John Taylor Gatto’s book The Underground History of American Education is available for reading in its entirety online! I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since I saw it recommended by Mary Pride several years ago.  From the Prologue which I just read:

The cost in New York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is $200,000 per body when lost interest is calculated. That capital sum invested in the child’s name over the past twelve years would have delivered a million dollars to each kid as a nest egg to compensate for having no school. The original $200,000 is more than the average home in New York costs. You wouldn’t build a home without some idea what it would look like when finished, but you are compelled to let a corps of perfect strangers tinker with your child’s mind and personality without the foggiest idea what they want to do with it.

I wish I coud have one fourth of the amount that the state would spend to educate each of my children in public school. I could invest it and give each child a start in his chosen career that would be the envy of anyone else watching.

Three important births took place on this date in history: Hopkins in 1844, Beatrix Potter in 1866, and me in 19??. (A woman shouldn’t have to reveal her age on her own blog.)

At the Wedding March
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
GOD with honour hang your head,
Groom, and grace you, bride, your bed
With lissome scions, sweet scions,
Out of hallowed bodies bred.

Each be other’s comfort kind:
Deep, deeper than divined,
Divine charity, dear charity,
Fast you ever, fast bind.

Then let the March tread our ears:
I to him turn with tears
Who to wedlock, his wonder wedlock,
Deals triumph and immortal years.

Joseph Hilaire Pierre Rene Belloc was born July 24, 1870. (I love these long names I sometimes find for familiar authors. Why do most people nowadays only have three, or even just two, names?) Interestingly enough in light of my previous post and its comments, Belloc was a devout Catholic and for a while, a Fabian, friend to both G.B. Shaw and G.K. Chesterton. As the three men debated Fabianism and socialism and Distributism in the press, GBS wrote a famous essay in which he called his two friends “the Chesterbelloc,” implying that Belloc did the thinking for the pair and led Chesterton astray. Later in their lives, Belloc and Shaw had little to do with each other, but Shaw and Chesterton remained “friendly enemies” all their lives.
Belloc funquote:
When I am dead, I hope it is said, ‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read’.

Belloc on education:
As between the Family and the State, Catholic doctrine is fixed. The family is the unit. The parent is the natural authority (auctoritas auctoris). The State is secondary to the family, and especially in the matter of forming a child’s character by education. Now here the State of today flatly contradicts Catholic doctrine. It says to the parent, “What you will for your child must yield to what I will. If our wills are coincident, well and good. If not, yours must suffer. I am master.” At least, so the State speaks to the poorer parent; to the richer it is more polite.

July 23:
Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore (b. 1823, d.1896) was a Catholic poet and essayist associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. He wrote The Angel in the House, a poem about the significance of love in marriage. He looks a little bit like Mark Twain to me, and he definitely has a great name. He was also homeschooled, a librarian at the British Musuem, and father to seven children. I smell a kindred spirit; I tend to like Victorians anyway.
Raymond Chandler (b.1888, d.1959) was the author of The Big Sleep and The Long Good-bye and other “hard-boiled” detective novels and stories. Here’s a sample quote: “From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.”–The High Window (Chapter 5) Now that’s hard-boiled!
Elspeth Huxley (b. 1907, d. 1997) began writing at the age of fourteen and authored some thirty book, but her most famous book was Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood. It sounds interesting, about her childhood in Kenya. Has anyone read it, and can you comment on it?

July 24:
Robert Graves (b.1895, d. 1985) considered himself first and foremost to be a poet, but he became famous and supported himself by writing novels, the most notable being I, Claudius. I read this historical novel a long time ago, and I’m left with an impression of Emperor Claudius as a doddering old man with a streak of Machiavellian genius. I haven’t seen the BBC series based on the book. Shoudl I? Graves, according to the biographies I read on the web, had his own eccentric theology, something he ccalled the worship of the White Goddess, inspired by studies of matriarchal societies and goddess cults. And that just goes to show that none of this pagan stuff is new (or ever dies completely), just recycled endlessly.

July 26:
Aldous Huxley (b.1894, d. 1963) was the author of Brave New World, a science fiction classic in which Huxley envisioned a world where babies were cloned in baby factories and the populace was kept calm and happy with a drug called soma. I read this one in high school, and I remember it being rather scary. Nowadays it’s coming true–and it’s still scary.
George Bernard Shaw (b.1856, d.1950) was, of course, the famous playwright and socialist. Epigrams galore:

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
I think GBS made it his hobby to be quotable. I also think homeschoolers can at least appreciate the last quotation in my list. Down with the NEA!

We’re back from a very pleasant weekend at Winedale. I saw two of the plays, Merry Wives of Windsor and The Tempest. I enjoyed Merry WIves of Windsor very much. I expected it to be bawdy, and it was. However, it was also funny and strangely virtuous. Marital faithfulness and true love are rewarded in the end, and unfounded jealousy and attempted seduction are punished appropriately. And it’s all done in the form of a comedy, not like Othello wich covers some of the same themes–except in the tragedy everybody dies. Favorite quote: Wives may be merry and yet honest, too.–Mistress Page

The Tempest we saw on Saturday afternoon in a rather warm barn-theater. I haven’t read the play in a long, long time, and I must confess that I found myself fighting sleepiness and unable to follow the intricacies of the plot at times. Still, I enjoyed the play and came away with a new appreciation for Shakespeare’s abilities as a writer of fantasy. Creating another world, an island, where magical things can and do happen, a fantasy world–this kind of writing definitely intrigues me. Of course, I believe the genre is most fully realized in The Lord of the Rings. Quotes from The Tempest:

My library
Was dukedom large enough. –Prospero

How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t! –Miranda