6/1001 Bradburian Nights

 Story: Only the Dead Know Brooklyn by Thomas Wolfe (available here)

The entire story is written in Broolynese (Brooklynite? Brooklynish?) and by the end, you can feel the rhythm of the dialect. Stilted and staccato and brusque. The story was really interesting considering that the idea of place and community have been things I've been thinking about lately. Can you know a place? 

“Listen!” I says. “You get dat idea outa yoeh head right now,” I says. “You ain’t neveh gonna get to know Brooklyn,” I says. “Not in a hunderd yeahs. I been livin’ heah all my life,” I says, “an’ I don’t even know all deh is to know about it, so how do you expect to know duh town,” I says, “when you don’t even live heah?”

What does it mean to know a place, and can we know it? The story doesn't answer it outright, but it's a question worth having in mind. 

Essay: Two essays today: The Mind at Work and Recipe Versus Thought by Essex Cholmondeley

Both of these articles were articulate, interesting, and connected with other articles and books I've read recently about leisure and contemplation. In both pieces, Miss Cholmondeley writes about narration and discussion in the classroom and beyond, and the role they play in acquiring knowledge. I'm going to focus on "The Mind at Work" in this review.

"The belief seems to be that if a matter has been discussed it has been understood. People are seeking to rouse intellectual effort, to make the individual mind active. Discussion trains the individual to use his mind, to order thought and speech, to exchange notions with other people, to hold opinions. Do you think this belief is a true one?" 

The question took me by surprise. Right away, the author turns to us and asks us to reflect and consider the question ourselves before she lays out her argument for or against. Do I think this belief is a true one? Well, I certainly have heard it thrown around. Discussion is now a major part of any learning experience, in both virtual and in-person classrooms, and especially in the humanities. The lecture model is seen as almost archaic and usually (if not definitely) less than ideal. What students really need, the line goes, is a chance to use their critical thinking skills through lively discussion.

"Thought must be stirred. Popular opinion says, 'Stir thought by discussion. Put the subject clearly before the audience, evoke questions, inspire someone to answer, others to bring experience to bear, until every mind is alert and active. Each person will remember the discussion and will go on turning the question over in his mind, seeking to know more, to find out more . . . Insist upon a really good discussion.' Is popular opinion right?"

There she goes, asking us to consider again.

Is popular opinion right?

Well, as Essex points out further on in the article, that depends.

"The answer comes from the intelligent man in the street. 'It's no good discussing it with So-and-so; he knows nothing about it.' -- 'I wish I had known more about it; the discussion was very active but I knew too little to join in.' -- 'She is in a muddle about electricity. She did not understand the lecture and the discussion confused her more than ever.'

"But he also says: 'There was a point about which I was not clear; the discussion put it right.' And: 'I do hope there will be time for questions. I have always wanted to discuss that point with someone who really knows.'

"The intelligent man in the street acts upon the experience that some clear understanding of a matter must be present before discussion can be valuable. There must first be a degree of knowledge. This granted, the mind can be stirred to fuller and clearer knowledge by discussion and questions. The value of a discussion depends upon what has gone before, upon the degree of attention, the quality of reflection, already given. A first lesson, an introductory lecture, a first reading of a poem, a glimpse of a work of art, do not call for immediate discussion. They must 'sink in,' we say, before we can talk about them."

In order to have a profitable discussion, the student must know something worth discussing first. It seems like a truism that goes without saying, but an over-emphasis on discussion as a method for learning makes it less so. Information alone is not knowledge; information requires reflection to become knowledge. In School Education, Charlotte Mason writes, "The distinction between knowledge and information is, I think, fundamental. Information is the record of facts, experiences, appearances, etc., whether in books or in the verbal memory of the individual; knowledge, it seems to me, implies the result of the voluntary and delightful action of the mind upon the material presented to it... The information acquired in the course of education is only by chance, and here and there, of practical value. Knowledge, on the other hand, that is, the product of the vital action of the mind on the material present to it, is power; as it implies an increase of intellectual aptitude in new directions, and an always new point of departure."

