Education and government

Thinking about something I read yesterday:

No one will doubt that the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be moulded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy; and always the better the character, the better the government.

~Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII, 1
tr. Benjamin Jowett

"The citizen should be moulded to suit the form of government under which he lives."

"For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it."

If this is true, then, looking at our government schools, what kind of citizen is our government trying to produce, and what does that say about the kind of government we have? Looking at it in that light the situation is a lot more grim than I'd been thinking.

The lesser of two evils

I'm reading The Imitation of Christ right now and last night I came across something very interesting. In the Third Book, "On Internal Consolation," Thomas à Kempis has this to say "On Patient Wrestling Against Carnal Desires":

1. O Lord God, I see that patience is very necessary for me, for many things in this life do not happn as we would like.
I see well that whatever plans I make for my own peace, my life cannot be without some battle and sorrow....

2. If you say you are not able to to suffer so much, how then will you be able to suffer the fire of purgatory?
Of two evils we should always choose the lesser. Strive, then, on God's behalf to endure the little pains of this world, so that you may escape eternal torments in the world to come.

Leaving aside the issue of purgatory, Thomas is saying that it's far better to choose the "evil" of a hard struggle against sin in this life, rather than to suffer the evil of punishment for your sins in the next life.

Or, for us moms, facing the difficulty of training a toddler can be overwhelming at times, but how much better it is to face that struggle, that "evil," now rather than to put it off until the child is six or twelve or fifteen years old when disciplining him will require far more work and will yield scantier results.

That's very good counsel, and I wonder if The Imitation is the origin of that phrase. If so, its original meaning was nothing like the way it's used in modern politics.

Mummy Slept Late and Daddy Fixed Breakfast

~John Ciardi (1916-1986)

Daddy fixed the breakfast.
He made us each a waffle.
It looked like gravel pudding.
It tasted something awful.

“Ha, ha,” he said, “I’ll try again.
This time I’ll get it right.”
But what I got was in between
Bituminous and anthracite.

“A little too well done? Oh well,
I’ll have to start all over.”
That time what landed on my plate
Looked like a manhole cover.

I tried to cut it with a fork:
The fork gave off a spark.
I tried a knife and twisted it
Into a question mark.

I tried it with a hack-saw.
I tried it with a torch.
It didn’t even make a dent.
It didn’t even scorch.

The next time Dad gets breakfast
When Mommy’s sleeping late,
I think I’ll skip the waffles,
I’d sooner eat the plate!

I love this poem and woke up this morning thinking about it—but not because I woke up late and Daddy made awful waffles. Years ago we belonged to a church that had a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper cooked by the men, and we’ve carried that tradition into our family, so tonight Mike’ll make pancakes and eggs and sausages for us and they’ll be delicious because he’s a good cook.

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. Some time during the day I’ll take down the last of the Christmas lights in the house, which I keep up through the winter to brighten the short, dreary days, then in the evening we’ll go to our church’s service for the imposition of ashes. What Lenten traditions does your family keep?

"Four ultimate types"

Through all my own dreams, especially waking dreams, there run and caper and collide only four characters, who seem to sum up the four ultimate types of our existence. These four figures are: St. George and the Dragon, and the Princess offered to the Dragon, and the Princess’s father, who was (if I remember right) the King of Egypt. You have everything in those figures: active virtue destroying evil; passive virtue enduring evil; ignorance or convention permitting evil; and Evil. In these four figures also can be found the real and sane limits of toleration. I admire St. George for being sincere in his wish to save the Princess’s life, because it is an entirely good and healthy wish. I am ready to admire the Princess’s wish to be eaten by the Dragon as part of her religious duties; for the Princess is generous, if a little perverse. I am even ready to admire the sincerity of the silly old potentate of Egypt who gave up his daughter to a dragon because it had always been done in his set. But there is a limit, the ultimate limit of the universe, and I refuse to admire the dragon because he regarded the Princess with a sincere enthusiasm, and honestly believed that she would do him good.

– The Illustrated London News, 29 October 1910.

The latest offering from The Hebdomadal Chesterton, to which you should all be subscribed.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Chapter Five

(Follow the discussion of Anthony Esolen's book at Cindy’s blog.)

