Churchill and Courteously Rigid Discipline

From Harrow, Churchill managed to gain entrance (after repeated effort) to Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point.

From Winston S. Churchill's My Early Life, page 50 in the Folio Society edition.

I learned several things at Sandhurst which showed me how to behave and how officers of different ranks were expected to treat one another in the life and discipline of a regiment. My company commander, Major Ball, of the Welsh Regiment, was a very strict and peppery martinet. Formal, reserved, frigidly courteous, punctilious, impeccable, severe, he was held in the greatest awe. It had never been his fortune to go on active service, but we were none the less sure that he would have had to be killed to be beaten.

The rule was, that if you went outside the college bounds, you first of all wrote your name in the company leave-book, and might then assume that your request was sanctioned. One day I drove a tandem (hired) over to Aldershot to see a friend in the militia battalion then training there. As I drove down the Marlborough lines, whom should I meet but Major Ball himself driving a spanking dog-cart home to Sandhurst. As I took off my hat to him, I remembered with a flash of anxiety that I had been too lazy or careless to write my name in the leave-book. However, I thought, 'there is still a chance. He may not look at it until mess; and I will write my name down as soon as I get back.' I curtailed my visit to the militia battalion and hastened back to the college as fast as the ponies could trot. It was six o'clock when I got in. I ran along the passage to the desk where the leave-book lay, and the first thing that caught my eyes were the Major's initials, 'O.B.', at the foot of the leaves granted for the day. I was too late. He had seen me in Aldershot and had seen that my name was not in the book. Then I looked again, and there to my astonishment was my own name written in the Major's handwriting and duly approved by his initials.

This opened my eyes to the kind of life that existed in the old British Army and how the very strictest discipline could be maintained among officers without the slightest departure from the standards of a courteous and easy society. Naturally after such a rebuke I never was so neglectful again.

Churchill and Harrow

Harrow is one of the ancient (1572) public (i.e. not run by the state) boarding schools of England. Along with Eton, it is immensely rich in history and tradition. Harrow has produced nine of the UK's prime ministers, including Winston Churchill.

From Winston S. Churchill's My Early Life, page 15 in the Folio Society edition.

I had scarcely passed my twelfth birthday when I entered the inhospitable regions of examinations, through which for the next seven years I was destined to journey. These examinations were a great trial to me. The subjects which were dearest to the examiners were almost invariably those I fancied least. I would have liked to have been examined in history, poetry and writing essays. The examiners, on the other hand, were partial to Latin and mathematics. And their will prevailed. Moreover, the questions which they asked on both these subjects were almost invariably those to which I was unable to suggest a satifactory answer. I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations.

This was especially true of my entrance examination to Harrow. The Headmaster, Mr Welldon, however, took a broad-minded view of my Latin prose: he showed discernment in judging my general ability. This was the more remarkable, because I was found unable to answer a single question in the Latin paper. I wrote my name at the top of the page. I wrote down the number of the question '1'. After much reflection I put a bracket around it thus '(1)'. But thereafter I could not think of anything connected with it that was either relevant or true. Incidentally there arrived from nowhere in paticular a blot and several smudges. I gazed for two whole hours at this sad spectacle: and then merciful ushers collected my piece of foolscap with all the others and carried it up to the Headmaster's table. It was from these slender indications of scholarship that Mr Welldon drew the conclusion that I was worthy to pass into Harrow. It is very much to his credit. It showed that he was a man capable of looking beneath the surface of things: a man not dependent upon paper manifestations. I have always had the greatest regard for him.

Churchill's introduction to Latin

I am reading Winston S. Churchill's My Early Life, published originally in 1930 when he was 56 years old and his best and most historic roles still lay a decade ahead of him. The edition I am reading is from the Folio Society.

There are a series of vignettes that are such wonderful exemplars of his deft wit or are so evocative of an era that is now so completely vanished that I will be making a number of Thing Finder posts.

The first relates an incident attendant to his new (and first) boarding school to which he was sent when he was seven.

From My Early Life, Folio Society, page 12.

. . . and I was alone with the Form Master. He produced a thin greeny-brown covered book filled with words in different types of print.

'You have never done any Latin before, have you?' he said.

'No, sir.'

'This is a Latin grammar." He opened it at a well-thumbed page. 'You must learn this,' he said, pointing to a number of words in a frame of lines. 'I will come back in half an hour and see what you know.'

Behold me then on a gloomy evening, with an aching heart, seated in front of the first declension.


Mensa a table
Mensa O table
Mensam a table
Mensae of a table
Mensae to or for a table
Mensa by, with or from a table

What on earth did it mean? Where was the sense in it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me. However, there was one thing I could always do: I could learn by heart. And I thereupon proceeded, as far as my private sorrows would allow, to memorise the acrostic-looking task which had been set me.

