Friends and Mentors in Wind Willows, Ch's Web, Bambi

Chapter 4 of Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian.

The Wind in the Willows portrays great role models of friendship between Mole, Rat, Badger and Toad. The friends aren't afraid to try to "convert" Toad from his frivolous ways even when it might offend Toad - they care about him enough to risk that. As an aside, I think this is one of the most well-written books ever. Grahame's use of language is wonderful, and his subtle humor is fun. One example: Toad's misery when he lands in jail: "To his horror he recollected that he had left both coat and waistcoat behind him in his cell, and with them his pocket-book, money, keys, watch, matches, pencil-case - all that makes life worth living, all that distinguishes the many-pocketed animal, the lord of creation, from the inferior one-pocketed or no-pocketed productions that hop or trip about permissively, un-equipped for the real contest." The only portion of children's literature that I enjoy more is Captain Hook's dilemma about maintaining "good form" when he's contemplating his enemy, Peter Pan.

Since chapter 7 (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn) seems to be a sticking point for many Christians, I'll focus on Guroian's comments in that respect. While seeking a lost little otter friend, Rat and Mole have a spiritual experience and catch a glimpse of Pan, the mythological piper (also alluded to in Peter Pan), that awes and inspires them to worship. Guroian says that Pan, as 'Friend and Helper,' is appropriate for this story of friends helping each other. "While Grahame employs motifs and characters of pagan myth, the theme of spiritual love, which is the highest form of friendship, taps a deep and ancient tradition of spirituality. That tradition successfully relates friendship to agape and that love to the desire for God."

Charlotte's Web portrays a warm mentor relationship as Charlotte mothers and tries to save Wilbur. Her efforts for him help to elevate her own short fleeting life by giving her a noble purpose, so the relationship benefits both of them.

Bambi also illustrates a mentor - but a distant one in the regal Prince who teachs Bambi the strength and wisdom that come from being alone. "In Salten's tale, this is the central relationship and not Bambi's love for Faline, the young doe, as Disney portrays it." The deer's need for alone-ness can suggest our own source of strength and wisdom that can be found through quiet devotional times.

All of the entries in this series:
1. Awakening the Moral Imagination
2. On Becoming a Real Human Child: Pinocchio
3. Love and Immortality in The Velveteen Rabbit and The Little Mermaid
4. Friends and Mentors in The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte's Web, Bambi
5. Evil and Redemption in the Snow Queen and Narnia
6. Heroines of Faith and Courage (and Conclusion)

ChildlightUSA CM Blog

ChildlightUSA, the organization that does CM conferences every June featuring CM scholars such as Carroll Smith, Jack Beckman, Ranald Macaulay, and Bobby Scott (head of the CM Perimeter schools) - now has a blog!

Their first weekly post is "On the Appropriate Use of Manipulatives, Projects and Other Hands-on Learning Methods in a Mason Context" by Dr. Carroll Smith. You can read it here. Feel free to leave a comment; I know they'd like to dialog and discuss CM.

ChildlightUSA "exists to recover and promote the educational philosophy and practice of Charlotte Mason (1846-1923). It is organizationally related to ChildLight in the UK." (Childlight is the group who published For the Children's Sake, When Children Love to Learn, Books Children Love.)

"Look, Mommy, I Made Us A Cake!"

"And it's only for us, Mommy, not for my brothers." How sweet.



Ingredients:
flour scooped from off the counter
water
soy milk (just a tiny bit)
a slice of soy cheese, broken into small pieces
a dash of cinnamon
a small handful of sunflower seeds
red sugar sprinkles

When it's all mixed and sticky, bring a teacup of tea leftover from the afternoon's tea party and pour it on top. Mix well with a fork.



Mmmm! "And it's going to have red sprinkles on top - I promise, really. I'm not teasing."

(Luckily, I wasn't actually required to taste any of this - just ooh-ing and ah-ing and taking a picture seemed to be enough.)

Love and Immortality in The Velveteen Rabbit and The Little Mermaid

Chapter 3 of Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian.

