The mystery of what sinks in in infancy and what flows by is profound

From Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, available directly from Slightly Foxed. "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

In this passage, Napier muses on children and language; a long meditation but an interesting one.

Lying in bed on those long summer evenings, looking at the square of bright blue sky beyond the window, one sometimes felt locked in eternity, as if the light could never dim, and sleep could never come. Thoughts splashed in one's brain; the waterfall words of the day flowed over one. The mystery of what sinks in in infancy and what flows by is profound; a child a baffling mixture of receptivity and inattention. Waves of words, breaking continually over the impressionable sand, leave weed and stick and broken glass and echoing shell, and sweep as much away. Another tide takes some, brings more; how much unaccountably sinks down to become part of the permanent structure of the shore? Nanny words, reading aloud words, caressing mother words, half-hearted snatches of conversation, of poetry, praise, blame, exhortation; why does some float by and some sink in? Wipe your mouth, say your grace, tell the truth, keep your elbows off the table. There are words so immediate and poignant that they could have been said yesterday, and are said for ever. Sir, come down e'er my child die. One swings abruptly from world to world. Don't care was made to care, Don't care was hanged. Take off your hat, William, to Mr and Mrs Dallin. Spare your breath to cool your porridge. And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat. This little pig went to market, this little pig stayed at home. Blow bugles, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying. Say please, say yes, say thank you, say sorry, say how do you do? For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. Once upon a time there were four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter. Fold your vest, and clean your teeth, and say your prayers. Nobly, nobly, Cape St. Vincent to the North West died away; sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay; Love me, kiss me, Hug me tight. Never kiss a lady with your hat on, William! It's no use grumbling, it's no use fussing, it's no use crying over spilled milk.

A mingling of folk-lore, impatience, platitude, affection; a jumble of eternal verity and country precept and temporary slang pours out daily over minds half-hearing, half-differentiating, alternately open as a sieve or retentive as clay. Subtly, day by day, words mould our prejudice, our apprehensions, joys, desires, the unconscious ethic by which we live.

Humpty-Dumpty sat on the wall, Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall. That's no way to hold your spoon. Paxus forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle of Pamere. For what we have received the Lord make us truly thankful. Say, no thank you, say, Yes please. Don't cough over the table. Say, I beg your pardon. Reiterated words, falling with the persistence of steadily dropping water and channelling their permanent grooves in the sand: shadowy words, scarce heard and less understood, dappling the landscape of the mind with the mysterious charm and rhythm of their sounds. It was no season then for her To wanton with the sun her lusty paramour. Finish your mouthful before you speak. Mind the step, and shame the devil, and shut the door behind you. Never ask a man his income, never ask a woman her age. I saw three ships come sailing by, sailing by, sailing by, I saw eternity the other night Like a great ring of pure and endless night.

A beguilement of words, a tumbling cataract of sounds, and how much of all is absorbed, and why, penetrating the steady self-enchanted dream of life?

Let them eat eggs

From Roy Sutherland's Wiki Man column in the February 28th, 2009 edition of the Spectator. His article is in the context of a recent change on the part of the British health authorities in which they reversed their guidance of many years standing to the public to restrict the number of eggs eaten per week.

It is an example of the 'hair-shirt fallacy' - the unwritten rule which states that, when in doubt, you should recommend whatever course of action involves the most self-denial. Hair-shirtism is a safe bet: people are instinctively Manichaean and easily persuaded that physical pleasures are bad. Also, while experts are routinely sued for negligence, no one gets punished for excessive caution. The Millennium Bug computer scare is widely believed by many commentators to have been a glitch inflated by scaremongers to apocalyptic status; yet who was sued for failing to downplay the problem?

Adam Smith spotted this bias when he remarked that 'Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.'

I never really satisfactorily decoded Smith's comment in the past but with Sutherland's context it finally comes into focus.

People had moments of not sharing this view

From Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, available directly from Slightly Foxed. "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

In this passage she describes the world through her eyes as a three year old.

