Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

[cahn]

Last 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.

Comments

Re: How not to raise a child: the Ferdinand of Parma edition

[mildred_of_midgard]

I have SO many feelings about this that I wrote this offline during vacation :P

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."