As an aside, something could be said here about the value of the lecture model over the discussion model in the classroom, or, for those of us who homeschool, the value of the living book (a book written by a single author who can articulate their knowledge about their area of expertise) over textbooks and scripted curriculums. Information has to be given, knowledge must be transferred - but how, and by whom? It requires first someone who knows. Learning from people who know their subject and can communicate it clearly (whether in a book or a class) is an entirely different experience than learning facts skinned of their context and pinned like specimens to the textbook page. We can learn information from textbooks, it is true, but does information presented in this sterilized way allow for the reflection which results in knowledge? Perhaps for the mind hungry enough to go to other books and read more, but I think for the most part it does not. Things like review questions at the end of textbook chapters or worksheets that repeat the information in the chapter covered show that in the case of the general student, reflection is not happening voluntarily. Or the publishers and school administrators think reflection will not happen voluntarily. The worksheets and review questions are attempting to manufacture the process of reflection. It's a bit like a hospital patient breathing with a ventilator and not one's own lungs, but in this case, it's treating the ventilator as the preferred method of breathing rather than the patient's. Wendell Berry in his essay Heath and Membership writes, "In dealing with problems of agriculture, I had thought much about the difference between creatures and machines. But I had never so clearly understood and felt that difference as when John was in recovery after his heart surgery, when he was attached to many machines and was dependent for breath on a respirator. It was impossible then not to see that the breathing of a machine, like all machine work, is unvarying, an oblivious regularity, whereas the breathing of a creature is ever changing, exquisitely responsive to events both inside and outside the body, thoughts and emotions. A machine makes breaths as a machine makes buttons, all the same, but every breath of a creature is itself a creature, like no other, inestimably precious." It is not too far of a stretch to apply this to education and the ways we learn. What are things like worksheets and chapter review questions than the "oblivious regularity" of machine-model learning? I do not fault the textbook manufacturers (are they authors?) for their attempts to force the student to "process" the information into knowledge. They recognize that in order for the student to know, they must reflect. But time for reflection is not built into the school day, and so the review questions are sent home as homework and the student fills in the blanks and we say that's education at work.

I am not saying a person can never learn from a textbook, or that bare information and facts can't become knowledge. Those of us who have gone through any kind of typical school can say that, yes, we learned things. We even learned that we liked certain subjects enough to learn more about them in our free time. But a textbook alone isn't enough. A teacher must be present - either in a classroom or through a living book. Among other things, textbooks or "educational" books with blurbs or "interesting facts" often don't give you the humbling experience of sitting under someone who knows their subject. In that kind of learning environment, the listener has to listen in order to learn. The student must be quiet and attentive to the teacher. An anecdote to illustrate: my oldest daughter and I went to see The Barber of Seville for her birthday and ended up arriving over an hour early, just in time to hear a complimentary lecture about the history of the opera. As we listened to the speaker, I realized that here was a branch of information I knew absolutely nothing about, and it was fascinating. Apart from learning about something of which I was previously ignorant, it was a pleasure just to listen to someone who knew what he was talking about talk about what he knew and loved, in depth and with charm and intelligence. But even if the speaker hadn't been as engaging, the information itself would have been interesting to us and we would have walked away with a few new things to think about. When there was a time for discussion at the end, several people asked intelligent questions, the kind of questions that someone who knew the subject better than a complete newbie (like my daughter or myself) would ask. We didn't even know enough to ask questions! And I knew this, I could feel how little I knew, so I listened and attended to what they said and enjoyed what I could understand.

This is one of the real, structural problems with the discussion model of education. We are assuming that a student's first introduction to a work is enough for them to have something to say on it. But there is such a thing as not knowing enough to even ask good questions. C.S.  Lewis, in his essay On Stories, says, “We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.”