People were too often, in the kindest manner, scaling one down to size, and laughter was the biggest shot in their locker. The sound of it dented, very slightly, the ruthlessly egocentric world in which, as a two- and three-year old, one lives. I was, of course, the most important thing that had ever happened. My dignity and independence, my whole separate being, and essence, could hardly have mattered more enormously. Other people were shadows, were laps for my sitting on, were arms to pick me up when I was tired, were shoulders for me to rub my bumped head upon. But when they laughed, one had a disconcerting impression that people had moments of not sharing this view. I wanted with all my heart to be taken seriously indeed, and there were times when there seemed to be no takers. Kindly, but in a head-throwing-back fashion, my father laughed and my mother laughed. Nanny and May laughed in a particularly belittling sort of way. Ahmed laughed without restraint, getting every ounce out of it, holding his sides, and Ismain laughed derisively, showing the gaps, in his teeth, or, more accurately, the rare teeth in his gaps, shaking his head from side to side, as he stopped up a leak in the hose with his extremely dexterous bare feet. Mohammed was a stand-by; dignified, silent and grave. But even his benign chocolate-coloured countenance divided sometimes in amusement around the brilliant whiteness of his teeth.

A Late Beginner

I am reading Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, (available directly from Slightly Foxed). "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

What a marvelous memoir, not only of an interesting period but written beautifully as well. Napier was born in 1908 and grew up between Britain and Egypt in the fashion of the day. Her family were of that ilk that formed the backbone of the the British Empire: engineers, soldiers, sailors, lawyers, etc. The people that went to the four corners of the world to make things work and inadvertently to kick-start the slow and fitful integration of the world.

As I read along, I keep coming across passages that bear quoting, either because they are so originally expressed, so beautiful or because they shed light on understanding a different age, a land where things are done differently for reasons we have forgotten.

Not having finished the book, I hesitate to recommend it yet but I will be posting a number of excerpts along the way: there are few better leading indicators of a book's quality and impact than the degree to which you think it is worth quoting.

Teaching - What a tangled web

Three articles touching on education, all coincidentally read within a couple of days of each other (despite their publication dates), highlighting just how challenging the burden is that we place upon schools in multicultural, modern societies. All three articles are at least thought-provoking. It reinforces my perspective that so much is contingent upon the underlying culture of the home from which children emerge to attend school. See Growing a Reading Culture.

First is an article from the August 1st, 2009 edition of The Economist, The Quality of Teachers. Unfortunately the article is behind their commercial firewall so to the library for a hardcopy; I did find this pdf version though. In Britain, most schools are managed from the center, strongly subject to the guidelines and funding of the national government. The experiment described in the article has, therefore a somewhat greater chance of success in that environment than it might in the highly decentralized system in the US. Regardless, the last paragraph argues a willful blindness to the core issue that still makes their gamble a long shot.

Almost all education-policy documents and research papers these days start with a reminder that a child's family background is by far the strongest influence on his educational achievement. This evident truth could spur teachers to greater efforts to lean against that wind; instead, it is generally used to explain away poor children's weaker performance. Teach First challenges such defeatism. "We believe educational inequity is a solvable problem," says Mr Wigdortz, "and that the way to solve it is to get the best people teaching in the most challenging schools."

Great teachers might mitigate the impact of the home environment but they cannot substantially displace it.

Next is this report from the September 19th, 2009 edition of The Economist (again), In Knots Over Headscarves. Again the content is behind their firewall; here is an external link to the article. The final two paragraphs say it all. What do you do when your tolerance of multiple cultures encourages intolerant cultures? And of course, teachers are caught in the middle trying to address on the ground what has not been considered at a policy level.

In short, the story of the Atheneum is complicated. Unintended consequences abound. There are people of goodwill on both sides, and actors with murkier motives. The row will probably lead to the establishment of Muslim state schools in Antwerp: the city already has Catholic and Jewish schools. Patrick Janssens, the city's mayor, regrets this, saying he is "not particularly in favour" of single-faith schools. He puts his trust in long-term development: as more Muslims go to university, or feel that society offers them equal opportunities, they will be "liberated" and "realise that religion is not dominant over all other values."

The story of the Antwerp Atheneum is the latest example of a paradox: how should liberal, tolerant Europeans protect their values, even as they protect the rights of less liberal minorities in their midst? Blanket laws banning headscarves are hardly a liberal solution. But Belgium's piecemeal approach left Karin Heremans running something approaching a ghetto-school. Distrust anyone with a simple answer.

