Old is new: on literature and Plutarch

by Anne White

from "The Teaching of English," by E.A. Abbott, 1868

The home-work should teach boys what is literature, the school-work what is thought. A beginning might be made with "Robinson Crusoe" and Byron's "Sennacherib," or some other short, intelligible, and powerful poem; then "Ivanhoe" and the "Armada"; then Plutarch's "Coriolanus"and the "Horatius Codes," Plutarch's "Julius Caesar" and Gray's "Ruin seize thee"; Plutarch's "Agis and Cleomenes" and the "Battle of Ivry"; then "Marmion"; then the "Allegro" and " Penseroso," or "Comus";  then (in the class in which those boys leave who are intended for commercial pursuits) Pope's "Iliad"; then part of the "Paradise Lost;" then part of the "Fairy Queen"; then Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" or Dante's "Inferno" (in English), or the "In  Memoriam," or some of the poems of Dryden, Pope, or Johnson...   A play of Shakespeare might be read during another term throughout almost every class in the school. Shakespeare and Plutarch's "Lives" are very devulgarizing books, and I should like every boy who leaves a middle-class school for business at the age of fifteen, suppose, or sixteen, to have read three or four plays of Shakespeare, three or four noble poems, and three or four nobly-written lives of noble Greeks and Romans. I should therefore like to see Plutarch's " Lives " in the hands of every English schoolboy; or, if it were necessary to make a selection, those biographies which best illustrate one's "duty toward one's country." 

T.S. Eliot Talk Source Notes: Anne White

by Anne White

A bibliography of sorts for the Deep in the Heart of AO talk "Ends and Beginnings: What I Learned From T.S. Eliot."

BOOKS

Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age: T.S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century (Random House, 1971)

Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S. Eliot: A searching evaluation of Eliot's masterpiece, Four Quartets (Dutton Paperback, 1950)

Selected Prose of T.S.Eliot, edited and with an introduction by Frank Kermode

T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962

Four Quartets, various editions

The Waste Land, at Project Gutenberg

The Illustrated Old Possum: Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, by T.S. Eliot

ARTICLES

"Somerset: Why Tom Loved the Last Word" (Telegraph article by Anthony Gardner)

"Why Walking Through a Doorway Makes You Forget" (Scientific American)

"Why you forget what you came for when you enter the room" (MindHacks)

"10 Ways You Can Have Enough Money and Stuff" (BeMoreWithLess website)

FILMS

Muscle Shoals (2013) (conversation with Gregg Allman)

Seymour: An Introduction (2014)

ONLINE VIDEOS

Anthony Hopkins reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Alec Guinness reading Four Quartets

Paul Scofield reading Four Quartets (multiple videos; the link is to "Burnt Norton II" because "Burnt Norton I" seems to be missing)

T.S. Eliot reading Four Quartets

On the boyhood reading of Plutarch

(posted by Anne White)

From the footnotes to Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on Plutarch, written by the editor, Emerson's son, Dr.Edward Waldo Emerson. (Photograph of father, son and baby grandson here.)

"Mr. Emerson as a boy read Plutarch, and never tired of this early friend. When I was fourteen years old, he put Plutarch’s Lives into my hand and bade me read two pages every week-day and ten every holiday. It seemed at first an irksome task, but my mother asked me to read them aloud to her, and this made it easier. Lycurgus’s training of the Spartan boys, Archimedes’s amazing military engineering in the defence of Syracuse, Hannibal’s passage of the Alps, Scipio’s magnanimity and Cæsar’s courage and genius won their own way, as my father knew they would with a boy, and, what is by no means common with authors, the personality of the writer also, as, for instance, where he drops the narrative to hotly censure the meanness of Cato the Elder in selling his slaves when they were past service. The style of Plutarch could commend itself even to a boy."

They Do Shakespeare Here?

by Wendi Capehart

Several years ago one of my daughters and I attended a Charlotte Mason seminar. There was a group of teens and young people there, some of whom were her special friends, met online via the Advisory and AO. They had some loosely planned activities to do together, planned mainly by Advisory son Tim Laurio and his soon to be bride Hannah Hoyt (I believe they are the main planners).