This chapter is divided into two parts. First, The Velveteen Rabbit. His desire is to be loved enough to become real. We all know the story - he does become real to the boy as the boy sees him as a real personality and not just a toy, and the rabbit becomes shabby-looking. But then the boys gets sick and all his toys are burned to prevent the spread of germs - and the rabbit is left out with the garbage to be burned. Then the nursery fairy turns him into a real rabbit. The boy's love made him real in one sense, but the magic of the fairy who watches over the toys (like God watches over us) makes him real forever - makes him immortal. His real-ness before was just a shadow of the real immortality, in the same way that our lives in the image of God are only a shadow of the real existence we'll have in Heaven.

Next, he examines The Little Mermaid. All her life, the little mermaid yearned for something more than her limiting life under the sea - she wanted to see the sun and the world beyond, much like we yearn for an existence beyond our finite lives in paradise. She tells her grandmother that she would give up all her years of life as a mermaid for just one day on earth and then an eternity in Heaven. That turns out to be prophetic. She is side-tracked when a young man reminds her of the statue that symbolizes life above the water, and her focus is thrown towards him. She yields to temptation and makes a deal with the powers of evil. She does get her day on earth, but with it comes pain and she loses her soul. Yet her final act of self-sacrifice when she refuses to take the life of the man who didn't love her becomes an act that saves her - she becomes a being of the air with a chance for immortality.

All of the entries in this series:
1. Awakening the Moral Imagination
2. On Becoming a Real Human Child: Pinocchio
3. Love and Immortality in The Velveteen Rabbit and The Little Mermaid
4. Friends and Mentors in The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte's Web, Bambi
5. Evil and Redemption in the Snow Queen and Narnia
6. Heroines of Faith and Courage (and Conclusion)

On Becoming a Real Human Child: Pinocchio

This is the second chapter of Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian.

Pinocchio has a hard, wooden heart but wants to be a real boy; a good boy. Throughout the story, Pinocchio is carried along by love for his father. When he gets his wish in the end, "real boyhood is not so much a reward" [it's not earned salvation] "as it is the visible sign of a moral task that has been pursued . . . His good heart with its innate capacity to love finally dominates over his wooden head." "Being good is not a means to gaining boyhood or girlhood as a reward. Rather, being good is a quality of respect and responsibility toward others you love, firstly and especially one's parents and siblings." The blue fairy tells him that if he wants to be human, he must "begin by being a good boy." Pinocchio at first tends to shift blame for everything that happens to him. Every time he relates his history, his story gets less and less selfish as he grows less self-deceived and learns about his own responsibility in his naughtiness.

Guroian parallels Pinocchio with "the parable of the prodigal son and Jonah and the whale and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress." Pinocchio illustrates "the biblical motifs of drowning and rebirth and penance and baptism into new life." There's a similarity between him, as a donkey, being drowned but the fish eat away his donkey skin to reveal his wooden frame, and C.S. Lewis's Narnian episode when Eustace has his dragon layers peeled off to reveal his own skin. The Blue Fairy displays true Christian grace when she loves and forgives him in spite of his badness. He doesn't deserve her help, but she loves him and helps him anyway.

In his evolution from puppet to donkey to puppet to boy, Guroian finds another Narnian parallel when Lucy says how dreadful it would be if people started turning wild inside like the Narnian animals who lost their ability to talk.

Guroian says to accept no substitutes for the original story: "The modern abridgements and retellings of Pinocchio, of which Disney's is only the most well known, soften the violence of death in Collodi's original tale and as a result also sweeten and sentimentalize the love that grows within Pinocchio. Thus, they also fail to capture the gritty nature of the puppet's courage and endurance."

Awakening the Moral Imagination

I've started reading Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian. I can't remember where I heard about this book, but I was so intrigued that I went online and ordered a copy. It arrived this week. There are six chapters, and I'll do a separate post as I read each one.

Chapter 1 - Awakening the Moral Imagination (Much of ch 1 is posted here.)

Stories are valuable because they say what statements can't. "Stories capture the meaning of morality through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil, where characters must make difficult choices between right and wrong or heroes and villians contest the very fate of imaginary worlds." Fantasy stories can help us to retain our sense of the mysteriousness of life. College professors have discovered that ethics and moral character can't be learned from lessons that define what they are, and give practical examples. "Instead, a compelling vision of the goodness of goodness itself needs to be presented in a way that is attractive and stirs the imagination."

In the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, children see that "appearances can be deceptive," and that "unless virtue is present in a person she will not be able to find, appreciate, or embrace virtue in another."

