We do not contest the fact that all healthy people perceive sugar to be sweet, and yet we do not have any logical reasoning to explain this perception. The matter of the judgement of art as beautiful or ugly is a similar phenomenon, except the perception of beauty is reliant not upon physical health, but rather upon moral health.

To deny one’s moral disease is the primary symptom of it, so those who have the worst judgements of beauty, are the most morally diseased, and the most vociferous in their claims to the idea that judgements of beauty are “subjective”. They claim that what is ugly to one person may be beautiful to another so there is really no meaning to beauty and ugliness anymore. One of the most morally diseased people in the world, Frida Kahlo, expressed her malaise best when she said “La belleza y la fealdad son un espejismo” meaning, “beauty and ugliness are a mirage”. It is because of this disease that Kahlo never made a single work of beautiful art in her life and is another charlatan pushed on the population to demoralise us with the ugliness of her work.

Is there a place for ugliness in art?

However the purpose of art is not merely to give pleasure to the senses and the intellect in the form of beauty. There is a place for ugliness in art when that ugliness plays a part in a story about something true, noble or good. The Raft of Medusa (1819, Theodore Gericault) is a painting which includes figures modelled from actual corpses, as it depicts the story of a group of fifteen survivors onboard a makeshift raft just moments before they are rescued by a nearby ship. Without the ugliness of the corpses in the painting, it would be impossible to convey the ideas of the harshness of the conditions they endured on the raft when their ship was destroyed, and to convey how desperate they must be for help.

The painting is not made to glorify the ugliness of the corpses, but rather to pay due respect to their story. If the purpose of art is to tell the stories of mankind then art cannot always be beautiful. Purposeful ugliness in art, however, is distinct from modern art that glorifies ugliness as its own end. Modern art uses ugliness to pervert what is good and beautiful and often feigns a nobler purpose which is never evident in the piece itself.

Ordinary People Can be Excellent Judges of Art

In the judgement of art, there are many parameters that may convey value that must all come together to form an overall assessment of a piece. While the ordinary, morally healthy person may have very good instincts with respect to the detection of beauty and ugliness, and of value in general when it comes to art, they are never given the language and tools to articulate these judgements. This is on purpose: if the ordinary person were to be taught how to properly articulate their perceptions and to draw a line of logic from the details of the work that make it good or bad, then charlatans who run the art world would have far less plausible deniability to show wicked and morally depraved images to us and pass them off as “high art”. Exposure to this kind of ugly and wicked artwork is not neutral; it harms our psychological, emotional and spiritual well-being.

The thinker who best provides the language by which we may judge the arts objectively, at least in the fine arts, is John Ruskin.

John Ruskin, Modern Painters

Modern Painters is a five volume book written by English writer and art historian John Ruskin in 1860. This work of literature has influenced artists such as JMW Turner and the entire Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Here I would like to enumerate, paraphrase and explain some of his very useful and interesting ideas about how we may judge and then articulate our judgements of art as ordinary people with good moral sense such that our words may nurture a healthier culture for our children to grow up in.

Art is Measured by Good Ideas

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“I would like to make a film to tell children ‘it’s good to be alive’” - Hayao Miyazaki, the founder and chair of Studio Ghibli

Disney is a name that has become synonymous today with the children’s story because it combined two very powerful things: the unique visual impact of beautiful animation with the unique penetration of the American Corporation. But despite its gargantuan profits and distribution power, Disney is waning in cultural relevance and power. Disney still primarily makes its money from Intellectual Property that was created half a lifetime ago and its new releases lose millions every year. While Disney as a business might be doing well, Disney as a story-teller for children is not.

There is a competitor that I believe is increasingly taking up more of Disney’s previous audience, and I believe it is well deserved. The competitor is Japan’s boutique animation studio, Studio Ghibli, for the very simple reason that Hayao Miyazaki remembers what Disney, in its greed for power and money, has long forgotten.

“Over at our place, we’re sure of just one thing: everybody in the world was once a child. So in planning a new picture, we don’t think of grown ups and we don’t think of children, but just of that fine clean, unspoiled spot deep down in every one of us that maybe the world has made us forget and that maybe our pictures can help recall” - Walt Disney, 1938

In this essay comparing Studio Ghibli and Walt Disney Studios, I will not only trace the history and philosophy of these two companies, but also examine what it is that makes a good Children’s Story that not only entertains but nourishes the spirit. Is Studio Ghibli really better than Modern Disney and in what ways?

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(To destroy the reasons for living for the sake of life; to squander life’s purpose just in order to stay alive and lead a meaningless life)

When we no longer study something for the sake of gaining a credential or a job or social status, we begin to see the true value of the subject of education and Art has shown its true beauty to me in this way. I did not learn the names of artists to impress people at parties, or the stories behind sculptures in order to sound intelligent to others. I did not earn a degree and the arts are not well known as a subject of study that leads to a job.

When I learned Art, it was for a much more ridiculous and serious reason: a love of life. I was drawn to something beautiful and wanted to get to know it better, just as a man might want to say hello to a beautiful woman, or a hiker might stop to gaze at a view along his path up a mountain. Beauty stops us, makes us pay attention, and we acquaint ourselves with it so that we may enjoy loving it even more.

The study of Art has long been seen as the domain of the idle aristocrat or a decorative degree for the wealthy heiress who must be able to put on a show of being able to create polite and intelligent-sounding conversation. For many people today, the arts are seen as luxury pass times of the wealthy rather than essential components of anyone’s life, unlike medicine, mathematics, law or even languages. After all, how will knowing what Michelangelo created in 1503 help a young man grow up to be able to provide for a family?

However, the idea that art belongs only to the wealthy is a modern phenomenon borne of the industrial revolution. A brief survey of history in all cultures prior to the industrialisation of modern life reveals that everyone’s life was once filled with creating art of some kind. Before the radio, there was a musician in every neighbourhood and family. Before mass production everyone’s mother was a dress designer; a portrait painter could find work in every village. A cobbler, a furniture maker, a smith, all made useful things for people and each useful thing, because it was made by a human being rather than a machine, was beautiful. Even the art of the renaissance, now locked up in museums, once formed a part of the peasant’s daily life. Fra Angelico, Giotto and Michelangelo created artwork to be enjoyed by the masses and used to learn about the word of God when they went to church.

