Read an Excerpt
Life Under Compulsion
Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child
By Anthony Esolen Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Copyright © 2015 Anthony M. Esolen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1830-2
CHAPTER 1
Courses in Compulsion
The School
Picture the scene.
It's Norway, many centuries ago. A young man named Olav, when he was hardly more than a boy, fled from his homestead because of a manslaughter he committed in a drunken brawl, cleaving a man's back with an ax before the man could run him through with a sword. God had not yet sent down upon sinful mankind the eleventh plague of Egypt, the lawyers—creatures that have their place but that, in great numbers, are far more destructive than grasshoppers and frogs. So Olav could not immediately plead self-defense. He had to betake himself to the protection of a powerful earl and fight his battles, leaving his betrothed wife behind. And in those years he was gone from home, she, beautiful, sweet, inattentive, and sometimes weak of will, allowed a hearty young Icelander, partly by force, to take her in bed. The result is a small child, Eirik, whom Olav has adopted as his own, for his wife's sake.
He tries to love the boy. That is hard for him to do when the mother is near, because she spoils the child, but when father and stepson are outdoors, things are different:
They agreed much better when they were alone together. Eirik was then more obedient and less restless, and even if he was too fond of asking odd questions, there was often some sense in them. He swallowed every word from his father's lips with eyes and ears, and this made him forget to come out with his fables and rigmaroles. Without being himself aware of it, Olav was warmed by the affection the child showed him; he forgot his dislike of other days and let himself be warmed whenever anyone showed him the friendship which he found it so hard to seek for himself. So he met Eirik halfway with calm goodwill; he instructed the boy in the use of weapons and implements, which were still more like playthings, smiled a little at Eirik's eager questions and chatted with him as a good father talks to his little son.
Best of all for the little boy are the times when they go out in a boat, father and son, to fish with a hand line. Eirik rushes back into the house at night and gabbles on in a splash of words about all he learned from his father, about rowing and fishing and making knots and splicing ropes, and how pretty soon he'll be going along with his father and the other men to fish and to hunt in earnest. It's a wild exaggeration, born from the boy's need to be loved by the man he thinks is his true father. Yet in it, even in these less-than-ideal circumstances, we see that what the boy learns from Olav is somehow different from what he might have learned from anybody else or on his own. It is a fully human kind of learning, mingled with the liberating bonds of filial love and fatherly duty. It is a learning that enters the sanctum of the heart. The boy will no more forget it than he could forget his name.
That passage is from Sigrid Undset's The Master of Hestviken. Does it matter that it is a work of fiction? Undset lived in her beloved Norway until the invading Nazis forced her to flee for her life with one of her two sons, over the mountains into Sweden and then, by one risky stage after another, to America. The other son fell in battle in the first few weeks of fighting. Norway then was far more literate than America is now. Yet to live in a land so often buried under snow and darkened by the long winters, you have to know how to do many things. You have to know how to take care of large animals like sheep and cows; how to fish through the ice; how to use skis to travel long distances (as, for example, over the mountains into Sweden, to escape the Nazis); where to find bilberries and lingonberries and how to preserve them; how to cut down trees and hew the wood into planks for houses and sheds; how to bake, how to use a smokehouse for fish and bacon, how to mend frayed clothes, how to brew small beer and cider, and many other things that Undset describes with intelligence and care.
In other words, you have to learn. It is one of the great things that families are for.
Picture another scene.
It's a boat, off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Aboard are the captain, his teenage son, a couple of other fishermen, and a new arrival, a teenage boy named Harvey. How, you may ask, can somebody show up one night on a boat that is a hundred miles out to sea? By the good grace of God. The boy, vain, boastful, and useless, was traveling with his mother on a cruise ship to Europe when the seas got foggy and choppy and he turned green in the gills. Going up to the main deck, he leaned overboard to be sick and a great wave swept him off the deck and knocked him unconscious into the sea. There he was picked up by one of the boats belonging to the fishing crew.
And, since these are times before cell phones, that's where he's going to remain for several months before they put to shore again.
Nobody on a fishing boat can be idle weight. Here is Harvey being instructed with rough-and-ready courtesy by one of the fishermen. He is literally learning the ropes—that is, learning which rope hoists which sail or turns which boom:
For an hour Long Jack walked his prey up and down, teaching, as he said, "things at the sea that ivry man must know, blind, dhrunk, or asleep." There is not much gear to a seventy-ton schooner with a stump-foremast, but Long Jack had a gift of expression. When he wished to draw Harvey's attention to the peak halyards, he dug his knuckles into the back of the boy's neck and kept him at gaze for half a minute. He emphasized the difference between fore and aft generally by rubbing Harvey's nose along a few feet of the boom, and the lead of each rope was fixed in Harvey's mind by the end of the rope itself.
