To the Crabmobile!

We blog writers all, at some time (or times) hit fallow spells when we write little for a greater or shorter length of time. I'm in one of them, recently. And we all have our excuses (as Jim Putnam says: “excuses are like elbows: everyone has a couple”).

Nobody, however, but nobody, worries about it more, or has more genuinely watertight reason, than Dr C: a man of deep morals, developed conscience, and commitment to his patients – especially those who are children. There are few bloggers for whom I feel the admiration, respect and affection which I have developed over the years for Dr C ... nor from whom I so vehemently refuse remorseful apologies for silence – which is always down to overwork on behalf of others.

In Dr C's coastal community, crabbing is an important component of local industry. One of the stratagems which he uses to put his youngest patients at ease is to ask them to make  drawings of crabs – some of which delightful results he posts on his blog. He also organises the wonderful annual Big Crab Contest for pupils at a local school.

All of which is background to a postal packet which I received this week. Inside was the wonderful crab mobile shown in the photograph here, accompanied by no explanation apart from a sheet from a yellow legal pad carrying (so typical of Dr C) ... an apology for silence.

I suspect that its workmanship may originate in that same local school as the Big Crab Contest. Whether it does or not, I love and treasure it; it has, as you can see, pride of place where it can be found by the morning sun.

Surreal moment of the week

From a rural bus somewhere near Oban, rounding a corner in a winding country road, I see a boy and a girl of primary school age enthusiastically bouncing on a trampoline in a cottage garden.

Between them, also on the trampoline but looking far less enthusiastic as she concentrates on keeping her footing, is ... a sheep.

Crabs, crabs, crabs!

I'm operating out of a haversack at the moment, on a Scottish beinn with only a cellphone to work with, but couldn't let a week go by before flagging up ... [drumroll] ... the  results of the Fifth Annual Crab Competition!

So...

You'll find them here

What is lost and gained

Laid up for more than two weeks with an exasperating virus that's left me with no physical energy and fragmented concentration span, I'm looking through some very old negatives.

I don't know who the kiddy on the left is, but from the context I can be certain that she lived in northern France in the early spring of 1974 ... so must be in her forties now. It's not a memorable photograph, but put that aside for the moment. I probably took it as a subconscious or even conscious background pursuance of the module on “The young individual and society”, for which I would at that time have been preparing my final paper.

Looking at this picture I am struck by the fact that I would, today, be constrained in taking a photograph of a child (particularly a girl child) in a place where I was an itinerant stranger.

Those were, in some ways, more innocent times ... though also times of greater denial.

I was, at the time, considering a career as a child social worker ... a career for which I was probably profoundly unsuited. Looking back, had I embarked on that career I would have discovered that a dark veil hid many childhoods from the sort of sunny light which had imbued my own – and I'm glad that it has been at least partially drawn aside in the decades since, even if comparatively rare “stranger danger” gets unrealistically disproportionate attention compared to the far more prevalent family abuse.

Since then, I have been married to one courageous abuse survivor and have now spent more than twenty years with a partner working in exactly that career path which I didn't take. There have been exposed scandals from Magdalen Laundries and Catholic abuse cases through care home abuse rings to the Jimmy Saville furoré. I would not for one moment ask that the clock be turned back.

And yet ... looking at this photograph I do also, simultaneously, feel sad that I probably wouldn't, today, take it. It's not a particularly good picture in itself; but the fact of its possibility feels important.

Conversation overheard

In a book shop, two boys around eleven or twelve years old. The first suddenly grabs his friend's arm in excitement.

First boy: “Oh, WOW , look – Charles Dickens!”

The second boy says nothing, but looks bewildered.

First boy: “He writes brilliant TV history dramas … and now, look, they've made books out of them!”

A precious resource

I have started to attempt a post in response to Sandy Hook, several times.

There's a lot I'd like to say, but somehow it always peters out ... there's too much I'd need to say, once I start. Jim Putnam, of Let's try again blog, said recently in a private email “Everything I could say pales against what has been done and said...” and perhaps that's it.

Dr C has made a better stab at it, here, than most.

Easy Ryder

I've always liked and admired SophieRyder's work – both artistically and polemically (she is one of the few who successfully pull off that combination without selling one of them short).

And children are usually intrigued by her playfully tactile incorporation of recognisable industrial detritus into organic forms (for instance, her frequent use of chain to represent spinal structure).