Art is not just a picture or a sculpture to contemplate in a museum on the weekend. Art is a necessary function of every human being, both in its creation and in its appreciation.

A cave discovered in the Argentine Patagonia reveals handprints on a cave wall placed carefully one on top of the other, stencilled in various colours, more than five thousand years ago. This is called the Cave of Hands. It reveals to us that to create art is something that mankind did even when he was fighting nature tooth and claw for survival. From this simple gesture it is very easy to draw a line to the sculptures of Bernini or the paintings of Velasquez and then to distinguish all three from a banana taped to a wall or pieces of paper hanging from a ceiling. This image on the cave wall tells us precisely what Art is and what it is not.

Art is the impulse of the human being to tell his or her story through material form. This can be done in paint, sculpture, music, writing, or dance. All forms of art are material ways to give language to that which it is almost impossible to rationally describe which is the experience of living life with a human consciousness. We are not quite beasts and not quite gods and somewhere in between we experience in the same mortal body, the gnaw of wrath and the restraint of charity; bone-deep beastly hungers and irrational, self-abnegating love that extends upward and outward. The story of art traces the story of humanity.

What distinguishes this art from non-art is then very simple to deduce. All non-art comes with a long label. The story is not told through the piece itself but rather through an attached label. Every aspect of the “Art-piece” is a poor metaphor for something else and it contains nothing within it that speaks for itself. Work like this is not art, it is rather political clownery.

Mark Rothko might have some very nice explanations for his political clownery and the educated classes might call you a barbarian if you think his work looks like a used napkin. Nevertheless, it is clear for anyone with eyes to see that his work does not speak for itself.

Compare his work to an artist like Bernini. You do not need Bernini to tell you the story of Hades and Persephone to understand what the story is expressing. Through the form of the sculpture itself, we can identify the characters: a powerful man and a beautiful young woman. We can identify their relationship: the man is overpowering the woman but she is resisting valiantly. The overall construction of the piece creates a kind of tornado effect where each angle carries the eye to the next plane of the piece creating a vortex of movement leading to the feeling of a climactic, theatrical moment of dramatic tension. A musician might tell this story in another way, a writer in yet another. Nevertheless, Bernini’s storytelling stands on its own and tells the story on its own merit. Learning more about the story of Hades and Persephone serves only to enrich our understanding of the piece even more.

The purpose of studying art seriously is primarily to bring our attention to great works of beautiful and compelling artwork that tells the stories of humanity with the most excellent skill. While the stories of humanity are universal in kind, they are not universally well told. It is clear that some cultures, some people and some time periods had more skill than others and it is worth drawing our attention on purpose to those who told the human story the best. One of the primary goals of education is to drawn our attention to excellent things and so the goal of studying art is to drawn our attention to excellent art.

When we draw our attention to the human stories that are told well, we can then learn things about ourselves, about others and about the human condition in more thoughtful, nuanced and rich ways. Said another way, we live better. But to even make this argument risks drawing too fine a utilitarian line under the reason we ought to study the arts seriously. Can a person really lead a good life without a bit of beauty to frame narrative of his pain, suffering, triumphs and reliefs? When we fall in love or lose a loved one, the more alive among us look around for a camera to take a good photo, for a writer to provide a few nice words, for song to capture, capitulate and to adorn the moment. No matter how practical we might be, we are human after all, and to be fully human is to search for art.

The truth is, everyone, even those who may pride themselves on not being overly concerned with art at all, are living and breathing art all the time. The difference is that those “practical people” are passive consumers of art, rather than active participants. The pictures on their walls, the design on their plates, the syntax of the emails they write, it’s all background music to them that has been picked out for them and they don’t even care to consider its power over them.

To study art then is to also understand its power over both the individual and the civilisation as a whole. Those who do not understand art are doomed to be enslaved to the taste automatically provided for them. Those who never take art seriously live in the default artistic setting and this leads to default states of consciousness, of thought, of desire and of expectations from life. To truly cultivate taste, consciously and with regard for beauty, harmony and order, is to cultivate a life itself.

There are many who pay lip service to how “beautiful art will save society” but it is not because you’ve memorised some AI generated facts about Tchaikovsky, but because you consider that you may listen to something more beautiful that can show you how a violin may paint the first rays of spring sunshine. It is not knowing the name of the Quattro Fiumi fountain in Rome that may enchant you, but the idea of how Rome at the height of its power captured the greek gods themselves, once high and mighty on Olympus, and brought them under the domain of the Roman Catholic Church.

You do not need to have aspirations to become a painter or an art museum tour guide or a glittering socialite in order to take an interest in art. You need only to have a desire to live life consciously. If this is your desire, then you must take your education in the arts as seriously as any other matters you consider practical. In fact, the telos of all your “practical matters” are directed precisely by your understanding of the human story and your place within it. Will you let others define that telos for you, or define it yourself?

Thank you for reading.

Virginia Woolf famously writes that the stories of great men and their accomplishments bore her, and this attitude of a feigned, petulant ennui and thinly veiled resentment against great men is precisely the attitude that describes not merely the emotional foundation of feminism, but also that of Marxism in general. This is what makes both of these ideas fundamentally “anti-civilizational”. If great men are the only ones who can build civilization, then to hate and undermine great men can only lead to its destruction.

Somewhere along the way, the idea was argued and concluded among the academics that Odysseus, Hector and Achilles were “toxic males” and that the hero had to be diminished in order to be palatable, and anyone who dissented to this idea was ostracised. But what does the Hero do for the psyche of mankind? For him to draw such ire and irritation from modern academics implies that the mythical hero, despite being (probably) fictional—and at the very least long dead—has immense power on the modern psyche and that this power does not go the way the academics prefer it to go.

