on expressing opinions."