Education Inflation

When my oldest three now-grown children were babies several people asked me how we could afford to have more than 2 children when projected college costs were so high. Some people told me that they stopped at one or two children for that reason. I think it is at that point that I started being consciously skeptical of the idea of college as a necessity for everyone.

I think our country has pulled an interesting sleight of hand on us. They provide our children primary and secondary public education at taxpayer expense. Then they propose a system by which no child, no matter how uninterested or unacademically inclined, should ever be "left behind" from a K-12 education. That means that education isn't based on a "progression through mastery" system but is based on a lockstep age-based system where, in order to give the slower ones a chance to catch up to age mates, the quicker ones are held back while the slower ones are made to feel ashamed. The uninterested or unacademically inclined, no matter how good their reasons are for being that way, are stigmatized and offered no viable alternatives to the system's norm.

Now, increasingly, 4 years of college is being held up as the norm for every student. The end result is inevitably a sort of educational inflation. What used to be an 8th grade education is now in many cases drawn out into the freshman year of college. There are ways to get around the sheer ponderous inefficiency of this mode of education -- homeschooling, dual college/highschool credits, CLEPing, merit scholarships, Great Books colleges are some things that come to the top of my mind as shortcuts through the maze -- but often they take money or at least intensive research and planning (and of a procedural, logistical sort, not straight intellectual). Many of these also require a pretty clear and usually family-supported effort to swim against the cultural current.

The good thing is that in the US there is hardly anyone who runs into an iron ceiling with regard to education. You can get a degree late in life, you can get a degree over the internet, you can sometimes get your employer to pay for your further education, you have any amount of access to "the best that has been thought and said" -- the only limits are the amount of time and energy you are willing and able to put into it.

The bad thing is this softening and dilution of education. One thing it means is that often you need a doctorate for a profession that doesn't really intrinsically require one. For example, just to take cases I have heard about personally, increasingly an occupational therapist needs to get at least a Master's Degree, and a physical therapist chooses between a doctorate and a master's. When a bachelor's degree is the norm, it becomes little more than a prerequisite for further specialization. This seems unnecessary and a sort of indirect, postponed punch of personal expense, the corollary of a purportedly "free" but extremely institutionalized and rigid (AND expensive to the country) K12 system. Many kids are going out into the working world saddled with large debts.

In that context, here is an interesting article: Are Too Many People Going to College? by Charles Murray. I rather disliked this article of his called "Intelligence in the Classroom" (we talked about it here) but I did think this college one made some interesting points.

The points seem to be:

• MORE people should be getting the basics of a liberal education.
• The core of this should be taking place in grades K-8.
• It should not have to wait for college.
• High school should be a place for survey classes and courses slightly below the college level, firming the foundations laid in the earlier years..
• College is not and should not have to be for everyone.

Liberal education in college means taking on the tough stuff. A high-school graduate who has acquired Hirsch’s core knowledge will know, for example, that John Stuart Mill was an important 19th-century English philosopher who was associated with something called Utilitarianism and wrote a famous book called On Liberty. But learning philosophy in college, which is an essential component of a liberal education, means that the student has to be able to read and understand the actual text of On Liberty. That brings us to the limits set by the nature of college-level material.

• For learning to make a living, the brick campus is increasingly obsolete.
• Having a BA does help increase income, but it may not be worth the cost paid for a lot of people.

The income for the top people in a wide variety of occupations that do not require a college degree is higher than the average income for many occupations that require a B.A. Furthermore, the range and number of such jobs are expanding rapidly. The need for assembly-line workers in factories (one of the most boring jobs ever invented) is falling, but the demand for skilled technicians of every kind—in healthcare, information technology, transportation networks, and every other industry that relies on high-tech equipment—is expanding.

He also makes the point that liberal knowledge is increasingly accessible through the internet -- many of the things only available to the college student in former times -- professor-taught courses, excellent books, and such things -- are now readily available to most people.

The physical infrastructure of the college used to make sense for three reasons. First, a good library was essential to higher learning, and only a college faculty and student body provided the economies of scale that made good libraries affordable. Second, scholarship flourishes through colleagueships, and the college campus made it possible to put scholars in physical proximity to each other. Third, the best teaching requires interaction between teachers and students, and physical proximity was the only way to get it. All three rationales for the brick-and-mortar campus are fading fast......

....Once again, the Internet is revolutionizing everything. As personal computers acquired the processing power to show high-definition video and the storage capacity to handle big video files, the possibilities for distance learning expanded by orders of magnitude. We are now watching the early expression of those possibilities: podcasts and streaming videos in real time of professors’ lectures, online discussions among students scattered around the country, online interaction between students and professors, online exams, and tutorials augmented by computer-aided instruction software. Even today, the quality of student-teacher interactions in a virtual classroom competes with the interactions in a brick-and-mortar classroom. But the technology is still in its early stages of development and the rate of improvement is breathtaking.

The final conclusion is that by holding up the BA as the norm and then making people jump through various financial and procedural hoops to achieve it, you set up a situation that widens class divisions and sets many people up for accusations of not trying hard enough or not being smart enough:

Today, if you do not get a B.A., many people assume it is because you are too dumb or too lazy. And all this because of a degree that seldom has an interpretable substantive meaning.

Let’s approach the situation from a different angle. Imagine that America had no system of postsecondary education and you were made a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. Ask yourself what you would think if one of your colleagues submitted this proposal:

First, we will set up a common goal for every young person that represents educational success. We will call it a B.A. We will then make it difficult or impossible for most people to achieve this goal. For those who can, achieving the goal will take four years no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward for reaching the goal that often has little to do with the content of what has been learned. We will lure large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability or motivation to try to achieve the goal and then fail. We will then stigmatize everyone who fails to achieve it.

more on the object of education

Here is something I've been thinking over recently and just this morning discussed with my daughter:

Interests––Have we many keen interests soliciting us outside of our necessary work? If we have, we shall not be enslaved by vapid joys.

Interests are not to be taken up on the spur of the moment; they spring out of the affinities which we have found and laid hold of. And the object of education is, I take it, to give children the use of as much of the world as may be.

I think this is one of the most important parts of homeschooling.... or perhaps of family life, since I know some kids who go to school and yet have maintained keen interests and avoided enslavement to vapid joys.

