A letter about learning from December 9th, 2015

Dear FutureCJ, My sweet child, your Mom & I love you and want to support you in your good growing in various ways, and yet we who have lived longer than you know that there will be a point, more likely multiple points, in your life when you will question your education, its meaning, and its purposes. At times you will feel you’ve plateaued and don’t feel any sense of advancement at certain moments, and may be confused as to what you should be doing, or what career you should pursue to fulfill your vocation. First, don’t let yourself get all tense about these things: it’s life! We have all struggled with how to best proceed with all of the things that happen in life, but remember, nobody gets out alive 8-). Sometimes, that plateauing, or feeling like you’re having a lack of progression is God’s gift for you to relax. Nobody can tell you precisely how to precisely live and do everything, and what you eventually realize is that you have already started on a journey of self-discovery about you, which only you see vividly, and only you can make, so it helps to be truly educated, and that is a never-ending goal and pleasure. Learning shouldn’t feel like a ***** march, and you’re the only one who is in control of your feelings, so don’t let learning be boring; have FUN in the process! The sad truth is, my dear, that you’re most likely going to have to educate yourself. The current American educational system doesn’t do a good job that it should do in training up kids to have a well-rounded education. My Mom once told me a conversation between your great-grandparents, her parents, Wilbur Arthur Street and Elizabeth Read Davis Street, discussing some uncouth manner of behavior of his sister Edna Bealle (nee Streett), to which he said, “Dear, you have to remember that she’s uneducated.” Now, he didn’t say that intending to insult her. He was just reminding his wife that his sister Edna wasn’t college-educated like they both were. Back then (Cf. Our family Genealogy that I’ve assembled), a college education matured and prepared you for business in the world and how to act and function in society. The current holes in our education are partially due to the fact that we no longer have a standard list of sources that we are expected to study in our schooling. You can do something about this. It’s your life, after all – take control of where it’s going. If you’re the inquisitive person like I am, I believe you will seek out knowledge *and* enjoy the journey, instead of look at learning as drudgery, which I will admit, it sometimes can be. In the pursuit of a God-focused and useful education, your Mom & I want to encourage you towards learning, not some kid of slavery being in front of learning material! It can be difficult to guide children is the most fluid, enjoyable way of learning, because the parent’s handbook doesn’t have a chapter on this. That may also be because there is no parent’s handbook. What we think you should learn, and how you should progress in your education will be dramatically different from what you may think should be, because we are coming at the issue from 2 different directions, with different experiences, and somewhat different goals. So let’s talk about this. We don’t want to train you up in hating to learn. We don’t want you becoming burned out on learning. We merely want you to seek your vocation, your God-given realization for your life. We can’t tell you what it is, but we can provide you with, what we believe are, good items to learn, towards being truly educated. Obtaining a degree and being educated are 2 different things. My good friend Case Ahr once told me when he was pursuing his Literature degree it was pronounced “Litter-A-Chur”, but when he graduated, it was en vogue to pronounce it “Lit-Writ-Chur” 8-) In reading the classics of human literature (how are you pronouncing that word now in your head? 8-), we see a lot of diverse perspectives, which is a good practice to be in the discipline of having. Also, you learn about the development of humanity down through the ages. Don’t fall into the trap that your class or generation is the best, most knowledgeable class ever. I think each successive high school class thinks that all who went before them were fools of the Neanderthalithic troglodyte order and that all who come after them will be disingenuous posers riding the coattails of your success. The reality is that those in ancient days had some good ideas and adventures, and it’s it useful and interesting to read about them. Consider this: if you were able to go back in a time machine to 100 or 500 years, what would you do? COULD you even change anything? Do you think that with the knowledge of the past you would somehow be a king? Doubt it. Can you put a phone together from nothing? What about electricity? Do you know its properties and how to conduct it through wires? How do you make wire? Do you know how to make a computer? How about making ********* – any clue how to do that? Want to **** Hitler? Sounds like a good idea at the onset; I mean, who wouldn’t want to prevent the Holocaust from happening, but from a wider context it wouldn’t be a good idea. I mean, for the first thought, could you **** another human being? And don’t forget: he didn’t win WW2. Save yourself the grief and remain in your own time; there’s enough which God has planned for you to be done here in your day without trying to invent a time machine that can’t be invented and shouldn’t (Cf. Time travelling paradoxes) be used. I would suggest that you should always remember NOT to take everything you read as totally true, but learn the process of digesting well the information you learn. It seems somewhat difficult to be a good listener and learner, mostly because, in this modern age of communications and social media, we are seeing and hearing and Tweeting and processing things with our minds much quicker now than society ever has in the past. We need time to digest and understand things. Some things cannot – and should not – be rushed. Listening means stepping back, resisting the urge to react, discipling yourself to not attack another’s viewpoint think while you’re in the process of hearing the other’s viewpoint. This is very hard to do for most people – mostly because they haven’t been educated or trained in how to listen. Knowing things also requires one to keep an open mind and also be willing to change, which some people also are not disciplined in practicing. With regard to thinking about “how to listen”, and in an attempt to bring an improvement to my (and hopefully others’) communications, an idea arose from learning about T.S. Eliot's "Three Moments" of criticism. This is in regard to our everyday communications & the receipt of an idea, concept or something new via a speaker or reading a text. I believe this idea goes to the root of good core values. I’m always looking for the way(s) to spread this “charitable receiving of data” or “mature communications” concept via real-life personal and business occurrences so we can realistically incorporate this approach to give respect to what we’re reading or hearing from others. 