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Everyone talks about how Hollywood is declining aesthetically but few are talking about how Hollywood has been writing toxic garbage for decades, and it’s just that the aesthetics no longer make their toxicity palatable. Ugly actors and colourless cinematography are simply physical manifestations of the rot that has always been at the core of modern western storytelling.

I have given many classic rom-coms a chance over the years, the Notebook, Notting Hill and Grease to name a few, but like toxic relationships that always promise they will be different this time, they almost always leave me with an unquestionable nausea, disgust, and churling bile of hatred and anger in the pit of my stomach.

I suffer, of course, because I am a lover.

I am a true romantic and therefore the words that these movies use, “true love”, “destiny”, actually mean something to me, whereas to these Hollywood movies, they are just window dressing for unrepentant cheating whores to use to justify their adulterous, superficial, narcissistic trysts that are little more than humiliation rituals for the male leads.

There are some good romance movies, very few, and I will reward my readers who read to the end with this precious list that I have walked over the broken glass of Hollywood trash to curate.

Much digital ink has been spilled over the last few years about how toxic pornography is for the mental and libidinal health of boys and men, but very little scrutiny has been given to the female counterpart, the more seemingly innocuous and therefore more dangerous cultural phenomenon of “the Rom Com”. Whereas a boy has to hide pornography if he watches it, a girl can watch a Rom Com movie like Letters to Juliet with her whole family in the room and no one suspects the way that it rots her brain, her heart and her soul in ways that are far deeper than actual pornography might. Whereas the lusts of pornography are primarily material in both origin and destruction, turning a man into a mere cuckolded voyeur of his own sexual desires, the rom-com justifies a woman’s worse vices to herself and thus prevents her developing the virtue that can guarantee any love in her life at all, not merely romantic, but any kind. The porn-addicted man feels a sense of disgust at himself that the rom-com appreciating woman never even acknowledges about herself.

In this essay, I will lay out the case in detail, using the 2010 film Letters to Juliet as my primary case study. (I wanted to do the Notebook as well but I got so angry thinking about it that I started to see red and I didn’t want to get a stroke). If a girl admits to loving either of these movies, she must be institutionalised to, at the very least, protect society from her destructiveness.

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It is a very simple test of beauty to assess how something ages. It is common to assert that “aesthetics” are simply a matter of preference and that we cannot argue one aesthetic preference is superior or inferior to another. But ugliness in society and low quality in fashion, literature, architecture and fine art wasn’t a democratic decision dictated by individual preferences. Ugliness was borne rather of efficiency and factories; it was borne of replacing the human with the factory.

Time and again when ordinary people choose what they find to be beautiful, not fashionable or impressive to their friends, not economical, not trendy, but truly beautiful, they use one word “vintage”. There is a very good reason for this: “Vintage” is human.

The word vintage finds its roots in french wine harvesting and was originally used to refer to the best quality wine from a particularly good grape harvest. It’s interesting that wine is the origin of the word vintage because as the word has evolved, it is now used to refer to everything from clothes to furniture to books and ideas and good wine also improves with age. It refers to aesthetics that are eternal in their appeal, and, that, regardless of time period or trend, people are always drawn toward.

When we think vintage, we think of an iron victorian key with flourishes made of metal in the shape of flowers and leaves. It is the kind of object that, even when it is no longer useful in our world of electronic locks, we still like to see as a form of decoration. It’s so much more wonderful when the vintage object of beauty is also functional; we love it when the things we use everyday also happen to be beautiful. This is the truth behind the yearning, at least aesthetically, for time travel to the past.

In a world of rapidly evolving technology, it is odd that so many people seem to be dreaming of time travelling to the past rather than imagining themselves living in a synthetic “futuristic” world where everything is made of silicon, glass and plastic. The modern and futuristic way of design seems to be to purposely leave things barren and empty as a performance of sophistication when in reality is merely a lack of skill in producing anything truly beautiful which requires human artistry.

These days, it is becoming increasingly popular to prefer all things “vintage”. People want to wear clothes that look like they’re from the past. We want furniture that looks like it was handmade by a 19th century Italian craftsman. People are thrifting and rescuing old grand father clocks, vintage armoires, refurbishing their grandparent’s clothes or re-making designs from centuries into the past. We want ornate and beautiful trains from peak Victorian era England. We want vintage french gardens and heritage children’s books. People want vinyl record players and home decor that evokes “the vintage vibe” is more popular than ever. People are buying swords, medieval looking scabbards to open letters with, and even in a time of electrical lighting, candelabras and ornate candle-sticks are what people prefer to decorate their tables with. “Vintage” cars that look like they belong in a 1930s James Bond or Grace Kelley movie are the kind that people still want to rent for their weddings or special occasions.

Is this just a trend or is this telling something about the yearning of ordinary people for something more? It was predicted that the “future” would look like silicone and metal cyber punk, but what if we want the future to be something akin to the 19th century wrought iron tracery and ornate decorative aesthetics? In reality, the longing for the “vintage” aesthetic is not a disenchantment from the modern world so much as it is a desire for our physical world to be meaningful rather than a political statement or mere utility.

The glass pyramid in front of the Louvre was put there by a Chinese-American architect in 1983 and inspired nothing but irritation and anger from people. The glass and metal structure when assessed honestly against the beautiful stone building of the Louvre itself, is a ghastly and horrible addition. It is perhaps more illustrative of the points made in this essay in particular because it is a glass pyramid telling no story. It is invisible. It has no craftsmanship or design in it. It exists only to negate its surroundings, not to build on them or enhance them in any way. In this way, it is a form of graffiti, but even less so because graffiti usually has some human message that it dares to communicate, however vulgar it may be. The glass pyramid of the Louvre is cowardly by comparison. Much modern architecture is like this. I believe that behind the “political statement” it is far more likely to be a lack of skill in the ability to build anything similar to the kind of craftsmanship that was behind the original building of the Louvre for example. Sophistication in modern art is a mask for a lack of competence.

There was once a human aspect to decoration. The modern way of designing and building, from home decoration, to cars, to clothes and our every day tools, is all done in a factory and removed from human craftsmanship. The design of things is optimised to reduce costs in manufacturing while still fulfilling the purpose of the object itself.