In due course the Master returned.

'Have you learnt it?' he asked.

'I think I can say it, sir,' I replied; and I gabbled it off.

He seemed so satisfied with this that I was emboldened to ask a question.

'What does it mean, sir?'

'It means what it says. Mensa, a table. Mensa is a noun of the first declension. There are five declensions. You have learnt the singular of the first declension.'

'But', I repeated, 'what does it mean?'

'Mensa means a table,' he answered.

'Then why does mensa also mean O table,' I enquired, 'and what does O table mean?'

'Mensa, O table, is the vocative case,' he replied.

'But why O table?' I persisted in genuine curiosity.

'O table - you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table.' And then seeing that he was not carrying me with him, 'You would use it in speaking to a table.'

'But I never do,' I blurted out in honest amazement.

'If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely,' was his conclusive rejoinder.
Such was my first introduction to the classics from which, I have been told, many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit.

I have no idea why . . .

but I find this tit-bit from Bernard Wasserstein's new book, Barbarism and Civilization and reviewed by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, to be oddly intriguing.

. . . Enver Hoxha, the Communist dictator of Albania, whose favourite authors were Goethe, Kipling and Jerome K. Jerome.

Who knew?

Book Bitten

Here is a new children's books blogger with a nice entry about the pleasures of a used bookstore. Hooked on Books.

Measuring Up

As is so often the case, interesting facts, when acknowledged at all, often get buried under political spinning and invective. But there are antidotes and grass-roots efforts and much that can be done at a personal level to strike some balance.

As an example of the first situation, an interesting fact overshadowed by how it is presented, please see the article by Catherine Shock and Jay P. Greene, Adding Up to Failure, in the Winter edition of the City Journal. The authors did some research which turned up an interesting fact: among top ranked education schools, nearly twice as many courses are offered around multiculturalism and diversity as are offered around math.

Interestingly they lead and end the article with perfectly sound propositions.

A good education requires balance. Students should learn to appreciate a variety of cultures, sure, but they also need to know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

and then

The issue isn't whether we should be teaching cultural awareness in education colleges or in public schools; it's about priorities. Besides, our students probably have great appreciation already for students from other cultures—who're cleaning their clocks in math skills, and will do so economically, too, if we don't wise up.

One could quibble with their methodology as outlined in the article but I suspect that their key finding is materially correct. It certainly maps to experiences we have had with the teachers of our children, individuals who as a group are broadly well intentioned, motivated and effective teachers but frequently light on the analytic/scientific side of things. And I don't think this is unique to the US, we experienced it with our kids in school in the UK and Australia as well.

This hits one of my hot buttons. I view mathematics and numeracy in general to be part of a continuum with reading - they are all part of the symbolic representation of an external reality. Literacy lends itself to a fine nuanced comprehension of reality, particularly non-quantifiable aspects of reality (such as beliefs, feelings, etc.) while numeracy at the other end of the scale, lends itself to more testable aspects of reality.

So a finding such as this, that our educators are being over-exposed at one end of the continuum and underexposed at the other is a fair issue to raise and debate. The authors of the article ought to be commended for the effort to shed light on the issue.

It is unfortunate then, that the body of the article is laced with derogatory or mocking comments (e.g. "professors are a self-perpetuatiing clicque") and with belittling comments (e.g. "prospective teachers haven't cried out for more math courses because such courses tend to be harder than those involving multiculturalism".) That tone tends to overshadow the real research they have done and the validity of the point they have raised.

Fortunately, regardless of how things get reported, there are things that can be done. It is someone else's fight to figure out whether teachers in education programs need to be better trained in rigorous and analytical thinking. I leave that to them.

As parents though there is plenty we can do through the books we choose for our kids. The nonficiton wing of children's books has long been sort of a red-headed step child. None-the-less there are great books out there that stock the minds of our children with useful information and help develop the capacity for observation, measurement, analysis and constructive skepticism. TTMD is slowly beginning to build a set of book lists to that end (for example see the book list, Teaching Children to Observe.)

There is a new children's book blog as well that was just launched this month, I.N.K. (Interesting Nonfiction for Kids) that is aimed at bringing attention to the quality books in this genre that can enhance the lives of our children.

Don't mess with Librarians - "They also abandoned other volumes, later, while fleeing from the librarians."

Oh, this is a good one. Here is a US Court of Appeals decision concerning an attempted theft of rare books from a university library collection. The story is on pages two through five. The rest is the legal reasoning behind the judges decision and while it is interesting it is not as laugh-out-loud as the summary of the actual facts.

