Hearts and Zucchini

   by

JoAnn Hallum

It's a new school year and I have seen all the printables and wooden blocks, the panic and the purchases, the general clamor to figure out how to home educate your kid.

A child is a human, and humans have brains, but they also have souls. They have things that interest them, and usually it’s an inconvenient interest. There are often piles of rocks stuffed into pockets and once I had a child who developed an obsession with collecting milk cartons. Three-year-olds are especially wild in their interests. But go ahead. Sit them down. Show them the letter A. We might as well all be bored together. We need to feed the cogs of the global economy, isn’t that why you were born!?

I am reading the Princess and the Goblin to my 8-year-old. Maybe you haven’t read it but you should know, for safety’s sake, the only way to keep Goblins away is to sing silly songs. A poetic chant. A laugh in the face of reason. The data monsters are real, they have come to the surface. They promise you knowledge but you’ll only get information.

You will have a head full of facts while you drown in reality.

Now is the time for poems. Now is the time to grow hearts and zucchini. Now is the time to read the books that kept us human for so long. There are enough computers. We need more harvest mice scampering by. We need more gardens with thistle and dock. We need the charms of the old words to keep the goblins away.

There was a time when people knew the world was full of forests, but they didn’t care enough about the trees to keep them. The Limberlost swamps are gone. We used to know about bread, and how to make it, but now we can find it easily, in its mummified form. We have lost our way, with pure knowledge, fake bread, and a lack of love. The cure is in the books, it’s in the words, it’s in the silly rhyme you learned in ancient times on a knee.

Beware! If you find knowledge, you will fall in love and everyone will think you are crazy for getting emotional about Charles Dickens. But the Goblins won’t get you, and you will have gotten an education. You will care, and you will know the lyrics to the songs that will carry us through. One, two, hit and hew!

This post is written by guest blogger JoAnn Hallum, a mom of four boys who homeschools them using AmblesideOnline. JoAnn writes on her Substack at JoAnn’s Substack | Collections | Substack

A Challenge for This Week

The story of Undine was an extremely popular children's story in the 19th century, although it is not one which recommends itself to today's parents.* Louisa May Alcott mentioned it in Little Women, and Charlotte Yonge references it in one of her collections of stories.  Yonge also wrote the introduction to it in one edition.
Briefly, Undine is a water sprite, unwittingly fostered by a sweet Christian pair of elderly parents. As a water-sprite, Undine is not evil, but she has no soul, which means she has no experience of the pain which causes humans to empathize with one other. Her bewildered human parents are unaware that she is not a human. They love her but are much troubled by her thoughtless, careless ways. She is affectionate but willful and self centered, unable to empathize with others, unconcerned with how her selfish antics grieve her family. She falls in love with a passing knight and he with her, and their union, consecrated in marriage, grants her a soul, instantly giving her a gravitas and depth of patience and human kindness that opens her eyes to the suffering she has caused and the good that is open to her in the world.

It reminds me very much of the George MacDonald story The Light Princess, which I won't summarize because it simply must be read.

At any rate, Undine's light and careless (and so often thoughtlessly wounding) affection is awakened, made deeper, stretched, and given real meaning when love imbibes her with a soul.

Mason uses this highly popular and very familiar story as a sort of a hook with which to open her sixth volume on education.  

This week, I'd like to challenge you to read this with me, and when you have finished reading take a minute or two to write down or review orally as much as you can of the following preface from volume VI (you can retell it to the baby while changing a diaper, or talk to your soup as you stir if you have no time or inclination to write):

"It would seem a far cry from Undine [by La Motte Fouque] to a 'liberal education' but there is a point of contact between the two; a soul awoke within a water-sprite at the touch of love; so, I have to tell of the awakening of a 'general soul' at the touch of knowledge. Eight years ago the 'soul' of a class of children in a mining village school awoke simultaneously at this magic touch and has remained awake. We know that religion can awaken souls, that love makes a new man, that the call of a vocation may do it, and in the age of the Renaissance, men's souls, the general soul, awoke to knowledge: but this appeal rarely reaches the modern soul; and, notwithstanding the pleasantness attending lessons and marks (grades and one's gpa) in all our schools, I believe the ardour for knowledge in the children of this mining village is a phenomenon that indicates new possibilities. Already many thousands of the children of the Empire had experienced this intellectual conversion, but they were the children of educated persons. To find that the children of a mining population were equally responsive seemed to open a new hope for the world. It may be that the souls of all children are waiting for the call of knowledge to awaken them to delightful living.

