Protect Good Reading from Bad Schooling

Augustine, Jerome, Montaigne, and Zora Neale Hurston on the Educational Virtue of Following Your Whims

I’ve got five kids, three still of school age. And they’re all back in class, or will be by the end of this week. Thank God! Few things make me happier than the start of summer vacation—except perhaps when it’s over. I might like that even more.

Of my three kids still in school, I’ve got a senior, a sophomore, and a second-grader. They’re all embarking on noteworthy years. It’s my senior’s last in secondary education, and my second-grader is starting at a new school. My sophomore? I’m homeschooling him, first time I’ve ever tried such a thing. Say a prayer for us both.

I often think about the artificiality of education. Speaking is natural. Most of us are doing it by two or three, even if we can’t yet take profitable command of the complexities of expression. But for words on the page there’s nothing inherent in the human mental kit that manifests the ability to automatically decipher letters or understand their corresponding sounds—let alone how to manipulate the subtler matter of grammar and syntax in writing.

St. Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne.

Sts. Augustine and Jerome

In his Confessions, St. Augustine described how he learned how to speak. “I would listen to the words,” he said, “and immediately I would work out from their positions in different sentences what they meant; and, as soon as I had learnt to get my tongue around them, I began to string them together in sentences of my own, in order to convey my own desires” (1.8.13, translated by Philip Burton).

Easy peasy. But words on a page were different, more difficult:

As for the reason why I hated the Greek literature in which I was steeped as a boy—for that I have still found no satisfactory explanation. I had fallen in love with Latin literature—not, that is, with the texts taught by my earliest teachers, but the literature taught by the so-called “grammarians.” My primers of reading, writing and arithmetic I found more of a burden and a punishment than the whole of Greek literature put together. . . . But it was through those books that I gradually acquired the ability to read any piece of writing that I came across, and to write myself anything that I wished to write; which ability, once gained, I still possess. (1.13.20)

Looking back on his experience, Augustine criticized the curriculum and the methods. “Education is a big business,” he said, and if students resisted their teachers, “out came the cane” (1.16.26). Yikes!

St. Jerome’s regimen sounds a bit more gentle and solicitous. Responding to a woman named Laeta asking him for advice on educating her daughter Paula, Jerome suggested the following:

Have a set of letters made for her, of boxwood or of ivory, and tell her their names. Let her play with them, making play a road to learning, and let her not only grasp the right order of the letters and remember their names in a simple song, but also frequently upset their order and mix the last letters with the middle ones, the middle with the first. Thus she will know them all by sight as well as by sound.

When she begins with uncertain hand to use the pen, either let another hand be put over hers to guide her baby fingers, or else have the letters marked on the tablet so that her writing may follow their outlines and keep to their limits without straying away.

Offer her prizes for spelling, tempting her with such trifling gifts as please young children. Let her have companions too in her lessons, so that she may seek to rival them and be stimulated by any praise they win. You must not scold her if she is somewhat slow; praise is the best sharpener of wits. Let her be glad when she is first and sorry when she falls behind.

Above all take care not to make her lessons distasteful; a childish dislike often lasts longer than childhood. (Letter 107, translated by F.A. Wright)

I think I know where Maria Montessori got some of her ideas. How many kids are put off education or don’t consider themselves learners because of lousy experiences in school? Jerome’s advice to Laeta was to stay focused on the long game; learning doesn’t do us much good if we come to hate it when school’s out.

St. Jerome by Marinus van Reymerswaele.

Montaigne’s Education

Montaigne’s father would have resonated with Jerome’s advice. His approach with his son was both gentle and eccentric. “Among other things,” Montaigne recalled in his Essays, “he had been advised to teach me to enjoy knowledge and duty by my own free will and desire, and to educate my mind in all gentleness and freedom, without rigor and constraint“ (1.26, “On the Education of Children,” translated by Donald M. Frame).

And yet Montaigne’s father would go to extremes to engineer the right educational environment of his son—including hiring a German tutor who knew none of the family’s native French and forbidding use of anything but Latin in the home so Montaigne would learn it as his primary language.

