Inspire

Our ancestors loved Wisdom

The agent of the miraculous was a person blessed with virtus, what Jeffs calls ‘the ineffable power of the saint’, the ability to channel the divine and charge everything about them with its grace, even after death. It is this that drew people in their tens of thousands to holy relics. A body’s sanctity was not diminished by dismemberment; each piece held the spiritual force of the whole. You might say the same about the shattered world of medieval Christianity. It is broken and dispersed, but its fragments carry the same indissoluble charge. ‘What should we do about the collective, royally imposed amnesia we have in relation to the survivals that are our birthright?’ Jeffs asks.

Birthright carries weight. If I’m learning anything at all on this personal journey it is that not everything was good, not everything was bad but that various men and women by battle and through culture wove our birthright into a rich tapestry. It is something to be preserved and to guard and to pass on. Birthright is what provides our children with stability and structure.

What is a word? The betrayer of the mind.

I am discovering too that there are myriad ways to connect the dots to a rich heritage and inspire learning. So I thought perhaps I’ll start with some Inspire style posts and dot these around as I pull together some curated resources for parents to use.

For example to get my son motivated enough to participate in an understanding of the Dark Age or Anglo Saxon or the Carolingians, linked by the growth of Christian faith as an educating force, I set aside a lazy morning with him today and started with a riddle

A man had to transport to the far side of a river a wolf, a goat, and a bundle of cabbages. The only boat he could find was one which would carry only two of them. For that reason he sought a plan which would enable them all to get to the far side unhurt. Let him, who is able, say how it could be possible to transport them safely?

In a safe transportation plan, neither wolf and goat nor goat and cabbage can be left alone together. It is one of the oldest combinatorial puzzles in the history of mathematics and the problem also shows up in Gaelic, Danish, Russian, Ethiopian, Suaheli, and Zambian folklore and is still used today in logic and integer programming. The Anglo-Saxon monk Alcuin (735–804 A.D.) was one of the leading scholars of his time. He served as head of Charlemagne’s Palace School at Aachen, he developed the Carolingian minuscule (a script which has become the basis of the way the letters of the present Roman alphabet are written), and he wrote a number of elementary texts on arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. His book “Propositiones ad acuendos iuvenes” (Problems to sharpen the young) is perhaps the oldest collection of mathematical problems written in Latin. It contains the well-known problem above.

have you ever wondered how we came to use a question mark?

Speak to your kids about this new language they are using and how unique it makes them feel? Skibidi, mid, rizz. It’s easy to connect them to how novel a question mark once was! I was surprised at how my son was then drawn to and fascinated by the Carolingians.

Again this is attributed to Alcuin. A neat little summary video can be found here though they don’t dwell on it nearly long enough, I intend to!

In one of his works, Alcuin created a dialogue between himself and his pupil Pepin, in which the young Carolingian prince, son of Charlemagne, asks him a series of questions. Alcuin made use of ancient sources to create his answers, but his work offers some insights into the thoughts the scholar, which at times could be both very shrewd and even very funny.

Pepin: What is a letter?
Alcuin: The guardian of history.

Pepin: What is a word?
Alcuin: The betrayer of the mind.

Pepin: What produces a word?
Alcuin: The tongue.

Pepin: What is the tongue?
Alcuin: The whipper of air.

Pepin: What is the air?
Alcuin: The guardian of life.

Pepin: What is life?
Alcuin: The joy of the blessed, the sorrow of the wretched, the expectation of death.

Pepin: What is the sun?
Alcuin: The light of the world, the adornment of the heavens, the grace of nature, the splendour of the day, the dispenser of hours.

Pepin: What is the moon?
Alcuin: The eye of night, the bringer of dew, the foreteller of storms.

Pepin: What are stars?
Alcuin: A painting of the heavens, guides for sailors, ornaments of the night.

Pepin: What is the sea?
Alcuin: The way of the bold, the end of land, the divider of regions, the home of rivers, the source of rain, a refuge in danger, the grace of satisfaction.

So who was Alcuin? Where was he based? What is a cathedral school? Who were the Anglo Saxons and the Franks? Who was Charlemagne? Who was Alfred? How did we get grammar? Why am I learning in school? Where do we get the Roman typeface? Why should I bother writing at all? Why does beauty matter? What is Latin? Roman Catholic, Byzantine, or Celtic Christian how did that change? What did we gain and what did we lose?

And from there I am starting to build a picture with everything I find. Little by little.

I’ll pull something here to share as soon as possible once I see what works and what does not. Which sources resonate with me and so on.

