Sailor: Education for Wonder: How to Raise Boys That Read

This great article appeared 24 September 2010 in The Wall Street Journal. When he started quoting Plato and C. S. Lewis about right education (using the same passages that so influenced Christian Integration), I had to ask: who is this guy?

The author is Thomas Spence of Spence Publishing, Inc. in Dallas, TX. Thomas Spence is president and publisher of Spence Publishing and a director of Spence Media. After graduating from Dartmouth College, he earned a law degree from the University of Chicago and a master’s in history from Harvard. He was editor in chief at WRS Publishing before founding Spence Publishing in 1996. He has been featured in Publishers Weekly, the Boston Globe, the Dartmouth Review, Insight, and the Washington Times and has written for the Dallas Morning News and the American Enterprise.

If you were thinking about buying your kids some video games, think again.

Principles

External Sensory Education:
Provide frequent, even constant contact with nature: “what is important is engagement with reality, not simply the discerning of reality.”[1] Like Belloc we “look once again at reality, at being, at Creation.”[2]

Science should involve very little applied math and take place mainly out of doors.

Try to experience the arts—for example, Taylor describes a school in Maslaqc, France where Latin was learned in oral conversation, reading done aloud, and music learned through singing.[3]

Grapple with the world: hike it, swim it, sail it. Play with the elements, play in the elements—include sport and dance.

Forego textbooks in favor of the real thing: “knowledge must be . . . firsthand. ‘Sampling and surveys’ will not do. . . . [Let the student] hear, see, and handle, for then he will remember and imagine.”[4]

Internal Sensory Education:
Continue the above and include literature and history enlivened by reading aloud, drama, recitation and original texts.

Aid memory and teach contemplative attention through sketching, calligraphy, choir, gardening, and memorization of poetry.

Literature and poetry aid poetic formation not by replacing sensory experience of created reality, but by imaginatively and emotionally inspiring the love of reality, as Helen Vendler writes, “We read imaginative works . . . in order to gain a wider sense of the real.”[5] If taught in a way that gives us a vicarious and engaging experience of created reality, literature and poetry can make us more responsive to sensory experiences:[6] “The poet says to us: Here it is. He presents it as a gift. This is the mourner, the lover, the moon, the smile, the soldier, the ship, the horse. Part of the wonder of poetry is that it does give us things in the present, puts us in their presence . . . The poet really says very little: something like ‘Look at that!’ The looking involves seeing with our imagination and memory. Or the poet says, ‘It is like that!’ in which case we see the likeness. All the devices of poetry are efforts to get at the mystery of what things are.”[7]

Literature and music also lie at the heart of emotional formation.

Emotional Formation:[8]
Literature: Literary forms are not the primary focus. [9] Writes O’Connor: “Meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply.”[10] So first, we look at literature and get in it. We ask, what would it feel like to be this person, experience this situation? We must weep with the weeping and rage with the enraged, feel what they feel, so we may learn what they learn.

Music: More later

Limits:
Poetic Education is “pre-scientific; it does not engage in measurement or analysis or inquiry into causes.”[11] Debates, arguments, and empiric science have no place here. Students are encouraged to pay little attention to and withhold judgment on current events, politics, policy of any kind.

Limit electronic media and entertainment which pacify senses. Pieper makes a strong point: “the average person of our time loses the ability to see because there is too much to see! There does exist something like ‘visual noise’ which just like the acoustical counterpart, makes clear perception impossible. One might perhaps presume that TV watchers, tabloid readers, and movie goers exercise and sharpen their eyes. But the opposite is true. The ancient sages knew exactly why they called the ‘concupiscence of the eyes’ a ‘destroyer.’ The restoration of man’s inner eyes can hardly be expected in this day and age—unless, first of all, one were willing and determined simply to exclude from one’s realm of life all those inane and contrived but titillating illusions incessantly generated by the entertainment industry.”[12]
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[1] James S. Taylor, Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), 73.
[2] Wilhelmsen, Belloc, 79.
[3] Taylor, 123.
[4] Mark Van Doran, Liberal Education (New York: Henry Holt & Company,1943), 91 & 117.
[5] Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), x.
[6] So, for example, for one person a poem can make you notice something for the first time—the sea, trees, laundry. For another familiar with these things the poem expresses and confirms an experience—in that magical—“You, too, know what I’m talking about?”—way. Both these pleasures are the gift of poetry.
[7] Dennis Quinn, Iris Exiled: A Synoptic History of Wonder (New York: University Press of America, 2003), 43.
[8] As Plato writes “education in music and poetry is most important . . . first, because rhythm and harmony permeate the inner part of the soul more than anything else, affecting it most strongly and bringing it grace, so that if someone is properly educated in music and poetry, it makes him graceful, but if not, then the opposite. Second, because anyone who has been properly educated in music and poetry will sense it acutely when something has been omitted from a thing and when it hasn’t been finely crafted or finely made by nature. And since he had the right distastes, he’ll praise fine things, be pleased with them, receive them into his soul, and, being nurtured by them, become fine and good. He’ll rightly object to what is shameful, hating it while he’s still young and unable to grasp the reason, but, having been educated in this way, he will welcome the reason when it comes and recognize it early because of its kinship with himself. (Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, 2nd ed., revised by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1992)), Bk III, 401d3-402a3.
[9] Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry provide a method for teaching poetry that enables students to enjoy poetry properly and in a way that contributes to a strong sensory-emotional formation. See also Jon Balsbaugh’s Teaching Poetry at Trinity Schools, unpublished document, 2008.
[10] Flannery O’Connor, “To a Professor of English,” 28 March 1961, in The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1979), 437.
[11] Quinn, Iris, 10.
[12] Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation, trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 31-33.

Sailor: Education for Wonder

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How to Raise Boys That Read

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