Justifying Homeschooling

What a fascinating article at Homeschool Research Notes about "Deviant Homeschooling Moms."
... about the accusations society tends to make against homeschooling moms and the arguments the homeschooling moms use to counter the accusations.

Lois’ research revealed four specific charges raised against homeschooling mothers, to which four responses by these mothers were offered. First, homeschooling mothers were commonly charged with feeling academically arrogant: “They were cast as smug, irresponsible mothers who thought they could do a better job teaching their children than credentialed teachers in conventional schools.” ...

A second criticism commonly voiced is that homeschooling mothers are socially overprotective. Homeschoolers are “irresponsible mothers who, because of their uncontrollable overprotectiveness, were failing their children by sheltering them from reality.”....

Third, homeschooling mothers are accused of feeling morally self righteous and extreme, be it the self-righteousness of the hippie counterculture or the fundamentalist theocrat. ....

Finally, homeschooling mothers are accused of being relationally hyperengaged, of having an “abnormally strong desire to be emotionally and physically close to their children,” which caused them to be “excessively involved with every aspect of their lives.” (221) .....

The article intersperses the defenses the sample of homeschooling moms (mostly Christian in this particular study) make to these charges. Worthwhile reading. As the article says:

Lois’ scholarly point in all of this is to emphasize that people accused of deviance are not only accused of wrong behaviors but of wrong feelings.

This makes defense trickier because it is more difficult to defend against charges of wrong feelings than of wrong actions. It's sort of like the classic "I met a weird homeschooler once, so I'm against homeschooling." It is a judgment made with little to no objective referent. So it's difficult to marshal up arguments that will counter-persuade, but the tactic taken is usually:

Homeschooling moms respond, often incredulously, by appealing to the very notion of good mothering that dominates middle class culture and explaining their attitudes in terms most Americans understand and accept.

Tasting and Swallowing

Catching up a bit on my blog reading (I'm trying to stay off the internet more during Lent) -- I liked these two blogs about food (actually, three, I guess):

revelation on the gluttony front by bearing blog.... about what Aquinas called nimis, I think. The etymology of gluttony is from "gluttire" meaning "to swallow".

Taste and See -- at Childlight USA -- it's really about education, but also about food. I liked the connection. Charlotte Mason talked a lot about the parallels. Here's the whole list of Aquinas's aspects of gluttony, if you want to relate them to eating real food or the educational equivalent:

• Praepropere - eating too soon
• Laute - eating too expensively
• Nimis - eating too much
• Ardenter - eating too eagerly
• Studiose - eating too daintily
• Forente - eating too fervently

I could apply those to some of the mistakes teachers make in educating children. Ignoring readiness, educational clutter, forcing too much information, not allowing enough access to real knowledge, and imposing too much influence on the children by means of personality, mediating the material, or rewards.

The positive corollaries: quality of knowledge, deliberation and restraint in teaching, variety and breadth, and "whole" simplicity. That would be similar goals for eating, too: good quality, moderate quantities, variety, and wholeness/simplicity of preparation, at least for the most part.

Credentials and their Limitations

Very good post at Life without School by Cindy of Applestars: The Myth of Credentialism.

I just wanted to bookmark it because I think it explains well the counter side of some assumptions people make about homeschooling, and particularly, unschooling.

Habitual Lines of Thought

Physiologists tell us of the adaptation of brain structure to habitual lines of thought––i.e. to our habits.

from Charlotte Mason's Preface to the Home Education Series.

Neurophysiology has advanced much since the day when she wrote this, but the field still seems to support her thoughts on this matter. I found one example yesterday when I was looking for the information on the prefrontal cortex. From Brain Development and the Development of Executive Function:

Changes in the brain appear to be dependent on experience. For example, stress appears to slow down the creation of new neurons in the hippocampus, whereas using particular parts of the brain appears to make those parts grow. In one study by researchers in London, England, cab drivers (who have to pass a rigorous test demonstrating their knowledge of London streets) were found to have larger posterior hippocampi than other men of the same age. Moreover, the size of their posterior hippocampi corresponded closely to the number of years that they had been driving a cab. This finding suggests that relying heavily on spatial memory (and engaging regularly in navigation) leads to an increase in the size of the relevant brain areas—in this case the posterior hippocampus.

Another study makes the same point. This study, by researchers in Germany, examined the sensorimotor cortices of violin players—specifically the part that is associated with the complex fingering movements involved in playing the violin. Results indicated that this part of the brain was larger in the violin players than it was in people who don’t play stringed instruments.

Evidently, you can grow your own brain by using it! Whether this growth involves the creation of new neurons is unknown, but it almost certainly involves changes that affect the connections among neurons (for instance, thickening of dendrites). ...

Of course, this is mostly concentrated on professional habits, while Charlotte Mason was talking about habits involving "lines of thought". Still, I would imagine the principle would be somewhat the same.

Developing Minds and Coherent Narrative

A few links on early memory, what The Developing Mind calls "implicit memory".

I think I originally planned to write a whole post on the book but now it's gone. But I wanted to save the links anyway in case I ever pick up that research trail again.

• What Your Child Remembers -- implicit memory
• Oh Where, Oh Where Have Those Early Memories Gone?
• Memory and Learning
• Training Mothers Improves Childrens' Memory and Narrative Skills
• Psychology Today: Article on Memory.

What I got from the book on a quick first read (I think the book's worth studying more carefully) is that a coherent narrative of one's past is a crucial sign of either natural or "earned" security in attachment theory.

Here's an article that explains a bit of that. How attachment helps children thrive.

Communication patterns form the basis of early parent-child attachments, Siegel explains. In a process called "contingent communication," a parent perceives the signals of his or her child, processes them and responds to them in a timely fashion. This sensitive form of caregiving makes the child feel safe and understood, and secure that his needs will be met.

Five processes that parents can use to help their children:

• Collaborative communication, the sharing of non-verbal signals such as eye contact, facial expressions and tone of voice.
• Reflective dialogue, talking with their children about thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories, sensations, attitudes, beliefs and intentions, all of which help kids develop compassion.
• Repair, reaching out to a child and apologizing after a misconnection.
• Emotional communication, accepting and sharing both the child's positive and negative emotional states and helping the child regulate his emotions.
• Coherent narrative, delving into one's past to better understand oneself and one's children.