Then another one of the crew, a fellow named Tom Platt, gets in on the instruction, chattering about sails and spars that he used to handle on his old ship, the Ohio. The men compete with one another on how best to instruct the lad:
"He'll be ruined for life, beginnin' on a fore-an'-after this way," Tom Platt pleaded. "Give him a chance to know a few leadin' principles. Sailin's an art, Harvey, as I'd show you if I had ye in the fore-top o' the—"
"I know ut. Ye'd talk him dead an' cowld. Silence, Tom Platt! Now, after all I've said, how'd you reef the foresail, Harve? Take your time answerin'."
"Haul that in," said Harvey, pointing to leeward.
"Fwhat? The North Atlantuc?"
"No, the boom. Then run that rope you showed me back there—"
"That's no way," Tom Platt put in.
"Quiet! He's l'arnin', an' has not got the names good yet. Go on, Harve."
"Oh, it's the reef-pennant. I'd hook the tackle on to the reef-pennant, and then let down—"
"Lower the sail, child! Lower!" said Tom Platt, in a professional agony.
"Lower the throat- and peak-halyards," Harvey went on. Those names stuck in his head.
It's a gently comic situation, but the author of Captains Courageous, Rudyard Kipling, is showing us some interesting things about l'arnin'. The schooner is the school. The sailors, with their extravagant accents, their wild experiences, their salty language, their long-loved songs, and their bluff willingness to work with and for one another—for otherwise no schooner could ever leave the docks—are the instructors. The boy Harvey is the student. The proving grounds are the vast and dangerous waters of the North Atlantic.
And here someone raises a hand in objection. "Think of the ropes on the boat—excuse me, the schooner! Think of the routine, day in and day out! Think of the hours upon hours of scaling fish and salting them and packing them in barrels. How can you possibly consider it a life of freedom rather than compulsion?"
There is nothing so grand, so dangerous, so man making, as months out on the open sea, fishing for cod and relying on nothing but your wits, your strength, and the wits and strength of your fellow sailors. Sure, there's a routine, as there's a routine in the work of the farmer who wakes up with the roosters to tend to his cows, and a routine in the work of monks who rise before dawn to sing praises to God. But these routines are in harmony with the nature of things: with animals, with the sea, with the sun, and with the human spirit lifting itself up in praise. They are not compulsions of impotence. Think of them as the ropes on the schooner. Unless you have those ropes, and people who have "learned the ropes," as the nautical saying goes, that salty and dangerous experience would never be possible; the schooner could never leave the dock. The ropes raise the sails and let you catch the wind.
Yet the most important feature of the scene is not technological. We all understand that it would be a poor substitute if Harvey had been given a set of diagrams and told to study them. It would also be a poor substitute if Harvey had been shown around the schooner by a robot, intoning in a metallic drone, "This is the reef-pennant. These are the peak-halyards." For one thing, Harvey would lack the mnemonic reminders that Long Jack imparts to him with such effectual physicality. He would never feel the ends of the booms rasping against his nose, or the free end of a rope thwacking him on the shoulders, or human knuckles burrowing into the back of his neck.
But even those reminders would not really do good work if they were not salted with the affection that the older men clearly show for the kid, as is shown by Jack's calling him Harve for short. A human being is meant to be taught by human beings for human things. That can never be accomplished by mere methods.
Think of any real encounter with another human mind and heart. Think of a small boy sitting on the knee of his grandfather, looking into his face and listening to how he once went barnstorming through Italy, earning his bread and oil and a dry bed by playing baseball for Italians who had never seen the game. Such a man was my friend, distantly related to Abe Lincoln, who would have appreciated the jaunt, being something of a river rat himself. Who is such a fool as to suggest that the child would do better to skitter through the Internet, with the keyword "Italy"? The real complexity of that encounter makes the screen, for all its technological intricacy, look like a stone knife or a pointed stick. But the encounter's worth abounds far above the complexity. It stirs in the heart. It is mingled with love and admiration. It declares, "This was a good thing to do!"
Even a dog cannot be well trained without affection. Dogs, we know, cannot just be inserted into the gaps of a contentment machine for wealthy professionals. Dogs need fresh air, exercise, play, the adventure of the pack. They should not be kenneled up all day.
