bearing blog

Service when you need it: a camp story.

My family and I spent last week up at YMCA Camp du Nord, north of Ely, Minnesota, on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW).  

(I've written about this place before, and it's been profiled here in the Star Tribune, which named it Best Family Vacation in Minnesota this year.  If you have ever thought that a week among the pines and firs and birches and aspens of northern Minnesota, with lots of canoeing and kayaking and fishing and hiking -- and a couple of hours each day free while the kids are in age-group activities -- sounds like a great place for your family, I don't think you could do better than here.)

Normally I would post pictures, but I didn't take any.  Not a single one.  I was too busy enjoying myself.  My 5yo daughter learned to paddle her own kayak, my 2yo son developed his own entourage of eight-year-old girls, my eight-year-old son discovered that he has an aptitude for slacklining, and my eleven-year-old --- well, I'm not sure exactly what my eleven-year-old was up to all week, and that is what he loves about the place --- he gets to wander around and do his own thing, something that I wish he had more of but can never quite make happen at home.

The main reason I didn't take pictures is that I usually do it with my cell phone.  But this year I didn't bother carrying my phone around with me.

In fact I had zero contact with phones or the Internet the entire week, with one notable exception.

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On one past trip to the camp, during Nature Notes, the older boys had learned a Cool Science Trick, a handy combination of botany and physical chemistry.   The naturalist showed the children how to scrape oozing tree-sap onto one end of a stick or a chip of wood, and throw the chip of wood into the lake.  This causes the wood chip to zoom along the surface of the water, powered by the difference in surface tension between the clean water in front of the wood chip and the miniature oil slick of organic compounds -- think turpentine-ish stuff -- that spreads out from the blob of sap behind it.  

The tremendous fun that could be had in the making of "sap boats" has grown in my family, in legends passed down from older to younger siblings, and in tales told with great enthusiasm to numerous other relatives who innocently asked "So what did you do this summer?"  So the stage was set.  The minute that the children were done with their job of ferrying items from car to cabin, all four of them began clamoring to go down to the lake and make sap boats.  We sent the three big ones off and breathed a sigh of relief that we could begin throwing together some dinner and unpacking bedding.

Moments later I heard my daughter screaming, and getting louder and louder.  I turned and through the window saw her running as fast as she could toward the cabin, wailing and screaming, with one hand clamped over her eye, followed closely behind by her big brothers.   "She got sap in her eye!" called one of the boys, and while Mark went out to pick her up and carry her in I picked up the cell phone.

 It's generally hard to get a consistent cell signal unless you cross the road and hike out on the North Arm Trails (here's the U. S. Forest Service map)  to "Old Baldy," a higher, rocky point.  Mine -- which has Poison Control on speed dial -- didn't get a signal, but I copied the number into Mark's iPhone and went outside the cabin and managed to get through just that one time.

May I just sing the praises of the Poison Control people again?  They are so helpful.  It's like they never heard of a lawyer.  You ask them for medical advice, and they give appropriate medical advice, with no CYA padding and no guilt and no "take them to the emergency room just in case."  YAY POISON CONTROL.  I wish I could send you cupcakes.

Anyway, they advised us to flush her eye out for five minutes, which we did with a plastic measuring cup at the sink -- this was not fun as she spent the whole time screaming "I'M BETTER NOW PLEASE PUT ME DOWN PLEASE," but we did figure out that you can overcome the squeeze-your-eyes-shut reflex a bit by instructing her not to keep her eye open but to blink rapidly and continuously under the water.  Then we were supposed to call back after forty minutes to report how the eye felt and looked (much better) and after that were advised to call back in the morning only if it didn't feel perfectly fine.

So we were all done with that OR SO WE THOUGHT.  About twenty minutes later the sound of screaming from my eight-year-old son let us know that he, too, had managed to get tree sap in his eye.  Fortunately, we were all prepared this time, and he is kind of the family stoic, so we got his eye flushed with less drama.

After that Mark instituted a NO HANDLING TREE SAP WITHOUT EYE PROTECTION policy.  Sunglasses will do in a pinch -- at least they keep you from absentmindedly rubbing your eyes while you work.

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1-800-222-1222.  Put it in your phone and memorize it.  Seriously, you never know.  If it weren't for them, we might have driven forty-five minutes back to the emergency room in Ely.

Anyway, that was the only cell phone signal I got for a whole week (though, to be sure, I didn't get around to hiking up to Old Baldy).

 

 

Non-evidence-based style.