The "coherent narrative" is particularly important:

Research shows that successful parents have gained insights into how their own childhoods -- and relationships with their own parents -- influenced their development as an adult and a parent. Adults who have "made sense of their lives" tend to raise kids who are securely attached to them.

It's not necessary to have had a securely attached background in order to have a coherent narrative of a background. I personally have quite a few friends who came from insecure or dysfunctional backgrounds and were able to "earn" this coherence in their lives. It takes work, but it is GOOD work.

A review of the book.
A PDF article by the author, Daniel Siegel, called Toward an Interpersonal Biology of the Developing Mind -- it's really more reader-friendly than the title indicates.

language is meaning incarnate in matter

A Humane Psychology of Education

Physical or chemical energy cannot touch that which we call "meaning," anymore than a shadow can knock down a wall. Meaning is not tangible to matter, because matter and meaning belong to different spheres of reality. Meaning is not extended. Meaning is simply the seal of man's reason. This seal can be pt into sound, and the sound becomes a language; it can be put into arbitrary lines and curves, and they become writing; it can be put into human movements, and those movements become gestures. Language, writing and gestures are, therefore, meaning incarnate in matter. ...

We have seen that matter cannot cope with meaning, but thought can. What all the chemical and physical instruments of the world cannot do, the mind of a little child does, because it can think. . What, then, is the nature of thought; of this mysterious instrument, so simple and yet so strong that it can achieve something which all the machines of the universe, big and small, cannot realize? ....Object and instrument are intimately correlated. Whence we deduce that if the meaning is not material, the organ of meaning, its connatural instrument, cannot be material either. Thought, the human urge after the meaning of things, is, therefore, a spiritual function.

Stopping by Ambleside on a Snowy Afternoon

Today we were supposed to go to an early Valentine's Day party with our little homeschool group, but we got 12 inches of snow and so it was postponed. That gives me extra time on my hands today that I thought I would be spending digging out the driveway and helping the kids make valentines. So I thought maybe I'd try to work out some thoughts about how our homeschooling is going right now. (there's an interesting thread at Real Learning about mid-year revamping).

Ever since about mid-December, we've been in a more unschooly mode. The little kids -- Aidan and Paddy -- are still at the stage where they can pick up most of what they need to know just in the normal course of the day. So unschooling and homeschooling and normal family life blend pretty seamlessly with them.

With my 13 year old (and myself) I felt like we were getting too complex by December, and that we've needed this long just to "deschool" again. It's funny, because I know people feel wretched when their "best laid plans" start going agley just around December (or if not then, at least by January and surely by February). Often they then accuse themselves of lack of discipline. Or at least, I used to. I don't so much any longer, because I've started wondering if there is any inherent reason why we can't have ebbs and flows in the school year just as we do in the liturgical year, in the physiological development progression, in the agricultural year, in almost everything else that's natural or based on nature. Another type of work subject to ebb and flow is the writer's life; almost anything creative or truly generative is going to have a certain rhythm which can't always be predicted or planned.

Now, though, I'm feeling like it's time to start doing more formal academics again (as with writing, or early spring, or the precursor to a new liturgical season, it seems to start with a restless feeling, then a slow trickle of thoughts and intentions, then suddenly a rush of enthusiasm and energy -- I'm at the second stage right now). So I've been ransacking the Ambleside Online site again, and I spent the weekend making plans. I always seem to go back to Ambleside and Mater Amabilis when I'm looking for a return to structure.

Earlier this year, I was actually seriously considering enrolling the children in CAVA -- a California charter version of the K-12 program. I couldn't figure out WHY an unschooly, rebellious person like me would be so attracted to a structured program like this one. (I do like the way it looks and if I had to choose a public school option this would totally be the kind of thing I would choose).

But now I think I've figured it out, a little. I am the type of mom who likes to be supportive. This is one reason why I'm attracted to unschooling -- I envision a kid getting passionately interested in something and my role is to provide resources and encouragement. (In real unschooling, I've found, it often doesn't work this way; sometimes the kids do get passionately interested in something but then, very often, they are able to mostly provide their own resource-finding and motivation; what really tends to happen at least in my home is that there are long times where "nothing" happens but then you have a conversation and find your kid has thought deeply about something that was completely off his radar only a short time before, or knows how to do something he didn't know a thing about previously. It's a completely different dynamic, at least in my experience, than you think it's going to be; much more like the preschool years than anything else I can think of).

When my kids were going to school I loved being supportive and sympathetic. I think that's why I felt the pull of a charter school. The school could make the assignments; I could support my kid and sympathize with him as he did them. This is basically my role with Sean now as he is off in high school.

The down side -- there always is a down side. When Liam was going to school and a year later, when he was enrolled in a "school at home" type curriculum, there were times he had to do things that seemed ridiculous to me. I feel like a liar telling the kid he "has to" do something that essentially, I know he DOESN'T have to do and that might even be counter-productive. Plus, the children really don't learn as well, in my home as least, using this lockstep method. Sean is doing adequately in school, for instance, but it certainly isn't lighting any intellectual fires in him at the moment.

Charlotte Mason (and CM-inspired programs like the ones I mentioned above) and Latin Centered Curriculum have the least deadweight of all the curriculums I've seen out there, at least in my scale of how education ought to look. That's why I always go back to those particular types of basics, when I do go back to basics.

Yet, there's always a down side. With high quality programs where it is all excellent books and excellent courses like Latin, I worry about turning the kids off on the very things I most want them to love. I think of my "hedge school" upbringing. There was school, which I hated. Then there was learning, which took place in hidden niches of the day where the tyrants could not come.... at recess and lunch, where I kept my nose continually buried in a book; at home after school, where I valiantly ignored my homework so I could keep up my personal intellectual life; and through the example of my parents who took continuing learning seriously (my dad woke up at 5 am so he could listen to language tapes and write for an hour or so before he went off to work; my mother got her degree while I was in junior high school).

