Helen of the Argives is as beautiful as Aphrodite wills her to be, and it is not merely an illusion. In reality, there are ways to make ourselves more beautiful and ways to neglect one’s appearance…and yet there is also a delicate distinction between enhancements in real beauty and enhancements that are mere illusions.

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A MAN NAMED Glaucon pleads Socrates to not merely define justice, but to defend why we ought to pursue it at all. Is justice something you do for its own sake? Socrates says that justice is something that you do “both for itself and for what comes out of it” (358a). Naturally, neither of these concepts is ever brought up again or elaborated upon.

If you expect The Republic to behave like a well organised debate, you’ll be irritated and miss the fun of it. Glaucon is a bit us, the reader, because he desperately wants Socrates to convince him, logically, and without a doubt, that he should be doing the right thing. Socrates doesn’t indulge him (or us for that matter) so easily, but Plato, through this dialogue, gives us an entertaining look into what distracts people from the idea of justice even though we all may have some sense of it in our lives.

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The story is based on a novel called Majo no Takkyūbin or “Witch’s Express Home Delivery” written by Japanese children’s book writer, Eiko Kadono in 1985. Kadono was inspired by watching her daughter play around and pretend to be a witch flying on a broomstick. I found this detail so personally touching because many people say that motherhood is the end of a woman’s artistry and creativity but like Kadono, I too have found my children to be my greatest inspiration. Kadono has written more than 300 children’s books and is now ninety one years old, but she got her start as a young mother in her early thirties, chasing her toddler around while trying to make time to draw and write.

I recently watched Kiki’s Delivery Service about ten times because my daughters loved it so much. Watching it that many times with them over the last several weeks has allowed me to understand something profound and important about what makes this story so much more powerful and beautiful than American attempts at “female-centred stories” that just...fall flat and feel fake. Many critics of Feminist controlled modern Hollywood contend that the stories of modern Hollywood/Disney are bad because they centre women, but movies like Kiki’s Delivery Service reveal to us that this is not the case. Female-centered western stories fall flat because their female protagonists lack virtue.

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There are many wonderfully written academic essays out there on The Republic and I may read them in the future, but I want to read this book for myself first and capture my first impressions, uninfluenced by outside sources that tell me what to think.

The only type of philosophy I was exposed to in my formal education was Modern Philosophy (Derrida, Sartre, Wittgenstein) which was dense and complicated. If Plato was the patriarch of philosophers, I expected him to be the most complicated of all. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the first chapter of Plato’s Republic because it was so clear. I found myself as the silent third member of an interesting discussion that was taking place between a man named Socrates and his various friends and neighbours and through the discussion you start to feel a warmth toward Socrates himself like a benevolent yet cheeky uncle at a family party.

The first book begins with Socrates visiting a religious festival and getting caught up in one of these discussions about old age, what justice is and whether or not justice is defined by the common argument that “might makes right”. Unlike modern debate formats, these discussions felt more human and natural because they was so unstructured; the characters went on tangents and got emotionally and intellectually distracted. There are even some new insults that I learned along the way.

PART I. Is there anything good about old age?

Socrates encounters a man named Cephalus who says that because he is older, he can’t make as many trips out to see him. This leads to a discussion about how Cephalus thinks that old age is actually quite good because as he grows older, his pleasures connected with the body decrease whereas pleasures associated with the mind increase such as the pleasure in good conversation. Cephalus believes that old age is good because he has fewer masters of the flesh such as lust and hunger, as the impulse reduces so much in an aged body.

I found Cephalus’ argument ironic because he began the whole conversation talking about how his body’s weakness restricted him from taking long trips to visit his friends! Old age may release a person from bodily lusts but it enslaves him to other weaknesses that are not only physical but also mental (in the case of dementias for example). Socrates argues that Cephalus is content in old age because he is rich and wealth can purchase that power of youth that is lost in old age, as wealth can purchase servants and nurses. He proposes that Cephalus undervalues the impact that money has on his ability to enjoy old age because he has inherited his wealth rather than earned it.

PART II. Does money make you more moral?