My friend M. has been deep in the books, trying to design and redesign a good homeschooling environment for her eight-year-old son who is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and who really needs quite intense attention.  She is looking at various styles of teaching and how they are shown to work with real children.

She came to me a few days ago saying (I'm paraphrasing):  "You know what's really amazing about the so-called 'classical model of homeschooling?'  So many homeschoolers put so much stock in it -- in this idea that the medieval trivium corresponds to three stages of child development -- but there isn't really any evidence for it at all!  If you go tracing back the claims that people make about classical homeschooling, they all go back to just one source --"

"'The Lost Tools of Learning,'" I said.  "The essay by Dorothy Sayers."

"...And, well, she just made it up!  She doesn't claim to know anything about how children develop.  It's just her idea.  But this entire industry has sprung up to support classical homeschooling, as if there was any evidence that designing a school the way she imagines it is something that really produces good outcomes.  There isn't any evidence.  And of course the medieval trivium wasn't at all like the homeschooling trivium that people talk about.  There's no evidence that children ever were taught the way she describes."

I thought for a moment how to respond.  "I think that the essay provides a useful organizing principle," I ventured.  "No more than that."  I did have to defend myself a little bit!

And I do think that the organizing principle behind "The Lost Tools of Learning" is so useful that I maintain it's part of the "homeschooler's canon" of educational philosophy.  

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But M.'s reminder is useful, too -- that Sayers' essay is just that:  an opinion piece.  After all, I do go around telling other homeschoolers, when I need to, that I am "oh, sort of a classical homeschooler, with a little Charlotte Mason thrown in."  Really, this is just a piece of code, shorthand for what I am not:  I am not an unschooler, I am not a school-in-a-box-er, I am not entirely disorganized (I have some kind of plan), and, well, I'm not entirely "evidence-based."  

(Even the Charlotte Mason reference is really cheating.  I've never actually read any serious books by or about Charlotte Mason.  That reference is code for "I like making my kids tell back what they've learned, and I tried keeping a nature journal for a while.")

One careful reading of Sayers' essay will show you that she never intended her imaginary school to be set up as a real place.  She breezily assumes ideal and impossible conditions:

Let us amuse ourselves by imagining that such progressive retrogression is possible. Let us make a clean sweep of all educational authorities, and furnish ourselves with a nice little school of boys and girls whom we may experimentally equip for the intellectual conflict along lines chosen by ourselves. We will endow them with exceptionally docile parents; we will staff our school with teachers who are themselves perfectly familiar with the aims and methods of the Trivium; we will have our building and staff large enough to allow our classes to be small enough for adequate handling; and we will postulate a Board of Examiners willing and qualified to test the products we turn out. Thus prepared, we will attempt to sketch out a syllabus--a modern Trivium "with modifications" and we will see where we get to.

But first: what age shall the children be? Well, if one is to educate them on novel lines, it will be better that they should have nothing to unlearn; besides, one cannot begin a good thing too early, and the Trivium is by its nature not learning, but a preparation for learning. We will, therefore, "catch 'em young," requiring of our pupils only that they shall be able to read, write, and cipher.

Did you catch that bit -- that at the start of her "school" the children have already been taught to read, write, and do arithmetic?  We're on our own for that part, homeschoolers.

Sayers' imaginary school is not, actually, a plan (and she takes pain to point this out).  Nor is it a reconstruction of the medieval trivium in any way -- significantly, she stresses, "It does not matter, for the moment, whether it [the trivium] was devised for small children or for older students, or how long people were supposed to take over it."

No, this school she describes is a rhetorical device.  The point of the description is to create vivid pictures in the readers' minds, of children arguing, or finding Cassiopeia in the night sky, or examining portraits of the Kings of England, or carefully studying maps.  This is just an illustration to motivate readers to hear and accept her philosophy of education, which she emphasizes by making it the very last sentence of the essay:

For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

This is a philosophy that appeals to me, and it is why I go around telling people that I am a "classical homeschooler."  Not because I think my homeschool should be split up into Grammar and Rhetoric and Dialectic (although I sometimes use those terms to describe the level of mental process that is engaged by a particular book or curriculum).  I tell people I am a "classical homeschooler" because I believe my job is to teach my kids how to teach themselves.

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Which brings me to the problem of evidence-based teaching.  Evidence is overrated.

