Speak Softly and Carry Nothing in Your Hands [Garden Memory Feb. 24, 2023]
Speak Softly and Carry Nothing in Your Hands [Garden Memory Feb. 24, 2023]
Restraint is Half the Battle
Dear Scriptor,
“Speak Softly and Carry Nothing in Your Hands” is one of my favorite letters from last year. It has a bit of everything & yet is cohesive all through. As you shall see when you read, I was then, on February 24, 2023, mapping out the path I still navigate, one I talked about recently and indeed almost exactly a year later, on February 23, 2023.
It is funny how much and yet how little changes year to year.
Last month, I went on a tear about the need for schools to eschew teaching higher math and advanced biological systems as if High School students were little scholars. I get uneasy after such rants, for, though I usually still agree with myself after wanting, I never make the allowances I ought, never give all the caveats I should. This is an inevitable weakness of even long-form writing (and at 4,000 words a pop, these newsletters are longform writing), but I do too little to correct it.
Advanced math and the functioning of a cell are part of the liberal arts, so why not teach them?
Simply because we don’t teach the foundational subjects well enough. An account I follow on Twitter, a woman who is a counselor at an elementary school in the South, said that many of her students don’t know what consonants and vowels are. Some can’t even spell their names. The crisis is deep, and though it is unlikely to fall so catastrophically on those of us who write or read letters like mine (or, rather, our children), the degradation affects us too.
So I’d like to introduce you all to another part of this garden, The Schoolroom. Like the Hortus Proprius, it will be one of our main sections. I mean to think through the problems of education not simply by way of stories, as I have done in The Courtyard and With Our Fathers, but in detailed argumentation with what reason I can muster. Having a place and a space to be direct, without a need to tie my argument to a specific story, will allow me to work through these ideas with greater delicacy. Thus I will present no more rants, except… I probably will.
For by nature and education, I am particularly susceptible to rants.
The Courtyard
Even before I went to law school, I’d been trained as a lawyer. I remember a pert middle class Catholic girl I dated in college once came with me to Seder at my cousins’ house. There was laughter and hugging as we entered and smiles and laughter as extended family caught up while my cousins assembled the Seder plate in the kitchen. And we were all jokes as we went through the Haggadah.
As soon as our last prayer had been said and the children had been loosed to find the Afikomen (and I’m sorry if this is making no sense to those of you who have never been to a Seder), the whole family descended into shouting. I remember distinctly one aunt raising herself half out of her chair to point a shaking finger at her nephew while yelling that he was ‘thoughtless and juvenile and too old to be so naïve’ because they disagreed over something to do with public schools.
While we shouted at high volume, I noticed my then-girlfriend slowly, slowly backing up, pushing her back high into her chair as if to fade away. My Uncle also noticed, so he gently got her attention and quietly asked, ‘Now what do you think about all this?’
Hours later, as we were leaving for the night, everyone was hugging and laughing and saying goodbye as if there had never been an argument in the world. Because the yelling had been (for my family) just part of the fun. As we left my cousins’ house, she turned to me and said, ‘I guess you aren’t that argumentative after all.’
On a visit to my best friend’s parents’ house half a decade later (and ago), some of their family was over. I can’t for the life of me remember what we were talking about, but it too got heated. At the end, as before, everyone was laughing and hugging and slowly heading to the door. My friend’s father said, ‘You know you’re with good friends and family if you’re shouting at each other and not having a fight.’
I used to think that the sentiment showed great virtue, an ego-lessness which manifested in not holding a grudge. And while that is a true virtue, it’s a virtue which stands in the shadow of a towering vice. There is no virtue in being contentious, tendentious, or loud in face of opposition. One need not yell to make his point. Interruption is rarely useful and never pleasing.
My natural and home-grown argumentativeness was nothing but exaggerated by my education. Both in school and at home, I grew up being invited to have an opinion on… well, just about everything. I was encouraged to reason ex nihil, as if reason were divinely granted into the minds of men.
Now, of course and in a way, it is. But men must have something to reason about, and that requires knowledge. In Charlotte Mason’s philosophy (from which mine borrows heavily), children must have ideas.
Or, to quote the inestimable (but impossible for me to read) Flannery O’Connor:
Flowerbeds
Maximilian Albert Josef Liebenwein was an Austrian book illustrator who reminds me a great deal of Arthur Rackham. They both have crisp and clean styles, with Mr. Liebenwein’s tending towards the Art Nouveau, and yet they both dealt in ancient, medieval, and eternal designs.
I once read an art critic argue Art Nouveau wasn’t a modernist movement. He said modernism was a wholesale abandonment of the fine arts’ patrimony but Art Nouveau partook of that inheritance freely. Without getting into a linguistic game about this, it’s clear that Art Nouveau is a different animal from contemporaneous movements like Expressionism and Cubism.
Here is a Liebenwein illustration; I don’t know its name. I found it floating about on Twitter, and if you do an image search for it, my retweet is one of the first that shows up as a source. So… maybe it isn’t even Liebenwein’s, though it sure looks like one of his. Enjoy.