Will literature and languages become the prison for my kids while they were the key out of the prison to me? I don't want that to happen; so far it hasn't seemed to. I am afraid that possibly I don't trust the excellence of the literature and language to do their own work in the children. I probably still think it's about ME too much; more than I should. Charlotte Mason spoke of this as the temptation of the earnest, well-meaning teacher type. That's where I am probably sometimes more hesitant about assigning things than I strictly need to be.

Just some thoughts on the journey right now; no conclusions!

The Heart of a Father and Teacher

Enjoy yourself as much as you like - if only you keep from sin. -- John Bosco.

St John Bosco is a particular friend of our family's. For one thing, my husband's birthday is today, on John Bosco's feast day. I don't think it's an accident! for in many ways my husband's way of doing things reminds me of the kind saint who evangelized through fun and laughter and games as much as by an honorable way of life and a kind of strict loving standard in his fathering that doesn't really need many words or overt disciplining tactics to be an excellent influence on his children.

(Happy Birthday Dear Husband)

There is some information about John Bosco's life at Catholic Culture.Pope John Paul II named Don Bosco "teacher and father to the young." This punctuates his life witness and teachings as recommendable to all teachers and parents.

He is the patron of schoolchildren and the young folk.

Son of Venerable Margaret Bosco. John's father died when the boy was 2 years old, and as soon as he was old enough to do odd jobs, he did so for extra money for his family. Bosco would go to circuses, fairs and carnivals, practice the tricks he saw magicians perform, and then present one-boy shows. After his performance, while he still had an audience of boys, he would repeat the homily he had heard earlier in church.

From this site about Blessed Luigi Guanella and St John Bosco:

"There I had the example of so many virtues, and the spiritual direction of Don Bosco who did so much good to all. Don Bosco's heart was like a magnet which drew all to himself; his words, few and well-pondered, were as lightning flashes to the mind. My eternal gratitude to Don Bosco and his works."

From this Life of St John Bosco

The greatest heritage that Don Bosco left the Church was his "preventive system" for the education of youth. When asked for the secret of his success, which transformed big institutions into a family of love, he answered with three words: reason, religion and kindness. When reasoning is used instead of threats, when God is the housemaster and when there is no fear but rather love, the end result is a true family.

A letter written by John Bosco near the end of his life described his attitude towards the boys from the streets he provided for:

Let us place ourselves in their service. Let us be ashamed to assume an attitude of superiority. Let us not rule over them except for the purpose of serving them better.

This was the method that Jesus used with the apostles. He put up with their ignorance and roughness and even their infidelity. He treated sinners with a kindness and affection that caused some to be shocked, others to be scandalised, and still others to hope for God’s mercy. And so he bade us to be gentle and humble of heart.

They are our sons, and so in correcting their mistakes we must lay aside all anger and restrain it so firmly that it is extinguished entirely.

There must be no hostility in our minds, no contempt in our eyes, no insult on our lips. We must use mercy for the present and have hope for the future, as is fitting for true fathers who are eager for real correction and improvement.

In serious matters it is better to beg God humbly than to send forth a flood of words that will only offend the listeners and have no effect on those who are guilty.

There are more details about John Bosco's method of Preventive Discipline in this pdf.
And here is another pdf, an article by Katherine O'Brien-Johnston -- Christlike Discipline.

And more here from the Salesians -- how a saint corrected children (another interesting connection -- that one of my heroes, St Francis de Sales, was the inspiration for St John Bosco in his gentle, loving and high-expecting style of guidance)

This saint of the day site about Bosco quotes GK Chesterton in reference to education:

“Every education teaches a philosophy; if not by dogma then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere. Every part of that education has a connection with every other part. If it does not all combine to convey some general view of life, it is not education at all” (G.K. Chesterton, The Common Man).

Finally, we have a little book around the house called The Life of Dominic Savio. It is a biography, BY St John Bosco, ABOUT one of the boys in his school, who is also now a canonized saint. So it is a saint's life written by a saint, which makes it unusual. Here is an online version of the book. The book made an impression on my oldest son, so much so that Dominic Savio is his confirmation patron. (And St Francis de Sales is my second-born son's confirmation patron).

God of mercy, You called Saint John Bosco to be a father and teacher of the young. Grant that inspired by his ardent charity we may serve You alone and never tire of bringing others to Your Kingdom.

St John Bosco, pray for us!

ETA: There is a good article about John Bosco at Castle of the Immaculate

Literacy and the Old Fashioned Ways

Andrea Chen was one of the first people I "met" on the internet back in 1998. First I found her site Catholic Scholars Online and it was a jumping-off point for finding a bunch of other cyber-treasures. Slightly later I joined the site owner's Catholic Classical e-list, and later still she turned the moderatorship over to me. A little while after that, she got involved in a project of starting this Mercy Academy which offers a learning style evaluation and then helps you choose curriculum accordingly. I used to be jealous because she always seemed to have access to really cool old books and resources even in the old days before Google's great public domain book repository. Anyway, that's all a long way of saying that I like this bit from Mercy Academy's Course of Study descriptions:

“It is to be kept in mind at all times that children in the First Grade cannot study; they want something to do.” Phonics and sight words were learned separately from the books used for reading practice. The children were taught phonics skills in brief, concentrated drills throughout the day. The drills included flash cards and short sentences read orally.

After two months students were given a book “...that was particularly appealing to that age.” This was not a phonetic reader as they were viewed as being dull and not appealing.. Students were given a list of new words to learn before each chapter so that “...upon reading the story they may not struggle in recognizing a word.”

Phonics skills were practiced separately from reading practice so that the child would view reading as a pleasant, interesting experience and not one connected with the struggle to sound out words. The student's attention was drawn to capitals and punctuation. Simple sentence writing was taught at various times throughout the week.

It's funny, because this seems absolutely true from the research I did last year. I googled Primers in the Google book deposit and glanced through many of them. I had always read that in the "olden days", reading was taught purely or mostly by phonetic methods and that was the reason that literacy was nearly universal in our nation. When we went to sight reading and whole language in the 70's, reading ability started to decline. For a rather mean-spirited article blaming this on whole language, read this Thank You Whole Language.