Unlike the factory, the individual craftsman often told stories in his decoration. The design of a carpet, the painting on a wardrobe, the design on tiles used to decorate a kitchen, the design on a dress, were once specialised to the village, the culture and the people that it was both made by and made for. This uniqueness cannot be easily turned into a multi billion dollar enterprise because a craftsman is one person, one soul. Each craftsman produces something slightly different even if they are trained in the same way. Only the factory mass produces and only mass production can produce obscene wealth. The production of obscene wealth leads to obscene power and obscene power, when untempered by the fear of God, tends to snuff out craftsmanship that might compete with it.

The return to craftsmanship and people making things by hand again is a signal of serious change in culture. This is thanks to companies like Etsy and the rise in social media businesses that allow individuals to overcome the hegemony that big corporations once had on the market. When human beings can talk to human beings again without all the middle men, human craftsmanship flourishes again because deep down this is what we all want.

We are not returning to the past so much as recalibrating with our most natural and healthy human instinct to create and to buy things from people rather than factories. Creativity ought not to be just an impotent hobby to do sometime between 5-9pm when our responsibilities have been taken care of, but rather an active part of our work day. We yearn to create things and do work that has utility and purpose in our real lives. Craftsmanship therefore not only surrounds us with more beauty, because of the individuality poured into each design, but also fulfils and satisfies us in a way that mindless, passive entertainment never can.

“People have grown accustomed to the elimination of poetry of the world, to the mechanization of life, to the expulsion of beauty… Are these not unambiguous symptoms of unhappiness, of an unfulfilled hunger for happiness?”

Dietrich von Hildebrand

The yearning for the “vintage” aesthetic is the yearning for more poetry, whimsy and humanity in our lives. Buying factory-made objects that look like they’re from 19th century England is not truly vintage but it is a symptom of a healthy inclination toward real beauty. That inclination should be pursued so that we seek out real craftsmanship where we can. Our spaces tell stories about ourselves. The tendency to bare walls and decor purchased from a factory comes from a fear of imposing a real physical personality upon the world. The only way to be completely politically correct as a human being is to disappear and the most politically correct personality presents itself as a bare home, with factory setting modern decor, and clothes in safe silhouettes and bland colours.

Aesthetics are the handprints of human beings on the material world. A human being cannot be alive without leaving behind footprints where he walks, warmth where he breathes the air. Despite our increasingly cerebral and intellectual existence “online,” we are still physical beings.

Where the modern world is not ugly due to neglect, it is ugly due to barrenness. Where the modern world is beautiful due to care, it is beautiful due to a timeless kind of craftsmanship that puts people’s stories in objective form, harmony and composition that is not a matter of “artistic opinion” but rather universal spiritual appreciation of aesthetic truth.

“There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.”

Christopher Alexander

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Without further ado, here are some simple strategies and methods to teach your child under 5 about True Art.

1. Picture Study

This is perhaps the easiest method and also the most important one. I learned it from Charlotte Mason but many esteemed educators recommend this method. The first step to educating a child about Art is to help him to develop taste and to grow to appreciate the inherent beauty in great art.

Picture study is very simple. You simply get high quality and high resolution prints of some beautiful works of art, and use masking tape to put them up on a wall at the level of the child. It could be in his playroom, in the living room, in the hallway, even on the fridge. You may laminate the picture so that they don’t put sticky fingers on it, or colour on it etc as little children are known to do.

This picture should be left up for at least three days. I prefer to leave it up for a week. Because it is high quality art that you will be printing out, you will find that children will return to it over and over again to examine details, and notice new things every time. Children have a much shorter attention span than adults, so allowing them more time to look at an image, to come back to it over and over again, is a wonderful way to work with the limitations of a tender young mind.

Look at the image with the child and, if they can talk, ask them to point things out to you that they notice. They may not talk right away, so give them time to collect their thoughts and form their words. You can point out things that you like in the image and by describing them, you can give your child words that they can use in the future.

The loveliest part of this exercise is that it helps to give you moments of pause where you and your child can exist as friends rather than always be concerned with entertaining them. You will find that you too will enjoy taking time out of your day to truly look at a work of art.

I will include in a future essay, a comprehensive list of artists and links to artworks that I believe work extremely well for picture study. For now, some artists I recommend, especially for the mind and sensitivity of children are: Kinuko Y Craft, Beatrix Potter, Viktor Vasnetsov and Frederick Leighton.

2. Fill the Child’s World With Beauty

An extension of the Picture Study method is to fill your home with beautiful things such as paintings on walls, decor that is beautiful and human, carpets, tea-cups, flower pots, gardens. Fill the child’s world with as much beauty as you can, and it doesn’t have to be expensive! Don’t succumb to what corporate soulless institutions tell you that a child’s world ought to look like; you don’t need to decorate everything with elmo, frozen and bluey and whatever other ugly cartoon they are trying to sell. Simple, well executed and beautiful images and harmonious objects that are not made of plastic will do: a wicker basket, a water colour illustration of a sailboat, an ordinary teddy bear with a red ribbon around his neck, a wooden train set.

Take your child to beautiful places such as parks. I have lived in Dubai where beautiful parks are not a walking distance away but I made an effort to take them out at least once or twice per week to a beautiful park where children can frolic among flowers and beautiful landscapes. Children are as happy with beautiful environments as adults are, but it is more impactful for them because it forms their idea of the world! Even taking your child to the beach or someone’s backyard with a very lovely vegetable garden is a big deal. Art museums can be good too, but that goes without saying!

3. Fine Motor Skills

When you look at the x ray of a child’s hand and compare it to that of an adult’s you will notice something very important when it comes to education: the adult’s hand has bones that are all connected to each other whereas the child’s hand has lots of space between the bones. The child’s bones have not fused yet and there is lots of “squishy space” between them. This is why children have such lovely dimples on the back of their adorable little fists. The other effect of this biological difference is that little children literally cannot exercise the same fine motor skills that adults can and so when they hold a crayon or a paintbrush, they will not have the ability to be exact.