“The possession of money contributes a great deal to not cheating or lying” (Plato’s Republic Book I, 331b)

Cephalus reflects that one of the problems with old age is that people start to consider on how their souls will be judged in the afterlife; a lifetime of debauchery, dishonesty and vice can lead to golden years that are full of consternation. In this way, Cephalus considers the moral benefits of money to protect a person from the necessity of crime. He concludes that the very rich can lead more honest lives because their material necessities are satisfied. I actually laughed out loud when I read this. The richest people in the world are some of the most debaucherous, vicious and dishonest people who live and this is not a new trend but a very old one. Cephalus erroneously believes that it is material deprivation that causes us to sin when the root is far more sinister and it is only amplified by material power and wealth. Socrates response was that Cephalus’ idea of being a just person was all about giving back what one owed and not stealing, which is incomplete.

PART III. Friends and the Restriction of Rights

“[justice] gives benefits and harms to friends and enemies” (332d)

Socrates considers whether justice is only about giving people back what they’re owed. He tests the idea by asking Cephalus if we should give someone back a weapon we borrowed from them if that person is not in his right mind. The key word I noted was friend. In the conversation it is stated that justice is when you help your friends and harm your enemies. But I was very interested by the idea of friendship and justice. Only a friend has the right to decide whether or not you can be deprived of your right. A friend is someone who wishes you well and must have proved that disposition to you somehow. Justice and friendship are separate things in my opinion. You owe justice to everyone but friendship to a select few whom you care about. It is a right of this intimate relationship to have the power to deny your friends their rights because a friend by definition will have your interest in mind. Enemies and strangers alike cannot be trusted with such a privilege. When the state restricts our rights, it must have proven a benevolent disposition toward its citizens first.

PART IV. The Utility of Justice

The conversation asks when justice is useful. Medicine is useful when you’re sick and a cobbler when you need shoes but what is the use of justice in peacetime? Cephalus, who is ever concerned with money, argues that justice is useful to guard money when it is not being used, in other words, when money is useless. It is argued the justice is useful for “contracts”. This made me think that it is only in societies that have a concept of the future that justice can be invented and prosper because only such societies can consider the value of resources even when they are not actively needed and justice is the system put in place to protect them. Plato also points out an interesting paradox of competence: the one who is most competent at guarding money is the best at stealing it (bankers!) and the one who is most competent at enforcing justice is also the best at conducting injustice.

PART V. On Harming Your Enemy

A character named Polemachus enters the discussion and they discuss whether we ought to harm our enemies. This seems paradoxical because we may even define an enemy as someone we are justified in harming. I remember that this was written long before Jesus Christ said such a thing as “love your enemies” but I can see how this discussion prefigures an inkling of that idea by moving toward a better idea of the word love.

The argument presented by Socrates, that horses become worse after they have been harmed, sounded incomplete to me because animals are certainly trained by harming; a horse runs when it is whipped. This is where I realise the paucity in vocabulary impoverishes this discussion because harm and punishment ought not to be conflated. The threat of violence as punishment works very well as a deterrence to unjust behaviour, especially for those who are not reasonable enough to understand why they ought not to engage in behaviour life theft or murder.

Socrates argues that justice is a human virtue and when human beings are harmed they become worse so they become more unjust. But the project of improving people and protecting the innocent is not one and the same. Protecting the innocent even at the cost of the improvement of the enemy, is a worthy endeavour.

An unjust person who harms others will not become more just if his behaviours are rewarded with good treatment. To treat him “justly” is to harm him in some way that he feels pain, in other words, to punish him. In fact to not punish him in some way that inflicts pain would be more unjust treatment and would make him more unjust a person. Punishment is not always harm and gentle treatment can be harmful when it is unjustly delivered.

PART VI. The Advantage of the Stronger

“Now listen” [says Thrasymachus] “I say that the just is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger” (338c)

The word stronger is translated from the greek kreitton which doesn’t just indicate physical strength but covers many kinds of superiority such as intelligence and excellence. This is the core of Book I where one considers, “does might make right?”

Practically, Thrasymarcus’ argument seems sound: those with the most power and strength have the ability to enforce their ideas of justice onto everyone else because they can compel obedience. Thrasymachus takes it a step further than this by arguing that the stronger don’t merely define and enforce justice, but that justice to them is whatever is advantageous to themselves. He also argues that the unjust man has advantages over the just man because given the opportunity, the unjust man will take more than is his fair share whereas the just man will not. How does Socrates respond?

