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cahnLast post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.
Re: How not to raise a child: the Ferdinand of Parma edition
Date: 2023-04-01 10:41 pm (UTC)Now, the philosophes of this era are big believers in education. They subscribe to a "tabula rasa" theory, in which the child is a blank slate and only their upbringing governs how they will turn out. As Leibniz says, training makes everything possible, even to teaching bears to dance.
These sweet summer children. I thought that too before I had kids! (Clearly they did not pay attention to their own kids, those of them who had them.)
So this whole idea about an education where the teacher isn't an authority figure but more of a guide who helps the student learn to think for themselves sounds great. But what happens when the student does things that you don't want him to do, like
THE DOWNFALL OF MANY CHILD-REARING SYSTEMS, IN FACT
Older sister Isabella (future ViennaJoe's wife), "If I were raising a child, I would not beat them up, because it just backfires, and you get a defiant child." She writes a very-modern sounding treatise on her child-rearing opinions, at the age of like 16, which you can only imagine is based on her role as surrogate mom to Ferdinand and observing how he was being treated and how that was turning out.
I did not expect that the person I was going to have the most empathy with in this discussion was Isabella of Parma! (Much as I like her in general.) Because, yeah, when I was 16 or so I had Many Opinions about child-rearing, similar to Isabella's, based on watching my sister and my parents work together. (I don't think all my opinions at that age were correct, but the general principles were there that went forward to when I had my own kids.)
Meanwhile, said kid, looking back, says he struggled to learn to read, but one day he went and prayed to a saint about it and kissed an image of the saint, and then he was able to read. Relics also helped his stomachaches.
Aw, this poor kid :(((((
In fact, Voltaire, who started out quipping that "The Infante of Parma will be in good company. He will have a Condillac and a Leire (a renowned atheist) with him. If he still manages to be pious, God's grace must be very strong indeed," ends up saying, "I hoped for a little from the Infante, the Duke of Parma, considering the good education he had; but where there is no soul, education can do nothing either; I heard that this prince spends the day visiting monks and that his Austrian and superstitious wife will be in charge. O poor philosophy! what will become of you? Still, we must stand firm and fight to the end."
Aw Voltaire! The same guy who was like, "well you know Huguenots preach against the theatre, clearly legit that Calas killed his kid" before he learned more about it :P One thing I have to say about Voltaire, I feel like everything he does is wildly in-character.
According to Badinter, the philosophes never actually acknowledge the contradiction between the "tabula rasa" theory they've been espousing and their sudden belief that there's something in the child that cannot be shaped by a philosophe armed with the right methods.
Except some people who meet Ferdinand and aren't fancy philosophes prove to have common sense. The French envoy tells Ferdinand, "If I'd been your tutor, I would have made you visit 6 churches a day once you started going through this phase," and Ferdinand laughs and admits that would have totally turned him off religion.
Aww, I love that Ferdinand himself realizes that! That's kind of endearing.
was willing to be inoculated (I mean, his sister had just died of smallpox the year before, and his mother had died a few years before that)
Based on his previous statement, maybe also they told him that if he were inoculated that he would have to be apart from his tutors for a few weeks? I'm just imagining how this would go:
Tutor: You should be inoculated because SCIENCE.
Ferdinand: Ugh, no! This sounds awful! I could just pray to saints instead!
Tutor: But very sadly we would have to be parted for a few weeks and your educational program will be delayed. Even though I know inoculation is a good thing, I am ambivalent about how it will affect your education.
Ferdinand: uh, you know what? GO SCIENCE. I changed my mind, SIGN ME UP yes please!!
and the one contradiction Badinter never addresses to my satisfaction is that his tutors supposedly endorsed education that treated the teacher more as a friend and supporter than as an authority figure to be feared...and yet were beating him regularly. All she says is that this was normal, everyone got beaten in those days, no one except Isabella ever questioned it. Which is not totally satisfactory to me.
I... actually this makes a lot of sense to me. Kids who aren't behaving the way the parent expects can be VERY frustrating, and if a parent/tutor has not read the parenting books :PP I feel like they can easily find themself in a situation where they are like, "okay, I want to guide and be a supportive friend, but right now the kid is not in the place where I can do that, so I need to resort to other means to get the kid there, and THEN we'll start with the guiding thing." (Of course, I am not endorsing this at all!)
My thought of Condillac's view of how teaching Ferdinand would go:
Condillac: Here, read Newton's great work, and this commentary.
Ferdinand, after a few hours: I have now read it, and have the highest respect for Newton! However, sir, do you think that perhaps Leibnitz has a point here that Newton did not sufficiently understand?
Condillac, laughing gently: My child, let's discuss it! Why don't you characterize Leibitz and Newton's arguments for me, and we will go from there.
Ferdinand: Of course, esteemed tutor! Here is my argument -- [...]
Condillac: Ah, but have you considered that -- [...]
Ferdinand: What a good point, sir! I see now that Newton was correct. Thank you for your instruction!
