The impoverished childhood of the modern child

We were, until about a year ago, the wealthiest society in the history of the world, or so I kept hearing. I question that.

I am trying to imagine a childhood more impoverished than one without fairy tales.

Look at it this way: education is the

• training of the intellect
• passing on of a tradition
• formation of the soul
• preparation for the “real world”

But our modern mindset has destroyed the imagination, which is 1000 times more important than anything else a school can cultivate.

Seeing Through the Invisible

While I know you are all desperately waiting the posting of pictures and tales from my trip out west (a “business cruise” with Andrew Pudewa’s organization), I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait for a day or two to see them.

I only have a moment and you don’t want to hear all the explanations about computers burning out and getting purchased and being adjusted to and all that rot. You just want to hear this:

CS Lewis introduced  a theme in The Pilgrim’s Regress that he developed continually throughout his writings, in particular, perhaps in The Abolition of Man.

I’m referring to his recognition that the modern and now the post-modern delights in “seeing through things.”

That part is recognized by almost everybody now, and the Beatles made a living off the motif after Sergeant Pepper, at the latest.

Pause.

They had a song on their Revolver album, I believe, entitled, I’m Looking Through You so it was even before Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.

But what Lewis saw was that, if you see through everything there is nothing left to look at.

You end up asking questions like Stanley Fish’s, “Is there a text in the classroom?” or writing essays like Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation.

Indeed, texts do disappear when you only look through them and interpretation becomes impossible when you stop noticing the forms of what you are looking at.

For these reasons I appreciate a phrase I saw a few minutes ago, though I no longer remember where. What I saw was, “the beauty of grammar.”

I don’t think most people think grammar is beautiful. Then again, they don’t think geometry is beautiful either. All that means is that they don’t have eyes to see.

The beauty of grammar is a formal and a calm beauty. I would go further and suggest that it is a hidden beauty.

Grammar is the skeleton of our language, but skeletons aren’t generally considered beautiful. If we want to hold to that metaphor, then let’s say that grammar is what makes the beauty of language possible.

The soul does not like confusion and disorder. Grammar removes them. It takes wild and whirling words and orders them, not arbitrarily but with deep meaning and purpose. It breathes respect for the auditor and ancestor into the sentence, and so exalts the speaker who humbles himself before her.

She makes human society possible and delightful. She weaves hearts together, even when they disagree.

Honestly, it is heartbreaking to see how she is despised and neglected in our day.

People want to see through every text and every statement, and not knowing grammar makes it a lot easier to do so. But the Beatle’s lyric comes back with a bit of a haunting conclusion:

I’m looking through you…

Where did you go?

Truth, Tradition, and Trajedy

In general, three approaches have dominated education from the beginning of time and I’m not sure there can be any more that are not combinations, parts, or permutations of these three.

The sophist does not believe in a knowable universe, so he focuses on adapting to change. The modern version of this approach is progressivism.

The traditionalist believes that knowledge is embodied in a tradition, so he focuses on absorbing and perpetuating that tradition. Many variations of this approach are followed in contemporary schools, but the best of the traditional theorists is probably ED Hirsch with his Core Knowledge approach.

The classicist believes in a knowable world in which knowledge is perception and relationship.

Individual Christians hold to any of these views, though Christianity is obviously a tradition in that its truths reside, not in the discoveries of the student, but in the wisdom of the fathers.

I find that Christian teachers trained in conventional colleges are strongly influenced by Progressive approaches, which discourage, by their nature, philosophical reflection on what you are doing.

For the most part, accepting these Progressive approaches without reflection undercuts the work and claims of the Christian school.

I don’t believe any of these approaches aligns with the teachings of scripture at a high level except for the classical approach.

At the root of the classical approach is a commitment to the belief that things have a nature and that we can know them according to their natures and treat them in ways fitting to their natures.

In addition, things have a purpose, and love enables its object to fulfill both its purpose and its nature.

In the classical tradition, the object of a science is to know the nature of a thing. The object of an art is to refine one’s ability to know the nature of things.