The Schoolroom
One must dig down to bedrock. I usually assume that means we needs start with the simplest questions. The Schoolroom is for delineating my thoughts on classical homeschooling. But “classical homeschooling” or “homeschooling” or “traditional homeschool” or “Christian schooling” or “family schooling” are all phrases that throw us in the middle of the river. Where’s the source?
Separating off “homeschooling” from “institutional schooling” isn’t particularly helpful, though it is somewhat further upstream. To dive into a logic chopping exercise at this point would be to drown myself, but definitions are useful, if only to assure ourselves we’re all talking about the same thing. So, for those interested:
Homeschooling doesn’t mean my own studies at home, doesn’t mean adults taking remote college classes, doesn’t even mean children taking enrichment classes or supplementary tutoring, and again doesn’t even really have to do with the home (a parent who homeschools his children does not cease to do so when he takes them to the library). When I say “homeschool”, I mean a parent or tutor teaching a small number of mixed-age children generally of one family or a few intimate families, with the instructor remaining the instructor over several years and often the whole the education.
But, as I said, this is still downstream from the source. Homeschooling is a species of schooling generally. And schooling generally is not just for children, not just for colleges, not just for lectures, but for you and me and everyone. Every time we take on a new art or technique at work and are trained in how we’re to do it, we (to use a now no longer quite apt formulation) are schooled. So too when the neighbor comes over to show us how to make a particular carpentry cut for a new table or a particular dough combination for a new bread. Schooling is the semi-formilized transfer of knowledge from one person to another.
That definition satisfies at first glance but the more I look at it, the more uneasy I grow. When I assign an essay to a student, we engage in schooling and yet less than half of learning is anything like “knowledge transfer”. I might have to explain the assignment and correct his attempt when complete (both knowledge transfers), but the research and the writing are as equally times of learning, and in neither case is there any “semi-formalized transfer of knowledge”. And the writing isn’t even “from one person to another”. Yet it’s still schooling.
If we return to the carpentry and baking examples, we see the same pattern, the same weakness. So long as our neighbors are good teachers, they may explain what we are to do, but then they will allow us to attempt it, watching us to correct our mistakes or adjust our technique.
This is already how I teach my two-year-old. Whether putting on her clothes, doing the laundry, cutting carrots – whatever it is I’m allowing her to do, I watch her carefully, let her struggle through mistakes, and then correct those she cannot yet correct herself.
So… schooling really isn’t a “transfer of knowledge” and we are not yet at its source. Now we could keep proposing these definitions, but they would likely equally fall apart under sustained questioning (as Socrates taught us). So perhaps we can get there another way, by looking at what people actually say about modern schooling.
Anyone who says he’s going to homeschool his children will be familiar with the three generic criticisms – often expressed as ‘worries’. First, our worrier will worry that ‘while no doubt you can teach such-and-such better than most teachers, how about this-and-that?’ Said again, our homeschooling parent may know advanced math very well but be lost in history, or history might be his bailiwick but science is forever a mystery to him. Said a third time, the worry is for a well-rounded education.
Second, the worrier will worry about our children being always alone. The arguments here range from ‘children need to engage with the world unsupervised in order to learn how to handle a world which is unsupervised’ all the way to ‘children need other children in order to learn how to be children’. It’s sometimes simply phrased as, ‘I knew some homeschooled children before; they were very strange.’
Third, and especially if those appeals fail, the worrier will worry about the amount of time attending to our children’s education takes from us parents. ‘You say you never have enough time, and, you know, if you just put your children out to school…’; ‘Oh, when I had children I couldn’t have kept the house clean if I hadn’t put them in daycare’; ‘Just think – if they were at school, you could work twenty hours a week and still have so much time for side projects.’
In sum, there are three broad arguments for schooling as we understand it: 1. Academic, 2. Socialization, and 3. Babysitting. Next time I’ll start to take a look at all three in hopes an examination of them will lead us to the source of our education conundrum.
A Bench Under the Trees
“If You Want Fewer Stupid Politicians And Voters, Promote Good Reading” by Mark A. Signorelli
In this article, written about a month after the 2016 election, Mr. Signorelli argues our deteriorating discourse is the direct downstream effect not of ideological polarization but modern citizens’ inability to comprehend arguments made at length. He writes, “[T]he increasing viciousness of debate among our college students… is routinely regarded as the fruit of ideological fervor. But that fervor is a consequence itself of the inarticulateness and constricted views of these students. It is the immoderate rage that grows in souls not trained to habits of dialogue and reflection—habits nurtured through reading. The primary reason they are shouting is not because they are impassioned ideologues, but because they are not capable of doing anything else—certainly not capable of forming a tightly reasoned, lucidly expressed argument.”
His whole argument too well buttresses one I’ve made before for me to be a disinterested analyst of its quality. So head on over and read it on your own.
“The Betrayal of an English Hero” by Alexander Palacio
Have you noticed there are no Robin Hood movies about? In a world where they’ve made several Superman movies, seven or eight Spiderman movies with four actors, and six Batman movies with three actors plus about two-dozen animated or spinoff movies, Robin Hood is nowhere on the horizon. Well, Mr. Palacio believes he knows the reason.