Nevertheless, it is very important to give children the opportunities to practise these fine motor skills and to get used to holding pencils and colours correctly, between the index finger and the thumb of the dominant hand. It is foolish to try and change the child’s dominant hand, by the way. Hand dominance is as inherent as eye colour!

Do not give a child finger paints because they might eat them. For the child of 1-2, give them crayons and a blank page and let them explore the effect of putting a colour to a page. It is very important to give them traditional media rather than ipads because children need to learn from interactions with the material world rather than simulacrums of the natural world. Simulations are best served as tools for the experienced rather than as primary contact points for children just getting to know the real world.

Crayons and pencil crayons are excellent for building this fine motor control. When the child is a bit older (about 3) you can give them water colours and a paintbrush. Give them colouring pages, by all means! But do ensure that these colouring pages are well drawn images and not horrible looking cartoons made with little care to form, shape, or beauty. (No colouring books from popular cartoons, I have noticed, have any sense of beauty about them). I really like the old Disney colouring books as well as colouring books with simply well drawn animals and plants. In the future I will link to some examples of companies and artists that have put out some good ones!

4. Drawing from life and paying attention to the world

When the child is above three, he should have his own little drawing book and it should not be for scribbling. The child should be encouraged to copy and draw shapes such as lines, circles, squares, as best that he can. He should be encouraged to try and draw things that he sees in life, or illustrations that he has seen in picture study or in his books. He may, of course, draw from his imagination, but the more and better that he can draw from life, the better he will be able to execute the lovely ideas from his imagination! Drawing something as simple as a dandelion he saw outside, a sea shell he collected at the beach or his own house, as best as he can, is an excellent exercise in teaching the child to see and pay attention to his physical world. This skill transcends across disciplines and is not merely useful in the learning of art of everything. A child that cannot attend is a child that cannot learn.

You should try this for yourself. The next time you see something beautiful, try and draw it as accurately as you can and you’ll find that your ability to pay attention and notice details about everything around you expands.

5. Mixing colours

Children can and should be taught how to mix colours and water colour is the best medium for this. When the first colouring books were released, children were taught how to mix the colours that they would need for each picture. Children from the Old World were held to higher standards than they are today.

Teaching children to mix colours is very straightforward. There are three primary colours: red, blue and yellow. These colours can be mixed to make secondary colours. Red and Blue make Purple. Blue and Yellow make Green. Red and Yellow make Orange. Experimenting with water colour to see how these colours can be created is a wonderful experience for any person when they first do it, and the practice of making these colours themselves will allow them to find more challenge and thus satisfaction in any colouring that they do.

Children should be encouraged to paint and draw the world as they see it rather than “however they feel like it” because the cultivation of the imagination requires a child to have experienced and attended to the real world in some serious way. In order to imagine we must first see. Painting a tree purple because that’s how it happens to look in that atmosphere in the distance is the true cultivation of the artistic instinct. Whereas colouring things “however you want” is simply the cultivation of a petulant lack of discipline that is only destructive and therefore can never be “imaginative”. Later, when the child is drawing things from his own mind, he can colour things as he imagines them to be and the imagined details will have a rhyme and a reason behind them. “I imagine that a dragon has breathed fire on the forest and that’s why all the trees are black”

When people are older, the teaching of art is often segregated between the teaching of “Art history” and the teaching of “art techniques”. However I believe that you cannot learn one without the other. Both these disciplines are nourished by learning to see the world around you more clearly.

Nurturing a Love for Art

To teach children about Art well has a few key components to it. First, the children must be taught to see and appreciate beauty both in art and in the world around them. Next, the children must be taught to develop their fine motor skills, slowly and at their own pace, so that they can see how they can make their mark in the real world, on the physical page, with a pencil, a crayon or a bit of paint. They must learn not only to make random marks, but to control these marks that they make and this is the cultivation of the child’s mind rather than simply his impulse. This is what distinguishes my ideas from the mainstream pedagogy that just creates artless barbarians with no respect or love for beauty. Art, especially art for children, doesn’t have to be formless and thoughtless.

Children should be taught shapes, colours, line and how to copy from their world properly. There is a method to all of these skills and until very recently, they were taught to children properly. I could write a whole book about all the different skills that can be taught quite successfully to a child!

This article was a very small introduction but I hope that it might lead and nudge you in the right direction as a parent or as a teacher or as a loving aunt, uncle, cousin, grandparent, or even to re-teach yourself about True Art!

Imagine washing ashore, battered and bare, after endless trials. Yet a lion’s fierce nobility stirs within. This is Odysseus in Book Six of Homer’s Odyssey, the turning point where there is finally some hope of Odysseus returning home, and simultaneously, the greatest danger of forgetting home that Odysseus has yet faced.

In this Classical Ideals Book Club session, this luminous chapter unfolds with Athena, subtle as a breath of wind, inspiring Princess Nausicaa, beautiful, brave, and brilliantly shrewd, to meet Odysseus at the river.

Emerging wild-eyed and half-naked, Odysseus approaches like a mountain lion: regal, dangerous, yet vulnerable. He flatters her as Artemis, never Aphrodite, securing aid while honouring Penelope. Nausicaa, no passive figure, guides him on palace etiquette to guard her reputation, showcasing timeless feminine agency. The Phaeacians’ blessed, paradisical island and sacred xenia shine against Odysseus’s brutal past, challenging modern indifference to strangers.

This ancient epic outshines today’s distractions, probing heroism, loyalty, fate, and human depth.

Let ancient virtue ignite something heroic in you by exploring Homer with us!

The recording of the book club is behind this paywall and all paying subcribers are invited to join the live sessions!

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No one enjoys feeling like a gullible, green lamb, easily hoodwinked by charlatans, but we are convinced that becoming wise is a kind of corruption. Is it possible to contend with the realities of the world while preserving our wholesomeness? Is vulgarity, that is to say, placing truths explicitly before ourselves and our children, the only way to make ourselves wiser? Modern culture has convinced us that wholesomeness is akin to being an idiot, a sheltered child in a fantasy land. But I have investigated many “wholesome” components of our culture and found them to be anything but naive and I have looked at many vulgar aspects of culture and found them to be nothing more than vice pretending to be sophistication.