Seeing this child (click for a larger view) nestle so happily and naturally into The minotaur and the hare, though, is a new thing to me – seeming to simultaneously enrich, clarify and validate Ryder's vision.

Conversation overheard

One little boy (about six or seven years old), who has obviously been in the hotel for at least one previous breakfast, instructing another (about five or six) in the use of a conveyor belt toaster:

“You need two knives and two plates, and your bread.
“Put the bread on the chain thing at the top.
“Then you wait for ages while it winds the bread through.
“But then it's not cooked so you put it back on top.
“Then you wait forever again for it to come out.
“But then it's burned.
“So use one knife to scrape it off onto one of the plates.
“That makes a mess, so you move the toast onto the other plate.
“Leave the messy plate and knife behind, when nobody's looking.”

Today

Hurrah! The crabs are back for another year!

The winning entries in the fourth annual Big Crab Contest are finally available to view.

Get on over there, peoples: and don't forget to leave comments for the young artists of Mrs D's class to let them know that you were there and enjoying their efforts.

Grieve for the dead, but remember the living

Whenever there is news coverage of a mass shooting such as Hungerford, Dunblane, Beslan, Columbine or, yesterday and today, the Utøya summer camp, I am struck by the way that everything focuses on number of deaths.

For those who were killed, it was dreadful – in the literal sense of that too easily used word. I cannot begin to imagine the terror they experienced. For those close to them it continues to be dreadful and will stay so for the rest of their lives.

But my thoughts go to those who are described as "lucky to be alive" – the survivors.

By what earthly measure does anyone imagine them to be "lucky"? Those who survive will have to live their lives with memory of that same terror which, for their dead peers, ended. And not just the terror either; there is survivor guilt. One survivor of Utøya spoke of being trapped in a toilet cubicle while one a boy was shot outside the door. Another of playing dead and feeling the heat of the barrel close to his face; yet another of watching class mates who had tried the same ploy being shot in the head. And on, and on... They will be traumatised for life. Use of the word "lucky" is disgustingly facile.

And I'm not forgetting that there are plenty of places where this sort of thing is so commonplace that it's never reported. What happens on such occasions is not a change in the world; simply that a brutal reality which is usually elsewhere has come to a venue near me.

Be careful what you wish for

When I was very small, my father used to sing (at my own urgently repeated request) a little one stanza song when we were playing out in the open air. I render it here with an attempt to recapture the particular cadence of his delivery.

I'm a lit-tle prair-ie flow'r
Grow-ing wilder hour by hour.
No-one tries to cultivate me
So I'm as wild as wild can be!

This memory lies dormant for weeks, months, years at a time, then springs to front of stage for no obvious particular reason to dance in my conscious mind for a day or two before returning to the wings. Inconsequential though it may be, it embodies for me something very personally precious about my father, and his relationship with me. A conversation with my brother, a couple of days ago, somehow brought it out for a spin in the light and it is sparkling still at the edge of my day to day thoughts, son on the spur of the moment I just did a search for it.

There are several video clips and MP3 files in the Google listing. I stuck to text hits, though, and the first I found was a partial reference within a longer anecdote. There was a small discrepancy (shown here in red):

I'm a little prairie flower!
Growing wilder by the hour!

Then there is this version, from Mudcat, which provides a whole song of which mine is the first stanza. Again, there are minor differences:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder every hour;
Nobody cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as wild can be.

The International Lions also give a whole song but shorter than and only partially resembling as Mudcat's. Subtitling it I'm a little lion cub, add a line repetition and a wordless twirl to the end of each stanza:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder every hour;
Nobody cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as wild can be.
I'm as wild as wild can be,
Tu-ra-lu-ra, Tu-ra-le.

Wikipedia mentions the song only under its entry for Lesley Sarony, without attributing it to him, although there are a number of web pages which do make this attribution.

Courtesy of Google Books I find that The Rotarian, vol.13 #3 (September 1918) , gives exactly the same version as Mudcat but the previous month's issue (vol.13 #2, August 1918) adds the last line repeat (though not the wordless twirl) of the Lion's version. Exactly forty years later (vol.93 #3, September 1958), however, a couple of years after my father was singing it to me, has it as:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder by the hour;
No one cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as I can be.

At this point, I realised that precious memory, whether accurate or flawed, was beginning to blur at the edges. So, I stopped looking. There can be such a thing as too much information, and there can be occasional limits to John's breezy (KJV 8:32) assertion that “the truth shall make you free”.