The sophist or Progressive educator does not believe we can know anything.

The traditionalist believes that we can know only through the tradition.

The classicist believes that we can perceive the nature of things and relate to them according to their natures.

What does your teaching lead your students to? That will tell you which of these theories you hold.

The

Rallying the Really Human Things: Excerpt Now Available!

Now available as part of our Further Up & Further In fund raising campaign is part I of Dr. Vigen Guroian’s wonderful book Rallying The Really Human Things.

This fascinating first section is called “The Three Voices of Christian Humanism” and examines the work of GK Chesterton, Flannery O’Connor, and Russell Kirk.

The PDF version of this book can be yours for whatever price you feel it’s worth. As part of our campaign it – and several other downloads – are yours when you make a donation to CiRCE of any amount. Yes, it can be yours for just $1.00.

Click here to donate and download now.

Here is some more information on the book:

General Description:

For Vigen Guroian, contemporary culture is distinguished by its relentless assault on the moral imagination. In the stories it tells us, in the way it has degraded courtship and sexualized our institutions of higher education, in the ever-more-radical doctrines of human rights it propounds, and in the way it threatens to remake human nature via biotechnology, contemporary culture conspires to deprive men and women of the kind of imagination that Edmund Burke claimed allowed us to raise our perception of our own human dignity, or to “cover the defects of our own naked shivering nature.”

In Rallying the Really Human Things, Guroian combines a theologian’s keen sensitivity to the things of the spirit with his immersion in the works of Burke, Russell Kirk, G. K. Chesterton, Flannery O’Connor, St. John Chrysostom, and other exemplars of the religious humanist tradition to diagnose our cultural crisis. But he also points the way towards a culture more solicitous of the “really human things,” the Chesterton phrase from which he takes his title. Guroian’s wide-ranging analysis of these times provides a fresh and inimitable perspective on the practices and mores of contemporary life.

About the Author:
Vigen Guroian is Professor of Theology at Loyola College in Maryland. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Ethics after Christendom: Toward an Ecclesial Christian Ethic and Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Imagination.

What’s Being Said:

“In this eloquent and substantive book, Guroian uses the light of the past to point the way to a more human and civilized future.”
— Michael Medved, radio host and author of Right Turns

“Guroian is a rare and precious bird these days: a scholar of the Real. Here he focuses his moral passion and theologian’s mind on some of today’s most smoldering issues.”
— Kevin Ryan, Professor Emeritus, Boston University

“Vigen Gurorian’s courageous and discerning vision illuminates both current issues of burning importance (campus promiscuity, nationalism, and gay marriage, for example), and major Christian thinkers of the recent past (Chesterton, O’Connor, and Kirk). This compendium is a resource that will help us all see more clearly.”
— Frederica Mathewes-Green, columnist for Beliefnet.com and author of The Illumined Heart: The Ancient Christian Path of Transformation

“These eloquent and wide-ranging essays in the moral imagination establish Vigen Guroian as our own Chesterton. For with fine Chestertonian wit, he demonstrates that the modern West is not heinously wicked so much as it is wildly virtuous, as the old Christian virtues, uprooted from their native theological soil, continue to produce mad sprouts. Responding astringently to the cultural and religious vexations of our age, Guroian restores these saving virtues to the deep loam of Christian tradition.”
— Ralph Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature, Baylor University

“Rallying the Really Human Things does not so much inform as remind. Vigen Guroian has busied himself with one of the most pressing tasks in our intellectual life, which is to rescue the dignified word “humanism” from the damage wrought upon it by both the secularly self-sufficient and the piously ignorant.”
— Tracy Lee Simmons, author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin

“Professor Guroian’s book is both a powerful and provocative defense of traditional Christian humanism in its conflict with secularism.”
— Bob Cheeks, intellectualconservative.com

“Of course, this review hasn’t even mentioned excellent essays on ‘gay marriage’ and why businessmen ’should read great literture.’ There are myriad positions in his pages I would like to sound with trumpets on one hand and anathematize on the other. Like Chesterton, Guroian can write infuriating passages, but never dull ones.”
— David Paul Deavel, Gilbert Magazine

Thoughts on knowing and the end of education

The english word epistemology seems like a technical word because it doesn’t come from the Anglo-Saxon or French and because it has taken on a rather precise meaning.