 My girl told me a story about one of the other teens there. She knew nobody before she came, not even as online friends. She clearly felt a bit out of place and awkward- something I think most of us can sympathize with. She wasn't sure she fit in. But then one of the young people explained they were meeting at such and such a time under such and such a tree on the grounds to read Shakespeare together in character, and those who were interested could join them, but nobody was required to be there. Hold your breath a moment in preparation for what happened next.

The girl feeling like a square peg in a round hole shivered and adjusted her perspective, looking, wide-eyed, her countenance brightening perceptibly as she turned to somebody near her and said eagerly, "They do Shakespeare here?"  I wasn't there, so maybe I am wrong, but I always think of this story as one of those Holy Ground moments, when the kalaidescope shifts and something beautiful is revealed- and what is more beautiful than an awkward child feeling miserably alone and out of the group suddenly realizes she is not alone?

Why yes, yes they did 'do Shakespeare' there, and she found her 'tribe' as she looked around at the other young people who suddenly appeared to be square pegs as well, and she realized she was in a place with plenty of square spaces in which to fit comfortably.

 My girl told me this young lady came right out of her shell over Shakespeare readings and seemed to have a lovely time henceforth. And I suspect that is why, when I was talking about this [2016] Conference with this daughter, now grown up, married, and with a baby, she said, "Oh, I could do Shakespeare with any interested teens who come!

 And so she is. The teens who wish to will be reading Midsummer Nights' Dream together in character. We purchased a version edited for homeschoolers by Joyce McPherson, so no worries about any of the sometimes bawdy bits Shakespeare includes.

 Those who want to join may, nobody is required to. Parents are still responsible for their own teens- this isn't babysitting or childcare. And because so far of those teens who are coming, most are coming to help with a younger sibling, and my girl is coming with a nursing baby, the times and locations will have to be flexible. They will work out details of where on the grounds and when amongst themselves. They will choose their parts, and read aloud in character, sharing books if necessary, breaking for the little ones amongst them as needed. It will be very flexible, very informal, and I am sure very, very delightful. Because we, too, do Shakespeare here, and so do most of you.

It's still not too late to register for the conference.  It is too late to ask for special dietary needs, but you may pack your own food and eat on the grounds or in your room (their rules- no outside food in their dining room).  Hope you can join us!

NEW GIVEAWAY!! CONSIDER THIS, by Karen Glass!!

Teacher@Home, YOU WON! Please email us with your address. And to everybody else, my abject apologies for the delay in getting a name drawn. I really have no excuse except conference business putting this task right out of my head. I am ashamed. Karen will have one free copy of her book mailed to the lucky winner of our next drawing! Our drawing for her book works the same way as our previous giveaway (except I'll be using a random number generator to choose our lucky winner)- share the conference!

  http://amblesideonline.org/2016Conference/Conference2016.html

To present your name for consideration for our give-away, please share the above link to our conference page on social media- FB, Twitter, Instagram, your blog, a homeschooling group you're in, Tumbler- whatever and wherever is out there that you are comfortable sharing our conference link. Then come back here and tell us about it in the comments, leaving a link to your share in the comments if possible. EACH time you share is one entry in a drawing.   So share on twitter, tell us about it, and that's one entry.  Share on FB, tell us about it, and that's another entry.

I will draw the name of the winner of our giveaway when we have fifty comments, or on Friday if we get fifty entries before then.

And congratulations to Amy Boesl, who won our giveaway of a mug and totebag, which we will mail right after the conference!

Your chance for an AO MUG!!

Amy Boesl is our winner!! Amy, email us your mailing address and we'll send your mug and bag when our conference is over (we'll be sending in one order for our conference, so we will receive your mug and bag w/our conference order). Amblesideonline, using gmail is our email addy. thanks to all for participating! Watch this space, because we are having another giveaway very, very soon! http://amblesideonline.org/2016Conference/Conference2016.html

Above is the link to the AO Conference we're having in May- our 3rd conference in ten years, and the last conference we plan to have for at least three more years, maybe more. We're hip-deep in the planning bounce house excitedly and energetically working out details right now, and as exhausting as it all is, we are getting excited, too.