Through fantasy and fairy tales, children can imagine themselves in the hero's shoes, making choices and living with the consequences--all from the safety of a book. Through stories, virtues cease to be dry facts and take on a life of their own. Values can be relative and picked up or discarded at will, but virtues are permanent and absolute. If a person has the virtue of courage, it will come forth in any situation, but a value can be rationalized away.

G.K. Chesterton's Education, or The Mistake About the Child is quoted; all 14 chapters are in Part Four in the book "What's Wrong With The World," which is online.
Chesterton said that modern lessons where teachers attempt to draw out beliefs and values to help children create and clarify their own values were deceptive because, even though they claimed that children were finding their own internal values without the coersion of an outside authority instilling virtue, yet by encouraging certain values and ignoring others, teachers were still exerting their authority. Fairy tales do a better job of instilling virtue because they can shape our character without being dogmatic and heavy-handed. They illustrate virtue in action.

(Dominion Family posted about this book in Aug 2007, but I heard or read about it somewhere else just a couple weeks ago. I wish I could remember where.)

All of the entries in this series:
1. Awakening the Moral Imagination
2. On Becoming a Real Human Child: Pinocchio
3. Love and Immortality in The Velveteen Rabbit and The Little Mermaid
4. Friends and Mentors in The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte's Web, Bambi
5. Evil and Redemption in the Snow Queen and Narnia
6. Heroines of Faith and Courage (and Conclusion)

An Interesting Journey

Edited to add the three latest additions . . .

I "met" Camille on a parenting forum when Miss M was an infant; Camille's baby was born a month after Miss M. Camille had lost a previous baby (stillbirth) and I've followed her changes and healing (and the birth of a brother for her first little boy!) as she's posted on three different parenting forums.

She's started a series of posts about how her experiences brought her from one parenting method to one that's almost completely opposite. She's not finished, but here are the first three installments:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4 Threepeat
Part 5 First Outing
Part 6 (the books that changed her perspective on grace and parenting)

The Risk of Teaching Your Child to Read

If you like humor, TC at Fish in My Hair has posted about reading:

"I've had a revelation. It dawned on me exactly when I lost control around here. It was when I taught my kids to read.
See, it doesn't take long, once a kid can read, that he gets twice as smart as his parents. One day he's working his way through The Cat In The Hat, and a week later, he's making subversive messages with those plastic letter refrigerator magnets . . ."

Read the rest here.

Excellent blogs!

By accepting this Excellent Blog Award, you have to award it to 10 more people whose blogs you find Excellent Award-worthy. You can give it to as many people as you want but please award at least 10. Thank you out there for having such great blogs and being such great friends! You deserve this! Feel free to award people who have already been awarded . . .

Beth nominated me for this, and it's the nicest award I've ever received.

Finding ten worthy blogs won't be difficult; limiting it to ten will be hard, though! I've started doing RSS feeds with iGoogle, and these are some of my favorites of my feeds.

I hereby bestow the Excellent Blog Award upon the following excellent bloggers ... thank you all for the various ways you've encouraged me over the years. I look forward to continuing to follow your journey in the Blogisphere!

1. Mama Squirrel at Dewey's Treehouse
2. The Headmistress at The Common Room
3. Miss Roxie
4. Ginger at Thimble Cottage
5. Queen S. The Beehive
6. Beth at The Brew Crew
7. Donna-Jean at Liberty and Lily
8. Dawn at The Gentle Art of Learning
9. Katie at CM, Children and Lots of Grace
10. Shiloh Mom at The Country Cottage

OK, I'm out of spaces and I still have three or four to add...

Oh, wait! It said at least ten! So here are more:

11. CoffeeMama at Our Blue Castle
12. Javamom at Take Time to Smell the Coffee
13. MamaLion at Shadybrook Acres
14. Athena in a Minivan

Admonition

The sun, going down in a riot of color,
belies the dreariness of this weary day.
How can the clouds betray me with
a sudden burst of joy? All day
they were content with grey--and now
this outburst.
There was nothing in the day to merit
such a get-up; no cause
for wild bursts of joy; no excuse
for out-of-season gladness.
I was content to let the sunlight pass
in weary contemplation. But these
unruly clouds have upset my thoughts
with their joyful shouting; all this
reverberating color
rebukes me into praise.

I was sure the day was coming
to a gentle, silent stop;
but the sky has forced a humble
exclamation-mark upon it.