That word 'savor' is an important one, and brings us back to the article by Miss Cholmondeley. "A first lesson, an introductory lecture, a first reading of a poem, a glimpse of a work of art, do not call for immediate discussion. They must 'sink in,' we say, before we can talk about them." Discussion, whether oral or in written form, is the part of the trinity of learning that gets a lot of attention in modern education, but we forget - or perhaps we don't realize - that discussion can only be beneficial when the students have been allowed a time of reflection. The information must simmer to become something like knowledge. It takes a while for beef bones and water to become stock. So too with information becoming knowledge. Contemplation and reflection must be allowed. In Only the Lover Sings, Joseph Pieper writes:

"An activity which is meaningful in itself, first, cannot be accomplished except with an attitude of receptive openness and attentive silence -- which, indeed, is the exact opposite of the worker's attitude marked by concentrated exertion."

The posture described here is not of one who is ready to speak and discuss, but one who is ready to listen and contemplate first. 

"Before you can express anything in tangible form, you first need eyes to see. The mere attempt, therefore, to create an artistic form compels the artist to take a fresh look at the visible reality; it requires authentic and personal observation. Long before a creation is complete, the artist has gained for himself another and more intimate achievement: a deeper and more receptive vision, a more intense awareness, a sharper and more discerning understanding, a more patient openness for all things quiet and inconspicuous, an eye for things previously overlooked. In short, the artist will be able to perceive with new eyes the abundant wealth of all visible reality, and thus challenged, additionally acquires the inner capacity to absorb into his mind such an exceedingly rich harvest. The capacity to see increases." 

While Pieper is talking about specifically about the artist working in visual mediums, the principle applies to the larger point. Time to contemplate is not optional in the life of the student; it is essential. Contemplation, consideration, reflection - all words for that inner, passive work (not an oxymoron) that transforms information to useable knowledge. As Miss Cholmondeley points out at the beginning of her piece, the mind has a three-fold action that takes place in learning: "It attends, it reflects, it uses what has been apprehended. This threefold activity receives unequal consideration. Much has been said and written upon the power of attention, how to secure it, to sustain it. ... Much, too, has been written and spoken about the value of expression when the mind has apprehended truth, or beauty, or goodness. ...Between attention and expression lies a whole world of thought, when the mind is active in reflection... A reflection is passive; there is no word to convey the active stillness with which an idea is received and absorbed. C. M. Mason uses the analogy of food and the body in order to describe the hidden process. She says that the mind 'feed' upon the ideas which it accepts and that the whole person is enlivened by the strength of such food. While this work goes on, the mind sees for words or images which fit its findings, and as these come, it forms and individual notion. The person begins to 'know.' Then comes the moment when he can use what he knows, can express it, discuss it."

I cannot imagine arguing with such an articulate argument. But considering that many students learn in environments that require time constraints, it is possible that people would respond with, "but there is no time for reflection! That's what the worksheets are for, to speed it up and get the student to think about the important things in the lesson." Miss Cholmondeley has a worthwhile response:

"It must be remembered that thought is a timeless action. To see with the mind's eye, going over a matter point by point, delighting in it, grasping it, does not take time, but leisure. To a person trained in the habit of narration, a calm, unhurried five minutes is leisure. Five minutes, pencil in hand with which to jot down a word here or there, is all that is needed in order to follow through a train of thought or a series of incidents before discussion. If a class reads silently, quick readers will have more leisure than slower ones, but a slow reader is often a clear thinker, so the loss is a gain. Thinking takes leisure and little time, discussion takes time, much time; so does every activity by which the human spirit chooses to express thought. 'Leisure for thinking, time for expression of thought,' is an unalterable law of necessity."