We have so many ideas for what we want to share with you all, and so little time.We are trying to offer a good mix of philosophy as well as practical hand-holding, sharing the why as well as the what, and speaking from our hearts about why we do what we do, and how you can implement CM's principles in your homeschool (or private school- we know we have teachers in private schools coming).

 One of the perks of being able to come to a conference, or just have a friend at a conference, is that up until now,  this has been the only way to get one of our special AO coffee mugs or totebags. These are so pretty- many people have wished they'd ordered two, or have asked us to consider shipping them out so people who can't come to the conference can also have them. They really are lovely, and while we wish everybody who wants one could own one,  we really can't redirect our time and energy from curriculum development and conference planning to shipping out coffee mugs.

However,  we have come up with an opportunity for one special reader to win a free mug and totebag and we promise to ship them out to you at our expense (but not until after the conference).
We're having a giveaway!
To present your name for consideration for our give-away, please share the above link to our conference page on social media- FB, Twitter, Instagram, your blog, a homeschooling group you're in, Tumbler- whatever and wherever is out there that you are comfortable sharing our conference link. Then come back here and tell us about it in the comments, leaving a link to your share in the comments.
 EACH time you share is one entry in a drawing for a free mug/totebag combo, shipping included. So if you share the conference link on Twitter, FB, and Instagram, you'd leave 3 comments, saying basically, "I shared the conference on Twitter!  (link here)."  Leave another comment for a fB share, and so forth.

The winner will be selected on Friday, or when we reach 100 shares, whichever comes first.  Should we reach 100 shares really quickly (like, by the end of today), we'll probably give away TWO mugs and TWO totes!

On Friday or when this post has 100 comments, I will select the lucky recipient of this week's giveaway by the randomly scientific process of printing out the comments, cutting them apart, tossing them in a bowl and having one of my deliciously adorable small grandchildren pull out one of the slips.

To Recap:

 Share the above link or this one on social media : http://preview.tinyurl.com/AOConferenceHeartofAO

Each social media platform mention is a separate chance to be picked for the giveaway- so copy and paste the link where you shared in the comments below, one per social media share.

Cross your fingers and hope we draw your name, and keep an eye on this space for the next pre-conference giveaway!!

P.S.  Yes, OF COURSE you can enter even if you can't come to the conference.

The modern place for older books

by Wendi Capehart

Why do we use old books?  We live in the 21st century after all!

In general, well written older books use richer vocabulary, more  complex sentence structure, and contain more ideas per page than  modern books. Recently written books, by contrast, use watered down language, weaker, less complex, sentence structures and if they have any meaningful ideas, they either sandwich them  between pages and pages of fluff, or they club the reader over the head with the message.

C. S. Lewis, in his introduction to Athanasius, advised that moderns needed to read more old books and fewer new books.  He explained:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. … To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

We can see the blind spots of previous generations, but it is harder to know our own.  Older books that we use have stood the test of time. They have  been read for generations and will be read for generations more.  It's too early to tell which of our currently published, modern crops of books will  still be communicating to readers outside of the culture and time  that produced them a hundred years from now.  Those who are contemporaries of the authors are the worst judges of that timeless quality, because we cannot step outside our own time, culture, and assumptions to see which are merely passing whims and which are timeless, not with any certainty, anyway.

The marginalizing of old books as though truth and beauty have expiration dates reflects modernity's disconnect with the past, something David McCullough addressed, pointing out:

Learning about history is an antidote to the hubris of the present, the idea that everything in our lives is the ultimate.Former President Harry S. Truman once remarked that the history we don’t know is the only new thing in the world. Picking up on a related theme, the late Daniel Boorstin, an eminent historian, Librarian of Congress, and friend of mine, wrote that planning for the future without a sense of the past is similar to planting cut flowers and hoping for the best. Today, the new generation of young Americans are like a field of cut flowers, by-and-large historically illiterate. This does not bode well for our future.

A sense of the past is not just a matter of knowing dates and events and being able to put them in order.  It's about coming into contact with some of the best minds of the previous centuries, not mere decades. It's about reading their ideas and stories in their words, getting a feel for   Truth, justice, mercy, faith, friendship, charity, loyalty, courage, these are ideas and traits that are timeless. 

