Utrum Siestae Necessae sunt pro salute...

and cute Paddy pic, too.

Like Butter over Bread, or Pancakes

This is pretty much my idea of Heaven.

Therefore, one of the biggest thrills in my life was when we moved back to the United States from Switzerland -- I had just graduated from high school. And I found the University of Alaska library. So many books. I could research Anything. In. The. Universe. Practically.

I felt like that again when I discovered the internet less than a decade ago. The Gutenberg storehouse alone was like university stacks. And then there was Google. Truly, there is much to be grateful about. The university library, and more, is right at my fingertips.

All the same, this was interesting to think about (HT: Katie)

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Reminds me a bit of this post by Kim at Starry Sky Ranch -- To Allow Silence:

We gobble down information without the necessary time to really assimilate. Slowly down our own speech helps to combat that frenzy and make even abundant times meaningful versus dreadful.

So this has been the challenge - to be deliberate and discerning. What kinds of input do we really want or need? Which add meaning and blessing and which fill up our lives with tension? Are we taking the time to truly understand what we read and hear? Are we allowing silence so we can let those words grow in us? That all takes time. There is no way around that part. We can read faster, type faster, but we can't contemplate any faster. You can't force that. You must allow silence if you wish to live deliberately.

Thomas Aquinas has Sixteen Precepts of Knowledge:

1. Advance up the streams, and do not all at once plunge into the deep: such is my caution, and your lesson. I bid you to

2. Be chary of speech,

3. Slower still in frequenting places of talk:

4. Embrace purity of conscience,

5. Pray unceasingly,

6. Love to keep to your cell if you wish to be admitted into the mystic wine-cellar.

7. Show yourself genial to all:

8. Pay no heed to other folk's affairs:

9. Be not over-familiar with any person, because over-much familiarity breeds contempt, and gives occasion to distraction from study.

10. On no account mix yourself up with the sayings and the doings of persons in the outside world.

11. Most of all, avoid all useless visits, but try rather to walk constantly in the footsteps of good and holy men.

12. Never mind from whom the lesson drops, but

13. Commit to memory whatever useful advice may be uttered.

14. Give an account to yourself of your every word and action:

15. See that you understand what you hear, and never leave a doubt unsolved:

16. Lay up all you can in the storehouse of memory, as he does who wants to fill a vase. 'Seek not the things which are beyond thee'.

Following these ways, you will your whole life long put forth and bear both branches and fruit in the vineyard of the Lord of Sabaoth. If you take these words to heart, you will attain your desire."

You can see how the internet, wonderful as it is, can work against those things. It can work TOWARDS them, too, so there is a balance, but Multa is not the same as Multum, and the former can diminish the latter.

The Meaning and Means of Habit Formation

When pondering what habits to form and how, I found this article by an Australian Catholic philosopher, AM Woodbury. It is called Natural Means of Character Formation and here is a list of the key points:

A. DEVELOPMENT OF BODILY HEALTH

B. CONTROL OF MOODS

C. REFINEMENT OF SENSIBILITY THROUGH ARTS AND POLITE SOCIAL INTERCOURSE:

D. AVOIDANCE OF CONTINUAL BUSTLE AND DISSIPATION

E. SELF-DISCIPLINE BY ACTS OF SELF-DENIAL

F. GOOD COMPANIONSHIP

G. FRIENDSHIP WITH THE GOOD

H. 'LIBERAL EDUCATION!

I. CULTIVATION OF MORALLY ELEVATED INTERESTS

J. PRACTICE OF THE MORAL VIRTUES:

While looking through these means I could see some that coincided pretty directly with some of the methods CM used -- such as a foundation of bodily health (like her, he says that intervention of God's grace can supply what is lacking in this, but we should do our part too). Also, a liberal education, good companionship (she warned several times against bad company) and control of moods.

I can see several things we have done that seemed to have helped build good habits without much need for formal training, and several more things that I could do better or more intentionally now that they are brought to my attention.

While I'm talking about character I like this article by Laura Berquist called Character Formation. It is based on the book by David Isaacs by the same title, and gives a nice chart of the virtues and the ones particularly to be focused upon at certain ages.

For example, obedience and order and sincerity are the virtues to focus on in the ages from four to seven. Encourage them to obey out of love.

I could write a whole post about that, because I think it's important to understand what obedience is about at that age.

As to what forming character has to do with training in habits -- to me, the answer is "everything."