It is difficult to understand something like “wholesomeness” when living in a culture that so rebukes and reject it. It is understandable why the enemies of wholesomeness would want to de-fang the idea and present it as a form of anti-expression, stifled truths and sanitised realities.

When I contrast truly wholesome works of culture against unwholesome ones, the main difference I see is not that wholesome works have less danger, violence, or darkness, rather, the difference I see is that wholesome works of culture are founded on the idea of objective virtue rather than subjective preference as the moral compass of the piece.

Example 1) Little House on the Prairie versus Modern Family

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Imagine a man offered everything the modern world chases: eternal youth, endless pleasure, god-like status with zero consequences…and he turns it all down. Instead, he chooses a leaky raft, storms, and the long, uncertain road home to a wife who may or may not still be waiting. That scene from Book V of Homer’s Odyssey is the heart of this month’s Book Club episode, and it questions everything our culture tells us about success, heroism, and happiness. In this conversation, we discuss the questions most of us secretly wonder about when we pick up The Odyssey:

• Why does the Odyssey feel so much more human and accessible than the Iliad?

• What does true maturity look like when the world rewards youthful rage and recklessness?

• Why do so many modern academics seem uncomfortable with the very idea of virtue and heroism?

• And can ancient stories still teach us how to live responsibly in an age that celebrates power without accountability?

We discuss why these epics are not relics for specialists, but are a form of living wisdom for anyone trying to navigate loyalty, limits, and meaning in a chaotic world.

Whether you’re a longtime classics lover or someone who always felt “I should read Homer someday,” this episode will leave you energised.

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An entire generation has been dumbed down. If we want any hope of making it possible for the next generation to escape this downward trend, we have to understand how this happened. Turning off the screens for your child won’t do much good if the books you read to them are just as insidious.

When we see videos of children speaking prior to the 1950s or read letters that children were once capable of writing, it is clear that the intelligence level of the average person has deteriorated significantly. Children spoke and wrote in complete sentences with complex thoughts, used a richer vocabulary and were far more descriptive and attentive of their environments.

For a full transcription of this letter you can visit this website. The boy and girl above, although only thirteen, both write at a level that would be considered advanced even for ordinary adult readership. There are undoubtedly little boys and girls who are capable of writing at this level today, but they are certainly the exceptions rather than the norm: mumbling barbarians and punctuate every shallow observation of life with “like”.

A degradation in one’s ability to express his thoughts is the most reliable predictor of intelligence because writing is the best reflection of how a person’s thinks. The shallow-ness of modern writing reflects the shallow-ness of the modern mind. Because this linguistic and intellectual degradation occurred so long ago, it cannot be blamed on “AI” or even “the internet”. We worry today that AI will replace human writing, but human beings have been writing like robots already for decades. If we want the next generation to actually be able to think, we have to understand what caused them to stop thinking well in the first place.

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The thing that makes the Odyssey such a fantastic work of art is that no matter how many times you read it, you can always find something new and fantastic within it. In this Book Club session, my readers and I talked about Book IV when Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, visits King Menelaus at Lacedeaemon. King Menelaus is married to Helen of Troy.

We talked about all the details of bronze age life that were miraculously passed on and transcribed with care and precision. Normally when we tell stories we leave out such details but that may be an affliction of the modern mind that takes it for granted that details will be recorded in things like photographs and other people’s records. We also have a much more atrophied memory compared to the ancients and that could be due to the disrespect we have for details.

We talked about hospitality, the rituals of grief, and the humility of Helen of Troy, the craftiness of men and the depiction of women in ancient literature. We talked about the demise of the men like Ajax and Agamemnon and how they mirror Odysseus’s situations and characteristics and thus offer alternate endings for the Odyssey itself.

Our Book Club takes place every Friday morning at 9:30am Dubai time and all paying readers are invited to join. The book club is “no prep” meaning you do not have to do readings in order to participate in the discussion. I provide the context and you can participate as little or as much as you wish! It’s a great way to enjoy these great works of literature together.

Here is the recording of the book club meeting below. I hope you will join us in our close reading of this wonderful story.

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Yet in the world of little children, there seems to be an abundance of bright colour, and a paucity of beauty. What can reconcile such a contradiction but the realisation that bright colour alone does not create beauty. In fact, the prioritisation of bright colour in aspects of design and aesthetics produces ugliness, because each bright colour clashes with every other when they are placed adjacent to each other in disharmonious ways.

If I were to ask you what colour childhood is, you would answer not with a shade, but with a sound: loud. But the world of childhood did not always look this way. Nurseries, toys, children’s books and clothes were once created in natural, mature and beautiful colour palettes. This aesthetic of the modern childhood in the high contrast, single toned, bright primary colours, was an invention of a movement called the the Bauhaus in 19th century Germany. Today, the bright, striking primary colours of children’s toys, books and clothes are seen as the default palettes that define childhood.

However, this striking, loud, “Crayola” colour palette is doing more harm than good. It is not helping children to develop into thinking, feeling people who will have a sense for beauty and a love for the world, as colour, when deployed beautifully, ought to do.

This essay is about the history of how this happened, the consequences of this colour palette on the mind and spirit of a child, and why and how the trends are slowly shifting toward in the future.

Let us begin here. Take a moment to look at these two representations of the story of Snow White.

One was done by Walt Disney Studios in 1939 and the other made by a modern artist. The Disney version has a much more muted colour palette whereas the modern one has one that is full of primary and secondary colours, high contrast and with zero variance in tonality or hue.

The Disney version is not only objectively far more beautiful, graceful and elegant, but it is also far better for a child’s nervous system and attention span. The child’s attention is not pulled to a hundred different details with competing bright colours, and colour is used to inform shape, shadow and gesture rather than simply to grab attention. This means that the child actually has the mental space to attend to the story itself, the shape of the objects in the scene and to connect with the composition and the art itself.