As a result, the word can intimidate the reader.

It doesn’t need to. It just means “what is knowable” or maybe “a set of beliefs or theories about knowledge.”

You can imagine that what you believe about knowledge would matter when you teach or build a curriculum.

What can we know? How do we come to know it? What does it mean to know? How is what we can know in one area related to what we can know in another area?

Your answers to these questions are your curriculum, so those answers matter.

So let’s take a moment and start to think about them.If we don’t, we’ll find ourselves teaching materials and in ways that we don’t understand and may not even agree with.

I would like to propose up front that we can find three broad theories of knowledge more or less commonly followed today and pursued through history.

For convenience, I will call them

1. The Christian and classical view of knowledge
2. The traditional view of knowledge
3. The Pragmatic view of knowledge

The pragmatic view is the one people follow most closely in our day when they are consciously following a theory. It’s greatest champions have been men like Francis Bacon (knowledge is power), William James, John Dewey, and Machiavelli.

In the pragmatic view, knowledge is the ability to do something, especially to adapt to and exercise power over the environment. Dewey and James are the most explicit theorists, and Dewey’s pragmatic theories dominate contemporary education, even in Christian schools.

Pragmatists are skills focused and they want children to construct their own realities. They tend to undercut traditions other than their own, seeing them as constraining and even oppressive.

In the old fashioned sense of the word, knowledge is impossible because there is nothing to known in that old fashioned sense and there is nothing that can know it anyway.

In other words, the world and everything in it is constantly changing, so there is no permanent “idea” or essence of a thing that you can know. You can just “know” what it is like now and adapt accordingly. This ability to adapt is knowledge.

In the traditionalist view, knowledge is the retention and reproduction of symbols. That sounds a little silly at first, so let me explain what I mean. Every tradition contains practices, rituals, artifacts, and texts (written or spoken) that embody that tradition.

When a member of a tradition wants to pass on that tradition (tradition literally means “to hand on,” from the Latin traduo), he teaches his students the practices, rituals, artifacts, and texts (which is what I mean by symbols) of that tradition.

Sports are relentlessly traditional because you become great, not by developing radically new techniques, but by imitating and then transcending those who were great before you. The very few exceptions (e.g. the Fosbury flop) only prove the rule.

The best reason for handing on a tradition is that a tradition embodies the wisdom of its members, especially those who came before.

When handled properly, the traditional symbols lead the recipient to the wisdom contained in or, better yet, pointed to by, the symbols.

When a school requires students to memorize poetry, repeat gestures, sing songs, learn the forms of grammar and literature, read old books, and otherwise remember and recite facts and information, it is acting traditionally.

A community embodies its soul in its traditions, so no community that is opposed to tradition can survive.

The great traditional educator of the contemporary world is ED Hirsch, with his Core Knowledge sequence.

You have succeeded as a student in a traditional school when you have demonstrated mastery of the content and symbols of the tradition.

The trouble with tradition arises from two possible sources. It may be that the ideas embodied in the symbols are false. In that case, the tradition may hold a community together, but it may do so by leading the whole community into error.

Or it may be that the members of the community look to the symbols and their preservation rather than the ideas and realities embodied in the symbols of the tradition.

Only a master of the symbols can transcend them. The clearest example of this fact seems to be our Lord and his response to the Pharisees. He recognized that they were, in varying degrees, living off the traditions instead of living by them.

As a result, they began to contort the traditions handed to them to their own advantage and became wolves among sheep.

In our Phariseeism, we can forget how very easily we become pharisees.