This is how the late Mrs. Francis Steinthal, who was the happy instigator of the movement in Council Schools, wrote,––"Think of the meaning of this in the lives of the children,––disciplined lives, and no lawless strikes, justice, an end to class warfare, developed intellects, and no market for trashy and corrupt literature! We shall, or rather they will, live in a redeemed world." This was written in a moment of enthusiasm on hearing that a certain County Council had accepted a scheme of work for this pioneer school; enthusiasm sees in advance the fields white to the harvest, but indeed the event is likely to justify high expectations. Though less than nine years have passed since that pioneer school made the bold attempt, already many thousands of children working under numerous County Councils are finding that "Studies serve for delight."

No doubt children are well taught and happy in their lessons as things are, and this was specially true of the school in question; yet both teachers and children find an immeasurable difference between the casual interest roused by marks, pleasing oral lessons and other school devices, and the sort of steady avidity for knowledge that comes with the awakened soul. The children have converted the school inspectors: "And the English!" said one of these in astonishment as he listened to their long, graphic, dramatic narrations of what they had heard. During the last thirty years we (including many fellow workers) have had thousands of children, in our schoolrooms, home and other, working on the lines of Dean Colet's prayer for St Paul's School,––"Pray for the children to prosper in good life and good literature;" probably all children so taught grow up with such principles and pursuits as make for happy and useful citizenship.

I should like to add that we have no axe to grind. The public good is our aim; and the methods proposed are applicable in any school. My object in offering this volume to the public is to urge upon all who are concerned with education a few salient principles which are generally either unknown or disregarded; and a few methods which, like that bathing in Jordan, are too

simple to commend themselves to the 'general.' Yet these principles and methods make education entirely effectual.

Challenges for this week (over the course of the week, not all in one day):  

Read the above, look up any words that aren't clear,  and spend a couple minutes either writing or telling as much of it as you can recall.

Write down or simply think about 3 points that strike you (for any reason at all)

Here are a couple of mine:  1. 'Pleasantness' over lessons vs Ardour for knowledge; casual interest vs steady avidity for knowledge.  

Undine's awakened soul allowed her to really understand, for the first time, how other people felt, to care about them in a meaningful way, to see things from their point of view, and no longer to put her own way of thinking first and foremost. 

Feel free to share yours!

Related challenges: 

1. Go outside with the kids at least once this week- take a walk in your neighbourhood, or visit a park, a farm, a garden (does a neighbour have one?) or a plant nursery.  Just enjoy it- walk along and look for something pretty or interesting to admire or be curious about.

2.  Sing aloud at least twice this week (more is better, but this is the minimum).

3.  Consider this poem:
 A centipede was happy, quite,
 Until a frog in fun
 Said, 'Pray, which leg goes after which?
This worked his mind to such a pitch,
 He lay distracted in a ditch,
 Considering how to run.

Are you overthinking your week? Read something good to your children. Sing with them. Take them outside. Ask them to narrate the good books and stories you read.  Nourish their bodies and their minds, starting with with what you have and where you are.

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*footnote and spoiler alert:  to be honest, the story of Undine doesn't end well, as not every human with a soul is as awakened to our duties and responsibilities to one another and the way of love as Undine.  Think Little Mermaid except the betrayal by the beloved is deliberate and the Mermaid is the cause of death to the unworthy human husband. 