Mortimer Adler says in Habits of Mind and Character:

Turning now to the moral virtues, and associating the one intellectual virtue of prudence with them because it is inseparable from them, we must ask what they are good habits of doing. The answer is that they are good habits of desiring, as contrasted with good habits of knowing. Desiring has for its objects (1) the goods we aim at -- the ends or goals we seek, and (2) the means we choose in order to attain those ends or goals. Our desiring may also consist in (1) acts of will on our part, or (2) emotional impulses or drives. It may combine both at the same time. When it does, both mind and body are involved. Since desire is the ultimate root and spring of all action, as understanding, knowing, or thinking by themselves are not, the moral virtues, as good habits of desiring, give rise to morally good conduct. The moral vices, as habits of desiring, result in morally bad conduct.

Moral virtues, and also vices, are like the arts or skills. They are habits formed by repeated acts, morally good acts or morally bad acts. A single good or bad action does not give an individual a morally good or bad character, does not make him or her a virtuous or vicious person. Not even a few such acts do so. Only many repeated acts, all aiming in the same direction and carried out in the same way, will have that effect.

Charlotte Mason often talks about how important it is that the child WILLS to do right. Mechanical habits -- the little habits that make life and social communication go more smoothly -- are useful but not the essence of what a "habit" is. Father Hardon writes in The Meaning of Virtue in Saint Thomas:

St. Thomas defines virtue as "a good habit bearing on activity," or a good faculty-habit . Generic to the concept of virtue, then, is the element of habit, which stands in a special relation to the soul, whether in the natural order or elevated to the divine life by grace.

The soul is the remote principle or source of all our activities; faculties are the proximate sources built into the soul by nature; habits are still more immediate principles added to the faculties either by personal endeavor or by supernatural infusion from God. Consequently the soul helps the man, faculties help the soul, and habits help the faculties.

Habits reside in the faculties as stable dispositions or "hard to eradicate" qualities that dispose the faculties to act in a certain way, depending on the type of habit. If the habit is acquired it gives the faculty power to act with ease and facility; if it is infused, it procures not readiness in supernatural activity, but the very activity itself. Natural or acquired habits result from repeated acts of some one kind; they give not the power to act, but the power to act readily and with dexterity. Thus in the natural order, the faculty without the habit is simple power to act, the faculty with the habit is power to act with perfection. Since custom is parent to habit, it is called second nature. Faculty is like first nature, and habit the second.

Not every habit is a virtue, but only one that so improves and perfects a rational faculty as to incline it towards good -- good for the faculty, for the will and for the whole man in terms of his ultimate destiny.

There is a broad sense in which we can speak of the natural dispositions of any of our powers as innate virtues, but this is a loose rendering and leads to confusion. More properly the infused virtues should be contrasted with the acquired habits, in which the autonomous will of the individual plays the dominant role. My consistent effort to concentrate on a given course of action, repeating the process over a long period of time and in spite of obstacles, gradually develops a tendency to perform the action spontaneously and almost without reflection, yet to a degree of perfection that someone else without the virtue cannot duplicate.

That is very philosophical, so I'll paraphrase it in simpler terms, no doubt losing something in the translation. Habits are qualities we acquire as opposed to those we are born with. Habits are good insofar as they improve and perfect our reason. Custom gives rise to habits -- an act done once is not a habit, but one repeated many times until it becomes "second nature" is a habit.

I notice that Fr Hardon (and Jesuit Catholics in general) often talk about "faculties", a term Charlotte Mason dislikes. I have googled and found nothing much to explain her dislike.

Here are the traditional Catholic faculties -- I do not think these were the ones she disliked, because she uses similar terms herself. Here's another list -- it gets sort of complicated and perhaps this was her objection -- that we start dividing up and compartmentalizing different traits and trying to strengthen this one here, that one there -- sort of like cognitive skills are compartmentalized nowadays -- at the expense of the integrity of the child's personality.

More on Personality.

Some thoughts from Maritain concerning the reverence due to personality. It relates to Charlotte Mason's thoughts on the sacredness of personality. (If you wonder why I am suddenly blogging about this subject, I am trying to follow this reading schedule along with the CMSeries group)

In answer to our question, then, "What is man?" we may give the Greek, Jewish and Christian idea of man; man as an animal endowed with reason, whose supreme dignity is in the intellect; and man as a free individual in personal relation with God, whose supreme righteousness consists in voluntarily obeying the law of God....