But long before the Pharisees began to contort the traditions, they had come to see the traditions either as ends in themselves, or, worse, as means to other ends than what they pointed to.

The Sabbath, for example, was a tradition handed to the Jewish people through their covenant with God. It was meant to be a Holy Day of rest. As such, it pointed the covenant people to something beyond a one day/week religious experience.

Symbols, in other words, don’t refer to themselves. This is easiest to see when we look at words. The word “lamp” is a sound symbol. It does not refer to itself, but to an invention with which we are all familiar that can enlighten a room.

There is a reality beyond the symbols.

In the Christian classical view of knowledge, the goal of learning is to perceive that reality.

We hand on and love and honor our traditions, not so people will know them, but so they will know what they refer to.

Of course, you usually can’t know what they refer to without knowing them because the reason you need symbols is precisely because it takes great wisdom to come to know the realities in the first place.

Here’s one way it could happen. A wise person comes to understand something about life. He wants his children to understand it to. They can’t, because they are young. So he makes up a fable. That fable becomes part of the tradition.

If the child actually contemplates the fable, he can move more rapidly to the insight of his wise father than his father was able to himself.

To the Christian and/or classical educator, it has always been necessary, but it has never been enough, to know the greatest symbols (in the sense I used the word above) of the tradition.

The goal is always to see what the symbols point to.

Knowledge, therefore, to the Christian classical educator is perception of reality.

The pragmatic educator is not content to “know” in this sense, because he does not believe such knowledge exists. He focuses on skills of adaptation.

The traditional educator at his best strives for this kind of knowledge, but he encounters so many temptations (especially honor from men who don’t see the reality beyond the tradition) that he rarely transcends the tradition.

And if he does, he’ll say something a little off kilter and offend the traditionalists around him, who will scapegoat or crucify him one way or another.

The Christian classical educator loves practical applications of his knowledge. But not as much as he loves the knowledge itself. Truth is the delight of his soul, the queen of his mind.

He does not demand of her that she step down and serve him.

The Christian classical educator loves the traditions on which he was raised. But not as much as he loves the truth and beauty embodied by that tradition.

The Christian classical educator takes the knowledge of the traditional educator and the skills of the Pragmatic educator and, guided by the good, weaves them into a beautiful tapestry of truth that nourishes the soul until the disciple has attained wisdom and virtue himself.

But only because he has come to see that knowledge is not mere power, nor is it mere recall of symbols and facts, but it is the perception and apprehension of reality itself.

On Being Civilized

Until we accept that we are not a civilized people, and that it matters, we have little hope of becoming one.

Knowledge, Love, and Civilization

Francis Bacon said “Knowledge is power,” and I know of no record of him ever apologizing.

What sort of disposition would lead a person to saying such a thing. It’s not as if people prior to Bacon did not realize that knowledge gave its possessor power. But they had good manners and higher values, so they didn’t come right out and say it.

But Bacon did.

Worse still, people embraced this statement.

When Francis Bacon said “Knowledge is power,” he introduced a scientific revolution. But what even the experts often fail to see is that he initiated an intellectual revolt that introduced a new intellectual temper.

Prior to Bacon people believed that it was possible to know things for what they were. In Plato and Aristotle, Moses and Solomon, St. Paul and Erasmus, one finds a consistent awareness that knowledge is not justly said to be power.

For the great western Christian classical tradition knowledge is apprehension, perception, relationship.

Such an awareness makes civilized life possible.

But in Bacon we hear the destructive philosophy of an elegant barbarian.

Let me draw an analogy to present times to explain my point. You will often read in the New York Times or USA Today or Wall Street Journal about how civilization has advanced over earlier western society or sometimes even over, say, the third world, because we have more advanced technology.

The widely held assumption of people who believe that such a thing as civilization might conceivably exist is that, if it exists, it is measured by technological advance, which is another phrase for power.

This is utter rubbish. Genghis Khan was amazingly advanced in some areas technologically. The gang-leader in LA has access to more advanced technology than Erasmus was able to conceive.