While Mason did use some books which were newly published in her day, she relied more heavily on great books of the past.  In volume VI, she explains that the children read literature which was published in the same historical time period they are studying.  She mentions Milton, Pope, Sir Walter Scott, Goldsmith- and of course, they were not 'modern' in her day, either.

She explains:

 The object of children's literary studies is not to give them precise information as to who wrote what in the reign of whom?––but to give them a sense of the spaciousness of the days, not only of great Elizabeth, but of all those times of which poets, historians and the makers of tales, have left us living pictures. In such ways the children secure, not the sort of information which is of little cultural value, but wide spaces wherein imagination may take those holiday excursions deprived of which life is dreary; judgment, too, will turn over these folios of the mind and arrive at fairly just decisions about a given strike, the question of Poland, Indian Unrest. Every man is called upon to be a statesman seeing that every man and woman, too, has a share in the government of the country; but statesmanship requires imaginative conceptions, formed upon pretty wide reading and some familiarity with historical precedents.

It is not that her students never read modern books for literature, it's just that Mason did not see a need to emphasize them.  She wrote that sometimes the oldest students' studies touched on:

current literature in the occasional use of modern books; but young people who have been brought up on this sort of work may, we find, be trusted to keep themselves au fait with the best that is being produced in their own days.

It is also true that we at AO appreciate about older books is that they are in the public domain.  Now, many, many public domain books are still twaddle, so that alone won't qualify a book for AO.  But once we've found a really well written book we love it when it's also public domain.  This means they are available on line as etexts,  *and will remain available.* I can't tell you how frustrating, how  much gnashing of teeth it causes the Advisory when a book goes out  of print. When we put together the curriculum (and when we revise it), it was and is the result of truly, thousands of Mama-hours (these are worth  more than man-hours, right? Just Joking!) researching books. 

We  amazed our librarians with the number of books we checked out from the  library and put on interlibrary loan. When all else fails, we  actually, gulp, spend money on a book if we can't find it to review  it any other way. We scan excerpts of different books into our  computers and pass them on to each other to compare and contrast.  We look at the wording, the breadth and scope of coverage, the  illustrations (if any), topics covered (and just as important,  topics not covered), and then, after devoting months of our lives to  this project, we finally pick the best book of all those available  and proudly and gleefully share it with the world.  Then it goes out  of print and we all have to go on anti-depressants and receive hours  of pastoral counseling. Okay, that last part was an exaggeration.  We don't go on medication.  Seriously, though, the newer, in-print  books have a Very High turnover rate. They very quickly become  newer but now hard to find and out of print books, and thus, of no  use to us. 

Individual homeschoolers can use and benefit from those books, of  course. Some of them may actually be better than any given book we  have listed. But a book that may be perfect for your family (or  mine) is not perfect for AmblesideOnline if it's out of print but not online.

Here's are some reasons why out of print but not yet in public domain books are not  very useful to us:
 We want to share our vision of what a Charlotte  Mason education might look like put into practice, and at the same  time, we want to make that vision available to as many people as  possible who might want to benefit from it.

We specifically want to consider the unique situations and needs of  missionaries, military, and other expat families overseas, as well as parents and educators around the world who love their kids; single  parents; families without access to a decent library, a good  bookstore, or inexpensive shipping; families who travel often and so  cannot cart thousands of pounds of books around; and fellow  homeschoolers all over the world. We want to recreate a solid, sound, and beautiful rendition of  what a CM curriculum might look like today, and we want that version to also  work for all those different families I mentioned. The best way for  us to do that is to rely strongly on public domain works that can be  used as etexts, whenever we find etexts of excellent quality..

This is not the only way to implement Charlotte Mason's ideas and  principles. These are not the only books worth using. But these  are the books that best fit the criteria we set for ourselves at the  start of this project. We want to offer a model of what a real living book looks like.  We want to share a curriculum based on excellently written books, packed with informing ideas rather than twaddle and  barren facts, in living language that engages the mind (often with some effort required, which is also an important part of a CM education),   and so we have chosen what we believe to  be the cream of the crop from those books that are online or still  in print, and in some cases, worked hard to get that oop book available online, or convinced a publisher to republish. 

We share this freely, and we try to keep costs down because we believe in Miss Mason's vision of 'Education for all.'