From the philosophical point of view alone the main concept to be stressed here is the concept of human personality. Man is a person, who holds himself in hand by his intelligence and his will. There is in him a richer and nobler existence; he has spiritual super-existence through knowledge and love....

I should like to observe now that a kind of animal training, which deals with psychophysical habits, conditioned reflexes, sense-memorization, etc., undoubtedly plays its part in education: it refers to material individuality, or to what is not specifically human in man. But education is not animal training. The education of man is a human awakening.

Thus what is of most importance in educators themselves is a respect for the soul as well as for the body of the child, the sense of his innermost essence and his internal resources, and a sort of sacred and loving attention to his mysterious identity, which is a hidden thing that no techniques can reach. And what matters most in the educational enterprise is a perpetual appeal to intelligence and free will in the young.

...thus the prime goal of education is the conquest of internal and spiritual freedom to be achieved by the individual person, or, in other words, his liberation through knowledge and wisdom, good will, and love.

So, to paraphrase:

• The child (man) is a person.
• His supreme dignity is in the intellect and will.
• Training has its place but is not the same as education.
• Education should appeal to a child's reason and will.

Jacques Maritain is a Thomist, and his view is the traditional Catholic one. In this way, I see Charlotte Mason reclaiming a classical Christian understanding of personality which has tended to be distorted in our skeptical day and age.

While I was looking for something else, I found this old set of newsletters by Karen Glass called Magnaminity -- about CM's educational philosophy and classical education.

Quasi-What?

I just can't help putting these on here. ... from this summary of Aquinas's treatise on prudence. I love little lists like this and remember, prudence or phronesis is supposed to be my meditation for the year ;-)

Question 49: The quasi-integral parts of prudence

• 49,1: Memory: memory is the essential aspect of experience, and there are various ways, noted in the reply to obj. 2, in which we can perfect and improve our memory. They include the use of sensible mnemonic devices, ordering of things to be remembered, taking positive steps not to forget important things, and constant reflection on what needs to be remembered. Pieper points out how easy it is for us, through wilful misremembering, to corrupt our deliberation.
  
  
• 49,2: Understanding of first principles: Prudence presupposes the cognition of practical first principles, known as synderesis. Further--and this is what is especially relevant here--it involves the sort of insight into particular ends that delivers up possible singular premises for pieces of practical reasoning with respect to a particular end.
  
  
• 49,3: Docility: Docility is our openness to the advice and teaching of others, especially regarding the demonstrated and undemonstrated assertions and opinions of the wise regarding both the universal and the particular principles of practical reasoning.
  
  
• 49,4: Shrewdness (solertia): If docility involves our willingness to listen to others, shrewdness involves the ability to size up a situation quickly on one's own and to see which of the possibly relevant practical syllogisms is the most appropriate. Aristotle identifies shrewdness (eustochia) as the ability to identify quickly the most appropriate middle term. Once again, this trait presupposes a good dose of moral rectitude to begin with if it is to operate accurately.
  
  
• 49,5: Discursive reasoning: This is the ability to research and compare alternative possibilities and to reason well from premises to conclusions in practical matters.
  
  
• 49,6: Foresight: Prudence is forward-looking and so essentially involves the ability to order means to ends that are to be realized in the future--which is foresight. Pieper calls this a capacity to estimate whether a particular action will lead to the realization of our goal. Hence, foresight is the principal integral part of prudence, to which the others are ordered and in the context of which they play their role.
  
  
• 49,7: Circumspection: This is the ability to take all relevant circumstances into account, since otherwise what seem to be a good end and a good means can be vitiated by factors that have not been considered. Note St. Thomas's example: In a certain set of circumstances, showing signs of affection in order to better one's relation with another can produce the opposite effect of what one intends, not because of any defect in the end or means themselves, but because of circumstances that affect the way in which the signs of affection are taken by the other. So to be circumspect is to be on the lookout for ways in which a contemplated means to an end might turn out not to be a means to that end at all.
  
  
• 49,8: Caution: Prudence requires that that we take care, when choosing good means to a good end, to avoid or to mitigate or at least to anticipate those evils that will likely result from a good act that we contemplate doing. So it is by caution that we take steps, if necessary, to avoid such evils. So to be cautious is to be on the lookout especially for the bad consequences of a contemplated action.

Hey, I really need to ponder all this. Even one alone looks like a good day for me. All together....? Maybe I'll try to ponder one at a time.

Here's another article on Prudence.

Here's something on Memory

The first of these thing is that he should find certain things [or mental images] that match the things he wants to remember, but this should not be at all usual: because we marvel more at things which are unusual, and the soul is held by such things more and with greater force; whence it happens that we remember more those things that we see in childhood. Therefore the devising of such likenesses and images is necessary, because simple and spiritual intentions fall out of the soul very easily if they are not linked to some physical likenesses: because human cognition is more powerful with regard to sensible things.

Second, it is necessary that a man should arrange in an orderly way the things that he wishes to hold by memory under his consideration, so that from one remembered thing he may progress easily to another.

Third, a man should apply interest and emotional energy to the things he wants to remember: because the more deeply something is impressed upon the soul, the less does it drop out of the soul.

Hence Tullius also says, in his Rhetoric (book 3, ch. 19), that meditations keep memory: because, as it says in the same book: custom or habit is like nature: hence the things that we understand many times we also recall quickly, as if moving from one thing to another in some sort of natural order.

In turn this reminds me of a book in my closet called Memorize the Faith!
It uses the #1 in the list above, in combination with a method of loci -- arranging the things to be memorized around an imagined physical location. My visual/spatial sense seems to work a bit differently. When I used the images suggested in the book I had to spend way too much mental effort remembering what images match up with what words and what place in the "mansion" they were in. I think for me the unconnectedness of it short-circuited my desire to have the "big picture" in mind.

I think for me it might work better to have the words written in a unique way in my mind -- Envy could be written in green with a snake winding its tail around for the "Y" -- etc. I can see it now. And I like the way Aquinas talks about arranging things in an orderly way so the mind walks from one to another -- you can do it visually/spatially as with the loci method, but you can also do it by train of thought, it seems. I really like #3 and #4.

agere sequitur esse

Liam was describing to me his stay at the Benedictine monastery and the balance between ora et labora, study and meals, active and contemplative.

I liked the way Thomas Aquinas and Education, described Aquinas's view of teaching, which puts into words the satisfaction I get from homeschooling:

"For teaching and scholarship constituted Thomas' way, as a Dominican, of fulfilling the common Christian calling to love God by serving others. So it is hardly surprising to find him more than once expounding a thesis drawing upon Christian spirituality's familiar distinction between the contemplate life of hermitage or cloister and the active life followed by most people.

Teaching, says Thomas, is a nice blend of both styles. For the teacher's energies converge upon two objects: the material that he teaches and the students to whom he teaches it. Consequently, the verb docere, like the English "to teach", takes a double accusative -- which should resolve any forced antinomy between a pupil-centered and a curriculum-centered school.

Insofar as the teacher must, by his own study, master the discipline he would teach, his life is contemplative. Yet it is even more properly called active, Thomas declared, since this study is ultimately directed toward helping one's neighbor and the active life consists chiefly in a man's relations with his neighbor. Indeed, this blend of study and teaching is better than mere contemplation, just as to illuminate is better than simply to shine."

Also, this:

THe Thomistic philosophical perspective on man also underscores the inadequacy of thinking about education only in terms of intellectual development. For it reminds us that man must be seen as a font of action since to exist is to act: Agere sequitur esse. Even a stone continuously repels other objects from pre-empting the space it occupies. But to say that man is intelligent is to say that he is capable of free action, because he can know alternatives that are opposed but not predetermining. At life's countless crossroads we are obliged to decide which of the possible turnings we should reasonably take. The ethical diminesion that is the dimension of choice is, therefore, the setting of life and education."

I think in part this expresses how many ways there might be to give a child an education, and how a true education will have its fruit in the ability of the child to become a reflective, responsible adult. I have been thinking about this but it will have to wait because I had an allergic reaction last night and my face is puffy and my mind is hazed with Benadryl.

Life continues to be more disconnected than I like it to be. Every day we seem to have to go somewhere -- from an orthodontist appointment, to more testing at the school, to physical therapy twice a week, to a regular GI clinic. Then there are there more fun trips, like a combine for my football playing son, a possible visit to Liam at college, and homeschool Stations of the Cross. But except for the local school meetings, everything is 20 to 60 miles away one way.

Plus we all have colds, I am looking forward to when the last of the snow melts and spring is really here, and we can go on some nature walks and NOT spend the afternoon in a car!