First, Socrates says that because all men are fallible, it follows that at least sometimes, the stronger may make decisions that are disadvantageous to themselves. Thrasymachus makes an incisive rebuttal by saying that we ought not to define a vocation by the instances of its errors. A cobbler is not a cobbler when he makes a shoe badly so a strong ruler is not a ruler when he is making errors in judgement while ruling.

Second, Socrates says that each craftsman’s virtue or primary motive is not his own advantage but rather the pursuit of excellence in his own craft. Though the craftsman must find some advantage to himself in his vocation (the physician does not work for free) his advantage ought not contradict the quality of his craft. If the stronger rule society as their vocation, the extent to which their “advantage” corrupts their idea of justice, they are no longer excellent in their craft and have done an injustice to themselves by corrupting the virtue of their vocation. When the ruler is no longer true to his virtue as a ruler (which is to deliver justice) even if he gains some material advantage, he has done himself an injustice and degraded himself.

“justice is the virtue of the soul, and injustice is its vice” (335e, Plato’s Republic, Book I)

Next week, I will be back with a summary and thoughts on Book II of Plato’s Republic.

What you do with your free time when you are a mother is far more significant than what you do with your free time when you are childless. When you have small children, there is no more endless evening or in-between time to read or work on a project; if you have an hour and a half free in the afternoon, that might be all the time you have in the day to do something other than your responsibilities. Looking after small children is sacrificial; however, in this way it also helps you as a parent to realise what truly matters to you. Friends you don’t truly connect with drift away, nonsense has less space to breathe, and you don’t take on projects unless you truly believe in their value and importance either for yourself or for your children.

Even as I write this essay, I am sitting at my desk at 6:00 am. I still have about an hour before my children wake up and then I will be “on duty” until they take a nap. This means even this essay, dear readers, was very important for me to write and I found immense value in it. You’re not merely getting an hour of my life, but an hour that was more precious for its rarity.

This is the context for explaining why, in the world of AI and ipad art, did I take on the burden of learning how to draw with pencil and paper? Why did I learn to painstakingly make anatomically correct water colour illustrations of puffins? The first half of the answer is wrath, and the other half is a love for children.

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This is because to speak about beauty in the particular indicts people’s “taste” and how sophisticated they think they are for having absorbed what they deem to be the correct aesthetic opinions. Of course the modernist aesthetic opinion is that nothing is ugly and therefore nothing can be beautiful, or worse, the modernist believes that artwork that respects the idea it is representing with some degree of accuracy is “boring” and that artwork featuring actual ugliness is superior. This is not merely an indictment of taste but also morality; if beauty calls us to goodness, and leads to hope, ugliness calls us to anger and hatred and leads us to despair.

Many people lament that our world today is full of ugliness everywhere we look, but it is only when we call something ugly that we can use the word “beauty” meaningfully.

The place where beauty matters the most is in the world of a child, because it is here that taste is formed and tied to nostalgia. There are many things we adore simply because they were exposed to us in the happy and innocent era of childhood. “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” published by Eric Carle in 1969 is one such example of a book that is often loved by people but only due to its association with childhood. When we examine the artwork with fresh eyes, we find that it is not merely ugly, but it is actually in insult to God’s design of the world.

When I recently tweeted about this I got hundreds of replies and comments that went over the top in insulting me personally and misconstruing my arguments. People were very emotionally charged by the suggestion that children’s literary media ought to have standards and explaining why those standards aren’t met in Carle’s illustrations.

But I also took the counterarguments I read seriously and realized that we lack a language to talk about beauty in the particular. People are forced into vague emotional language when talking about art because modern art education has abandoned people with nothing but abstraction and lies. I have done some of the work here to provide some language by which we may judge art and illustration objectively. I hope that this will help you too.

I am a traditionally trained illustrator and I have spent several years learning the art of composition, form, style and design.

In this essay I explore the questions: is it possible to objectively judge the beauty of an illustration? What is the importance of realism in artwork and to what extent can it be neglected when producing art especially for children? What is the history of the change in aesthetics from serious illustration that respects the rules of design to illustration that looks like a young child drew it? How do the aesthetics of children’s media affect the lives of children in serious ways?