Now look at how we treat children. They are kenneled up nine months of the year, institutionalized ten hours a day. We persist in believing that children, because they are intelligent, are more malleable than dogs. Notice the word taken from metallurgy. We will not see that it is just because they are intelligent that their teaching can never be training and can never subordinate the personal to the mechanical. They need to learn more than the rules. They need to learn the ropes. They need to do more than learn laws. They need to be inspired to loyalty. They need the adventure of love.
Harvey has that adventure, as the captain becomes a new father to him. Because he learns, he can go out one day with his pal on a rowboat fishing on their own. Because he learns, he grows so well into manhood that, when he finally meets his father on land again, he can speak to him frankly and sensibly about his future. He is no longer a silly spoiled brat. He has grown into freedom.
An Interminable Ride to a Terminal Place
And now, a different manner of conveyance.
"Imagine," said my friend, "how long it takes the bus to go from Little Anse," a village at the extreme end of the island where my family and I spend our summers, "all the way out to the Academy, stopping every five hundred feet."
"It must take an hour at least."
"Try an hour and a half, twice a day."
The people of Little Anse and the two neighboring villages are fierce defenders of their local church, St. Joseph's, where Masses have been said for many decades in French. They are determined that, if one or two of the four churches on the island must close, it won't be theirs. But the English speakers among them no longer have a school to defend with that same determination. The Academy, as the high school is called, is, like most such institutions in the United States and Canada, in the middle of nowhere, inaccessible except by bus and set far from the road so as to discourage casual visitors.
Why do people invariably enjoy visiting old one-room school-houses? I think it's because they are human places, on a human scale, for the education of little human beings. It isn't just that one knows, without having to think about it consciously, that the planks and joists were pegged together by the hands of the same people whose children would go to school there. It's that the whole idea of the school was founded upon natural desires and intentions.
There's the boiler, to keep the class warm in winter. There's the woodshed for the boiler. The men would stock that shed, and boys would haul the logs in when needed. There's the schoolyard, cleared for play. There are the windows, for natural light and for fresh air when the spring comes. There's the American flag, and a portrait of Washington, Father of the Country, or the Canadian flag, and a portrait of Queen Victoria. There are the books, tailored for children, certainly, but also compact, without wasted space—books were expensive. The readers are filled with folktales and poems and historical fiction and, for the older children, selections from Cicero, Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope.
The school looks in part like a home, or a small town hall, or a chapel. Appropriately so, since it is a public extension of the home, in harmony with the virtues encouraged by the church. As at home, as in church, children intermingle, the older ones seeing to the younger ones. There is no unnatural separation by year of birth. The teacher is hired by the people, for their purposes; he or she is not a member of a cabal intent upon subverting the purposes of their employers. The school belongs to the people who live there. It is their free and liberty-making creation.
Such schools, or schools somewhat larger but similar, used to be everywhere. One of my earliest memories is of a wooden schoolhouse painted blue, not five hundred feet from our back door. One night we saw it burning to the ground. My mother went there when she was a little girl. When she was older, she walked to the small high school "downtown," a little less than half a mile away. That structure, next to the rectory and the Catholic church and across the street from the parish hall, the Knights of Columbus, a candy store, and a barbershop, met its fate around 1970, when three towns consolidated into one district and built a new high school, sprawling, expensive, ugly, and inaccessible. The last time the building was used was as a home base for the town's centennial celebration in 1976. It remained boarded up for years, till it was condemned and torn down. Now a little park and garden commemorate where the high school—where my mother learned Latin, in a graduating class of about thirty—used to be.
For a long time, the poison of compulsion was kept in check by poverty. People simply couldn't afford to destroy the natural institution to benefit the unnatural. There was no way to whisk hundreds of children miles away to the impersonal Academy, built by contractors and staffed by people largely unknown and with purposes of their own, for whom parents are either compliant clients, no-shows, or pests. So, even though it was made compulsory for children to attend school, the compulsion had not yet begun to characterize the kind of school they were to attend. Victor Hugo's heroic revolutionary Enjolras, in Les Misérables, could call for "free and compulsory" schooling, without any sense of irony or paradox. But that state of affairs could not last.
It did not survive the revolution in transportation that replaced legs with wheels. Let us think about this for a minute. Sometimes things that are right in our path are the last things we see.
The school bus and the school warehouse go together. The latter requires the former. The school bus and the school as an institution set over against the family and family loyalties also go together. The former makes possible the latter. One hulk of an institution is not the same thing as ten schools put together. It is ten schools obliterated, with a hulk, a thing of a different sort, to take their place.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Life Under Compulsion by Anthony Esolen. Copyright © 2015 Anthony M. Esolen. Excerpted by permission of Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
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