But it starts with a lesser known character from history. And there are plenty, men and women alike.

Wisdom and Beauty

We have buildings too which speak to these ancient seats of learning inspired by Alcuin, Charlemagne and Alfred’s assorted efforts, what’s left of them, they remain a visible reminder of history culture and connection with the past as well as creative passion for beauty passed down through the ages very much accessible today. They still employ people to preserve them and young people are invited to connect with that legacy, as you can see here below. Again useful tools and videos to inspire and connect. Many kids have literally no concept of their meaning.

It’s worth pointing out to kids that cathedrals were often the first schools. They encompass the spiritual as well as the educational along with the great desire to create lasting beauty.

I’d start with the history of Gloucester Cathedral here again using Khan Academy because it embodies history. They do a good job of explaining that here and I enjoy their simultaneously enthusiastic and relaxing presentation.

And then watch this great video here which brings us right back to 2024 in Gloucester and inspires and empowers young people with a possible stake in its future.

Essentially I’m trying to draw together ancient themes. Beauty, wisdom, harmony and rootedness.

See Alfred the great again for why.

History is being sanitised, airbrushed, rewritten by Marxist academics (and these new Right wing podcaster types) as well as infantilised and made cartoonish if you look at kids history lessons now, in a way as equal to the destruction of the Vikings or Henry VIII. And in a way I would prefer the Vikings as they at least had a sense themselves of self preservation as indeed arguably did Henry.

There may be an argument for reshaping the way we have understood our history and there is always room to debate it but the trouble is right now anything which rips into the fabric is negative and this is passed on to younger generations at lightening speeds. Before they can start to use the great skills passed on through Alcuin and absorbed from what he also learned from the classics of philosophy, reason, debate and queries we should at least attempt to ensure our kids have sufficiently developed them. You cannot possibly do this negatively or in a shattered environment.

Both Charlemagne and Alfred facing the tumultuous worlds they were trying to fashion order from, understood the incredible value of having a place and a stake in the culture.

our kids are so convinced the world’s appalling that they don’t even want kids themselves

There’s a pretty depressing read in The Spectator which focuses on young people and which in my experience running a business employing them, seems very accurate to me.

Twenge (fifty-one, Gen X) began looking at the differences between generations as a twenty-two-year-old doctoral student. She documented the rise in individualism that began with the baby boomers and continued with millennials. But it wasn’t until 2012 that she noticed the data really beginning to change. “There were abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs and many of the distinctive characteristics of the millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data — some reaching back to the 1930s — I had never seen anything like it.”

She argues that individualism has collided with iPhone and screen time and created a culture of loneliness. In addition to a world which offers precious little hope it has also changed the way we interact

“Interacting face to face tends to be more cooperative and more emotionally close. It’s more honest but it’s also more agreeable. People have a very strong tendency online to say cruel things that they would never say to someone’s face.”

She concludes that

Gen Z needs our help — Twenge’s daughters aside. They’re so sad and so convinced the world’s appalling that they don’t even want kids themselves. “They are more likely to report that they don’t think they will have children, and that was particularly interesting,” says Twenge. “The percentage of eighteen-year-olds who say they were likely to have children was high and very stable from about 1976 to 2012 before it started to go down — so it was stable for that many decades and then started to change, which is really striking.”

My experience employing this age group would suggest there is a degree of truth in all this though I suspect they dial up and play on this feelings based culture we live in, when polled because it’s become their culture.

There is so much to connect us all in a positive meaningful way which tracks through history and gives us hope even in this terribly negative destructive time. There is such a hunger for rootedness and for some way out of this moral and cultural abyss.

So I am thinking I’ll divide topics into

Inspire

Ideas to inspire and prompt questions and open up learning

Bitesize

Attention spans are short. Lots of learning in resources, videos, text in manageable chunks or a podcast when I can work up to it.

Go Deeper

Take a theme and explore it further

Complement

Tangential themes or people

Revisit

Go back over other topics which complement new themes

Sources and Resources

All the stuff I find

I’d welcome any further suggestions or help.

Thanks very much for subscribing.

This is really born of a huge desire to make some sense of the last ten years of my own life which was ripped apart by terrorism and where I’ve arrived at negative outcomes, losses and the need to start over far too many times. It’s been a decade of chaos now and I am longing for some attachment and stability. In some ways there is an almost intellectual need to understand why I keep failing, feel lost and crucially hear why the world feels broken - to organise something positive from these circumstances. Much like I imagine Alfred and his wife felt in the marshes. I genuinely appreciate the positive support and encouraging start to this project.

Also I thought Whetstone might be a good name for it?