Of Good Books: The Power and the Fear

by Wendi Capehart

Some time ago a mother asked for help understanding why we might read a book like George MacDonald's Princess and the Goblin.    
The discussion reminded me of my experience with the sequel, The Princess and Curdy. I read it as a very young child, so young I don't remember how young, and for a very long time I couldn't remember the title of the book. In fact, over the years the details of the story slipped away to the point that the memory of most of that story was hidden in the mists of other memories, other books, other experiences. Then one day when I was in my very late twenties, busy with my life in Japan as a young military wife and mom, the memory of that book came out of the mists, recalled by a stray reference.

I was reading one of those special children's book catalogs that used to abound, catalogs as literary as the books inside them, chatty, personable. The catalog writer explained that she had read this book as a child and over the years had forgotten all but a single detail of the story- something about a grandmother with a fire of rose petals that never lost their rose petal essence (similar to the burning bush in the Bible), and you could put your hand in it without harm. She found this detail in the Princess and Curdy while reviewing it for the catalog, and with a thrill recognized her old friend and was delighted and it all came flooding back.

I promptly added the book to my list, which back in those days entailed writing out my order by hand and snail mailing it with a check. That fire of rose petals is the one detail I also had remembered. I, too, was thrilled to find my old friend again. I was even more delighted when the book arrived several weeks later and I read it again as an adult. The sequel is just that good, and the first book is even better.

 MacDonald was a devout Christian and a pastor devoted to his flock - and his God. His books are somewhat allegorical. For some reason, there are some who don't care for them. I don't understand it. However, I would not pass these up based on second hand information. I'd at least skim through them myself first.

 It is true that not every book is every person's cup of tea (and children are born persons). But it isn't true that merely not liking a book is a sound reason to avoid it. Nor is it good policy to avoid books merely because they have scary things like planned goblin invasions, greedy trolls, and dark caverns in them. A book that frightens one child encourages another. A book that makes no impression on another child will be a never to be forgotten source of courage for another.

 We cannot know in advance what a book will be to our children- we often think we know, but my own children surprised me again and again. I also have now heard hundreds of times from mothers who say they were sure their child would love or loathe or be bored by this book or another, only to discover it was the newest favourite. Children, like the rest of us, are people of many parts, and we should give them the dignity of being complex human beings with depths we have not yet plumbed and may never.

Children have many different reactions to different stories, some good, some bad. I knew a child afraid of beavers after being frightened by talking beavers in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I would not avoid a book widely recognized as a well written children's classic merely because another child was afraid of the dark after reading it. Consider that the fact that it is recognized as a well written classic.  While that is not alone a stamp of approval and compatibility with your belief system, it does indicate that thousands more children (and their parents) have been blessed and have grown in their understanding because of it, and their experience should be weighted in our decisions as well if the reactions of other children is our measurement.

 One can also use that knowledge to help with a book rather than to reject it. If reading a book makes one child afraid of the dark or another afraid of rats or grand-daddy long-legs or whatever, I'd use that knowledge to help the young reader work through it and deal with it. Real life is not sugar-coated and lined with cotton wool. Children will come to face to face with terrors of their own, both real and imagined. It is better to deal with those first in the fictional story between the pages of a book that can be put down. Real life is full of choices of right and wrong, bravery and cowardice, and people who make the wrong choice. Real books give children some exposure and practice in considering those choices, thinking about the implications, imagining what they would do in similar circumstances. Well written books come alive in our minds. They bring us into the scene. These powerful descriptions and scene setting, this skillful building of worlds feeds our imaginations, warms them, brings them to life, gives the reader an excellent exposure to the skill of writing and the power of words. While we don't want to inundate children with frights and horrors and ignore sensitivities and maturity levels altogether, we also don't want to avoid all possible ways they might become afraid, all misdeeds, or all wrong choices. We all have and have had fears for good reasons and for ignoble reasons and for silly reasons- it's a blessing to be able to recognize them for what they are and have help facing them when young in safe circumstances, not something to avoid at all costs. MacDonald's story of Curdy, the goblins, and the princess is really lovely and living and deserves to be judged on its own merits, not on second hand information (not even mine). Please let your understanding of this book, and every other book, be based primarily on your reading, not just on what a few negative secondhand witnesses have claimed for a book.