If I say "Evidence is overrated," you should know I am speaking tongue in cheek.  I am trained as an engineer and as a scientist, and even though I abandoned that life in its early stages, its inner life has not abandoned me:  I can never lose the engineer's problem-attacking method, nor the scientist's reflexes to observe, test, and revise.  

No, what I really mean is that the marshalled evidence often overemphasizes one kind of data to the exclusion of another kind of data that, depending on the application, may be more important.  The distinction between the two kinds of data:  that drawn from large groups and that drawn from individuals.

Data drawn from large groups can be usefully applied to help individuals, it's true.  Let's imagine an experiemental school -- would that schools would actually do this -- in which two methods for teaching arithmetic are to be evaluated.  Children are randomly assigned to two classrooms, one in which the arithmetic skills are taught via method A, and one in which the teacher uses method B  to teach the same skills.  After a suitable time, the children are evaluated, and method A comes out ahead:  perhaps more students in classroom A have achieved a certain minimum competency, or perhaps the average score of students in that classroom is significantly higher than the average in classroom B.   Perhaps A outperforms B by both metrics.  If the test is repeated over different schools and different populations, and if A consistently outperforms B, that would certainly be a strong argument for teaching with method A instead of method B.  I would gladly support this kind of approach to curriculum selection in my local public schools, who are, after all, in the business of educating large groups.

However, just because A is the better method overall does not mean it is the better method for every child in the class.  Imagine there is one particular child -- let's call him Jacob -- who responds better, in a critical way, to method B.  It's not that Jacob was one of the top kids in classroom B -- no, let's be honest, most of the "top kids" in classroom B would also have been "top" in classroom A, because every classroom contains at least a few kids who are going to absorb material no matter how you throw it at them.  No, this boy was on the margins:  Jacob was one of those who achieved competency in classroom B, did well enough.  But when the classrooms all switched to the A method -- the method that was proved superior by the average-score metric and by the number-achieving-minimum-competency metric -- Jacob did not succeed, did not achieve competency.  More of his classmates will succeed in the A environment, and that is good for them, and good for the school, and good for the teachers, probably.  It does not help him.

I am not, mind you, saying that the evidence drawn from large groups is unhelpful for the large groups.  I do think schools should use data to shape their curriculum, because that is the job of the schools.  I just want to point out that the schools have one job -- to teach the large groups -- and Jacob's parents have another -- to teach Jacob.  

This is, to me, the distinction that gives meaning to the notion that education of children is primarily the responsibility of their parents.  It is reflected in Minnesota law, at least:   Our state's constitution stipulates that the legislature shall establish a "general and uniform" system of public schools; "uniform" is supposed to provide for equal and fair access to schooling, and that is commendable and appropriate for government schools.  The statutes specify this:  "The parent of a child is primarily responsible for assuring that the child acquires knowledge and skills that are essential for effective citizenship."

My point:  You use large-group evidence to design approaches that are aimed at large groups.  If your job is to teach Classroom B, you use what you've learned from metrics that measure Classroom B.  But if your job is to teach Jacob -- and that, mind you, is not legally our state's job, nor a single classroom teacher's job, nor can it be -- it is Jacob's parents' job -- then you have to give primary weight to evidence drawn from Jacob and not to that drawn from his classmates.

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I derive a lot of inspiration from Dorothy Sayers' opinion piece, even though it is not evidence-based.  Sayers never thought that people would try to copy the imaginary school she described, and I don't either.  I follow her example -- not by trying to create in my home the school that she imagined -- but by trying to create in my home the school that I  imagine.  

I consider the problem that life has posed me -- and I frame it and sketch it out as How will I teach my children to teach themselves?  I make assumptions, I list my constraints, I weigh costs against likely benefits, I approximate when necessary, and in the end I do what I can with what I have.

I make a guess -- this particular sort of curriculum will interest my eleven-year-old, or arranging the school desks in that particular way will keep my eight- and five-year-olds from fighting; I try it out; I check to see if my eleven-year-old is engaged in his work, I listen to see if the squabbles have diminished; I revise my hypothesis, I try again.

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There is another thing to weigh, too -- and it is sort of outside the evidence of what sort of methods produce academic excellence.  Because academic achievement is not, actually, central to what I am trying to do here (although it's very easy to forget that, because academic achievement is so much more easily measured, and because the culture values it, and I am swayed by culture).  

What I am supposed to be doing is forming human beings who are honest, fair, kind, and wise, who have a firm understanding of their own value and of the value of other human persons, who recognize their direct responsibilities and carry them out.   And no amount of evidence of academic achievement should entice me to apply a method that undermines any of these.