Last waltz

Last night (or, more accurately, since it started just after midnight, this morning) we took three boys to see the last Harry Potter film. The oldest, now fifteen, went with me to see the first almost ten years ago, on his sixth birthday. That started a tradition which first his cousin, then his brother (now eleven), finally my partner, joined at intervals of a couple of years or so.

We have, in the past, gone to the earliest convenient showing. This time, however, as with the last book, it seemed important to take the last opportunity to experience a collective event ... so, school and work this morning not withstanding, there we were at CineWorld for the midnight première.

The boys, I'm glad to say, thought it was “definitely the best” in the series. Me, though of course I didn't say so (who wants to be the one who spoils the fun?), I am less sure.

Though the books come emphatically first for me, I have always regarded the films as an excellent separate stream which expands their world. This one, based on the second half of the seventh book, though very good in its own right, seemed to me the least of the franchise as a whole.

I can't, at the moment, be sure why that is. I probably won't really be able to start sorting out an answer to that until we have (as we intend to) seen it again on our own. It's possible that the very fact that I find Deathly hallows the best book in an always superb set (I've read it six times now) has, in my own mind, set an impossibly high bar for the film. Or perhaps wearing 3D spectacles (not my own preference; I'd prefer to watch the 2D version; but 3D was part of the experience for the three boys, who were the priority here) took the edge off it for me.

Or, perhaps I was disappointed to see two key moral foci from the book either skimmed over (the debate over what to do with the elder wand) or simply not included at all (Harry's gratuitous torture of Amycus Carrow, in a fit of thoroughly personal rage). But really, this is a perennial matter of judgment. A film maker cannot possibly include more than a small fraction of the content from any novel, never mind one as long and full as Deathly hallows. I could probably find similar omissions from every one of the films, if I was in the wrong mood.

Or perhaps I really, subconsciously, felt that the show was over already, with the final book, and the film was always on a losing streak because it came later and I unwittingly condemned it to anticlimax?

Or ... uncomfortable thought ... perhaps I'm just too old, these days, to cope with watching films which debouch me onto Capel Street in search of a five seat taxi at half past two in the morning.

One way and another, the evidence seems to suggest that I'm probably just a grumpy old sod, and the film deserves a second chance. So, some time in the next couple of weeks or so, I'll go to an afternoon 2D screening and settle down to watch it properly.

---

• J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the deathly hallows. London, 2007, London: Bloomsbury. 9780747591054

• David Yates (dir), Harry Potter and the deathly hallows: part 2. 2011, London: Heyday films.

Breaking up is hard to do

Different education systems in different liberal democracies tackle common problems in different ways. Broadly speaking, across the range of common objectives, they achieve comparable levels of success. If one system makes gains in a given area which is not managed by another, that is usually balanced by shortfall in another. I'm not inclined to believe that any one system is, overall, "better" or "worse" than another.

I am, however, inclined to believe that common shifts in philosophical bases for education systems across the liberal democracies can make a difference to long term educational drifts ... and have done so. Some of those drifts are (to my own mind, at least) good; some are unfortunate; some may be neutral; some may be mixed. Among those which are, in my own personal opinion, retrograde is the increasing trend towards earlier and earlier specialisation.

Children are natural sponges, programmed by biology to learn. They are also naturally inclined to make and pursue interconnections within that learning. Curiosity is a live and potent force within them, and acknowledges no boundaries. A boundary between specialisms, by interrupting their hot pursuit of a curiosity driven line of thought, damages their enthusiasm for knowledge. (As a new secondary student miserably told me, ten years ago, “last year, maths was real ... like designing an Olympic stadium ... but now it’s just A, B and C filling a bath with a teaspoon while D empties it with an egg-cup and nobody tries to stop him ...”)

Ruairí Quinn, Minister for Education in the republic of Eire, like his opposite numbers elsewhere, is faced with a need to improve literacy and numeracy. This is a real need; the only question is how to meet it. Like many others, his approach is to increase the amount of time focused on this particular need. His strategy of increasing daily teaching time allocations hypothecated to literacy and numeracy closely mirrors, just for example, that which has already been followed across the Irish Sea in the United Kingdom.

I have no disagreement with that, in principle. The problem, for me, lies in the fact that in systems which specialise, increase in time for one specialism inevitably reduces time available for breadth of study overall.

In Eire, post primary education is organised into Junior Certificate (Teastas Sóisearach) subjects, tested by examination (with a couple of exceptions) in the mid teens. Six subjects make up a mandatory core curriculum, additional subjects being selected from a menu of options. Despite many differences of detail, it's a system easily related to, for example, the British GCSE or US Junior High School models.

But here's the thing ... and I'm using Eire only as an example; the systemic principles would apply to most equivalent systems elsewhere. Given a fixed number of school hours per week, the extra time taken from the timetable for teaching discrete literacy and numeracy (roughly totalling between five and ten hours per school week, depending on how you count and calculate) means that one of three things must happen.

1. The time spent on each existing subject can be reduced, to make time for the new literacy and numeracy time.
2. Literacy and numeracy can be taught through integration with the existing subjects.
3. Existing subjects can be dropped to make way for the new literacy and numeracy time.

The first runs immediately into the brick wall of examination requirements. No administrator nor politician dares risk stealing time from an examination subject and perhaps being blamed for subsequent fall in success rates in that subject. It would also raise (amongst parents, voters, and employers) questions of comparability between new graduates from the system and those in the past.

The second would be in immediate opposition to the declared intention of visibly giving additional time "exclusively for the teaching of" basic skills.

And so Mr Quinn has, inevitably, taken the third course: removing subjects. From this coming September intake, secondary students will have their choice of subjects capped at a maximum of eight.

By the time mandatory subjects are allowed for, this means a reduction of between 11% and 33% in the total diversity of a typical student's academic encounter range. For options, once mandatory subjects are counted in, the reduction in real choice clocks in at between 33% and 67%. And, since the number of students estimated to be “experiencing serious [literacy and numeracy] problems” is one in ten, this reduction is being applied to a majority of students who will not gain from the intended benefits. (I do not argue that last point too strongly; I believe that all students, however able and brilliant, would benefit from increased focus on literacy and numeracy competence if it were delivered to them in an appropriate way.)

So what would I suggest as an alternative? Well ... realistically, I have to admit that Mr Quinn is caught between the well known rock and hard place for the reasons above; the harsh environment gives him no choices at all unless he is willing to throw away his career on a gamble. He is, like Eire itself, doing his best in an impossible world and I do not criticise him, nor his country, nor any of the others struggling with similar vicious circles elsewhere in the world. But my answer, from the safety of a seat where I have neither to implement my beliefs nor pay for them, is that numeracy and literacy needs would be far more effectively tackled by integrating the new emphasis into broader study. The chosen approach not only restricts the value of education in general, it undercuts the whole (valuable) intent behind the reform itself.

When I am dictator of the world, I will unify secondary study by abolishing boundaries between subjects. Students will learn through integrated "themes", as they did in primary school, allowing their interest to range (and their minds, and their skills, to grow) across the full gamut of human knowledge – or, at least, across that part of it which can realistically be encompassed by a school's day and resources. Literacy and numeracy will then become part of everything the student does, growing organically in most and nurtured in those who need it.

I will also abolish examinations altogether; but that's another story, and I don't want to frighten the voters who must make me dictator before any of this can happen, so best keep that bit quiet for now...

---

• Irish Times, "Minister orders cap on exam subjects". Saturday, July 8th, 2011.

Hurrah – the crabs are back!

Despite unavoidable absence from their natural habitat¹ on medical priority grounds, the crabs of Easton MD² are back.

The results of the 2011 Big Crab Contest have been announced. Congratulations to all participants on this year's magnificent crop of Pleocyematal artworks

---

1. *addendum, twelve hours later ... just to confound me, a new sighting in natural habitat waters has now been verified.
2. **that's MD Maryland and MD Medicinæ Doctor, both.

What was lost

A week and a half ago I wrote about Room, in which a girl is lost and then found. This book, What was lost by Catherine O'Flynn, is as different as it is possible – but could be described in the same words.

So very much is lost, in this book.

Ten year old Kate Meaney lost her mother ten years ago, and now loses her father. Friendless, she haunts a nearby shopping mall with her father's last present: a book on how to be a detective. Around her are friendly neighbours who have lost their way. Then Kate, too, is lost.

Lisa, deputy manager of a music store in the Mall, who twenty years later finds Kate's toy monkey, has also lost her way – as have most of her staff. She has also lost her brother (literally), and her parents (figuratively).

Kurt, a security guard who spots Kate on the mall's CCTV system, has lost his way and his parents too ... he has also lost the love of his life. Those around him fear that he has lost his mind.

There are other characters; lost, in one way or another, every one of them.