1. Surrender to (or Embrace) the text or concept. Force yourself to give the text or speaker a charitable interpretation or a sympathetic reading/ear. Identify the strengths the argument, and understand the position in a way that is kind and charitable to the author. Remember, just as you would want someone to pay attention to your efforts, the deliverer has put effort into their communication for a good reason. Read or hear the material as you would want someone to receive what you have written or spoken. 2. Recovery. This is the act of, after receiving the full text or concept, returning to your own opinions, beliefs and understandings. After you have properly surrendered to the idea, only then are you able to look at your own position critically. This is where you take the time to see if the positions articulated in the text or concept expose weaknesses in your own position. Does the new/other view shine a light on areas in my own thinking that need to be challenged? Do I need to change my mind about something? Does the other view point out something missing in my own position? Does it offer a better answer? Can I accept that my view may not the best way? It’s questions like these that help us get a better grasp of, and possibly even improve upon, our own position. 3. Criticism (only in light of the first two moments) Finally, instead of initially, one is able to proceed to a critical reflection on the text or concept in front of you. *Only after* you have gone through the first two moments are you equipped to critique because you 1) have a thorough grasp of the intent of the other position, and 2) you have given it a careful evaluation in light of your own position. This is a much more difficult process than most people think. Our immature tendencies (me included) are to be "lazy readers" while reading a text, or to have a “quick-to-assume” manner in a conversation. We live in a fast-paced society where there is an unspoken desire to display our intelligence, instead of being respectful or open. When something in a conversation or reading strikes us as "not quite right", quickly our defenses go up and we will jump to point out the negative, like it somehow proves our worth or proves that we’re smart(er). Usually this happens before the entirety of the text or concept has been communicated. We unwittingly (and often too quickly) react to embrace a suspicious approach to the text or concept and we become predisposed to giving the author or speaker a less-than-charitable interpretation. We look for errors, not for the sake of establishing truth, but from a deep insecurity that looks for ways to justify our self value and initial suspicions. Our goal should be to build daily habits of being careful, methodical and mature readers and communicators. This may seem counter-intuitive because every day we’re bombarded with all sorts of material from different media, but our core attitude affects even the simple task of reading a piece of paper or listening to an opinion. It takes a concerted effort to identify and implement such a change in our communications. A classical education usually depends on a 3-part process of training the mind called the TRIVIUM, where in the early years of school, time is spent in absorbing facts, systematically laying the foundations for advanced study. This is called "The Grammar Stage". In the middle grades, students learn to think through arguments in "The Logic Stage", and in the high school years, you will learn to express your thoughts in what is often called "The Rhetoric Stage". You can only do well in the 3rd/Rhetoric stage if you have made good progress in understanding the 1st 2 stages. A child is ready for the Logic Stage when the capacity for abstract thought begins to mature. During these years, you study the process of algebra and logic, and begin to apply logic to all academic subjects. The logic of writing, for example, includes paragraph construction and learning to support a thesis. The logic of reading involves the criticism and analysis of texts, not simply reading the information. The logic of science requires that you learn the scientific method. Then there’s the logic of history which demands that you find out, and restate with your own words, why such things as the War of 1812 was fought, rather than simply reading the history of it & knowing who the combatants were. All knowledge is interrelated, and as you will see in your years of schooling, consists of repetitions of much of the same pattern: Ancients, Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, and Modern Times. Rigorous study and practice develops virtue – and, my sweet lovely child, I hope you will learn sooner instead of later in life that that is a truly enviable goal to be rigorous and thorough in your studies. FYI Aristotle defined virtue as “the ability to act in accordance to what one knows to be right.” A virtuous man or woman can force themselves to do what they know to be right, even when it runs against their comforts, desires and inclinations. The classical education continually asks a student to work against his baser inclinations of the current world around them, to view previous world events, in order to reach a goal: a mastery of the subject. In the light of listening, learning and appreciating literature that has been created in the past, here is a list of books that should be on your “bucket list” of books to read in your life, and the sooner you read them, the better and more well-rounded you will be. Trust the process and know that the inspirational point behind this list is in the human and social value of reading the classics, and tapping into that value requires much in the way of personal sacrifice and effort. It will be time well spent, even if you nod off to sleep during some of your readings, as I’ve often done. Novel List 1. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes 2. Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan 3. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift 4. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen 5. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens 6. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte 7. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne 8. Moby ****, Herman Melville 9. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe 10. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert 11. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky 12. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy 13. Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy 14. Portrait of a Lady, Henry James 15. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain 16. Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane 17. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad 18. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton 19. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald 20. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf 21. The Trial, Franz Kafka 22. Native Son, Richard Wright 23. The Stranger, Albert Camus 24. 1984, George Orwell 25. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison 26. Seize the Day, Saul Bellow 27. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez 28. If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino 29. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison 30. White Noise, Don Delillo 31. Possession, A.S. Byatt Autobiography List 1. The Confessions, Augustine 2. The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery Kempe 3. Essays, Michel de Montaigne 4. The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, Teresa of Avila 5. Meditations, Rene Descartes 6. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, John Bunyan 7. The Narrative of Captivity and Restoration, Mary Rowlandson 8. Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau 9. Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin 10. Walden, Henry David Thoreau 11. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself 12. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass 13. Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington 14. Ecce ****, Friedrich Nietzsche 15. Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler 16. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Mohandas Gandhi 17. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein 18. The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton 19. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, C.S. Lewis 20. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X 21. Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton 22. The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn 23. Born Again, Charles W. Colson 24. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Richard Rodriguez 25. The Road from Coorain, Jill Ker Conway 26. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, Elie Wiesel History List 1. The Histories, Herodotus 2. The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides 3. The Republic, Plato 4. Lives, Plutarch 5. The City of God, Augustine 6. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede 7. The Prince, Niccolò Macchiavelli 8. Utopia, Sir Thomas More 9. The True End of Civil Government, John Locke 10. The History of England, Volume V, David Hume 11. The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau 12. Common Sense, Thomas Paine 13. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon 14. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft 15. Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville 16. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 17. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt 18. The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois 19. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber 20. Queen Victoria, Lytton Strachey 21. The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell 22. The New England Mind, Perry Miller 23. The Great Crash 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith 24. The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan 25. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan 26. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Eugene D. Genovese 27. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman 28. All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein 29. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, James McPherson 30. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich 31. The End of History and the Last Man, Francis ******** Drama List 1. Agamemnon, Aeschylus 2. Oedipus the King, Sophocles 3. Medea, Euripides 4. The Birds, Aristophanes 5. Poetics, Aristotle 6. Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays 7. Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe 8. Richard III, William Shakespeare 9. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare 10. Hamlet, William Shakespeare 11. Tartuffe, Molière 12. The Way of the World, William Congreve 13. She Stoops to Conquer, Oliver Goldsmith 14. The School for Scandal, Richard Brinsley Sheridan 15. A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen 16. The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde 17. The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov 18. Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw 19. ****** in the Cathedral, T.S. Eliot 20. Our Town, Thornton Wilder 21. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill 22. No Exit, Jean Paul Sartre 23. A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams 24. ***** of a Salesman, Arthur Miller 25. Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett 26. A Man For All Seasons, Robert Bolt 27. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard 28. Equus, Peter Shaffer Poetry List 1. The Epic of Gilgamesh 2. Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer 3. Greek Lyricists 4. Odes, Horace 5. Beowulf 6. Inferno, Dante Alighieri 7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 8. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer 9. Sonnets, William Shakespeare 10. John Donne 11. Psalms, King James Bible (which is more for the beauty of its olde English wording, but avoid the New KJV) 12. Paradise Lost, John Milton 13. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, William Blake 14. William Wordsworth 15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 16. John Keats 17. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 18. Alfred Lord Tennyson 19. Walt Whitman 20. Emily Dickinson 21. Christina Rossetti 22. Gerard Manley Hopkins 23. William Butler Yeats 24. Paul Laurence Dunbar 25. Robert Frost 26. Carl Sandburg 27. William Carlos Williams 28. Ezra Pound 29. T.S. Eliot 30. Langston Hughes 31. W.H. Auden 32. Philip Larkin 33. Allen Ginsberg 34. Sylvia Plath 35. Mark Strand 36. Adrienne Rich 37. Seamus Heaney 38. Robert Pinsky 39. Jane Kenyon 40. Rita Dove Love eternally in Christ, ~Dad