A person who believes that technology is the mark of civilized society is a barbarian himself. A person who believes that knowledge is power is both profoundly and utterly ignorant and a barbarian.

That knowledge gives power one cannot deny. The claim that knowledge is power is a revolt against the entire Christian and classical tradition.

I don’t want to imply that Bacon himself held to such a thoroughly barbaric conception of knowledge in all his thinking.

Nevertheless, after Bacon British thought embraced his axiom and developed an anti-philosophy under the name of Empiricism that has undercut civilized thought everywhere in the world.

I mean these claims to be taken quite seriously and not as mean-spirited ad hominems.

In fact, I might go so far as to claim that the difference between barbarians and civilized people is that the former lives by Bacon’s axiom and the latter live by something higher, richer, less easily coined, and more human and humane.

For example, in Plato, we see the groping of a mind for something beyond power, something that will harmonize the soul and the community. In Aristotle we read in his Metaphysics that “All men by nature desire to know,” and he goes on to explain that knowledge is an end in itself because knowledge itself is a delight to the soul.

What Aristotle meant, at least in part, was that, since our nature desires knowledge, we derive pleasure simply from knowing. We do not need to apply it, make it “relevant,” or derive some practical application from our knowledge.

Simply knowing gives us pleasure. So we keep our eyes open – and we don’t only look at the things that we might trip over. Sometimes we look at the stars in the sky even if they don’t provide any practical guidance.

Bacon’s axiom, on the other hand, would lead us to look at the stars only as astrologers or sailors.

Which might explain why we don’t teach astronomy much any more even though a cursory study of the history of science will reveal that all the natural sciences as studied in the western tradition developed out of the study of the stars.

Civilized people use things rightly. In other words, they deal with them according to their natures.

Bacon’s axiom (for which I will use the name Bacon from now on) led to the conclusion that things cannot be known in their natures. We can only “know” them from the outside.

The culmination of this teaching was reached in Dewey’s doctrines and is the unknown core principle of teaching in America.

He argued that knowledge in the Christian classical sense does not and cannot exist. Knowledge to the benighted Christian or classicist was derived from a hang-up on permanence.

But Bacon’s revolution was secured by Darwin who showed us that nothing is permanent.

Things don’t have a nature, Dewey argued (he used the term “species” following Aristotle). Things are like they are now, but their environments will cause them to become something other than what they are now in time.

There is no human nature. There is only the present state of the offspring of human parents.

The nature of things, therefore, cannot be known, since it does not exist.

Thus to set limits on things, which is a precondition for knowledge in the Christian and classical tradition, is both unnecessary and counterproductive.

Why set limits on what humanity can become? If people as smart as Dewey can only rule us, they can make us into something better than what we are now. So give us the schools and let us have our way.

Why set limits on what a word can mean?

Why set limits on what a text is saying?

Why set limits on what the state is allowed to do?

Why set limits?

Limits imply natures, and natures don’t exist.

The problems with such a horrific idea are manifold and would merit an encyclopaedia of their own. Our age is that encyclopaedia.

If you don’t set limits on what a word can mean, the word doesn’t mean anything. Take marriage for example.

If you don’t set limits on what a text can mean, the text doesn’t mean anything. Take our constitution for example.

If you don’t set limits on what the state can do, the state can do anything.

If you don’t set limits on what the object of your attention can be, you can’t give the object your attention.

To define is, by definition, to set limits on meanings. To remove the limits from meanings is to overthrow meaning itself.

To live a life without meaning is to be a barbarian.

Thus we delude ourselves to think we represent civilization. We live in a barbarian country.

We are all barbarians.

We don’t love civilization; we love meaningless equalities and limitless liberties and undefined powers.

What then is needed? Is it possible for us to become civilized?

It is possible, though it isn’t likely. Civilization is difficult and it requires submission.

First, it requires submission to reality. Civilization’s core principle is that all things must be treated according to their natures.