Meanwhile, I am supposed to be forming myself in honesty, fairness, kindness, and wisdom -- and if I somehow form my children in ways that deteriorate my own character, I'm equally wrong.   

 To put it bluntly, if by daily beatings or regular bribes I could ensure my child a perfect SAT score, that wouldn't mean I should do it.

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Large-group evidence based on large-group metrics will only take you so far.  It isn't useless:  it's just that it is useful for purposes different from mine.  (I can, of course, use it for my own purposes:  what's good for the group may be the best thing to try first, before tweaking to suit the individual.)    This is true about education, but lots of other things too:  taking care of your health, disciplining children, deciding what sort of community to live in, deciding whom to spend time with.  Sometimes "what works" is what matters; other times it's far more important to find something you can live with, whether it "works" or not; most often it is a matter of balancing both.

"Hacking for Solidarity."

Interesting history post at the Engineering Ethics Blog:

During the 1980s, the Communist government of Poland imposed martial law and rigidly suppressed and controlled speech. All media outlets, including radio and TV, were under government supervision. As the Solidarity movement grew, however, a group of radio and television engineers joined with other technical types (mainly university professors) to do (what we would term today) hacking of the official radio and TV networks. Pretty soon after that, TV-watching Poles began to see images of things like the words of the national anthem superimposed on the video feed of dull official programs. Now and then, the audio of the TV channel would give way to music of the national anthem, a joke, or some popular song that had nothing to do with the official program. At other times, Poles listening to their radios began to receive signals from “pirate” radio stations broadcasting information that the government did not want them to hear.

The content of the messages sent by what came to be called “Radio Solidarity” was not as significant as the mere fact that somebody, somewhere, was messing with the government’s system, and could get away with it.

Read the rest.

 

Faithfulness in small things.

Jennifer linked to a post today from One-A-Day Gratitude that struck me as an excellent example of a tiny, tiny good habit -- although maybe "good" is not the best word, because it's almost a gratuitously unnecessary habit -- that supports a much, much larger goal.

What is the habit?  Keeping one small kitchen drawer completely empty, all the time:

It stands alone in a sea of possessions. A reminder that there is a way to live without, live with less. Among the myriad of things we own, this lone kitchen drawer helps me keep my sanity and maintain my balance. 

While the pull to buy more, pile more, have more, is great, my need to have this island of a drawer is greater. So, I resist. I resist with a lot of force. I battle constantly with the marketers, the advertisers, and the sales people. Temptation is everywhere. At one point, my resistances break and I buy. I buy, yes, but soon after that I discard. For almost every new thing I acquire, I let go of another. I do not have room for more. I do not have a need for more. Life is a continuing circulation, and so is my house. It is the live example of “in with the new, out with the old.” 

Growing up in a time and place where "hoarding" was a survival skill meant that I had a long way to go to reach that empty drawer. It meant getting over many internal hurdles and overcoming personality traits, old habits, and societal teachings. Living in a time and a place now where "consumerism" is a way of life means that keeping that empty drawer is an ongoing challenge. 

We have 18 more months in this condo. I intend to keep that drawer empty for that time. I will try every day not to use it to pile more things. It will be my practice to save this drawer from a suffocating existence. It will be my meditation. My example to live by.

 

I called it "gratuitous," and one of the things that I love about this tiny thing is exactly that it is so unnecessary.  I mean, if she has the space, there is no "real" reason not to store something in it.  If she expected to purchase something that would go in that space, that would be a "reason" to keep it empty, but she explicitly does not have even this reason.

Her identification of this practice as a "meditation" is interesting.  The gratuitousness of it does resemble many religious practices, particularly private acts of penance, mortification, and fasting.   Such activities almost derive their value purely from the fact that they objectively have no value, or rather, no value other than that they are freely chosen -- and in some sense, acts that have no value are the ones that we are most able to choose freely.   (Marc Barnes has recently written amusingly that a totally gratuitous act, such as hopping on one foot to the bathroom, being unreasoned and even reasonable, represents an act of free will and thus a statement against determinism.)

But it's also a tangible, if tiny, manifestation of an aspiration -- in her case, to be detached from possessions, to clear her space of "the old" in order to have ready room to welcome "the new."  Often aspirations are frustratingly intangible.  But one way to crystallize them is to create a tiny place (or recurring moment) in which the aspiration is realized, is real.  