Finally, there is Malcolm Gladwell's article in the December 15th, 2008 New Yorker, Most Likely to Succeed. Here he focuses on the challenge of how do you a priori identify who will be successful and effective as a teacher? An interesting question with significant policy implications which present enormous political challenges. Nothing worth doing is ever easy though.

What's more - and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world - the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material. That difference amounts to a year's worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You'd have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you'd get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there's a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.

Aurea mediocritas

The golden mean in Latin is aurea mediocritas from Horace Odes 2. 10. 5.

Odes, Book II, X. Rectius Vives
Horace

Licinius, trust a seaman's lore:
Steer not too boldly to the deep,
Nor, fearing storms, by treacherous shore
Too closely creep.
Who makes the golden mean his guide,
Shuns miser's cabin, foul and dark,
Shuns gilded roofs, where pomp and pride
Are envy's mark.
With fiercer blasts the pine's dim height
Is rock'd; proud towers with heavier fall
Crash to the ground; and thunders smite
The mountains tall.
In sadness hope, in gladness fear
'Gainst coming change will fortify
Your breast. The storms that Jupiter
Sweeps o'er the sky
He chases. Why should rain to-day
Bring rain to-morrow? Python's foe
Is pleased sometimes his lyre to play,
Nor bends his bow.
Be brave in trouble; meet distress
With dauntless front; but when the gale
Too prosperous blows, be wise no less,
And shorten sail.

Let us proceed as if childhood is reclaimable, in some form

From Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century . Postman continues his almost apocalyptic view of what is happening to our children in the Information Age. Unfortunately his hypothesis has a lot of supporting evidence and I am afraid he is on to something.

Let us proceed as if childhood is reclaimable, in some form. How can we give it a voice? There are three institutions that have a serious interest in the question: the family, the school, and government.

As for the first, it is as obvious as it is depressing that the structure and authority of the family have been severely weakened as parents have lost control over the information environment of the young. Margaret Mead once referred to television, for example, as the second parent, by which she meant that our children literally spend more time with television than with their fathers. In such terms, fathers may be the fifth or sixth parent, trailing behind television, the Internet, CDs, radio, and movies. . . . In any case, it is quite clear that the media have diminished the role of the family in shaping the values and sensibilities of the young.

Moreover, and possibly as a result of the enlarged sovereignty of the media, many parents have lost confidence in their ability to raise children because they believe that the information and instincts they have about child rearing are unreliable. As a consequence, they not only do not resist media influence, they turn to experts who are presumed to know what is best for children. Thus, psychologists, social workers, guidance counselors, teachers, and others representing an institutional point of view invade large areas of parental authority, mostly by invitation. What this means is that there is a loss in the intimacy, dependence, and loyalty that traditionally characterize the parent-child relationship. Indeed, it is now believed by some that the parent-child relationship is essentially neurotic, and that children are better served by institutions than by families.

An effective response to all of this poses difficulties and is not without a price to pay. If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture. This is especially the case in America. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of the throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also almost un-American to remain in close proximity t one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in their sexuality, self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control e media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly, in the short run, the children who grew up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will be able to keep alive a humane tradition, It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it has children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service for themselves and their children.

Comics, culture and influence for good or ill

Louis Menand has an article, The Horror, in the March 31, 2008 edition of The New Yorker, covering the 1954 Senate Judiciary Committee's investigation of the Comic Book industry. Quite interesting. As a Mad Magazine aficionado of the seventies, I had not realized that it's editor, William Gaines, had had such a significant role in these cultural First Amendment battles. Poorly argued as it was, you've got to love the humor of this exchange at the subcommittee hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee, conducting a public assault on the first amendment over Gaines' admittedly graphic horror comics.

"Let me get the limits as far as what you put into your magazine," the committee's junior counsel, Herbert Beaser, asked him. "Is the sole test of what you would put into your magazine whether it sells? Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?"

GAINES: No, I wouldn't say that there is any limit for the reason you outlined. My only limits are bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.
BEASER: Then you think a child cannot in any way, in any way, shape, or manner, be hurt by anything that a child reads or sees?
GAINES: I don't believe so.
BEASER: There would be no limit actually to what you put in the magazines?
GAINES: Only within the bounds of good taste.
BEASER: Your own good taste and saleability?
GAINES: Yes.