Hooray for Mrs. Gooch, Ms. Brown and the other librarians, front line defenders of our book heritage.

From the judges summary of the facts (my emphasis added)

Mrs. Gooch had realized that, due to the department's security measures, Lipka and Borsuk could not re-enter the Special Collections Department from the elevator, and she had begun to free herself to call for help. She yelled to Susan Brown that they were being robbed, and Ms. Brown wheeled around to pursue the robbers.

She caught up to them in a stairwell where they were attempting to open the emergency exit and, surprised by her arrival and aggressive confrontation, they dropped several objects - specifically, the two remaining volumes of the Birds of North America four-volume set (they had left two volumes atop the pink bed sheet in the Special Collections Department) and the two volumes of the Quadrupeds three-volume set (one of the three volumes had been left behind, stuck in its drawer in the Special Collections Department). Lipka and Borsuk fled through the emergency door carrying five objects (Hortus Sanitatis, the 20 pencil drawings, Synopsis of the Birds of North America, Origin of Species, and Illuminated Manuscript), with Ms. Brown and other librarians in hot pursuit.

Convictions

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

Indian Giver

Indian giver - one that gives something to another and then takes it back or expects an equivalent in return.

One of those childhood school-yard taunts whose meaning is relatively clear. But where did it come from? Why an Indian giver?

I came across the answer in The Gift, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde. It is one of those little vignettes that illustrate all the pitfalls of communication that bedevil even the most well-intended travellers - miscommunication arising not from the words we use or misuse but of the assumptions that we carry without being aware of them.

When the Puritans first landed in Massachusetts, they discovered a thing so curious about the Indians' feelings for property that they felt called upon to give it a name. In 1764, when Thomas Hutchinson wrote his history of the colony, the term was already an old saying: "An Indian gift," he told his readers, "is a proverbial expression signifying a present for which an equivalent return is expected." We still use this, of course, and in an even broader sense, calling that friend an Indian giver who is so uncivilized as to ask us to return a gift he has given.

Imagine a scene. An Englishman comes into an Indian lodge, and his hosts, wishing to make their guest feel welcome, ask him to share a pipe of tobacco. Carved from a soft red stone, the pipe itself is a peace offering that has traditionally circulated among the local tribes, staying in each lodge for a time but always given away again sooner or later. And so the Indians, as is only polite among their people, give the pipe to their guest when he leaves. The Englishman is tickled pink. What a nice thing to send back to the British Museum! He takes it home and sets it on the mantlepiece. A time passes and the leaders of a neighboring tribe come to visit the colonist's home. To his surprise he finds his guests have some expectation in regard to his pipe, and his translator finally expains to him that if he wishes to show his goodwill he should offer them a smoke and give them the pipe. In consternation the Englishman invents a phrase to describe these people with such a limited sense of private property. The opposite of "Indian giver" would be something like "white man keeper" (or maybe "capitalist"), that is, a person whose instinct is to remove property from circulation, to put it in a warehouse or museum (or, more to the point for captialism, to lay it aside to be used for production).

The Indian giver (or the original one, at any rate) understood a cardinal property of the gift: whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept. Or, if it is kept, something of similar value should move on in its stead, the way a billiard ball may stop when it sends another scurrying across the felt, its momentum transferred. You may keep your Christmas present, but it ceases to be a gift in the true sense unless you have given something else away. As it is passed along, the gift may be given back to the original donor, but this is not essential. In fact, it is better if the gift is not returned but is given instead to some new, third party. The only essential is: the gift must always move. There are other forms of property that stand still, that mark a boundary or resist momentum, but the gift keeps moving.

Just Communicate - Coping with the Caveman in the Crib

There is an intersting article by Tara Parker-Pope in the New York Times on February 5, 2008, Coping with the Caveman in the Crib. Not a panacea for a wailing child but an interesting insight.

Dr. Karp tries to teach parents the skills to communicate with and soothe tantrum-prone children. In doing so, however, he redefines what being a toddler means. In his view, toddlers are not just small people. In fact, for all practical purposes, they're not even small Homo sapiens.

Dr. Karp notes that in terms of brain development, a toddler is primitive, an emotion-driven, instinctive creature that has yet to develop the thinking skills that define modern humans. Logic and persuasion, common tools of modern parenting, "are meaningless to a Neanderthal," Dr. Karp says.

The challenge for parents is learning how to communicate with the caveman in the crib. "All of us get more primitive when we get upset, that's why they call it ‘going ape,' " Dr. Karp says. "But toddlers start out primitive, so when they get upset, they go Jurassic on you."