Once one drawer is emptied, you no longer have to say "One of these days I'm going to get rid of all that extra stuff."  You can truly say, "I'm in the process of getting rid of all that extra stuff."  *insert sound of drawer being pulled out*  "See?"

What "one empty drawer" can you create to nucleate that grand aspiration you have that still remains formless?

Cherry tomato gazpacho -- no peeling, no seeding.

About once a year I wind up with a bounty of tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers that must be eaten, and of course gazpacho is one way to get them eaten pretty fast.  

Except that everyone in my family hates gazpacho ("Cold soup?  Cold tomato soup?!?")  So gazpacho is one of those recipes (there are several others) that I save to make for lunch when H. is over with the kids for a co-schooling day.

Typically one makes gazpacho with peeled, seeded tomatoes.  On Thursday last there were no more big tomatoes, but still many beautiful cherry tomatoes.  I asked H. if she minded terribly if the tomatoes were not peeled and seeded, and she said "Of course not.  I love tomato seeds. I love cucumber seeds too.  I even eat bell pepper seeds."  This made the job much easier, and in the end I did not even notice the seeds and peels.  I did cut the tops off because I thought maybe the little bit of core would be a problem. 

I made one other tweak to the recipe.  Gazpacho is normally made with raw everything (except the bread) -- raw tomatoes, raw peppers, raw onions.  However, H. cannot eat raw onions because they give her heartburn.  (As far as I can tell, it's her only major character flaw.)  So I didn't use very much onion, and I sauteed it in olive oil first, along with the garlic.

Note that unlike most of my recipes, this only serves 2-3.  Start with cold vegetables and juice, you may not have to chill it for very long.

 

No-Peeling, No-Seeding Cherry Tomato Gazpacho (2-3 servings)

• 1.3 lbs large ripe cherry tomatoes, with just the very tops cut off (you're shooting for a pound of tomato going into your food processor, so if your tomatoes are small, use more)
• 1 medium cucumber, peeled (not seeded) and cut into chunks
• 1 medium green bell pepper, crowns and seeds removed, cut into chunks
• 1/2 of a large fat jalapeño chile, some seeds and ribs removed according to taste, minced
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1/2 a small onion, chopped
• 3 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil or more
• 1 thick slice bread (I used homemade whole wheat)
• 2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
• 1 and 1/2 to 2 cups tomato juice (mine was my mother-in-law's home canned juice)
• Salt to taste
• Chopped ripe avocado for garnish

Sauté the onion and garlic in 1 Tbsp olive oil until translucent and perhaps a little browned.  

Soak the bread in a small amount of water or  tomato juice to soften.

Working in batches if necessary, puree the tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, chile, onion and garlic, bread, vinegar, the other 2 Tbsp olive oil, and enough juice  to get everything moving in the food processor, a good long time.  Puree until it's as smooth as it's going to get.   Mix your batches up and chill it till cold (I stuck mine in the freezer for about half an hour).  After it's cold, taste and add salt.  Divide into bowls and top with the chopped avocado.

Other possible garnishes are sour cream or chopped egg...

Time off for good (better anyway) behavior.

Do you ever get really, really tired of the sound of your own voice?  

Or of wondering what people are going to say back to it?  

Or of obsessively checking all the breadcrumbs you left behind in comboxes/tweets/status updates/blog posts to see if they were... er... eaten by birds perhaps... and then regurgitated or something?

I have definitely hit that point today.  Time for a break!

I have scheduled a couple of posts -- I meant it to be three, but I apparently haven't got the hang of the scheduling thingy on my iPad blogging app, because one of them already posted -- but don't expect much else from me for, oh, about a week.

 I will spend it relaxing, thinking about American history, and discussing the 2012--2013 fiscal year with my husband, who just finished making our budget.  But I will not spend it writing in comboxes.

Have a great week!

Costliness.

The Anchoress has a post on the perennial topic of why Catholics (well, some of us, anyway) think it's okay to keep our costly communion vessels and our big fancy churches instead of selling the money to give to the poor and all that. I know we have been over this before, but a new way of phrasing and framing the issue is never a bad thing.

Sell everything in a church, strip it down and you buy some temporary assistance; then the people who sold all that sinful, frivolous beauty go back home, feeling pretty good about themselves and all the ‘help’ they gave to ‘the poor.’ But when the money runs out — and my cousin says money running out is one of the few things you can bank on — then for the poor who remain, “it’s back to business as usual, but with nothing beautiful for them, anywhere.”