Method 4: Replace the Fairy Tale with Political Clichés and Fads or, Vote Early and Often

I must admit that while I appreciated the the comparisons of various stories Esolen made in this chapter, I don’t think he made his case at all. Like several other bloggers have mentioned, I was convinced before I began the chapter, so I’m going to write about why I’m convinced for the sake of those who may not believe that fairy tales are good for anything, or who may believe that Christians ought to avoid fairy tales and fantasy of any sort.

Before I do that though, I want to say that while I believe that parents ought to teach their children to be kind, patient, courageous, and so forth, I’m not making that case right now. Also, I do not think that virtue is the same thing as saving faith in Christ, and again, I’m not talking about the necessity for our children to have faith in Christ.

The importance of the imagination in the life of virtue

In his essay, “Men Without Chests,” C.S. Lewis says that

no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism…. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. (The Abolition of Man, pp. 24-25)

When a child reads a story he cares what happens to the characters. He’s frustrated with Lootie for not believing Irene’s story about her grandmother. He laughs when Curdie makes up silly rhymes to keep the cobs away, rejoices in his bravery, and worries (but not too much) when he is caught and imprisoned by them. He hates the goblins’ plans for Irene and rightly hopes they will be defeated and is glad when they finally are.

His interest in the characters engages his emotions, and that’s a big reason why it’s so important for parents to be careful what books their children read, and what movies they watch, during the formative years. The child’s taste in literature is being formed and this taste is a large part of the health of his soul, just as his taste in food is a large part of the health of his body.

St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. (p. 16)

When a child has been brought up on a diet of stories that encourage him to love what ought to be loved, to hate what ought to be hated, and everything in between, he is being trained in virtue. So, the best way to show our children what virtue looks like and how it behaves, and to encourage them to be virtuous themselves, is through the imagination, by means of stories.

Fairy tales as a means of instilling virtue

In Tending the Heart of Virtue, Vigen Guroian says:

The great fairy tales and fantasy stories capture the meaning of morality through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil, where characters must make difficult choices between right and wrong or heroes and villains contest the very fate of imaginary worlds. The great stories avoid didacticism and supply the imagination with important symbolic information about the shape of our world and appropriate responses to its inhabitants. (pp. 17-18)

Building on Lewis, Guroian says that

[m]ere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture the virtues. It might even backfire, especially when the presentation is heavily exhortative and the pupil’s will is coerced. Instead, a compelling vision of the goodness of goodness itself needs to be presented in a way that is attractive and stirs the imagination. A good moral education addresses both the congnitive and affective dimensions of human nature. Stories are an irreplaceable medium for this kind of moral education—that is, the education of character. (p. 20)

Here’s is G.K. Chesterton’s take on the matter:

Now, the little histories that we learnt as children were partly meant simply as inspiring stories. They largely consisted of tales like Alfred and the cakes or Eleanor and the poisoned wound. They ought to have consisted entirely of them. Little children ought to learn nothing but legends; they are the beginnings of all sound morals and manners. I would not be severe on the point: I would not exclude a story solely because it was true. But the essential on which I should insist would be, not that the tale must be true, but that the tale must be fine. (The Illustrated London News, 8 October 1910, found at The Hebdomadal Chesterton)

If we grant that the imagination must be engaged in order to teach virtue, it still doesn’t follow that fairy tale or fantasy must be used, does it? Why not any of the many wonderful realistic stories, like biographies of great men, or stories of fictional characters who are worthy of emulation?

Douglas Jones supplies the best answer I’ve read. “Fantasy,” Jones says, and by extension I’m including fairy tales,

offers a much more accurate picture of the oddness of Christian reality, a reality packed with weird invisibles and interlacing graces and dark evil. These are a large part of the world around us, but they are precluded from “realistic” stories; they can’t be measured. (“Most Real Fantasy,” Credenda/Agenda, Volume 14, Number 2)

As an example of that reality, Jones offers the story of Elisha’s servant who was so worried about all the enemy soldiers he saw surrounding their city. “Doom was sure. The facts were all in. They were grossly outnumbered. The reality was visible.” But Elisha knew that what they saw was not the full extent of what was real, and he prayed that the Lord would open the eyes of the servant, and when the Lord did so, the servant saw that “[t]he world was crammed with beings—flaming chariots—that a surface scan couldn’t begin to see. The servant’s scientific vision was utterly unrealistic and narrow. The reality was far more fantastic.”

But if a storyteller wants to include that “larger reality” in his work, doing so can create problems.