The Disney version was made at a time when children’s animation was not about maximising attention spans but rather about telling good and beautiful stories. They did not feel desperate for attention through gimmicks like bright contrasting colours, because they knew the story was powerful enough to leave an impression for a lifetime.

The modern version competes for attention through visual gimmicks because there is no substance. It is an optimised commercial product rather than a work of art. By distracting children rather than offering them something of value, they are both deprived of real art, and mentally and visually exhausted from looking at what modern art offers.

It is interesting that as the world becomes more grey in every respect, from fashion to buildings to logos, the artefacts and objects of childhood become more colourful than ever. Foam mats are sold in bright blues, yellows, greens and red. Children’s toys come in loud primary colours. New parents often lament at the gaudiness of the objects of childhood when they fill a room and make it look cluttered and ugly, as if the ugly, overstimulating environment is a necessary for their child’s well being. Even children’s artwork, in books, films and tv shows, features a very limited palette of primary and secondary colours that all clash against each other, clamouring for attention.

In another essay I’ve talked about modern toys versus vintage ones and how they impact a child’s brain differently.

“Look at me!” everything yells to your child. Is this really good for them? There was a point in time when children’s books, clothes and toys had more sophisticated and muted colour palettes. What changed?

The history of the primary colour childhood

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Have you ever wondered what the ancients thought like? How they lived? How they understood their place in the world? Though Book III of the Odyssey is not the most exciting plot-wise, it’s rich with ideas and themes that can help put us in the “ancient frame of mind”.

Below is a summary of our discussion as well as the recording of our conversation! It was lots of fun discussing this book together. We meet every Friday at 9:30am Dubai time if you want to join next week!

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Not only are the illustrations poor in their quality of artwork, the substance itself is extremely dumbed down. Children’s literature is at once poor in quality and permeated with political propaganda promoting marxist ideas.

Publishers seem to believe that just because a book is marketed toward children, quality no longer matters. This makes sense for a world that views children as an expensive lifestyle choice for old fashioned people rather than human beings to protect and nurture.

Here are some examples:

Despite the poor quality that is offered in stores, intelligent and motivated parents are aware of the necessity of beauty and good writing for the healthy development of a child’s spirit and intellect. As such, many of us have found excellent books regardless, published in the past, by excellent writers and artists who respected not only their craft, but the children who would read their books.

I have written here about why Beauty matters to the child and here about how the quality of literature literally shapes our minds. Not all reading is good reading and in fact, it is better for a child to read nothing than to read poor quality, ugly books.

The best place to find good children’s books is in used book shops, but even then, it is important to know what you are looking for. Busy mothers don’t always have the time to scour book shops, so, I have compiled a list for some excellent books for you here that you can easily find online.

Here it is!

Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter is a writer and illustrator who lived in the mid 1800s in Britain’s gorgeous Lake District. In this picturesque world, Potter crafted some of the loveliest tales about the little woodland animals she observed so keenly as a child in the countryside. The stories are written in complete, eloquent sentences that will stimulate a child’s acquisition of good vocabulary and speech habits, yes, even before they are speaking! The stories, although complex and often dark, will interest parent and baby alike. Modern pedagogy has us convinced that babies are only capable of attending to three words on each page. This is just not true. In my experience with my own children, children do attend to these wonderful stories. Potter’s beautiful and whimsical water colour illustrations are also sure to delight any child and train their taste toward beauty and goodness.

Raymond Briggs

Raymond Briggs is another excellent British artist who only recently passed away in 2022. His stories are silent and whimsical tales. “The Snowman” by Briggs has been repeated in our home hundreds of times now (the 1982 movie is also excellent by the way). Not only are the stories wholesome and beautiful, but the illustrations themselves have a magical, otherwordly quality to them that would enchant any child and would help any adult to begin to see like a child again as well. His illustrations are also all hand-drawn in pencil crayon. Unlike Potter these stories are not text-heavy but the images are things that a child can look at for a long time and will nurture his or her imagination for years to come.

Judith Kerr

I am now in serious danger of appearing to be an anglophile (guilty as charged), but here is yet another English writer and illustrator who has contributed beautiful work to the genre of children’s literature for littles. Our copies of Mog the Cat and Tiger Who Came to Tea are so thoroughly abused, I mean ‘loved’ that I have mended them multiple times. They are favourites for bed time, for tantrums, for distractions at airports and in airplanes. My 1yo daughter’s fifth word ever was “Debbie” a character from the story.

Kerr’s stories are much simpler than Beatrix Potter but they are still very well written. They are humours and light-hearted and a lot of the humour is in the illustrations themselves! The illustrations are high quality, colourful and build up a detailed world that helps young children identify objects and practice words by looking and pointing. These offer great opportunities for playing “I spy!” as well. These are sure to be well loved by children aged 0-5 and adults too will find them entertaining to read, no matter how many times you go back.

Janet and Allan Ahlberg

What’s that? More English authors? Maybe the rainy weather on that grey island had some drop of genius in its clouds that made it so prolific in its production of great artists and writers. Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s books, especially The Jolly Postman, and Each Peach Pear Plum (which my 2yo adorably calls “Each Peach Bum”) are some of the most excellent children’s books I’ve ever seen. These books are good because they tell the whole story in rhyme and meter. This not only helps train the child’s ear for rhyme and rhythm, but it lends itself to memorisation, which little children are eager to do. The stories all centre around the characters of nursery rhymes and the rich illustrations are so detailed that little children will love to pore over them by themselves, even when reading time is over. This is excellent for parents who occasionally like to cook and read a book without a baby clinging to their legs for attention.

Elsa Beskow

Phew, let’s increase the diversity around here by introducing someone exotic like a Swede. Elsa Beskow is someone whose work I only recently discovered thanks to one of my readers who sent me a tip. I appreciate that very much because Elsa’s illustrations are so unbelievably stunning. I think her and Beatrix Potter are the most artistically beautiful of all the authors mentioned here. The stories as well are so unique and lovely. I read one about a little girl named Rosalind who has a pet deer that gets stolen by a King. I think because these stories are based in the mythology and culture of Sweden, they are less well known to the anglo-sphere. I truly love her stories because they are wholesome and interesting. The sentence strucutre is also complex enough that it will encourage the development of good speech.

That’s the interesting thing about good quality children’s literature, it is not boring to adults! It brings adults back into the world of children as well and this is how parenting little children should be: we give up a bit of adulthood to meet our children in fairy land for a while.

Hans Christian Andersen

And to complete our DEI initiative toward the end of this essay, the final author I will introduce to you is a Danish writer you might well be familiar with already. Hans Christian Andersen is the author of many of the most iconic fairy tales of the western world. He wrote many classics such as Cinderella, The Snow Queen, The Little Match Girl, The Wild Swans, and The Little Mermaid. His stories are interesting because they are not at all what Disney nefariously twisted them into for marketing to a secular, materialistic audience. For example, did you know the reason The Little Mermaid wanted to be human was so that she could get a human soul and go to heaven one day? And not because she wanted to know what “dingle-hoppers” are or to marry Prince Eric? These stories teach virtue overtly, directly and beautiful. They have courage that we as parents might lack in this world of secularism where we are made to feel ridiculous for loving God. Andersen did not illustrate his own stories but there are many excellent classic illustrators who did and I just love seeing the different interpretations. When children are a little older it can even be fun to get them to come up with their own illustrations.

You Have Free Will: Choose Beauty, Choose Goodness

Reading to our children, even when they are only a few months old, is an excellent way to get into the habit of forcing yourself to slow down to the pace of the child. Children like to snuggle with you, they like to hear your voice, they like to look at beautiful pictures and if you read them beautiful words and stories as well, it will impress their spirit with goodness and love that will equip them for anything else they need to navigate in life.

My children have often fallen asleep in my lap when I read to them. They have surprised me by indicating to me that they understand so much more from these stories than we can possibly know. When we respect children by giving them excellence and quality, we are showing them love. Let us not hinder children with mediocrity and ugliness.

Along the way, as we read to our children high quality books, we ourselves will rejuvenate and recalibrate our love for the tales of children and recover some of the innocence and virtue we wish to protect in our babies.

I hope that this list helps you to choose beauty and wholesomeness, in a world that promotes ugliness and depravity.

In a world of abundance, a lack of discretion can be fatal; one can easily get bloated on nonsense rather than nourished by quality. When we walk into a grocery store and see the shelves lined with food of every kind, our austere ancestors living on seasonal food and what they could grow or preserve, would marvel at our wealth, but we know that not all that is in the store is truly nourishing. We can fill entire grocery carts with “food” that, although is calorific and will prevent starvation, will nevertheless make us sick very quickly rather than nourish our bodies the way that real food ought to.

Our media environment is very similar. It has never been easier, cheaper and more convenient to get books and reading material than it is today. It is curious therefore, that people who would admit that not all food is healthy, are reluctant to admit that not all reading material is healthy. “As long as you’re reading, it’s good for you” is a message repeated to adult and child alike. In fact, just as some kinds of food, containing toxic food dyes, carcinogens and chemicals, are actively harmful to the body, so too is a lot of reading material toxic to the mind and spirit.

A beautiful mind shows itself in its aura, what it creates, how it responds to the world with thoughtfulness and wisdom rather than volatility and self-centeredness. How can we cultivate a beautiful mind through selective reading? Read on.

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Dear readers,

Today we had discussed Book II of The Odyssey! The discussion centers on Telemachus’s coming-of-age in Ithaca’s disordered household, emphasizing character development over rapid plot. Athena deliberately sends him on a voyage to Pylos and Sparta—despite knowing Odysseus’s whereabouts—to build his maturity, transforming him from a passive, tearful boy into an assertive young man who calls an assembly and confronts the suitors.

Key themes include:

• Maturation and inherited virtue — Telemachus confronts injustice despite emotional immaturity; Athena invokes his “brave soul” from Odysseus, highlighting lineage and the pressure of living up to a heroic father. This contrasts sharply with modern views that treat identity and heritage as random or detachable, enabling disconnection from family, culture, and land.

• Cunning (mētis) as heroic intelligence — Penelope’s loom trick (weaving and unraveling a shroud to delay remarriage) exemplifies positive cunning, a strategy the weaker use against the stronger—mirrored in Odysseus’s future deceptions. Telemachus, by contrast, is sincere and direct, lacking this trait.

• Fatherless youth and undisciplined masculinity — The suitors, likely raised without paternal guidance due to the Trojan War, embody laziness, entitlement, impiety, and moral decay (gluttony, unchastity, disrespect for gods and hosts), serving as negative examples of what happens without strong fatherly discipline.

• Ancient vs. modern values — Identity is rooted in family lineage (“son of Odysseus”) rather than profession; vivid Homeric epithets (“rosy-fingered dawn,” “long-haired Achaeans”) and preserved oral details reflect respect for precision and heritage, unlike modern tendencies to omit or alter narratives.

• Inaction and power imbalances — Mentor condemns the Ithacans’ cowardice in allowing few suitors to oppress Odysseus’s household, drawing parallels to contemporary feelings of impotence against elites.

Additional reflections touch on heroic morality (honoring sacrifice beyond transactions), the value of rereading classics, and criticism of an upcoming film adaptation for apparent disregard of the epic’s spirit.

Here is the audio recording for you to listen to!

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Nature is the most important classroom for the young and developing mind. This is a fact that is every mother knows in her heart but she is often told by the world that her child must be placed behind a desk with a pencil in his hand in order to begin to learn the truths of the world. However, without a proper sense of truth, how can a child (or anyone) possibly evaluate the information they are given second hand, for example through a teacher or a book? How can a child answer the question that must bubble up inside his tender mind “how do I know this is true”? Like many childish questions, it is at once very simple, and very challenging to answer. In this essay, I explain precisely how frequent encounters with nature prepare a child’s mind to answer just this question well.

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