“The disappearance of Robin Hood can be stated simply. In the last few decades, writers keep making one or two mistakes when writing Robin Hood. First, they take a grim, gritty, realistic approach to the tone of the story and characters. Second, they interpret Robin’s outlaw status to make him transgressive in a way that is opposed to the medieval social order itself. These approaches are not compatible with Robin Hood as he exists in his archetypal form. They violate the valid expectations people have for a Robin Hood story.”
A good article on theme and what it means to be faithful in franchise retellings.
“Episode 162: Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Horatius” from Critical Readings
This is the first podcast recommended in Hortus Scriptorius. I listen to many (too many) podcasts, and it’s a constant struggle to know to what I ought attend. So though I’ve become a Twitter “mutual” with one of the professors running this podcast, and though it bills itself in every way designed to excite my attention, I hadn’t listened to a single episode. This past week I remedied that, and Boy Howdy am I glad I did.
I once grabbed a random book of "Roman Lays" from a friend's (19th Century) house library and put my feet up at a coffee shop on a gloomy, spitting New England day. I found myself standing alongside Horatius at the Bridge. Impossible to put down until I'd finished, I felt as if an invisible hand kept my head bowed and my arms up.
And Critical Readings’s treatment is perfect; Professors Cooper and Keane do what professors ought, true exegesis. No cut-rate sociology here, just history and analysis to open the text to their listeners. Even where I knew the history they described, it often took me listening to them to connect it to the poem. And I often didn’t know the history besides.
Do enjoy.
The Amphitheater
The Main Squeeze is a funk band out of Indiana. When I’m in for a fix of modern music, I’ll often put on their covers. I will never be able to watch horror movies; they make me twitchy and furious. But I do understand why those who like them like them. It’s for the same reason people like the Blues and Soul, both of which I just adore. A good sad song just saps life’s venom and frustrations straight out of me.
So it is with The Main Squeeze’s rendition of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come”:
And, just in case your life has been deprived of the original, here's that too:
Reviso Courtyard et Peroratio
I recently finished rereading Emma, Jane Austen’s second- or third-best book (again, don’t @ me – and for the record Sense and Sensibility is the competition and Pride and Prejudice has none). Like all of Austen’s books, it’s a long contemplation about the line from Scripture: “By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive”. (Matthew 9:16.)
In particular, Emma is about Emma’s long struggle to know when to speak and when to keep quiet. All her mortification happens because of an excessively liberal tongue and all her correction comes from the reserved but penetrating speech of Mr. Knightly (and her own conscience, of course).
I too need to learn when to hold my tongue and when to speak, and how to speak.
In my New Year’s letter, I wrote:
“We come to the end of the year and my fifth newsletter. In these letters I’ve tried to balance scholarship, to the extent I engage in it, and reflections on writing generally as well as on education. I fear, though, that these letters sound rather too much like a diary and are rather too long besides.”
Ever towards the confidential and the personal have these letters strayed. As Valéry noted, omphaloskepsis is a weakness to which all humans are heir, and for those of us with a captive audience (a captive audience with multiple PhDs too! How special must I be!), the temptation is especially strong.
As my New Year’s letter says, Hortus Scriptorius aims to elaborate upon three topics: 1. Our cultural heritage generally, 2. Our literary heritage specifically, and 3. How to teach in a classical tradition. I shall endeavor to keep my eye on those three balls.
In the Introduction, I talked about those poor children (in spirit if not in purse) who are illiterate by almost any measure, but the truth is that none of us compare favorably with our ancestors. Even compared to an unschooled farmer during the Civil War era, we often know very little indeed. (Unsurprisingly but appropriately, Austen is good on this in Emma, with her character of Mr. Martin.)
There is no easy summation for what went wrong. The problem is at every level of the education, every level of culture, every level of politics, every level of religion, and every level of the family. To see what’s wrong and talk to someone who only knows our modern education system as it exists in all public and all-but-all private schools in this country is to try to converse in a virgin language. Which is what The Schoolroom aims to address.
But my greatest worry is that these letters go on too long. Partially this is a particular sickness of mine (I have never said five words where fifty would do), but it’s also a testament to how much I try to cover in each newsletter. So the simple expedient is to shrink them. But given that my writing style is decidedly set at this point, how can I use fewer words yet cover the same distance?
The same way I would eat the same amount without overeating at any one meal; I need to pace and space myself.
You might have noticed there was no Hortus Proprius in this letter. That’s because this was a Schoolroom letter. Next week (not in another fortnight but next week), I shall send another letter with a Hortus Proprius. As this letter is about three-thousand words, I hope each letter will be three-thousand words weekly instead of four- or five-thousand words fortnightly. (Editor’s Note: This did not work out as intended.)
And no, this is not just an excuse to write more, though I can’t quite blame you if you come away from this thinking so.
Piggybacking on last week’s question: if you could have any month of the year completely off, which would it be? Especially for those in cold climates, I can see an argument for January or March (February is too short), where one might be able to escape the deep chill. Would those around me like to have all of August instead of only part off so we could escape the baking heat?
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Until next we meet, I remain your fellow,
Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff