Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

Children Learn To Love Books By Example

Children Learn To Love Books By Example

You should teach a child.

You should, and you do teach a child.  You teach them to eat, speak, read, and drink out of a cup.

They also have to be taught about fairness, and sharing, and how phones work.

But I want my children to love books too, you see.

And I know they will.

Because there is no better teacher than leading by example.

Want your kids to love books? Keep a lot of books around.

I want a library my kids (and I) can get lost in.

“It was strangely comforting, for I remembered copying such things from a heavy textbook that sat on the shelf above my father’s desk. He had all kinds of books rescued from dustbins and deserted houses and bought for pennies at church bazaars. The range of subjects from ufology to Plato to the planarian reflected his ever-curious mind. I would pore over this particular book for hours, contemplating its mysterious world. The dense text was impossible to penetrate but somehow the monochromic renderings of living organisms suggested many colors, like flashing minnows in a fluorescent pond. This obscure and nameless book, with its paramecia, algae, and amoebas, floats alive in memory. Such things that disappear in time that we find ourselves longing to see again. We search for them in close-up, as we search for our hands in a dream.”

–Patti Smith. M Train

Coffee With Children, In The Rain

Coffee With Children, In The Rain

Here is to us all developing a heart for children.

For innocence. For wonder. For adventure. For posterity.

For the awe in the face of a child going to the zoo for the first time.

How beautiful and fleeting it all is.

Let’s never lose the perspective that G. K. Chesterton had.

His sense of wonder gave him a love of children, and he fabricated great schemes to involve them and enflame their imaginations. He once organized the Society for the Encouragement of Rain, which in England was not unlike creating an organization devoted to the preservation of snow in Alaska. Chesterton made membership cards and named his wife’s niece as President Rhoda Bastable and himself Secretary G. K. Chesterton. The bylaws of the organization required meetings to be held “on the Salisbury Plain where under the sign of an umbrella members were invited to partake of cakes and coffee in the rain.” Keep in mind that this man we see creating a fictional society with children was described by one scholar as “one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed.”  A pope called him a gifted defender of the faith. Even one of his greatest opponents said that the world is not thankful enough for him. And his biographer, Dale Alquist, argued, “G. K. Chesterton was the best writer of the twentieth century. He said something about everything, and he said it better than anybody else.” Yet Chesterton dreamed of coffee on the Salisbury Plain with children—in the rain—and could not go to the store for milk without forgetting where he was meant to be because he was pondering the meaning of pocket lint.

–Stephen Mansfield, Mansfield’s Book Of Manly Men (Amazon)

Sterling Terrell