Well, there's no doubt there has been a steep decline in the past few decades, but there had to have been more to it than just phonics or lack of it. For instance, my mother told me she learned to read purely from sight. After a while she intuited the phonics for herself. I won't isolate the decade when my mother was in first grade, but you can probably figure out it had to have been earlier than the 60's or 70's.

She has told me something of how I learned to read because she was impressed at how quickly I was able to read well using this program at the public schools. It was a balance of phonics and sight words, probably similar to the conventional method of today.

From the fascinating and extensive Don Potter page which is devoted to the pursuit of intensive phonics you can find many, many downloadable resources and I've looked through most of them. Almost all of them taught using a mixture of sight and sound approaches.

I have no doubt that "analytical phonics" are of great value for gaining depth in reading skills. I think it is no accident that most successful readers have either an intuitive or an instructed understanding of phonics (and further than that, of root words, since so many of our more advanced words come from Greek or Latin roots).

But I don't think it can be said that strict phonetic methods are the only way to teach reading. .... or that phonics alone is even the traditional approach. Susannah Wesley taught her children to read by first teaching them the alphabet when they were age 5, then starting them on Genesis 1:1 with her help. The children simply progressed through the Bible a bit at a time until they were reading. I have no doubt that she discussed phonetics as she went, because that is what I would have done, and she was much more eminently practical than I was.

Charlotte Mason used a somewhat similar approach, only with nursery rhymes. The children were taught to "see" the whole word and recognize how it looked during "reading" lessons, and then in "spelling" lessons they were taught the phonetic reasoning behind the words. Here are more details.

From what I have learned from reading lots of primers and turn of the century "reading methods", many teachers taught much as it describes in the Mercy Academy snippet. They had "reading lessons" where the aim was interesting material and some preparation so the children didn't get bogged down in sounding out. Then they would have isolated phonics drills as a separate lesson. Harriette Treadwell's Primary Reading and Literature is one example of this approach.

Paddy learned to read by the Atticus Finch method. I don't think he can remember a time when he wasn't reading a bit. Presently he is at probably a 2nd or early 3rd grade level. On the other hand, he still prefers to listen and follow my finger on the page. I tried some phonetic readers but he disliked them because the stories were boring. I think I shall have him read bits and pieces of whatever he is reading and perhaps use the words he misses as the basis of short phonics lessons at a different occasion.

Aidan seems to be following a Montessori approach. With his appreciation of the concrete, he falls in love with words as entities. He doesn't readily generalize outwards -- he's known forever the sounds of the letters, and he recognizes and can spell lots of words, but knowing how to read DOG does not help him with HOG and FOG and LOG because those words aren't friends yet. This has ALWAYS been his pattern -- he has to develop an intimacy with something before he learns it -- and I have to do it his way and show him what's out there and give him lots of tools, like letter magnets and cards games, so that he can practice whenever he wants.

some quotes on the object of education

Just a tiny bit more about education's proper end:

"Although we often succeed in teaching our pupils 'subjects,' we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning." Dorothy Sayers.

“The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.” Robert Hutchins

“Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.” Robert Hutchins

it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs. Aristotle

Newman's Ideas of Paideia

This article from the files, called Athens in the Mid-19th Century, is part of a book available online, Between Athens and Berlin: The Theological Education Debate, written by one David Kelsey who is apparently a professor at Yale Divinity School. The theological education debate is not of too much interest to me at present, but I think I printed out the chapter because it dealt with John Cardinal Newman and his book Idea of a University. The chapter summary is as follows:

This chapter present a case study of a mid-nineteenth-century version of the "Athens" type of theological education that was highly honored, at least verbally, in some mid-twentieth-century discussions of higher education generally, in order to draw attention to ways in which the material modifications it introduced have proved to be problematic.

Briefly, Kelsey summarizes the context and subject matter of Newman's important series of discourses. He does this quite well, it seems to me, so that part of it was interesting reading. From there he tries to make the point that Newman's idea of "paideia", or the university education as "formative", while valuable to us as a sort of commentary on past times, is "theologically problematic" and at the same time a break from classical notions of paideia AND outdated. This part seemed ultimately unconvincing to me, though it raises some interesting issues, and I'll try to explain where I see the problem. Just the thing for a Sunday afternoon while I share leftover Christmas-stocking Skittles with whoever happens to pass by the laptop.

Kelsey writes:

... Newman’s lectures are instructive in a cautionary kind of way. Newman’s modifications of the "Athens" type are theologically problematic. His social assumptions, his view of human rationality, and his vision of the fulfilled human life are so alien to North American culture in the late twentieth century that they may help to distance us from our own assumptions about social values, human rationality, and the fulfilled life. At the same time, his historical and cultural distance from us may help to highlight features of the "Athens" type that are inherently worrisome when the type is adopted by specifically theological education.

The content of Dr Kelsey's criticism seems to have two main threads. One is that Newman broke with the traditional, classic notion of paideia as a fostering of virtue:

Newman explains the overarching goal of teaching by reference to those who are taught, not by reference to what is taught. By this move he embraces paideia as the model of excellence in schooling. However, it is a modified paideia because his view of human rationality is different from the view classically assumed by paideia. The goal of teaching "is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence"....

Newman’s notion of intellectual excellence is analogous to a traditional understanding of moral excellence as "virtue." But it is only analogous, not identical. Here he departs from the classical paideia model for which, as we said, cultivation of the mind’s excellence was identical with coming to an intuitive grasp of the Good. It involved a conversion of the person. Intellectual and moral excellence are one..

This is interesting to me for two reasons.

One is that Kelsey never really explains why, if Newman did break from classical notions in distinguishing intellectual excellence from moral excellence, it is theologically a problem. Surely the common tradition that Christians share tells us that:

For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.... so, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand....I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members (Romans 7)

Surely, even throwing out the Christian tradition, it is apparent just from normal life experience that moral goodness and intellectual excellence are not identical to each other; that cultivating the intellect does not directly lead to cultivation of character, nor is moral excellence always found in the best educated or the most intellectually gifted (in Idea of a University, Newman discusses this topic at length -- I don't have space to write it out in this post, but it is surprising that Kelsey brushes over it without apparent notice).