My cousin [a Capuchin priest] is a man with a great deal of common sense and compassion; living where and how he has lived, he needs both; he is by no means anyone’s idea of a “conservative” but he feels strongly that comfortable, wealthy people with generous instincts mostly have no idea what the poor “need” and that the poor have just as much right (and expectation) to enjoy the consolation and spiritual uplift of a beautiful church as anyone else. Moreover, struggling people don’t want everyday things like straw baskets to be used at communion, because they use everyday things, every day. At Mass, Jesus deserves beauty and they want to engage him in beauty.

I suppose it isn't quite right to try to speak for all struggling people. Surely they are just like everyone else in that some, viewing a costly liturgical vessel in use at their own parish, appreciate its beauty and feel that it magnifies the Lord, while others feel indignant at the luxury, thinking "This could have been sold -- what could I do with that money? What about the local soup kitchen, or my children's school?" The beautiful vessels are a shared resource, I suppose, and there will ever be disagreements about how to use them.

The Anchoress comments that criticism of this sort could be leveled at other institutions ("the Capitol building") but rarely is. I think that is because it seems like a useful accusation of hypocrisy, because we claim to love the poor. It doesn't really work, of course, if you understand the difference between capital and operating costs; our costly things are among the capital we use to help the poor and rich both, no? Remembering that the main "business" we are in is, after all, spiritual -- expressed and enacted in liturgy, which requires people, places, and things.

It's sort of like saying to a nonprofit anti poverty org, "Wow, that community clinic and food shelf downtown is sure sitting on some sweet real estate. Shouldn't you sell the building and give all the money away?" Or like saying to a cash-strapped municipality that it should sell all the books in the city library, or all the artwork in the city museum, to pay down the debt.

Perhaps I should have titled that post "Grocery store gobbling."

The commenter on the "Grocery Store Munching" post who is quoted in this update, emails me a link from which I have taken the following photograph.  

(I'm being deliberately nondescriptive in my text to protect her from Googling that connects her to her job.)

Those Cheetos-stained fingers on the guy rifling through the grapes don't look so bad now, do they?

Frederick Douglass and an inspiration: a rhetoric-based approach to high school history?

First, the Douglass.

Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy has posted the entire text of Frederick Douglass's speech of 160 years ago today, "What July 4th Means to the Negro."

Since this is a blog of religious practice among other things, I am excerpting (emphasis and some paragraph breaks mine) this part about the Fugitive Slave Act (which, among other things, required all states to enforce within their own boundaries the property "rights" of slaveholders):

I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were nor stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.

...But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines, who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines!

They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty and leave the throne of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and with out hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation-a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons, and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea’ when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

...The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday School, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery, and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds, and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.

In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared-men honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning... [G]reat religious lights of the land have, in utter denial of the authority of Him by whom they professed to be called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example of the Hebrews, and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God.2

My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the “standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ,” is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are....

...[T]he anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable instead of a hostile position towards that movement.

The whole speech is long, covers many more points than this one, and is a wonderful piece of argument.

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Now, the inspiration.

I am preparing to teach 19th-century American History again this fall with a crop of late-elementary school kids, and Frederick Douglass is one of the personages whose biography we'll highlight; this piece makes me wish it were easier to teach 19th-century American rhetoric directly to kids under eleven or so.

In my vision for homeschool high school, I have generally assumed that a "survey of American history" course would be a necessary evil -- you know, pack the entire thing into one school year, anchored by a text that necessarily runs broad but not deep. I thought the best I could hope for would be to find a really well-written text (and that not necessarily a text made for schools).

I wonder now if, especially given the way I taught elementary school history, if I couldn't put together a sufficiently informative U. S. History course based primarily on pieces of rhetoric. I think you would still have to have the history spine to hold it together, provide a time-sequence, and give context, but perhaps I would not have to work so hard to find a wonderful "main text" if the intellect and imagination were fed by primary sources -- not meta speech, but speeches. And pamphlets, and laws, and opinion-pieces, and court opinions, even advertisements.

I suspect I would have to cut back a bit on other literary analysis in order to fit it in -- or conversely, I could make that the same year that "literature and writing" focuses on persuasion, analysis, satire, and the like -- er, rhetoric, I suppose -- so that History and Literature/Language Arts dovetail.

Thoughts?

Animated scale of the universe.

Speaking of the cosmos, ChristyP pointed me to this very well done, shareable-with-your-geeky-kids interactive Flash animation, and commented, "I learned some new SI prefixes from this."  Check it out.