But the rewards are unspeakable, and the first of those rewards is that our souls can escape the lust for power that led Bacon to his foolish axiom and Nietzsche to his extension of it in his doctrine (much more worth reflecting on than Bacon’s) of the “will to power.”

Our souls can return to a right understanding of knowledge. For in the Christian classical tradition, knowledge is not power.

Knowledge is perception.

Knowledge is apprehension.

Knowledge is relation.

Civilized people recognize that right knowledge requires love because to perceive something for what it is we need to receive it into our souls as it is.

To receive something into our soul requires that we will the thing we seek to know.

Thus knowledge requires, first and foremost, a pure will in relation to the thing we seek to know.

Love does not feel good about its object or even desire, first, to be united to its object. Love wills its object – it wills the perfection and well-being of its object.

And this is possible only when the nature of the object is acknowledged and known.

Thus love alone makes accurate knowledge of the object possible.

The Problem with Form

I have a problem with people who are obsessed with form and can’t get it past it to the spirit of the thing. A long time ago a man named Mahaffey wrote a little book called Conversation that carried some wonderful counsel on how to be a good conversationalist.

In it he said:

The man who parades his logic is one of those poor and narrow thinkers whose over attention to form mars his comprehension of the matter and so leads him astray.

Exactly!

That is why I want students to learn form early in life, mastering as much of it as possible during the middle school years.

Otherwise one of two things will happen: one, they’ll disregard it more or less completely or two, they’ll overly attend to it.

For example, contemporary writers and readers are obsessed with form. If a sentence extends beyond two clauses they lose their minds. To use hyperbole (a little bit): every joint in the skeleton of a modern book is swollen with arthritis and you are made to stare at the joints when what you want to see is graceful movements.

You can’t. You have to stop for the period. After each clause. Or you will have to think too many thoughts. Too fast. And your mind can’t take it. You need a commercial break. Your brain has arthritis too.

This overly scientific and analytical mind, lost in its lack of self-awareness, is the plague of the common grammar class.

On the other hand, early training in form enables the student and writer to internalize the forms, to attain second nature reflexes, and thus to transcend mere form and follow it to the spirit of the idea expressed.

It my seem ironic, but the neglect of form in schools leads people to an obsession with form even as they think they are free of it. It’s a bit like a person who dresses like his peers to show that he is independent.

A Prayer of Thanksgiving

I’m leaving tomorrow for a trip to CA during which I will be creating videotapes of The Lost Tools of Writing. That’s the idea. Now the application: I’m very busy and shouldn’t be blogging right now.

But sometimes my emotions get the better of me, so I have to tell you all something – both negative and positive.

I’ve always tried to back my computer up, and it’s a good thing because my latest version has been dying lately.

Knowing it was on its way to its fate, I wanted to get a new one, but we haven’t had the resources at CiRCE to get one.

Well, yesterday one of our supporters made a contribution that enabled me to get a new a brand new computer!

Last night I went out to buy it, having lost the day to fighting with computer issues when I wanted to be finalizing my plans for Saturday’s video session.

I came home from the store last night and turned on my old computer so I could get the information I needed for E-mail and that sort of thing.

It was as dead as Marley.

Talk about timing.

It’s horribly inconvenient, of course, but I cannot imagine how much more inconvenient it would have been if the computer had died before I had the new one.

So I want to use this post to thank the donor who stepped forward and all the others who have been contributing during our fund-raising drive.

I mentioned we were seeking $50,000.

You have already contributed an astonishing $7000 of that $50,000.

Dozens of you have already downloaded the recordings of talks from Ken Myers, Laura Berquist, Andrew Pudewa, Vigen Guroian and others.

With the support we’ve received, a 2010 conference on Liberty looks promising, a third edition of Classical Education is hopeful, many refinements to LTW become possible, and I can continue to provide support to classical educators at every level of their involvement.

If you have already contributed and downloaded the talks: THANK YOU.

If you would like to do so, please follow this link or, better yet, click on the banner to the left (which lists the speakers and their sessions) and feed your soul while supporting Christian classical education through the CiRCE Institute!