I know that to the ancients, paideia was meant to foster "arete" in a larger sense -- a word meaning "excellence" which incorporated all human forms of excellence -- virtue, rational capacity and physical health and athleticism. However, from what I understand "paideia" in this sense was a larger topic than "how a university ought to be set up." It incorporated everything that goes into the formation of youth. I'm not even sure Newman uses the word paideia in his discourses; in fact, I'm pretty sure he does not. So to bring up the term in its general meaning and then use that to critique Newman's work as a departure from its general meaning seems roughly analogous to criticizing my homeschool because it does not have a full-fledged agricultural program like our local high school does.

Also, since the two concepts (of moral excellence and intellectual excellence) are capable of distinction-- in other words, they may overlap but are not identical sets -- it follows that making the distinction can be allowed even though the two may contribute in different ways to a bigger whole. (Newman goes into this in more detail and I hope to blog more about it a bit in future, but for right now I'm just writing out the general point).

Kelsey writes:

It was central to paideia that the cultivation of human reason would, contrary to Newman, inherently yield not merely the "gentleman" but the good person. What is questionable in Newman’s proposal is the view of human personhood that underlies the content of his theory of teaching.

This seems to be the other main area of criticism.... that Newman has a parochial idea of what education is meant to accomplish. Newman, Kelsey thinks, conflates the product of university education with a fine English gentleman. In this, Kelsey's view of what the ancients meant by "the good person" seems a trifle over-simplified. Even I know that the Greeks, when talking about the philosopher's calling, were talking about a very specific class -- free, Greek-born male. Their notion of paideia in this respect is quite as limited as Kelsey thinks Newman's is.

Kelsey goes on to discuss the qualities of a gentleman that Newman describes in a famous passage (I put the passage under the body of this post, too, in case you don't want to link-surf) . This is his criticism in part:

It is troubling that these values that mark the excellence of a gentleman turn out also to be the virtues marking intellectual excellence. The identification of the virtues that mark intellectual excellence ought to be warranted, not by the accidents of socio-economic status that privilege a few, but by a picture of human rationality that applies to all persons. That is exactly what Newman claims to do. ..... But why the remarkable coincidence that makes this way of identifying intellectual virtue so troublingly like ideological justification of the values of a cultural elite established by prevailing socioeconomic power arrangements?

Kelsey does admit that it is unfair (anachronistic is the term he uses) to reach back in time to judge a person's thinking by today's standards. To me, this seems patronizing. Remember that Newman was giving his lectures in Catholic Ireland where the bishops were trying to decide on the scope and ends of a Catholic university which they were proposing to bring into being. Newman was not trying to lecture on a Utopia where women, for instance, would take their place in the halls of academe. He was speaking to an actual situation. But he was laying down principles that would apply to a wider extent in theory than they actually did, at that time, in actuality.

The link on the Gentleman I mentioned above says it this way:

Taken in isolation, Newman's descriptive definition, which appears an exemplary idealization of the British gentleman, appears a standard, unsurprising presentation of a sociopolitical ideal clearly related to specific class interest. In context, however, his statement immediately appears more complex, since he does not address those with political or even economic power. In fact, his intended audience of Irish Catholics were doubly disenfranchised as members of a colonized people and a despised, only recently permitted religion.

In addition, as David J. DeLaura points out, for Newman, "the insuperable defect of humanistic culture," appears in the limitations of the gentleman, who has 'no means for transcending the limits of the natural man (p. 238).'"

The last point was actually the one I noticed very clearly when I read Newman's description of the gentleman in context. I had never read the whole thing before, just the excerpted passage, and I had never realized that to a certain extent the description of a gentleman is the description, almost the critique, of the limits of the cultivation of human intellect in itself.

Such are some of the lineaments of the ethical character, which the cultivated intellect will form, apart from religious principle. They are seen within the pale of the Church and without it, in holy men, and in profligate; they form the beau-ideal of the world; they partly assist and partly distort the development of the Catholic. They may subserve the education of a St. Francis de Sales or a Cardinal Pole; they may be the limits of the contemplation of a Shaftesbury or a Gibbon. Basil and Julian were fellow-students at the schools of Athens; and one became the Saint and Doctor of the Church, the other her scoffing and relentless foe.

Why this view, even granting that it really is a departure from classical notions of the role of human reason, is "theologically problematic" to any Christian, really perplexes me. Surely St Paul, who with all his education and intellectual training and sense of moral responsibility, held the coats for those who stoned St Stephen, would heartily come down on Newman's side of the fence -- that intellectual education does not and cannot stand in for the religious life in a human person?

Oh, and why am I bothering to write this out? Well, because it's fun ;-) and also because reading the article did motivate me to read further through The Idea of a University than I ever have before, and after reading it I am even more of a Cardinal Newman fan than I was after reading Apologia pro Sua Vita. I wish I understood him better than I do, but I did not have the kind of education he recommends, unfortunately (more about his recommended kind of education some other time). Since I wanted to blog about Newman's idea of education and I don't really have enough knowledge to do it in a scholarly way, tackling a Question is an easier way to do it than just skimming superficially over the top with no specific focus.
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(Passage by Newman on the ideal gentlemen is below)

It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them. The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast; — all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets every thing for the best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain, because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blunder. [From The Idea of a University, 1852]

Highlights

Since I'm still having trouble putting two thoughts together in writing -- a combination of starting the school year, plus a mild case of the blues, plus trying to catch up on political issues in time for November, plus some kind of blog identity crisis -- I thought I would try to just start writing and see what happened. You know what happened last time. But maybe this time it will go better.

(and Lissla? I am going to email probably tomorrow! Just in case you don't read through all this!)

Some links:

On the Necessity of Long Sentences
from Quiddity. It reminded me of what Mary Daly says about diagramming sentences. She says more in her Whole Book of Diagrams. ... to the effect that most people nowadays aren't able to read sentences with clauses or sentences with more than 12 words, because we have not grown up either learning Latin OR reading the kind of syntactically complex vernacular prose (and poetry) of earlier centuries. Dr Vavra says something similar. Syntax is essentially logic. The object of teaching grammar is teaching understanding. Textbooks, for instance, often use extremely simple syntax in order to get content across; I forget where I read it, but it is possible that this defeats the purpose by emphasizing content at the expense of the more sophisticated thinking frameworks that are encouraged by more sophisticated sentence structures.

