On Fairy Tales

I've been doing some research on fairy tales and came across this helpful site.  It has a page of great quotations.  Here are a couple:

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."

"When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking."

~Albert Einstein~

"Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!"

Charles Lamb to Samuel Coleridge 

Sir Philip Sydney on the End of Education

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) wrote a spirited argument in favor of poesie (poetry, stories, fables, dialogues) as the greatest teacher of the virtues in his Defence of Poesie.  The work also has much to say about classical education and its proper end.  Here are a few quotes to whet you appetite for the rest of this great book:

On the goal of education:
"the finall end [of education] is, to lead and draw us to as high a perfection, as our degenerate soules made worse by their clay-lodgings, can be capable of."

"...with the end of well doing, and not of well knowing onely. Even as the saddler's next ende is to make a good saddle, but his further ende, to serve a nobler facultie, which is horsmanship, so the horseman's to souldiery: and the souldier not only to have the skill, but to performe the practise of a souldier. So that the ending end of all earthly learning, being verteous action."

"I affirm, that no learning is so good as that which teacheth and moveth to vertue, and that none can both teach and move thereto so much as Poetry, then is the conclusion manifest that incke and paper cannot be to a more profitable purpose employed."

On Aesop's Fables:
"Whereof Esops Tales give good proofe, whose prettie Allegories stealing under the formall Tales of beastes, makes many more beastly than beasts: begin to hear the sound of vertue from those dumbe speakers."

Contemplative Imagination

"Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, thousands can think for one who can see." - John Ruskin

Laura Fry Kready in her 1916 book,  A Study in Fairy Tales, describes "contemplative imagination" as the power with which "the child realizes the meaning of particular tales.  He learns: that Cinderella means that goodness brings its own reward; that Three Pigs means that the wise build with care and caution, with foresight; that Star Dollars means compassion for others and kindness to them; and that Red Riding Hood means obedience."  The rest of her discussion sounds a lot like poetic knowledge.  The entire book is available free here.

The Gardener

One of my criteria for determining the value of a children's book is whether the adults enjoy it as much as the children.  Tonight's read-aloud was especially beautiful and enjoyed by young and old alike.

The King's English

If you had any doubt, this video demonstrates the powerful influence of the KJV on the English language.

How the Irish Saved What?

I don't intend in any way to disparage Mr. Cahill's book, which I haven't read, or the work of great men like St. Patrick, but I have heard it told that without the Irish monks and monasteries, all classical knowledge would have been lost.  I'm trying to square this with the existence of Byzantium and the schools and monasteries of Constantinople which existed at least from 425A.D. until 1453A.D..  Byzantines then brought ancient manuscripts into Europe to help begin the Renaissance.  Maybe I'm missing something, but could it be that the Byzantines saved civilization?

University of Constantinople 425-1453A.D.

Overcoming Psychological Torture with Geometry?

I can’t recommend a book more highly than the Interviews, Homilies, and Talks of Father George Calciu.  Father Calciu was sent to a communist re-education prison in Romania in 1948 where he suffered unspeakable torture.  He survived and was released from prison in 1965.  Then in 1978 he courageously preached a series of sermons to the youth of Romania which he knew would lead to his arrest.  This time he was sentenced to ten years in prison – much of it in solitary confinement.  The whole detailed story is amazing; filled with courage and grace. 

What does this have to do with geometry?  Father Calciu was having difficulty remembering his prayers (after days of interrogations), and when he tried to write them in chalk in his cell, his guards would beat him.  Here is what he says during the difficult period of interrogation at the beginning of his second stint in prison:

“Then I started to do something else.  Pascal was a French philosopher and a mathematician.  In his childhood he loved mathematics very much, but his father wanted to make him a lawyer and confiscated all his books of mathematics.  At twelve years of age he remade in his mind the geometry of Euclid.  So I said, I am fifty years old; I can remake the geometry that I learned in high school.  I started with a point: what can I do from this point?  Two points, a line; three points a triangle.  Thus I started to remember geometry.  This put an order in my mind!  I was oblidged to think logically, to imagine, and this ordered my mind completely…  There was great purity in this; it was like a prayer.  This order – not with three but with two dimensions – made in my mind a spirituality.  Since there was no flesh in this, no third dimension, there was nothing outside of the spirit in my mind.  So I succeeded in remembering geometry in two dimensions.  The profit of this was very great for me, not because I remembered geometry – I have forgotten it now – but because it put my mind in order.  I was able to think logically, and was able to go out of the passions – the psychological passions. 

As a result, I started to remember all the prayers.  Before I was arrested I learned the Liturgy by heart… So I was able to recite the Liturgy in the cell.”  

For an introduction to Father Calciu's life go here.

Where the Devils Are

"I will tell you a story.  In a certain village there was a tavern.  In my time no woman would enter the tavern, only the men.  It was full of men drinking and cursing and fighting and so on.  In this tavern there was a single devil.  He had nothing to do; he was sleeping, because the men sinned without his help.  But in the village there was a very poor house with a widow and six children, and she was praying.  Around the house there were legions of devils."

(From Father George Calciu - Interviews, Homilies, and Talks)

How Jane Austen Taught Me to Be a Man by William Deresiewicz

(from the article found here)

Humiliation, I realized, was exactly what I needed, too. Our egos, Austen was teaching me, prevent us from owning up to our many errors and shortcomings, and so our egos must be broken down. "Humiliation," after all, comes from "humility." It humbles us, makes us properly humble.

I had come to graduate school with a very different idea about what it means to get an education. Growing up, I had learned to equate being educated with knowing things, knowing facts. And the purpose of knowing things, in a strangely circular way, was simply to "be" educated, to be able to pride yourself on being a "man of culture" (and feel superior to those who weren't).

Knowledge, culture, ego: That was pretty much the formula. But now I was learning a new idea—about education, but also about being a man. You didn't have to be certain, Austen taught me, to be strong, and you didn't have to dominate people to earn their respect. Real men were not afraid to admit that they still had things to learn—even from a woman.

Toward A Definition of Classical Education

It has been almost 14 years since I first encountered the idea of classical education, primarily through the recorded lectures of George Grant (thank you Dr. Grant!), Douglas Wilson's book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning and Dorothy Sayers' essay The Lost Tools of Learning.  I found these ideas so compelling that I almost immediately became involved in the start up of a classical school (Coram Deo Academy) where I taught for nine years with a wonderful group of faculty and students.

Over the past few years I have read and listened to many critiques and corrections to the Dorothy Sayer's essay and for the most part they are constructive and show that the classical education movement is beginning to mature.  I can remember giving many talks on classical education as "three stages and a language" to use James Daniels' terminology.  Classical education WAS the grammar, logic, and rhetoric of each subject, a course in logic, a course in Rhetoric, and studies in the Latin language. My own personal study and experience has shown me both the great successes and some of the weaknesses to this approach.  I also have come to see that many of our schools and educational approaches don't really look like the schools and approaches of the past, the Ancient and Middle Ages particularly.

Again and again I find myself returning to David V. Hicks book Norms & Nobility.  He seems to get to the essence of classical education, though with humility, "the questions and concerns of the older writers were once the focus of education, an education we might rather loosely refer to as classical.  My purpose in writing this book is to offer a personal interpretation of classical education."

Hicks argues that "education at every level reflects our primary assumptions about the nature of man."  Classical education takes this question as its heart.  It is concerned with what Hicks calls the "Ideal Type".

"The Ideal Type was at once immutable yet ever in need of refinement.  It was the metaphorical incarnation of wisdom and truth, empowered by education to metamorphose the diligent student.  Both an elaborate dogma and a man, it defied comparison with any man, yet all men discovered themselves in it.  The Ideal Type embraced Gilgamesh's love for Enkidu and David's love for Jonathan, Odysseus risking his precarious safety to hurl gratuitous insults at the Cyclops, and Achilles deciding at the dawn of human history to die at the supreme moment of glory rather than to live through the long, wizening, connubial years.  What made these stories valuable was not their historical authenticity or experimental demonstrability, but their allegiance to a pattern of truth.  Whatever fit this pattern was retained and added to the education of future generations.  What fell outside this pattern was judged superfluous to the education of the young."

Classical education is therefore prescriptive and not descriptive of man.  Modern educational theories are descriptive of man - man's nature is a given, one only needs to look at the average man.  Modern education enables man to "get along in the world" and cope.  Classical education is education into the Ideal Type - by understanding and imitation.  It is education in humility, wisdom, and virtue.  Hicks states in the prologue "indeed, it is my intention in this book to ponder the difference between the man who was educated to believe himself to be a little lower than the angels and the man whose education permits him to ignore both angels and God, to avoid knowledge not of the five senses, and to presume mastery of nature but not over himself."  Self-mastery, virtue, wisdom, truth and humility in pursuit of the Ideal Type - toward a definition of classical education.

The Heart and the Intellect

It is common for Orthodox Christians to distinguish between the intellect and the nous (or heart).  The nous is the center of man's spirituality and the primary organ of communion with God.  The intellect is the seat of our rational capabilities.  So, the following combinations are possible:

1. A person with little intellectual attainment but the highest level of noetic perfection 
2. Or, a person of the highest intellectual attainments who has fallen to the lowest level of noetic imperfection
3. One can also attain both the highest level of intellectual attainment and noetic perfection
4. Or, one may have the lowest intellectual accomplishments and the hardening of the heart

If this taxonomy is correct, what conclusions should be drawn for the home school or the private school?         

My Principal Concern

"My principal [concern] was that in our age, because of the great increase of knowledge, we had forgotten  what it means to exist, and what inwardness signifies."
(as quoted in Dialogue, Catalogue, Monologue by Craig M. Gay)

Soren Kierkegaard

A Parable on Bickering

I saw two caves, one of which gave off an echo, while the other was dumb. Many curious children visited the former, incessantly engaged in shouting matches with the cave. But visitors quickly left the other cave, because it gave them no echo in return.
(from Prayers by the Lake by Nikolai Velimirovic)

Discovering a Hidden Treasure - MOMO

Over at the Circe Institute blog, there was an interview posted with Jeffrey Overstreet in which he mentions an overlooked children's story by Michael Ende called Momo.  I love finding hidden treasures, so I went off to look for a copy of the book.  It is out of print in the USA, but thanks to Amazon.com I was able to get an inexpensive copy from the UK in a few days.

Momo is the story of a little girl with a special gift and her battle with the forces of modern efficiency.  My wife and I enjoyed the story as much as our children did.  It reminded me just a little bit of another of my favorites, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  

Momo

Norms & Nobility Quote

“It is the mark of an ineffective teacher to answer a question before it has been asked.”