Letters from Pemberley

Billy Ward was what the Scotch tenderly call an “innocent,” for though thirteen years old, he was like a child of six. He had been an unusually intelligent boy, and his father had hurried him on too fast, giving him all sorts of hard lessons, keeping at his books six hours a day, and expecting him to absorb knowledge as a Strasburg goose does the food crammed down its throat. He thought he was doing his duty, but he nearly killed the boy, for a fever gave the poor child a sad holiday, and when he recovered, the overtasked brain gave out, and Billy’s mind was like a slate over which a sponge has passed, leaving it blank. (Little Men, Ch. 2)

Now, we don’t go in much for brain-fever caused by over-studying today, but Alcott certainly feels strongly about the grammar stage as it was misapplied in the 19th century!  Little Men is quite an interesting book when read as a declaration of educational philosophy.  Only…how did the Plumfield pupils manage to spend so stinking much time outside observing nature while living in Massachusetts?  Were winters there in the 1870s just a lot milder than Pennsylvania winters in the 2010s?  I think an Alcott/Mason approach to education would be way easier in, say, Malibu than the Northeast!

I’ve been thinking a lot about education lately, and good talks with the Gaetanos this week reminded me to pull up Dorothy Sayers’ “Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning” to remind myself why I’m into the classical model.  Of course everyone should read the whole thing, but here are some selected quotes that resonate with me:

Is not the great defect of our education today–a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned–that 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…In certain of the arts and crafts, we sometimes do precisely this–requiring a child to “express himself” in paint before we teach him how to handle the colors and the brush. There is a school of thought which believes this to be the right way to set about the job. But observe: it is not the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a new medium.

(To me, the biggest problem with child-led education is that the child doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.  He may be able to get some pleasant sounds out of a piano, but he’ll never be able to play Chopin etudes without learning to play scales, read music, etc.  I find that most children I’ve been around, especially my son, quickly grow frustrated with “expressing themselves” without having been given the tools to do it properly.)

The whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning, before he began to apply them to “subjects” at all. First, he learned a language; not just how to order a meal in a foreign language, but the structure of a language, and hence of language itself–what it was, how it was put together, and how it worked. Secondly, he learned how to use language; how to define his terms and make accurate statements; how to construct an argument and how to detect fallacies in argument. Dialectic, that is to say, embraced Logic and Disputation. Thirdly, he learned to express himself in language– how to say what he had to say elegantly and persuasively.

(She explains in detail how this process works in each subject area, but as a writing teacher, I find this application to language so true of my own experience.)

Taken by and large, the great difference of emphasis between the two conceptions holds good: modern education concentrates on “teaching subjects,” leaving the method of thinking, arguing, and expressing one’s conclusions to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along; mediaeval education concentrated on first forging and learning to handle the tools of learning, using whatever subject came handy as a piece of material on which to doodle until the use of the tool became second nature.

(It’s really a fundamentally different way of approaching education…)

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

(Sayers wrote this in 1947; how much more relevent are her observations in 2011!)

I recognize three states of development. These, in a rough-and- ready fashion, I will call the Poll-Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic–the latter coinciding, approximately, with the onset of puberty. The Poll-Parrot stage is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult and, on the whole, little relished. At this age, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things.

(What parent of a toddler or preschooler does not recognize this poll-parrot description?  Or are my kids the only ones who go around reciting random things in a sing-song voice?)

The modern tendency is to try and force rational explanations on a child’s mind at too early an age. Intelligent questions, spontaneously asked, should, of course, receive an immediate and rational answer; but it is a great mistake to suppose that a child cannot readily enjoy and remember things that are beyond his power to analyze–particularly if those things have a strong imaginative appeal (as, for example, “Kubla Kahn”), an attractive jingle (like some of the memory-rhymes for Latin genders), or an abundance of rich, resounding polysyllables (like the Quicunque vult).

(The classical model is not accelerated education; rather, it focuses on teaching children how to learn with developmentally-appropriate steps.)