My late father, having made all the inquiries a man can make, among men of learning and understanding, about a superlative system of education, became aware of the drawbacks that were prevalent; and he was told that the long time we put into learning languages which cost the ancient Greeks and Romans nothing was the only reason we could not attain their greatness in soul and in knowledge. I do not think that that is the only reason. At all events, the expedient my father hit upon was this, that while I was nursing and before the first loosening of my tongue, he put me in the care of a German . . . wholly ignorant of our language and very well versed in Latin. This man, whom he had sent for expressly, and who was very highly paid, had me constantly in his hands. There were also two others with him, less learned, to attend me and relieve him. These spoke to me in no other language than Latin. As for the rest of my father’s household, it was an inviolable rule that neither my father himself, nor my mother, nor any valet or housemaid, should speak anything in my presence but such Latin words as each had learned in order to jabber with me.

This immersive approach paid off later when it came to reading. “The first taste I had for books,” he said, “came to me from my pleasure in the fables of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. For at about seven or eight years of age I would steal away from any other pleasure to read them, inasmuch as this language was my mother tongue, and it was the easiest book I knew and the best suited by its content to my tender age.”

Montaigne wanted nothing to do with whatever vernacular adventures kids his age were reading, “rubbish on which children waste their time.”

Montaigne by anonymous artist

Montaigne’s tutor put his passion for reading to good use. He let his pupil follow his whims, nudging and directing, rather than dictating a strict course of study.

For by this means I went right through Virgil’s Aeneid, and then Terence, and then Plautus, and some Italian comedies, always lured on by the pleasantness of the subject. If he had been foolish enough to break this habit, I think I should have got nothing out of school but a hatred of books, as do nearly all our noblemen. He went about it cleverly. Pretending to see nothing, he whetted my appetite, letting me gorge myself with these books only in secret, and gently keeping me at my work on the regular studies.

What do I take from all this? Education is challenging, and regimented learning is not always the right course. I know the arguments for it, but how many students are simply turned off from learning because the subjects bore them to distraction or grind them to discouragement?

Augustine mastered Latin but, cane or not, never did learn his Greek (which might have had serious consequences for the development of western theology). There’s something to be said for letting students follow their own whims and interests, learning as they go rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all track from above.

I know that’s been true for my kids, some of whom have had special challenges in school. My new homeschooler, Jonah, is now a pretty serious reader. But he couldn’t read at all until the second grade—couldn’t make sense of it until then.

Working by Whim

My own education, especially by high school, was accidentally similar to Montaigne’s at least insofar as his freedom to read what he chose. I attended a small Christian school that placed no serious emphasis on literature, sadly. But my dad was an English teacher at a local public high school. We had an ample home library, and he placed no real restrictions on what I read.

For school I read, as I’ve mentioned before, Johann Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson—possibly the worst novel ever. I have no fond memories of it. But at home I read everything from David Morrell’s First Blood to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I also read plenty of history, politics, economics, and theology—all subjects my dad cared about and which I loved too, along with Celtic mythology, Thrasher skate magazine, CARtoons, and plenty else Montaigne would surely label “rubbish.” It was. Did it matter?

Naturally, I ended up with an idiosyncratic education with gaping holes. I, for instance, read most of the Tarzan novels but missed The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby (an oversight I remedied only recently). One purpose behind my classic novel goals the past few years has been to patch some of those holes. But that’s just the point, isn’t it?

Along with those holes, I also acquired a thirst for learning and reading. I can fill those holes anytime I choose. But what about the kids who “have got nothing out of school but a hatred of books,” as Montaigne said, slugging their way through required reading and then rarely picking up a book once they’re done? They’ll choose Netflix. After all, back to Jerome, “a childish dislike often lasts longer than childhood.”

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Go Ahead, Read Whatever

In her memoir Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston talks about her own idiosyncratic and often interrupted eduction. After being away from school for a while, she returned to find herself several years behind in the curriculum. She had one advantage: She was a serious reader.

“I had hundreds of books under my skin already,” she said. “Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading.”

Free to work by whim, Hurston escaped the downside of Jerome’s concern and Montaigne’s warning. When you follow your interests, you’re never bored or put off. She read whatever she could get her hands on, and the joy of the exercise fueled her persistence. But what about the “trashy” stuff she mentions? Wouldn’t it have been better if she’d only read proper books?

Hurston around 1920. Photo by Carl Van Vechten.

Far from a problem, Hurston considered the rubbish a net good. “I do not regret the trash,” she said. “It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.”

This was what fueled Augustine’s love for Latin literature, Jerome’s advice for making reading playful, and Montaigne’s voracious, somewhat indiscriminate reading. Good taste can be shaped and learned, but there’s little point if reading doesn’t become a habit, a love, in the first place.

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