The problem is that we can’t just start putting dialogue in the mouths of angels and demons at whim. Their reality and psychology is beyond us; it would be backhandedly blasphemous to write a tale that dictated where these great beings went and said, what God did next, and how the Holy Spirit answered a particular prayer. In short, we can’t write about real reality without degrading it. (ibid.)

I think it’s convincing―your mileage may vary.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

I also have some thoughts on types and clichés, and on the flattening into political cliché I’ve seen in recent movies made from beloved books, but I think I’ll save that for a later post, if it seems like there’s a need for it.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Chapter Four

(Follow the discussion of Anthony Esolen's book at Cindy’s blog.)

I’m going to start this off with another story, but before I do I just want to say that all these stories with so little talk about the book itself is because lately I find it so much easier to tell a story that gets my points across than to write an exposition, so there really is a method, as they say, to my madness, so to speak.

Method 3: Keep Children Away from Machines and Machinists, or All Unauthorized Personnel Prohibited

By the time she was nine years old, my mom’s two older brothers had grown up and left home, so when her daddy needed help rounding up the cows, he taught her how to drive his pickup truck. It was a standard with the gear-shift on the steering column, just like an automatic. I’ve only seen that kind of truck once it my life and it is really confusing -- you’re dealing with the clutch, which I do know how to do, but the gear stick doesn’t move in an orderly fashion from left to right the way an automatic does, nor does it move in a geometrically rational fashion the way a “four on the floor” does. You do this back and forth thing that’s just mind-bogglin. And Mom learned to drive that when she was nine!

I wonder how much of that experience and others like it are what made her into the self-confident person she is today. When I was a child my definition of being a grown up was being competent in every situation that life threw at you, always knowing what to do or to say in any given situation, just like my mom. Well, I’m plenty old enough to be considered a grown-up but I’ve never felt that way and at this late date I don’t expect to. I think that personality has a lot to do with it, basic wiring.

But still, I’m sure that the experiences my parents gave me made me more confident than I would have been otherwise. Daddy taught me to handle guns and shoot from a fairly early age, and started real driving lessons when I was twelve. I’ve tried to do the same for my children but our society has made it nearly impossible for a suburban family (as we were until five years ago, and still are in many respects, including this one) to learn to drive at a suitably impressionable age.

Well, I’m no example when it comes to driving lessons, but I think I have something to offer when it comes to guns, so I’ll talk about that a little. Our policy from the beginning was not to buy our children toy weapons. We intended to teach them to use real guns when the time came, but prior to that their weapons were the sticks and other things they used of their own accord in their play. We never restricted that kind of play except in two important ways: they must always treat the imaginary weapon as if it were real, and loaded, and they must submit to the rules of just warfare -- no unjust wars; no undeclared wars; no endangering women, children, and non-combatants, and so forth. This worked well when it just my own children playing, but when the neighborhood kids wanted to play I quite often had to forbid shooting games because the other kids were not gentlemen. They shot anything that moved including sisters who weren’t playing. They shot people in the back. It was horrible.

My own children knew better than to pull this kind of garbage. I still remember once when my son’s enemy was standing near his mother and me as were talking, and my son drove by on his bicycle and shot at him with his Star Wars blaster (a gift from a well-meaning friend that we, not unnaturally, let him keep). The Powers that Be descended upon him with great wrath and he was sent to the Place of Judgement where he was tried for war crimes, convicted, and summarily executed. He remembers that incident to this very day.

Our policy, as I said, was not to buy our children toy weapons, but I accidentally bought one once. It was when we were living in Hampton, Virginia, and while my mom and sister were visiting we decided to go down to Fort Monroe and look around. Fort Monroe was one of the few forts in a Confederate state that remained in Union hands during the war, and President Davis was imprisoned there after he was captured. My mother’s great-grandfather had also been imprisoned there, so you see, it was a very emotional experience and that’s why I lost my head when, visiting the gift shop before leaving, my son asked if he could buy a toy Confederate rifle and I agreed. It was only after we got home that I remembered our policy, but we let him keep the gun after all and I’m glad to report that, what with that and the Star Wars blaster and various and sundry other inconsistencies, he’s grown up to be a good boy in spite of us.

Okay, one more story. When my daddy was in high school he and a cousin built a telescope and took this picture of the moon:




With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies !
How silently, and with how wan a face !