Why Formal?

Maybe I’ve already addressed this but I know it’s a big question and one that needs to be thought about as completely as possible.

Why teach formal grammar? Why not just teach it as it comes up, as the need arises?

I want to be sure to not create a disagreement where none exists. I think you should teach grammar when the need arises. I even think it is extremely effective to do so and very possibly more effective than at other times.

So I do agree with anybody who says that we should teach grammar informally in response to needs.

If there is a disagreement I would have to hold fast over, it would be with anybody who went to the extreme of suggesting that we should only teach grammar informally, perhaps even only according to “felt need.”

We aren’t trying to sell it to the students, we are trying to teach them.

I am simply contending that grammar needs to be taught formally, not that it shouldn’t be taught informally.

So why teach it formally?

From what I can tell, people seem to hold to two general motivations: we should teach formal grammar because it is practical and/or we should teach formal grammar because it is sound.

On the practical side, there seem to be three advantages to learning formal grammar:

1. It gives a person more control over his language, and thus enables him to communicate better (more intelligently, more effectively, and more consistently or logically). This applies to writing and speaking as well as reading and listening.
2. It enables a person to learn a foreign language more easily. For the most part, the differences between languages are in the words and their patterns. But at the root of every language are the parts of speech and how we use them. So by learning what languages have in common, we can more easily learn where they are different.
3. It enables a person to do well on a test, such as the SAT or the Civil Service Exams.

Each of these is a fine reason to use grammar under most circumstances, though none are a necessary good in itself. They show us that grammar offers many advantages, but they don’t tell us about her own unique excellences.

If you enjoy her for her own sake, she’ll give you these benefits. If you demand the benefits but dishonor her, you’ll eventually lose the benefits.

Grammar, in my view, should be taught for her own sake.

Because it isn’t, the benefits she offers are rarely gained.

When they are, she gives them humbly, so the recipient often can’t trace them back to her. Consequently, Grammar has many more beneficiaries than votaries.

When you teach grammar for her own sake, you keep the benefits and also gain her blessings, many of which are simply unpredictable.

When a child learns formal grammar, he becomes her intimate acquaintance and they flourish in a symbiotic relationship like a cherished governess or mother.

She forms his mind to its own nature. She empowers the child to think.

Form itself becomes a mental habit – if the soil is ready. You come to realize that things have structures. You start looking for the structures of things like language, poetry, literature, natural objects (e.g. trees, bodies, the cosmos), and knowledge itself.

By recognizing structure and order you come to perceive the relationships between things and you realize that the life of the thing is embodied in its structure.

You come to love order.

But you don’t make it the end of your observations. It is always a foundation, a skeleton, and never the spirit.

I can imagine some readers hearing the words form, structure, and order and deriving a very different connotation than the one I hear.

Perhaps you hear constraint and limitation. And you think that limitation binds and enslaves us.

And indeed, that would be true if we were infinite beings who could exist without form. However, anything that is not infinite can be what it is only within the constraints that make it what it is. These define (set limits to) its nature.

You can only be a free human being if you accept what a human being is. To chafe at the limits of our human nature is, practically speaking, to hate human beings.

A word also has a definition. That definition limits what the word means. If the word means everything, then it means nothing.

A sentence uses form and words to express a limited meaning.

As Wendell Berry put it so perfectly, “The sentence is both the opportunity and the limitation of thought.”

Thought cannot think about everything. To try to do so is irresponsible.

A word cannot mean everything.

A sentence cannot think everything.

A government cannot rule everything.

And when a young child learns the form of grammar, he develops two habits of mind that are essential to self-governance and freedom:

• He learns to limit what he is saying to what he is trying to say – he learns to think with limits and therefore to think about something
• And he learns to insist that others mean something when they speak and limit themselves when they rule

So learn grammar for all the practical reasons you want to learn it. But love her for herself too. She’ll give you rewards you couldn’t have imagined before you fell in love.