The Teacher is like a Midwife

Wonderful title, hmm? I bet it pulled you right in : )

Speaking of titles, I am reading a really really good book with a rather unattractive one: A Humane Psychology of Education. For me, the title has associations of animal shelters, psychotherapist couches and behaviorism, but the book itself is almost the opposite. "Humane" here, within the pages of the book refers to the unique characteristics of our race which is in the material world but not of it; Psychology refers to the study of the personality, that is, what makes the human a person rather than simply one of a species; and Education is in regard to developing (or bringing out, in Socrate's metaphor of a midwife, that unique human personality.

The book is out of print; it was written in 1936 by Jaime Castiello, SJ, PhD. He writes:

..Thought is essentially the abstraction of meaning....Getting at the meaning of things is as personal an operation as digesting food or getting well from an illness. no one can digest or get well or see the meaning of a thing for another. The duty of the teacher, therefore, is to place the student in such a mental situation that he will be able to abstract the meaning for himself....

An obvious and most wholesome conclusion of this doctrine is that the teacherr is not and simply cannot be the efficient cause of any learning. The efficient causes of the learning are on the one hand, reality, on the other hand, thought. The teacher is and must remain the instrument. ....The teacher, therefore, is the go-between, the "midwife", the stimulator who quickens the inborn urges of the mind."

How this reminds me of what Charlotte Mason said so often! paraphrased at the Common Room, here.

She talks in one of her books about how impertinent, dangerous, and interfering it would be to constantly be inspecting the child's digestive system to make sure it was working properly, or to try to separate the functions and strengthen each one individually.

Instead, we give the child healthy, nourishing food, and trust the digestive process to take care of itself. In the same way, she suggests we give the children healthy,
nourishing, generous material for him to set his mind upon, and let the faculty development take care of itself- in, again, 'normal' children. She acknowledges some children will need special help, just as some children need special assistance to learn to walk.

I think she also believed that the balance was skewed and was trying to correct it- that the student was the one who needed to be doing the mental work, but with the apperception mass nonsense floating around, the teachers ended up doing all the work and making all the connections for the student- about as helpful as moving a normal child's legs for him to help him walk. They needed to let go of his mental legs and give him a wide and generous place to walk- if that makes any sense at all.

There are all kinds of echoes of Charlotte Mason in the book; I think more on the "great minds think alike" note; I don't think that Castiello necessarily read CM, or vice versa, though the book was published by Sheed & Ward, a Catholic publisher in Britain during the same time frame as Charlotte Mason lived. I think that at the very least, Miss Mason and Dr Castiello read some of the same educational theorists. More on that in another post.

On a similar note, about the teacher's role -- Studeo -- A Little Schall (and Maritain)

Love2Learn Mom quotes James Schall:

He (Maritain) considered education to be an art, perhaps in its own way the finest of arts because its object, when perfected, was the most beautiful of all the earthly realities. The closest analogy to teaching, Maritain thought, was medicine. Neither medicine nor education created its respective subject matter or what it was to be healthy or complete once it existed. Each sought to lead or guide a body or soul to what it ought to be when it functions normally. Once in its normal status, the healthy body or the healthy soul should be left alone to do its myriad things that healthy minds and bodies do. Given that the body was healthy, it - that is, the human incarnate person informing it - simply lived, did the things that healthy human beings do.

And one more link that fits in here: Educational Theory of Thomas Aquinas -- a summary of Aquinas's work De Magistro:

Knowledge must result from the activity of the pupil's own mind. Along with acquiring knowledge with the aid of the teacher, he can also acquire knowledge by applying his mind by which he knows the first principles of all knowledge. The teacher often points out issues which the pupil had not thought of and shows the relationship between concepts which the pupil would not have noticed without the teacher pointing them out. Aquinas stressesthat teachers are only for helping the student know. The student must digest the knowledge. Otherwise, it is like pouring water into a sieve.

not water in a sieve

Knowledge must result from the activity of the pupil's own mind. Along with acquiring knowledge with the aid of the teacher, he can also acquire knowledge by applying his mind by which he knows the first principles of all knowledge. The teacher often points out issues which the pupil had not thought of and shows the relationship between concepts which the pupil would not have noticed without the teacher pointing them out. Aquinas stresses that teachers are only for helping the student know. The student must digest the knowledge. Otherwise, it is like pouring water into a sieve.

Educational Theory of Thomas Aquinas