~*~ ~*~ ~*~


Okay, I lied -- one more story. I had a friend once who was descended of the earliest New England settlers and I loved listening to her family stories. When she was fifteen her father bought a VW Beetle, brought it into the garage and took it all to pieces. Then he told her that it was hers, after she put it back together. It took a long time and just a little help from one of her older brothers -- he never actually did any of the work, but he'd help her think through whatever trouble she ran into so she could solve it herself -- but she did it, and always remembered how wonderful that feeling of accomplishment was. She never had car trouble after that that baffled her, and if she had to take it to a mechanic for the actual work, they couldn't deceive her about her car's troubles. Love it.

Inspiring the imagination

In response to my previous post Dawns asks, "[W]hat are some things parents do to help children observe, enjoy, and think?" I started writing about some of the things that my parents did that I've tried to imitate with my own children, and the reply got so long I decided to make a new post.

My daddy loved the night sky and he shared that love with us. Watching the Perseids in August was an annual event and was so much fun. Also, I knew the story of Perseus rescuing Andromeda and I knew that Cassiopeia was her mother and could easily recognize that constellation. I think I knew these stories before I began reading mythology -- I got my first copy of Edith Hamilton's book when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I was already familiar with some of the stories, so I'm thinking Daddy must have told them to me.

There were at least three things going on here:
1) Daddy loved the stars and shared his excitement with us.
2) He told us some facts about what we were seeing.
3) He told us beautiful stories that both connected to what we were seeing and to people who lived long ago and far away

Charlotte Mason talks about education being the science of relations, and we know how important it is to let children make their own connections, but I think it's also important for parents to make a few connections for their children, to cut the trail, so to speak -- to give them an example of how things are connected. Now, I don’t believe I was “thinking big thoughts” during the Perseids -- we were too busy trying to be the first to see the next shooting star. But on other evenings it would all come together, and it was awe-inspiring to be lying in the grass in the 1970s thinking about people who had lived thousands of years before, and how we have the same sky they had and the same stars and the same stories.

Notice there wasn't a religious lesson, even though the feelings inspired are the kind we associate with religion -- awe, wonder -- and I know Dawn wasn’t asking about religious education, but when you’ve had that experience, repeatedly, and then you read, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork,” you know exactly what that means, and all that you’ve felt in response to the sublime comes back to you and that emotional connection is made there in response to the God who made heaven and earth, and you worship him, and give him the glory due unto his name. And for us Christians, that’s the whole point.

So, in a nutshell, share your loves with your children, make a few judicious, ennobling connections for them, and try to avoid, as Cindy mentions a lot, making everything into a Bible lesson.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—
      For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
      Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
      Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
            With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                                                                    Praise him.

~Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889)

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Chapters Two and Three

(Follow the discussion of Anthony Esolen's book at Cindy's blog.)

What does Esolen mean by imagination, anyway? Dictionary.com lists the first definition as “the faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.” My 1940s Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary goes further by adding, “esp. [mental images or concepts] never perceived in their entirety; hence, mental synthesis of new ideas from elements experienced separately.” I especially like Dictionary.com’s fifth definition, “ability to face and resolve difficulties; resourcefulness.”

Those qualities are what I’ve been thinking of so far while reading the book, and I’ve seen children who really didn’t have any imagination -- or, as my children would say, “Those kids don’t know how to play!” It’s not that they didn’t know how to play on the swingset or throw and catch a ball, but that they didn’t know how to make-believe.

In her post on keeping them inside, Dawn says:

I don’t ever remember, as does Esolen, thinking big thoughts, being intrigued by nature, staring at the sky, being around animals other than sheep or dogs or cats.

Part of my problem with these sorts of books is that I think the writers are the exception to the norm; do most children enjoy wandering with their inmost thoughts on death and proving God’s existence? Are children really that introspective? The examples he gives are wonderful, but I have to think something at home was done so the examples wished to think on Dante or other long thoughts. That being outside wasn’t by itself the solution.

I think she’s right. My parents’ attitudes surely influenced my own, and they also made sure I had the right books to read and plenty of time to read them and to daydream. But maybe being an introvert has something to do with it, too, since you’re predisposed to sit and wonder about things. When I was in kindergarten, every morning I’d go sit quietly at my desk and watch the other kids laughing and talking and playing together, and I distinctly remember wondering how they were able to do that. “I have to get used to people before I can do that,” I told myself, and that was every morning for at least half the school year. When I was five years old. Maybe “most children” aren’t that introspective, but I don’t think I’m exceptional, either -- just more inclined to sit and watch and think than to interact.