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One of the most common ways that these questions are answered by materialists and atheists is simply this: we ought to do that which maximises our pleasure and minimises our pain. This way of thinking reduces human beings to mere animals running from the trap and toward the cheese, and reduces morality to operant conditioning: we do that which is right because there is a reward at the end of it called pleasure and define right by that which gives us pleasure, and we avoid that which is wrong because wrong is defined by something that gives us pain. This way of thinking about morality is called “hedonism”.

Many claim to reject hedonism but don’t have anything sufficient to replace it with when they’re truly interrogated about virtue and morality. Some replace it with the age old “God-said-so” but for the intellectually curious, that is insufficient. This essay is an attempt to go provide the way of thinking about morality that better explains the concept than hedonism or authoritarian religiosity.

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The sea calls to the gamine feminine spirit that wishes to be free of the chains of civilization in a way distinct from the masculine hermit because there is no hardship for a mermaid as there is for the hermit. The mermaid lives as effortlessly in the sea as a wave. The sea is a mythological symbol of the unconscious, with the dark side of the moon, the mysteries of the psyche, and women even as children understand they are a part of this mystery, to be experienced rather than understood. The hermit contends with nature whereas the mermaid subsumed as a part of it. To frolic in the moonlit waves and spend all their days doing nothing but having cheerful fun in the sea is the greatest expression of girlhood in mythology that there ever was. And that is what makes the Mermaid so dangerous to the little girl (and the woman she then neglects to become).

In his infinite genius, Hans Christian Andersen wrote a story particularly addressing the drama of the little girl in his fairy tale with the purpose of reminding her that however lovely it is to be a mermaid in her imagination, there is nothing so valuable as being a human girl because a human girl has an immortal soul.

Far out in the wide sea,—where the water is blue as the loveliest cornflower, and clear as the purest crystal, where it is so deep that very, very many church-towers must be heaped one upon another in order to reach from the lowest depth to the surface above,—dwell the Mer-people.

This is how Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale begins about the little mermaid princess who lived at the bottom of the ocean and fell in love with a human prince she rescues from a ship-wreck. When the cartoon film adaptation of the Little Mermaid came out in 1989, it was a huge success because of its spectacular music, hilarious characters, and of course Ariel’s adorable American sweetheart charm.

The film often got criticised later on by feminists because Ariel gave up her whole family, her voice and her mermaid tail in order to become a human being and be with Prince Erik. I found this criticism to be ridiculous because people make huge sacrifices all the time for love! But then I read Andersen’s original story…and it blew me away. I had tears in my eyes by the final paragraphs of the story. I was so shocked at how much more depth and beauty the original story had that the 1989 film never even touched. Although I still love Disney’s Little Mermaid, compared to the original story, it feels like nothing more than a silly little forgettable romcom.

If you’ve never read The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, here is the link to the free pdf online. It will take you about an hour to read the whole thing; I read it with my two little toddlers and they were surprisingly captivated by it.

My first exposure to the story of the Little Mermaid was not Disney but rather an abridged adaptation of Andersen published by Honey Bear Books. When I was a child, we were quite poor living in Canada, and my mom got us books from the dollar store and it was from this treasure trove that I discovered this version of the Little Mermaid which still holds a special place in my heart because of how many times I read it at age seven.

This version’s ending doesn’t show The Little Mermaid getting married to the Prince in the end, but rather, she is rescued from death by some flying spirits that take her away. I was so confused about how I felt about the ending. It wasn’t tied up in a neat little bow at the end like Snow White or Cinderella where the princess marries the prince and they ride off into the sunset. Disney’s 1989 version certainly forced this ending onto Andersen’s tale, and this is illustrative of one of Hayao Miyazaki’s criticisms of Disney, that it is uncomfortable with darkness and doesn’t know what to do with it. But Darkness has a place in children’s stories, and I have written about this here.

If the stories we tell our children try to pretend that darkness doesn’t exist, then darkness has a strange way of turning up in their lives in a far more attractive and enthralling way than it would if we showed it the respect it was due in the first place.

It would take me twenty-three years, reading Homer and a conversion to Catholicism for me to finally understand the ending of Andersen’s story. So that’s what this essay is about.

The Little Mermaid, despite being a heavy story, has a lot to offer to young children and especially to young girls that I think a modern leftist ideological world neglects us from understanding. This essay will help you refresh your heart and mind to see the true value in this story for yourself and for your children.

