 | |||
 | |||
 | | | |
| | |
GWS 32 continued from previous page. This is page 13 of 13.
Because he could see that tinkering with nature was risky and could lead to unexpected, unwanted, and irreversible results, but even more because he loved the variety and beauty of all the living creatures he saw, Leopold at the end of his book called for "a land ethic," which, as he put it, "changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it. It also implies respect for his fellow members, and also respect for the community as such." Later he writes: "It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense." Almost forty years later we still do not have a land ethic, though we perhaps have more people who see the need for one. One of the important reasons we don't have it is that most people, without being scientists, have absorbed through the skin or learned in school the supposedly scientific notion that everything, including every living thing, is just some kind of a machine. How can one, and more important, why should one, love a machine? Machines are for us to use for our own benefit, aren't they? What else would they be for?
But I run the risk of giving the impression that the book is a collection of sermons about ecology. It is not, though there are sermons in it. Mostly, it is a book of descriptions. For a while we look through the keen, informed, and loving eyes of Leopold at many different parts of our country, including the "barren" Sand County in Wisconsin, which most of us would otherwise consider uninteresting and not worth looking at. Because Leopold sees so much, and enjoys so much what he sees, and learns so much from it, we who read him will in our future contacts with nature see and learn and enjoy more than we did before.
The book has many illustrations of plants and animals, mostly in pencil, some in ink, by Charles Schwartz. They are so accurate, detailed, and full of life that we can easily imagine that we are seeing these drawings in color. My goodness, if I could draw like that I would never be without a pencil in my hand.
GENERALLY SPEAKING - How Children Learn Language, by Ronald Macaulay ($9.95 + post). This is a very short - the text is only 61 pages long - very perceptive, interesting, wise, and witty book. I had met Dr. Macaulay in Nov. '82 when I spoke at Pitzer College, in Claremont, Calif., of which he was then acting Dean. We enjoyed each other's company, he was interested in and sympathetic to what I had to say about home schooling, and as I left he gave me a copy of his book. On page 2 I found this:
As adults we do not have a set of ready-made utterances from which to choose when we wish to speak. Instead we have the ability to produce and understand utterances we have never heard before. For example, it is unlikely that anyone will have heard the following sentence previously: "Karl Marx was playing bridge with Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Mary Queen of Scots when Tarzan walked in."
At this bit of dry Scottish wit I began to feel that I was going to have to have this book for our list.
This is also a very scholarly book by an expert in the field - Dr. Macaulay has long been a Professor of Linguistics, and in the back of his book he has listed almost six pages, in very fine print, of references to other experts like himself. Since he is saying, as I have for years, that children learn to speak not by some combination of rote learning and blind imitation, but by the most careful listening and creative thinking, has book can be very valuable to many parents who do not want their children subjected to the blind rote learning that is the norm in so many schools. When I say that children, in their explorations of the world of language, act like very capable scientists, most educators find it easy to dismiss the idea as the work of a non-expert and a "romantic" - if not an outright nut. It will not be so easy for them so to dismiss Dr. Macaulay.
The book can be useful to parents in a number of ways. To those who have not observed at first hand the process by which children master language, or who never gave much thought to the process going on under their noses, it will make clearer to them the meaning of what their child is doing, and so enable them to share in this great human adventure. To all of them it will show what many, but not all, know by instinct - how important it is to listen to what little children say, to make every effort to understand them, to answer their questions as far as we can. And to parents wanting to teach their own children, and preparing for the schools a statement of their educational ideas and plans, it will furnish many valuable quotes, such as this, from page 1: "...it is obvious that the child does not learn language like a parrot by memorizing whole utterances." Or this, from page 61: "[helping a child develop linguistic competence] means creating a situation in which the child can be his or her natural self: happy, curious, and talkative." - JH
Editors: John Holt & Donna Richoux Managing Editor - Peg Durkee Advertising Director - Pat Farenga Subscriptions & Books - Mark Pierce Office Assistant - Mary Van Doren
Copyright 1977 Holt Associates Inc.
This is page 13 of 13. | ||
| | |