Well, on to the methods -- and I’m so late on last week’s contribution, and anyway these two methods belong to each other, that I’ve decided to make one post of it.

Method 1: Keep Your Children Indoors as Much as Possible, or They Used to Call It “Air”

Method 2: Never Leave Children to Themselves, or If Only We Had a Committee

My parents utterly failed at these, and how grateful I am that they did!

I have a lot of pleasant childhood memories -- Mom playing Chopin’s waltzes on the piano as we fell asleep at night; Daddy taking me on my first boat ride, and to visit his workplace, a laboratory -- he was a chemist; make-believe games with my brother, usually involving the deep recesses of the linen closet which could be anything from the Swiss Family Robinson’s tree house to a spaceship, or appliance boxes Daddy brought home.... But most of my happy memories take place outside.

Daddy would take us out to the carport during thunderstorms to watch the lightening and listen to the thunder, and we had regular times of lying in the back yard watching meteor showers. My best friend, Nan, and I would lie on our backs watching the clouds and tell stories about what we saw there, then we’d roll over onto our stomachs and look for four-leaf clovers. I don’t remember whether I ever found one, but I did find a five-leaf clover once and pressed it in my Bible. I remember the tiny flowers that grew in the grass and watching the ants move about in their own tiny world, as oblivious of us as we were to what happened above the sky in the daytime. I remember waking up one morning and looking out my bedroom window to see that a ring of mushrooms had magically sprung up overnight. Thankfully I’d read the right books, so I knew just what that meant -- the fairies had danced there in the night!

When we were a little older, my brother and I played in the woods that were behind our house. Our neighborhood was a suburban one, but it had once been part of a farm and our house was built on the edge of a former pasture up against a large wooded area that was state property. Trails wandered all through it and one of them led to a pauper’s cemetery -- people who’d died in the State Hospital were buried there. It was such a sad lonely place, no real headstones at all, only small, flat concrete markers with numbers identifying whoever was buried there. I used to sit and wonder who those people were and how they got to be there instead of in a cemetery surrounded by family like all my relatives were. The cemetery was dug up when I was ten or eleven years old to make way for new buildings for the state police and the Game and Fish Commission and I always wondered what they did with the bones. Of course there were also ghost stories that we kids told each other that all took place in that cemetery after dark. That neighborhood couldn’t have been more than five years older than I was, but our stories made it seem like it had a long history, and we told all of them as if they were true.

The best part of the woods was the creek that ran out of it and across the wide path that ran between the back yards and the woods, and into a concrete pipe and underground. Johnny and I spent countless hours there panning for gold -- never found any. One summer we dug out the area beneath a tiny waterfall (it was maybe a foot high) to make a swimming hole. We finally got it deep enough that we could sit, one at a time, up to our chests in the water.

We had to move away when I was thirteen years old, but that place is so much a part of who I am that to this day when I dream about being At Home, I’m in the house I grew up in surrounded by those woods.

Reading over what I’ve written, I notice that there are hardly any adults present in those out-of-doors memories. The parents were there, just in the background. Nearly all of the moms were home during the summer and most were during the rest of the year. My mom taught school for several years while I was growing up, so I spent more time in day care than is typical of people my age, but she preferred being home, so when school was out, we were free -- no organized activities except for Vacation Bible School at our church, the first week of summer break.

In letting us have so much free time outside Mom was merely raising us the way she and my daddy had been raised.

Both my parents grew up in close-knit farming communities, so their parents knew everyone and didn’t have to worry too much about what might happen to their kids when they were out playing with friends, or walking to and from school. I walked to school, too. My kindergarten was a half-day affair at a Methodist church three blocks from my house. Several of the kids in my neighborhood went there and we all walked together. We “Walkers” felt very superior to the kids who were driven by their parents. First through third grade was an elementary school that we got to by walking along the wide path between the woods and the back yards in our neighborhood, then across a pedestrian overpass that spanned the new Interstate, down a hill and across the school yard -- a little over half a mile, over all. Then, from sixth through ninth grades I went to a junior high that was a little more than a mile away, and of course we walked whenever we could. There was a city bus that we could catch on bad weather days or when we were running late, but it cost thirty-five cents we and preferred to use the money to buy a candy bar at Wal-Mart on the way.