Leisure is not the modern idea of having a massive amounts of time to loll about and do nothing; it is time well-used. Much can be done in 5 minutes of thought that can't be done in 50 minutes of active discussion without prior time to reflect. Part of the push for discussion is the modern insistence that we must be "doing something" and not "wasting time." But often doing something simply for the sake of doing something is a waste of time, or at least a misuse of time and a waste of our energy. Activity does not necessarily mean that meaningful action is taking place. Sometimes the  most meaningful thing to do is, as the poet W.H. Davies wrote,

"A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

The essay does not say that discussion never has a place in the classroom or in the learning process: "Too few people discover how to assemble what they know, how to bring one thing to bear upon another, how to enquire, how to criticise, how to hold an opinion. Many people are helped to such power by well-conducted discussion." Notice the qualifier. It is not discussion per se that does it, but one that is well-conducted and, as she says earlier, held by knowledgeable people. Those who know enough to participate in the discussion have no reason to feel ashamed that they cannot participate. They are acquiring information to reflect on at their leisure. For the homeschool student, this is where narration comes in. The student may know absolutely nothing about the battle between the English and Spanish armdas, for example, and yet as the student reads through the book and narrates as he goes, his narrations will become more articulate and informed. By the end of the book, he will know more than he did when he started because he spent time learning from the author and time reflecting (ordering his thoughts, considering what to say, remembering what he has already read) before discussing (or narrating) what he learned. Since it is not a summary, the narration can include questions that he has or references to other works he is reading that the present book reminds him of. Reflection is built in to the process of narration. 

This maybe a tangential application of what she says, but reading Miss Cholmondeley's essays made me grateful that our family decided to homeschool from the beginning, and that we have been using Charlotte Mason's method and principles in mind for half of that time. The longer we practice her methods and apply her principles, the more I see that this really is the only method that aligns with the way we naturally learn, and not only aligns with it but honors it. I wish that schools could allow for this natural process. Miss Cholmondeley worked for a school where student narration was built into the method of teaching. Classes would participte in group narrations, and as the kids grew, those oral narrations would become written compositions. But the modern, mainstream system of education is like a factory or a machine. It is mechanical in practice if not in actuality, and to ask a machine to make students is to ask for the "unvarying, oblivious regularity" that cannot pause for natural processes. To quote from Berry's essay again:
"The world of efficiency ignores both loves, earthly and divine, because by definition it must reduce experience to computation, particularity to abstraction, and mystery to a small comprehensibility. Efficiency, in our present sense of the word, allies itself inevitable with machinery, as Neil Postman demonstrates in his useful book, Technopoly. 'Machines,' he says 'eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity. They work swiftly, they are standardized, and they provide us with numbers that you can see and calculate with.' To reason, the advantages are obvious, and probably no reasonable person would wish to reject them out of hand.
"And yet love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized. A body, love insists, is neither spirit not a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark."

Leisure - time for reflection - allows the mind at work to work in that world of love, seeing it as "precisely and uniquely what it is." Reflection is when information begins its metamorphosis to knowledge. I'm challenged to make time for it in my own intellectual life.

Leisure by W.H. Davies

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Poem: 

Edgar Allan Poe

by DuBose Heyward

Once in the starlight

    When the tides were low,

    And the surf fell sobbing

    To the undertow,

    I trod the windless dunes

    Alone with Edgar Poe.

    Dim and far behind us,

    Like a fabled bloom

    On the myrtle thickets,

    In the swaying gloom

    Hung the clustered windows

    Of the barrack-room.

    Faint on the evening

    Tenuous and far

    As the beauty shaken

    From a vagrant star,

    Throbbed the ache and passion

    Of an old guitar.

    Life closed behind us

    Like a swinging gate,

    Leaving us unfettered

    And emancipate;

    Confidants of Destiny,

    Intimates of Fate.

    I could only cower,

    Silent, while the night,

    Seething with its planets,

    Parted to our sight,

    Showing us infinity

    In its breadth and height.

    But my chosen comrade,

    Tossing back his hair

    With the old loved gesture,

    Raised his face, and there

    Shone the agony that those

    Loved of God must bear.

    Oh, we heard the many things

    Silence has to say;

    He and I together

    As alone we lay

    Waiting for the slow, sweet

    Miracle of day.

    When the bugle's silver

    Spiralled up the dawn,

    Dew-dear, night-cool,

    And the stars were gone,

    I arose exultant,

    Like a man new born.

    But my friend and master,

    Heavy-limbed and spent,

    Turned, as one must turn at last

    From the sacrament;

    And his eyes were deep with God's

    Burning discontent.