Here are the headings of the essay you can look forward to:

• Teenage Rebellion vs Rite of Passage

• Immortality & Heaven

• The Sea Witch, Trans-humanism and the danger of witchcraft

• Kiss vs Marriage as the Proof of Love

• Deathless Death

Teenage Rebellion vs Rite of Passage

The first thing that struck me about Andersen’s story was the beauty of the writing. I believe that abridged classics deprive children of the beauty of the writing of original authors of such stories. The land of the mer-people is described with such detail and each detail is a magical one that refers to nothing we could have seen in reality. Everything blooms and glitters at once in the mind’s eye when we read Andersen’s descriptions of this magical world that does not exist. This stimulation of the imagination—the images of the mind—are precisely the beauty of storytelling that inspires other works of art of never before seen worlds.

Here is a little excerpt:

The sand that formed the soil of the garden was of a bright blue colour, something like flames of sulphur; and a strangely beautiful blue was spread over the whole, so that one might have fancied oneself raised very high in the air, with the sky at once above and below, certainly not at the bottom of the sea. When the waters were quite still, the sun might be seen looking like a purple flower, out of whose cup streamed forth the light of the world.

In the story, though the Mer-King is a widow, he has a mother who helps to look after his six daughters. The Little Mermaid is never given a name except that she is The Little Mermaid. The grandmother is shown to be a decent person who loves and cares for her princess grand-daughters.

Similar to the film adaptation, the Little Mermaid in the story too has a strange fascination with a human world and keeps a statue of a human boy in her garden. But unlike the film, her finally going to the surface is not a teenage transgression but rather a rite of passage. In the story, Mermaids come of age at fifteen years and after this, they are permitted to go to the surface and see the world of the land-walkers with their own eyes. In contrast, Ariel is portrayed as a minor child who transgresses against her father to see the human world. This is significant because in the movie then, a huge part of the conflict comes from Ariel disobeying her father.

Reading Andersen, the reader must wait just like the Little Mermaid does for her turn to see the world. The suspense builds with each of the older sisters sequentially coming of age and reporting back what they saw of the world. This builds a crescendo of anticipation toward the moment when the Little Mermaid can finally ascend to the surface herself.

When the Little Mermaid finally reaches her fifteenth birthday, she goes up to the surface to find a ship with a party on it, celebrating the birthday of a Prince with fireworks. For a mermaid to see fireworks would be one magnificent sight because nothing even close to this must exist in the under-water world. I liked the detail also that the Little Mermaid and the Prince share a birthday.

“However, she soon raised her little head again, and then it seemed as if all the stars were falling 10 down upon her. Such a fiery shower she had never even seen before, never had she heard that men possessed such wonderful powers. Large suns revolved around her, bright fishes swam in the air, and everything was reflected perfectly on the clear surface of the sea.”

This description by Andersen is so beautiful and powerful because it imagines how a mermaid, who had spent all her life in the ocean, might perceive and describe fireworks for the first time in her life.

Immortality & Heaven

It is quite interesting to see how each of the other sisters responds to the human world because it helps to highlight the strangeness of the Littlest Mermaid’s personality. The reader and the child both question where this strangeness in the Little Mermaid comes from; why is she so fascinated with the human world? In the film, the song “Part of Your World” the song insists that Ariel’s fascination might just be because the human world is forbidden. However in Andersen’s story, the Little Mermaid can see the human world as often as she wants to when she comes of age; her fascination is more profound, and it is similar to the yearning of Achilles and Faust: Immortality.

The Little Mermaid’s grandmother explains to her:

“We live to the age of three hundred years, but when we die, we become foam on the sea, and are not allowed even to share a grave among those that are dear to us. We have no immortal souls, we can never live again, and are like the grass which, when once cut down, is withered for ever. Human beings, on the contrary, have souls that continue to live when their bodies become dust, and as we rise out of the water to admire the abode of man, they ascend to glorious unknown dwellings in the skies which we are not permitted to see”

This is the heart of Andersen’s story. The Little Mermaid wishes to be human to be with the Prince, but far more than that, she yearns for an immortal soul so that she can one day go to heaven and evade death all together. Hans Christian Andersen was a Christian writer and as such, believed this truth sincerely. The Little Mermaid wanted eternal life which is offered only to human beings. The little girl who yearns to be a mermaid will, upon reading this detail, realize the value of her own soul even though she doesn’t have the chance to lead the mystical, wonderful adventures of the mermaid. Hans Christian Andersen reveals to us the gift of being human.