Kefauver spoke up. He pointed to one of the covers, from an issue of "Crime SuspenStories," on display in the hearing room.

KEFAUVER: Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman's head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?
GAINES: Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it, and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.
KEFAUVER: You have blood coming out of her mouth.
GAINES: A little.

There is a very telling observation in the article for "liberals" as Menand puts it or for fans of the First Amendment as I would characterize it.

Gaines was not a stupid man, but, as Hajdu points out, he was in the position many liberals find themselves in when they set out to defend the freedom of artistic expression: he claimed that comic books that treated social issues in a progressive spirit were good for children, and that comic books that were filled with pictures of torture and murder had no effect on them. If art can be seriously good for you, though, it follows that it can be seriously bad for you, and that is the point at which censorship enters the picture.

Too right and the argument has to be answered. I believe children's books to be a wonderful and potentially enormously positive influence on children. How then to address the potentially very legitimate concerns of parents wanting to shield their children from "bad" books? A subject for a separate post, but I do think there is an answer that squares the circle.

UPDATE: The original link now redirects incorrectly within the New Yorker. This is a new link to the book review, The Horror by Louis Menand

Memoirs, veracity and Augustine

Daniel Mendelsohn has an interesting article about memoirs, But Enough About Me, in the January 25, 2010, New Yorker. I bring it to your attention because it touches on veracity in story-telling which is an issue that seems to raise its head as frequently in children's stories as in the more adult memoirs that Mendelsohn cites. He has some intriguing speculation which I think over-reaches but remains intriguing none-the-less.

As part of the background on memoirs, he tells the story of Augustine of Hippo's Confessions. Though not regarded in the same fashion, I suspect that there are a fair number of YA readers who can access and enjoy the Confessions in a way not dissimilar to Catcher in the Rye. The language gets in the way of most readings but the issues are not all that different to those with which every teenager wrestles. As Mendelsohn describes the story:

It all started late one night in 371 A.D., in a dusty North African town miles from anywhere worth going, when a rowdy sixteen-year-old - the offspring of an interfaith marriage, with a history of bad behavior - stole some pears off a neighbor's tree. To all appearances, it was a pointless misdemeanor. The thief, as he ruefully recalled some thirty years later, was neither poor nor hungry, and the pears weren't all that appealing, anyway. He stole them, he realized, simply to be bad. "It was foul, and I loved it," he wrote. "I loved my own undoing."

However trivial the crime and perverse its motivations, this bit of petty larceny had enormous consequences: for the teen-ager's future, for the history of Christianity and Western philosophy, and for the layout of your local Barnes & Noble superstore. For although the boy eventually straightened himself out, converted to Christianity, and even became a bishop, the man he became was tortured by the thought of this youthful peccadillo. His desire to seek a larger meaning in his troubled past ultimately moved him to write a starkly honest account of his dissolute early years (he is disarmingly frank about his prolific sex life) and his stumbling progress toward spiritual transcendence - to the climactic moment when, by looking inward with what he calls his "soul's eye," he "saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind." The man's name was Aurelius Augustinus; we know him as St. Augustine. His book was called "Confessions."

As Augustine, a teacher of rhetoric, well knew, there had long been a tradition of biographies of accomplished men - Plutarch's Lives, say, written at the end of the first century A.D. - and of autobiographical accounts of daring military escapades and the like. (Xenophon's Anabasis, for instance, written in the early third century B.C., recounts how he and his troops managed to make their way back to safety after getting trapped behind enemy lines deep in what is now Iraq.) But Augustine was the first Western author to make the accomplishment an invisible, internal one, and the journey to salvation a spiritual one. The arc from utter abjection to improbable redemption, at once deeply personal and appealingly universal, is one that writers have returned to - and readers have been insatiable for - ever since. Augustine of Hippo bequeathed to Augusten Burroughs more than just a name.

Ethiopian Jazz

Swing Along Again, an article in the January 28th, 2010 The Economist. And I never even knew there had been a golden age of Ethiopian jazz.

AFICIONADOS are hoping for a revival of the golden age of Ethiopian jazz, as players who emigrated westward a generation ago, especially to America, come home amid the global recession.