Morningside Family on Cradles of Eminence. I am reading this right now after getting the title from Laura's blog so it's nice to follow her thoughts on it as I read. I don't know if I'll be able to finish the book before I have to give it back to the library. I keep reading a bit and then stopping to think, and as you see above, thinking is not going particularly well right now. So I may have to re-request it some time in the future to read the rest.

Educational Apples and Oranges -- from The Common Room. Since my 15 year old is going to school this year -- the first family school experience (besides college) since my oldest three went to parochial school way back in their primary years, I have a chance to compare bit by bit. Conclusion? it's just different. The way they do things is of necessity different from the way we do things, and vice versa. My son's school does welcome parental involvement, but it has to be a different sort of involvement than what we take for granted in the homeschool.

Dawdling and Dreaming as Educational Pursuits -- and maybe this helps explain why homeschooling is different. When a kid gets on the schoolbus just after 7 am, comes home on the late bus at 6 pm and still has homework to do, there is just not that much time for notable educational pursuits in the dawdling and dreaming department. I managed to accomplish these two D's while occupying space in a school building, though -- you can do it if you're determined enough ;-).

Actually, this goes back a bit to what Laura wrote about Cradles of Eminence. One notable trait in the eminent people, besides their often strong and determinedly unconventional families, was their lack of success in conventional education. You all know how Edison was called a dunce and how Einstein did poorly in his schools. The list can be multiplied. Schools can apparently play a toughening-by-adversity role though. People are stronger than the constrictions in their lives. The worst kind of servitude is mental, I guess -- like the story of the elephants I read in a recent book, that can be held in one place by a slender rope on a stake. So maybe those daydreaming, under-achieving kids in school, or even the kid balking a bit against the homeschool routine, are helping themselves developmentally in a way hard to reproduce by any other means.

Finally, Harmony Art Mom, a blog I just found because of Katie at CM, Children and Lots of Grace, has a post on Albert Bierstadt: My Painter of Light. I don't think I can make it connect to anything else in this post, but I totally agree with her take on Bierstadt. My daughter does too. We live in the area that Bierstadt often painted, and it really REALLY does look like that sometimes.

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."

Argument for an Integrated Curriculum

In Norms and Nobility, David Hicks writes:

"In framing my proposal for a unified curriculum, I have asked myself: How does a scholar's mind work? ....A scholarly mind is characterized by an ability to make connections, to visualize the relatedness of sundry facts, ideas, and concepts. The scholer's mind works like a person laboring over a jigsaw puzzle, grouping pieces by pattern, image, and color, whilee retaining in the mind an outline of the whole picture. The scholar derives his exitement and motivation at first from snapping discrete pieces together and, in time, from seeing the image of the whole puzzle begin to emerge. His excitement, as well as his chances for completeing the puzzle, however, depend on his being given a sufficient number of pieces from the same puzzle.

.... The measured unfolding of history is an ideal vehicle for providing this insight into the connectedness of knowledge's parts and for encouraging the student to perform creative acts of scholarship at any early age. History embraces the whole of knowledge, as well as the student himself, but its vastness need not frighten or overawe the novice. At the beginning, it can be treated, as it was by the ancients, as mythology: the same questions can be asked of Churchill as of Tolkien. Being full of discrete puzzles comprising pieces to ever larger puzzles, history affords an almost immediate opportunity for the student to exercise his or her incipient ability to make connections.

Because the student himself is a part of it, the study of history lends itself to normative inquiry, bridging in exciting and ennobling stories the hiatus beween knowledge and responsibility. No subject deserving of praise as excellent in form or in content is excluded from the study of history, and no curriculum framed in history should fail to form a quick, intuitive, scholarly mind.

There is more in the chapter in this strain, along with specific suggestions for a curriculum for the middle and high schools. I thought it was interesting because though I tend towards using language as the heart of my curriculum, I can see his point about history as an integrative pursuit. As a devotee of etymology, I don't think the two -- language and history -- can be easily separated, anyway, so perhaps the serious pursuit of one will tend to pull in the other.

I think David Hicks' curriculum must have influenced Ambleside's.

Subsidiarity and Homeschooling

Dr Thursday has written a blogg on How Teaching is Tied to Subsidiarity. Check it out!

From the post: Positive and Negative descriptions of subsidiarity:

Negative Form: It is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of right order for a larger and higher organization to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies.
[Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno 5]

Positive Form: A community of a higher order ... should support a community of a lower order in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good. [John Paul II, Centesimus Annus 48]

Power of Attention

Etymology of attention:

"to direct one's mind or energies," from O.Fr. atendre "to expect, wait for, pay attention," from L. attendere "give heed to," lit. "to stretch toward," from ad- "to" + tendere "stretch" (see tenet).

The notion is of "stretching" one's mind toward something.

Maritain writes:

For St. Thomas, knowing consists neither in receiving an impression nor in producing an image; it is something much more intimate and much more profound. To know is to become; to become the non-I. Does this therefore mean to lose one's being and to be absorbed in things? .... That is certainly not Thomistic intellection. Furthermore, no type of material union or transformation can attain to the degree of union which exists between the knower and the known. If I lost my being in something else, in order to be united with it, I would not become that other being; it and I together would make a composite, a tertium quid, instead of the knower's becoming the known itself. The union of the knower and the known is thus a true and genuine unity; they are more one than matter and form joined together.

It seems to me that attention is sort of the linking between the knower and the thing known.... the way that the subject reaches out towards the object of his study. Charlotte Mason says that attention is not a faculty:

Attention is not a faculty at all, though I believe it is worth more than all the so-called faculties put together; this, at any rate, is true, that no talent, no genius, is worth much without the power of attention; and this is the power which makes men or women successful in life. (I talk like a book without scruple, because you know my light is borrowed; Professor Weissall is our luminary.) "Attention is no more than this––the power of giving your mind to what you are about. (Vol 5)

This makes it sound like attention is a power (a potentiality) that can be more or less fully actuated by training or at least exercise. It is distinctly human because it is a person's will that inclines him to attend to something, though Charlotte Mason thinks that like all acts of the will it is perfected by habit.