Even Achilles, for all his conquests, victories and virtues, ends up in the Odyssey as just a pathetic shade in Hades. It is not until Jesus Christ’s resurrection that the gates of heaven are opened and eternal life is possible for mortal human beings made in God’s image.

This element of the story was left out entirely from the Disney movie and this is what made the movie so much less profound and meaningful. Ariel in the movie only wanted to be with Prince Eric whereas Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid wanted something far more important…and out of reach. She was chasing not just a silly little romance, but eternal life. In our own human sacrament of marriage, when we do it without God at the centre of it, we are liable to fail and divorce, ending the romance in heartbreak and misery. But when God is at the centre of the love story, you have a good chance of taking each other to heaven; not merely to love, but to love forever. Isn’t that what every Vampire Romance is truly yearning for?

What does it mean to be human? The Sea Witch and Trans-humanism

“He whom I love more than my father and my mother, with whom my thoughts are constantly occupied, and to whom I would so willingly trust the happiness of my life! All! all, will I risk to win him—and an immortal soul! Whilst my sisters are still dancing in the palace, I will go to the enchantress whom I have hitherto feared so much, but who is, nevertheless, the only person who can advise and help me” said the Little Mermaid.

The Sea Witch is a transhumanist because she is a materialist. This is far less obvious in the movie than it is in the original story. In the movie, Ursula the Sea Witch believes that giving Ariel legs will make her human, and that only a mermaid tail separates the little nymph from being fully human. Based on the plot of the film, that is reasonable to presume. However, Andersen’s story reveals to us that there is a fundamental difference between mermaids and humans in their metaphysical essence itself because mermaids die like sea-grass that gets subsumed into the ocean, whereas humans have souls that can ascend to heaven.

The Sea Witch in the original Little Mermaid promises to her that if she marries a human prince, she can not only keep her legs, but she will also get a human soul because when they become one-flesh in the marriage ceremony, his soul will be shared with her. It was a shocking realization to see that the Disney movie had swapped the sacrament of marriage for a mere kiss. Yes, kisses are magical, but I think that this kind of messaging in media is meant to undercut the power of the sacrament of marriage itself. It makes sense in 1989 for them to do this at the height of Divorce Capital USA.

Just like how a mermaid cannot become human just by getting legs, a man cannot become a woman just by getting breasts appended onto his chest. There is an essential aspect of our being that cannot be altered. The Sea Witch is evil precisely because she tells the mermaid she can change her essence with a magic potion paid for by her tongue being cut out.

The Sea Witch does blood magic to make the potion for The Little Mermaid that turns her human, pouring a little of her own blood into the mixture. This is eery and interesting because blood magic is also used by actual satanists and witchcraft rituals in real life. Blood is powerful. It’s interesting that in Christianity it was Jesus’s perfect blood that made the most powerful sacrifice in human history and rendered all the rest of the sacrifices of mankind needless and powerless.

This story then is also a cautionary tale against witchcraft. However much it promises, it is always deceptive because it will never give you long-lasting happiness, only short-term bliss.

Kiss vs Marriage as the Proof of Love

The Prince finds the dumb Little Mermaid and thinks she is just a beautiful girl who looks vaguely like the one he remembers saving him from the ship-wreck. She lives with him as a consort or mistress, always by his side and worshipping him like an idol. He adores her and cares for her and even kisses her…but he does not make her his wife.

The movie the Little Mermaid tells little girls that the ultimate proof of True Love is a kiss. Whereas Andersen’s tail tells girls that a man might want to kiss a woman all the time and still he does not truly love her until he binds himself to her in the sacrament of marriage. This is a message that very few girls are given today and this is also what makes his fairy tale ring truer than the watered down and modernized Disney adaptation.

In Andersen’s tail, the Little Mermaid makes a similar judgement flaw that Juliet does in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and that many modern young lovers do: she worships a human being. If she had not worshipped the Prince, she could have judged him better and paid attention to his treatment of her. When the Prince ultimately marries another Princess instead of The Little Mermaid, she is utterly heartbroken.