That is a lot more freedom than my kids have today, but it’s less than my parents had. My daddy, who was born in 1935, used to tell about going rabbit hunting as a boy -- he’d spend the entire day out hunting, taking along his lunch and gun, and bringing home something for supper. Once, wandering in a swampy area near the Arkansas River, he lost his way and spent hours trying to find a landmark he recognized. It was getting late and he’d decided to look for a dry place to build a fire and spend the night when he finally found his way home. He was eight or ten years old at the time. And it was not the last time he spent the entire day out like that.

It’s certainly a different world today and we can’t let our kids have the same kind of freedom that we had growing up, let alone that our parents had, but I think Esolen still makes a good point, in his tongue-in-cheek manner -- if you want your kids to grow up without two ideas to rub together, keeping them safe indoors and perpetually occupied are where you should start.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Introduction and Chapter One

(Follow the discussion of Anthony Esolen's book at Cindy's blog.)

I had an epiphany while reading the first chapter, entitled "Why Truth Is Your Enemy and the Benefits of the Vague," and it made me really angry. In the midst of explaining how to make any subject dull, Anthony Esolen turns to mathematics. "There can't possibly be any imagination in manipulating numbers, right?" He answers the question by first talking about memorizing math facts and rules of operation, which are dull enough in themselves, but then warns the reader that having a kid full of that kind of fact is really quite dangerous if you're trying to produce a dull, unimaginative mind, lacking in insight and initiative. To illustrate the danger, he pulls a problem from the classic math text, Ray's New Higher Arithmetic (1880) -- "Multiply 387295 by 216324."

Simple drudgery, you say. Ah, but here's the trick of it. Do the operation by performing only three sets of multiplication. That is, 216324 has six digits in it, and you'd think, if you were not imaginative with numbers, that you would therefore have to perform six sets of multiplication, first by 4, then by 2, and so on. It isn't so.

The trick is to see -- and imagination is a power that allows us to combine things and recombine them, seeing them anew every time -- that 216324 has a pretty set of digits. It has a 3, and a 24, and a 216. But 3 x 8 = 24, and 24 x 9 = 216. These things you just know; they are tools for your cleverness to fool about with, as a machinist learns the feel of a wrench or a drill press. This means that if you multiply by the 3 first, putting the product...

... and then he goes on spouting some gibberish explaining how easy it is to multiply those horrendous numbers in Three Easy Steps. Only I don't "just know" what he suggests I should because I never learned my eights, and don't know my threes very well, either. I know my nines, but only up to eleven, so "24 x 9 = 216" is something I have to figure out either with pencil and paper or by skip-counting.

Esolen describes this facility with numbers as "play." That's when I had my epiphany. I used to LOVE playing with numbers and number patterns. When I was seven or eight years old I invented a pattern that goes like this: 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34... It's only been a few years ago that I learned that some Italian guy nearly a thousand years ago first wrote about that pattern, so it's called a Fibonacci Sequence in his honor.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I'm terrible at math. I'm so bad at it that I've taken to bragging about it as an act of bravado. I hate math because I was so bad at it in school -- well, starting around the fourth grade. Before that I was really good at it and enjoyed it. I don't know what changed in the fourth grade, but by the sixth grade I was happy if I got a "D" in math because that meant I wouldn't have to repeat the class.

But according to Esolen, playing with numbers IS math!

I felt the same way during my oldest child's first year of formal education. We were reading Margaret Pumphrey's book Stories of the Pilgrims as our history text, and thoroughly enjoying it. I've always loved reading about people who lived Long Ago, and finding out what they thought and seeing how they dressed and so forth. But I hated "History" as a subject in school -- we had to memorize names and dates of battles and treaties and whocaresaboutallthatstuff -- so it was a pleasant revelation to find out that, actually, I loved history. But pleasure quickly turned to anger that my schooling made me think I hated it.

Several years later, it slowly dawned on me that, even though I had hated studying Poetry in school, I loved poetry. I've figured out why that's the case: In school, you study poetry by killing and dissecting poems.

I suppose that that's what they do with History and Math, too.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

On a more cheerful note, I now have a new favorite sentence: That sixteen-line-long feast of words and ideas and humorous commentary from Henry Fielding's Jacob Andrews that Esolen quotes earlier in chapter one.

I won't quote it just now, but I will say that if you haven't read Joseph Andrews you really should -- it's delightful. But first you have to prepare yourself by reading Samuel Richardson's Pamela, followed by Fielding's Shamela. Then and only then can you fully appreciate Joseph Andrews.