My thoughts on how it actually went:
Condillac: Here, read Newton's great work, and this commentary.
Ferdinand: Don't wanna. I wanna go to church. People at church are nice! And don't make me read stuff!
Condillac: Whaa--? But Newton is so beautiful!
Ferdinand: It's not. You know what's beautiful? THE HOLY RELICS.
Condillac: ARRRRGH! WHAT DO I EVEN DO WITH THIS.
Condillac: Okay, kid, I'm going to beat you into reading Newton. THEN you'll see how beautiful it is, and then we'll be at the level where we can have the cooperative friendly discussion I want! It's for your own good!
I think in modern culture (at least in my socioeconomic bracket) it's widely accepted that beating your kids is about the worst thing you can do (in a way that wasn't the case hundreds of years ago -- and even when I was growing up, spanking wasn't considered ideal, but also not bad in the same way it is today), so today, if you're subscribing to a cooperative education sort of viewpoint, when a kid isn't doing what you want, you're unlikely to beat them. But, for example, other punishments (nagging, withholding rewards, emotional punishment, guilt, etc.) ARE still widely used in some circles. So I believe a modern parent who endorses cooperative education (but especially who has large perhaps-unrealistic expectations) can still find themself in a situation where they are regularly using (non-physical) punishment, especially if they don't have a very coherent theory of punishments being not useful.
...And even knowing all that, did I snap at my kids the last morning when we were in a hurry and they were STILL not getting ready after I asked them four times? Yes. Yes, I did. (And if I were a different person, I'd be like, "and it was your fault! If only you'd done what I'd asked you to do like a reasonable [adult, haha] person, I wouldn't have had to snap at you!")
In conclusion: a) child-rearing is hard b) not least because the child is very often not gonna do what you expect the kid to do and it is legit frustrating c) however, that being said, expecting your child to fall into an extremely specific mold almost never works out well for anyone, not least because you are likely to resort to extreme means to try to force the kid into the mold so that you can carry out your program of supportive and cooperative friendship :PP
(Leopold Mozart: well, he had the advantages that he was instructing kids who were already that way inclined (potentially at least partially through genetics) and at least one of whom he had already noticed had exceptional ability and interest, and developing that ability and interest. So he didn't have to deal with what happens when the kid Just Is Not Interested. Maybe -- depending on how invested he was in the idea of musical children vs. the reality -- he would have beat them if they were tone-deaf and kept sneaking out on practice to play football, who knows. Maybe not. He does seem to have been much better than average at paying attention to what his kids needed, at least musically!)
Re: How not to raise a child: the Ferdinand of Parma edition
Date: 2023-04-01 11:58 pm (UTC)If I hadn't expected you to have such feelings, I wouldn't have finally followed through on my intention to do a write-up more than a year later! (Yes, write-ups of this sort are like pulling teeth.) You were very motivating!
(I actually don't have nearly as many feelings about Alexei.)
Understandable, since I have much less material to work with: my source there was a biographical essay of his tutor, not a monograph on the child-rearing practices. Badinter's book made me wish the Alexei essay collection had included an exact Russian parallel with lots of pedagogical detail!
is like telling their nervous system "IT'S LIONS FIGHT FIGHT" that I think is DIRECTLY RELEVANT here :P
DIRECTLY RELEVANT.
Aww, I love that Ferdinand himself realizes that! That's kind of endearing.
I know, right?
Tutor: You should be inoculated because SCIENCE.
Ferdinand: Ugh, no! This sounds awful! I could just pray to saints instead!
Tutor: But very sadly we would have to be parted for a few weeks and your educational program will be delayed. Even though I know inoculation is a good thing, I am ambivalent about how it will affect your education.
Ferdinand: uh, you know what? GO SCIENCE. I changed my mind, SIGN ME UP yes please!!
You are a genius, and headcanon accepted!
I... actually this makes a lot of sense to me. Kids who aren't behaving the way the parent expects can be VERY frustrating, and if a parent/tutor has not read the parenting books :PP I feel like they can easily find themself in a situation where they are like, "okay, I want to guide and be a supportive friend, but right now the kid is not in the place where I can do that, so I need to resort to other means to get the kid there, and THEN we'll start with the guiding thing." (Of course, I am not endorsing this at all!)
No, no, I'm not saying I didn't think of that myself. I came to all the same conclusions you did, for the same reasons. (We have similar intellectual backgrounds in this regard.) It's no different than Dirk the podcaster repeatedly commenting that after having their lands pillaged, their men killed, and their women children enslaved, the Saxons (later Slavs) still had not realized that the Christian God was omnibenevolent. :P
What I was saying was that if you, Badinter, are writing a monograph ABOUT the failure modes of this child-rearing system, you should maybe ADDRESS this point, instead of leaving it as an exercise to the reader. Any other book, I would have filed it under "well, can't cover everything," but in this case, it made the work feel very incomplete. Especially with all the time she spent on the other contradictions, like the whiplash from "pure tabula rasa" to "has no soul."