Deathless Death

In the 1989 film, the Princess that the Prince is about to marry instead of Ariel is the Sea-Witch in disguise. This offers a convenient way for Ariel to win in the end by rescuing the Prince. However, in the original story by Andersen, things are more complicated because the Princess is describes to be a good person, and a beautiful human girl that the Prince genuinely falls in love with. There is no magic spell to assuage The Little Mermaid’s feelings. Her heartbreak is real and it is okay to share this moment of grief and frustration with children.

Modern storytelling wishes to protect children from all negative emotion and real pain but this does them a disservice; offer children flat stories and they will look for depth elsewhere, and those might not be salubrious places with good morals and virtues to direct that depth.

The Little Mermaid, because she has not married the Prince, is doomed to become sea-foam by sunrise as a part of the curse she signed up for with the Sea Witch. At the last minute, the Little Mermaid’s six sisters arrive, all with shorn heads as they reveal they exchanged their beautiful mermaid hair with the Sea Witch to buy an enchanted dagger from her so that the Little Mermaid might kill the Prince and become a mermaid again.

Because the Little Mermaid loves the Prince so much, and with a pure heart, she cannot bear to harm him or his bride. She overcomes her feelings of jealousy and fear and replaces them with perfect love. As a reward then, rather than becoming sea-foam, she is rescued by angels who take her up to the sky. They tell her that she can spend the rest of the life of the world looking after the little children in the world with them, like a guardian angel, and then one day she will be allowed to go to heaven with all the human souls.

Reading this ending brought a tear to my eye because it was so beautiful.

Despite the Little Mermaid folly in loving foolishly, trusting a sea-witch with witchcraft to change her body in unnatural ways, she was rewarded for loving with a good and pure heart. Though she would never be human, her wish for immortality was granted in a way she never expected.

Conclusion

The ending of the Little Mermaid is not easy or uncomplicated as Disney’s 1989 version makes it out to be. The Little Mermaid faces consequences for her actions. She doesn’t get all her mistakes erased by her father; she doesn’t magically get everything she wished for just because. But she does get a happy ending in a way that she didn’t expect to. The Little Mermaid teaches girls the values of their human souls, and the immortality that is available to them. It teaches girls not to change themselves completely to attempt to win the love of a man they idolize. It teaches them to not trust witchcraft to solve their problems, as it will likely just create more. And finally, it teaches little girls that one good deed, one moment of courage and true love, can make all the difference in the end.

Thank you for reading!

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Crafts on their own can be excellent ways to teach fine-motor skills to young children and as a form of art, they are an amazing way to teach children how objects can be repurposed in more than one way. A toilet roll can be glued to another one and it suddenly turns into binoculars. And who can forget the magic of unfolding a piece of white paper with its mystical little cuts, to reveal a beautiful paper snowflake! However the creativity of these crafts is often that of the teacher/parent rather than the child. What’s more, these crafts often substitute and supplant a real art education for children which has entirely different methods, benefits and ends.

When we read about the history of artists such as Bernini and Michelangelo, we learn that in Europe in the middle ages and the renaissance, art was not an idle pass-time for wealthy people, but rather a real mechanical skill that people took seriously even when they were children. Children are far more capable than the modern education system gives them credit for because the modern education system has devolved so much into baby-sitting rather than teaching.

Modern art education has no objective standards and anything a child scribbles together on a piece of paper has to be applauded like it is the exalted work of a prophet, but this deprives the child of a proper education. Just as a child would be lovingly corrected in their writing and grammar so that they can express themselves beautifully in the written word, so too must a child be corrected in their artwork. So many people also grow up thinking they can’t draw when they ever never taught the basics in the first place! Imagine how much more beauty we would have in the world if each person were given the ability to express themselves in the language of fine-art properly.

The first step to learning real art is to learn to see properly. This means learning to perceive the colours, shapes, forms, and light of the real world in such a way that we really pay attention to how they look. The best and most important steps to learning how to create and appreciate real art is to draw from life.

There are three main goals while teaching fine art. In this essay I include strategies that can be employed to teach each one. These skills, although outlined for children, can also be applied to adults who wish to improve their own fine art skills if they were never taught before and wish to learn! I have included references, books, materials, activities and much more in this essay. As a self taught artist who studied fine art for two years myself, I understand the value of being able to appreciate and create a beautiful image by hand.

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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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