Games and Grades

I liked this (from Rational Mathematics Education) firstly because DH designs games for a living; secondly, because that's a very philosophical description of a mystery; third, because of the commentary on the "school" approach to learning. It actually reminds me a bit of what I've been reading recently in the Charlotte Mason books about habits of real learning, which often don't operate quite as showily or neatly as various academic tricks sometimes do.

First, an analogy: Games are to puzzles as mysteries are to secrets.

Second, a claim: The more you know about a mystery, the more mysterious it becomes. The more you know about a secret, the less secret it becomes.

.......Schools tend to pose problems to students in the form of puzzles far more than in the form of games. This can result in students being taught to think that there is an answer to every question, a solution to every problem. There is an endless array of secrets that others know and you don’t. When students leave school they frequently find that problems in the “real world” tend not to have “once and for all” solutions. Many problems seem to have no solution at all. People create problems themselves and solve problems created by others. They begin to think in terms of strategies for coping with their problems, strategies that serve their ends but can be expected to conflict with other people’s goals. Therefore a puzzle-based education might not prepare people for life after school as well as a game-based education might.

He goes on:

There are practical alternatives to the puzzle approach, alternatives that encourage people to reflect upon, cope with, and even enjoy mysteries. That games are analogous to mysteries does seem to be the case insofar as progress towards higher and higher levels of game playing proves to bring greater and more confusing challenges. “Solutions” that worked at one level are exposed quickly as solutions that were only relevant to the prior situation. This follows whether the game is bridge, chess, football …

This made me think about how things that don't seem necessarily like "learning" in a schooly sense, around this particular house, often seem to have a long-term seed-planting effect which is a bit of a mystery to me. I think the puzzle-maker sets up the puzzle to control the outcome, while the game-maker sets it up to let the player have at least a hand in the outcome. Puzzles are fun, but they can only be solved one way; while games vary according to the dynamics of the game and the players.

Raising Princes, not Dauphins

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right? (Aristotle, Ethics)

Leonie's good things about kids is nice to read along with The Thinking Mother's thoughts on Kindergarchy. I had a bit of a bad reaction to reading the Joseph Epstein article on the kid-centered society, and it was summed up by vere loqui's brief comment on the article. that, "he does not critically examine some of the potential drawbacks of his own parents child-rearing philosophy".

In general, I dislike those either/or scenarios. The alternative to the rule of the child, it appears from reading Epstein's article, is to basically go on with one's own adult life and let your kids alone. Really? Is that the best we can do? Epstein writes:

Born into the middle class in the Middle West, growing up I did not know any married woman who worked. So the mothers I am talking about here did not put a five- or six-year separation between the birth of their kids for economic reasons, or because it gave them more time to devote to their first-born children, or any other reason I can think of other than their own damn convenience. They did it because--insensitive, selfish, appalling really to contemplate--it was easier not to have two children under four years old to worry about at once; it made more sense to them not to have to deal with two or more needy greedy little children simultaneously. Let one go off to school, then we shall think of having another--much easier for everyone all around. Or so I believe thinking on the matter went.

He goes on to describe in more detail the milieu in which he grew up, in a basically similar vein. His point seems to be that the children were actually better off under this sort of regime, selfish as it was; that serious adults don't lock themselves in a primary colored Sesame-Street world; that child-centric parenting ironically does a disservice to the children themselves. OK, I can see that. The children who grew up knowing that they were not the center of the universe were better off, because they didn't have to learn the hard way when they grew up that everyone has an equal claim to "center of the universe" or worse, never learn it at all.

Epstein writes of his encounter with the grown kindergarchs in the university:

Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.

I think my problem with this is that he is stating a condition of human development as a philosophical conclusion. The nature of a human is to thrive not in isolation, like Narcissus, but with respect to his duties to other people. True enough. But if a child grows up to think that human "significance" is measured by achievement, well, then, we are likely to end up back in the same kindergarchic state in a generation or two.

The reason for that is that children are not incidental to society or to a family, however indirectly helpful it might be to raise them that way. Imagine a perfect society. Now imagine it with no kids. Perfect or not, it is dead. The perfection of a society depends on transmission.

The kindergarchic parents nowadays seem to recognize, to their credit, that "achievement" is meaningless if it does not include and in fact prioritize transmission. How can you possibly define "achievement" where children are incidental accessories? In success in playing bridge? Success in the workplace? Success in a transformative medical breakthrough? All sterile, in themselves. See Aristotle's words, at the top. These are means, not ends.

Where the kindergarchic parents go wrong is that "child-raising" becomes the new achievement. The standards and techniques used in bridge-playing and in the workplace are applied to young Johny, whose upbringing is researched, maneuvered, manipulated, hedged. Johny becomes a product, sufficient unto himself. Society is his playground and feeding territory.

The solution, though, is not to relegate children to the place of a purse or decoration in the adult life, or to stake an exclusive claim to narcissism as adult territory, a luxury to be afforded only to those who have delayed their gratification for a few years or staked their "achievement" bet and are now getting their payoff.

Children ARE significant, and human significance does not depend upon achievement. It does not even depend upon potential for achievement. If you walk through a pediatric hospital floor you see that it is so. Once I saw a businessman, obviously prosperous, berating nurses at the top of his voice, spilling out ugliness in all directions. Another time I saw a child, unable to walk or speak, but with a human soul shining unmistakably in her enormous sky blue eyes. You would have to redefine significance as correlated with achievement very radically in order to make proper sense of those two scenes.

The secret of raising children is the same as the secret for perfecting oneself.

that the Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue. (Aristotle, Ethics)

This comprehends Epstein's point that "significance" is dependent upon exercise in conformity with excellence, without putting the burden solely on children, tying excellence in with some contingent definition of achievement, or exempting adults from their duty to nurture and transmit what Chesterton called "the soul of the society" through education and formation in virtue.

Epstein's subtitle was "raising children as dauphins" -- very nice description of the ultimate wrongheadedness of raising little rulers that enjoy royal prerogatives but aren't really expected to rule anything, least of all themselves. I would suggest that we are to raise our children as apprentice "kings", through brotherhood with Him who became one of us, and that this is a strenuous calling but precisely because it involves such inherently high significance; not because children are insignificant.