Quote for the day: T.S. Eliot on getting older

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.

 ...Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

T.S. Eliot, from "East Coker" in Four Quartets

From the archives: Knowledge and nonsense

First posted April 2006

My friend the DHM at The Common Room quoted Charlotte Mason today:

"There is absolutely no avenue to knowledge but knowledge itself, and the schools must begin, not by qualifying the mind to deal with knowledge, but by affording all the best books."--Towards a Philosophy of Education (Vol. 6), pg. 347

Did she mean the most serious books? The hardest books? The longest books?

Just before Miss Mason gets to that point in the chapter, she has been describing the sad case of two young men who had a half-baked education (in her view), who "laboured indefatigably" at making sense of the books they picked up as young adults, but who admitted themselves that "You and I go at a subject all wrong!" 

What was one of the books they couldn't make sense of? Alice in Wonderland.

Deeply impressed he bought the book as soon as he returned to London and read it earnestly. To his horror he saw no sense in it. Then it struck him that it might be meant as nonsense and he had another try, then he concluded that it was rather funny but he remained disappointed.

Here, again, is another evidence of the limitations attending an utter absence of education. A cultivated sense of humour is a great factor in a joyous life, but these young men are without it. Perhaps the youth addicted to sports usually fails to appreciate delicate nonsense; sports are too strenuous to admit of a subtler, more airy kind of play....

So we have to give our children more than facts, more than vocabulary drills. Knowledge, yes...the DHM's post points that out well, along with the sad fact of our culture's anti-knowledge bent. But also another kind of knowing...an understanding of laughter and nonsense that goes beyond the usual nose-picking humor found in childrens' books. They need to meet characters like my aged Uncle Arly, sitting on a heap of barley...and the Humbug...and the White Knight, one of my favourite characters in any book. They need some silliness, some furry squirrel puppets (I promise we'll do a post about Dewey soon), some knock-knock jokes, some James Thurber, and eventually some Wodehouse and Chesterton. They need to let their brains learn to play and dance and jump around with all the wonderful connections that a sense of nonsense allows. They need some nonsense so they can understand inventiveness...and a mandatory credit in inventiveness and creativity will not substitute.

I found this posted on the Catholic Culture blog:

A friend said all this reminded him of the scene in The Chronicles of Narnia where Aslan (God) creates Narnia, including an odd little bird which, like all the animals, can talk. The bird says something ridiculous and all the other creatures laugh. Turning to Aslan, the bird says, “Oh, Aslan, have I made the first joke?” “No,” Aslan replies, “you are the first joke.” My friend says there is a moral here.

I think he's right.

Consider This makes it clear (book review)

I remember when homeschoolers were first reading Susan Schaeffer Macaulay's For the Children's Sake. It sounded nice, but we had to scratch hard for the how-to's. That led many of us to the newly-reprinted CM Series books, and we started to find out where the most useful bits were, in all those pages. We all seemed to be hollering for practical, concrete, and writers like Catherine Levison obliged with concise CM-made-easier books. How to do copywork and narration, what Charlotte Mason said about math. The operative verb seemed to be "use": we "used" Charlotte Mason.

In more recent years, it seems that the most common questions of CM methods, though still sometimes misapplied, are well-understood enough to allow CM discussions to return to the big picture, the philosophy. This is very welcome, especially for those who may not be actively homeschooling but who find more and more wisdom in Mason's writings. As I wrote here in a review of Laurie Bestvater's The Living Page (2013), talking about Charlotte Mason has become less homeschool-ish, more of a larger effort to value people and their families, homes and communities; a new understanding of why relationships matter, possibly because those things that were once taken for granted are now rare commodities. Susan Schaeffer Macaulay wrote regretfully about people seeing children just having fun playing outdoors together as unusual, families reading together as unheard of; that was thirty years ago, and things are worse than ever.

So when new CM books are published these days, they tend not to repeat the "user's manual" information; we seem to agree now that it's time to stop "using" Charlotte Mason and simply learn from her, as she learned from those who came before her. The Living Page discusses notebook keeping and the "blank page" philosophy in new ways. Karen Glass's book Consider This (2014) focuses on wisdom-in-action, examining a long classical tradition of character-centered education. The interesting thing is that all of this ends, like the best CM lessons, with the opportunity to do something about it: to find a blank book or, if need be, staple some pages together to write down favourite quotes; to sprout some seeds, to read a book, to look for loveliness. In a way, we're back to the ideals of happy family life described in For the Children's Sake. It's time now, and we need it more than ever.

If I were to make a word cloud of Karen's book, particularly the last, most hands-on chapters, I'd choose words like this: We need to begin with a life-giving, relational, synthetic (putting-together, making connections) kind of thinking and learning that begins with relationships, and involves delight, loveliness, wonder, enthusiasm, heroes. Much of that learning is going to be centered on names, words, language, books; books that make us want to know more, that show us that there is order in the universe, that truth exists and that we can know some of that truth, though we need the humility to see that we will never know all of it. We will incorporate analysis, picking-apart, facts and terminology, when they are useful and necessary, but the main focus, for most of the school years, will be synthesis.

In a way, you could skip the buildup to Karen's later chapters (but don't do that, the earlier part is interesting on its own); even stop worrying your way through Charlotte Mason's books, at least temporarily; and focus on what is indeed practical and concrete. Eat apples. Sprout seeds. Sail twigs. Read stories together. Narrate them back. Act kindly. Sing hymns and silly songs. Have courage. Learn to be a mensch.  It's not only that everything fits into something else, but everything you've tasted and touched and read fits into you.  Our learning is a gathering together. It is putting together and seeing wholeness before we try to take apart and analyze fragments. As parents and teachers, we need to provide a healthy learning environment, to offer ideals to strive for, to teach habits of right thinking (and right acting), and to allow children opportunities to think, to explore, and to act.

If that is classical, I'm in.

Start off your work week with some delightful leisure

In tribute to The Beehive's very important post On Leisure, Learning, and Large Rooms:

"You are, in short, blind, and should take a week or a month of delightful leisure during which you set aside all these lowly values that have enslaved you, open your eyes to honor and virtue, engage in a pleasant humanizing conversation with some truly wise people, and, well, repent of your miserable miserliness. Because the more actively you inflict your vision on education, the more damage you are doing.

"There is no education without leisure for the simple reason that education is a leisure activity. It requires all of the other values: controls, freedom, money, and honor. But it’s only true end is virtue for the simple reason that only virtue is big enough to rightly order the other goods. The wise man knows where and how to get honor, money, freedom, and controls, and he knows how to use them. Because he is not driven by them as by an unruly mob. Instead he governs them."

--from Leisure, Plato’s Republic, and American Education
Posted on Quiddity, December 9, 2008 by Andrew Kern