And yet, it's not all gloom and doom. Much is also found. There is hope as well as loss. There is also warm humour. I'm glad to have read it, and will read it again with pleasure.

I'll leave you with a recommendation that you read it too, and with one of my favourite line from the book – it concerns Kate's primary teacher, who is (of course) lost like everyone else:

“Mrs Finnegan, though criminally unsuited to teaching small children, was in fact a very fine mathematician.”

---

• Catherine O'Flynn, What was lost. 2007, Birmingham: Tindal Street. 9780955138416 or 0955138418 (pbk)

Room

Declan Hughes, reviewing Emma Donoghue's Room for the Irish Times, said that "this book will break your heart". Perhaps he's right ... but I think that it will also fill your heart to bursting point with fierce hope for the indomitability of the human spirit.

If you remember John Fowles' novel The collector, start there. If not, think of Natascha Kampusch. Either way, don't get too literally hung up on what is only a point of departure. The unnamed woman in Room is, like both of those women, victim of a kidnap. Like Miranda Grey in The collector, she was taken as a young adult; like Natascha Kampusch, she has survived eight years of captivity in the twelve foot square "Room" of the title; but she is neither or them. She is unnamed because the story is told entirely as interior monologue by her five year old son Jack, born in Room (he capitalises most nouns and uses them as names: Room, Rug, Wardrobe) as a result of repeated rape by her captor. Jack knows her (and refers to her) only as "Ma".

Both characters (Ma and Jack) are astonishingly powerful extended psychological pen portraits. Both are strong, resilient characters – and kept that way by mutual reliance, the depiction of which is a tour de force in itself. I have never known anyone who has been though this exact set of experiences; but I have known mothers in their twenties and their small children, trapped in or recently escaped from abusive relationships, who displayed exactly the same codependence portrayed here. Just from this perfectly realised portrayal, Room will amply reward the time you spend reading it.

In a larger sense it's about courage, devotion, freedom, love, loyalty, psychological toughness, resilience, self reliance, and many other things ... but also about the limits of those things, what lies beyond them, and what they cost.

Then again, it is an exhilarating intellectual journey: an intriguing, non SF example of what Ray Girvan describes as "conceptual breakthrough" fiction – and a new take on Ray's suggestion that such fictions peculiarly suit young protagonists. Jack has never seen the outside world, and believes his twelve foot by twelve foot Room to be the whole universe. The whole book showcases his dawning realisation that there is more reality than he can imagine.

But, before all of that, it is a gripping and beautifully told story.

[many thanks to David P for the recommendation]

---

A couple of (possibly random) connections which may make no sense to anyone else: reading this book sent me back to two personal old favourites. First, a book which is at least superficially very different, The stolen child by Kevin Donohue (no "g", no relation) which I have mentioned previously. Second, Tanita Tikaram's song "World outside your window".

---

• Emma Donoghue, Room. 2010, London: Picador. 9780330519021 or 0330519026 (pbk)
• John Fowles, The collector. 1963, London: Jonathan Cape. [newer edition: 2004, London: Vintage. 0099470470 (pbk.)]
• Keith Donohue, The stolen child. 2006, London: Jonathan Cape. 9780224076968 or 0224076965 (hbk.), 9780224076975 or 0224076973 (pbk.).
• Tanita Tikaram, "World outside your window" on Ancient heart. 1988, WEA. 2292438772.

Bizarrest, bizarrer, and merely bizarre...

Within an interesting, as always, post yesterday (Bizarre notes, bizarre cheers), JSBlog commented that...

“... the more I read of US school/college traditions ... the gladder I am I went to British ones, where you can just attend, get your education, and leave. Ritual chants are just the tip of the iceberg of a set of effectively compulsory tribal systems...”

When I read it, I simply thought "hear, hear" (my limited observation of US academic life confirming my agreement) and read on. Having thought about it over the hours since, I still agree and just as strongly – but have also realised that British education is not itself free of bizarre undergrowth. While post-compulsory education in the United Kingdom (and more widely in western Europe) is certainly refreshingly different in that way from its US equivalents, there are oddities (I would personally say unhealthy oddities) further down the chain.

As a thirteen year old I moved from a coeducational Australian school where you sank or swam amongst your contemporaries according to the usual vagaries of children everywhere to a British single sex school. Here I had to be thrown into the fishpond. Teachers who would later send me home because I had forgotten my school cap showed no sign of noticing that green water running from my sodden uniform was forming a malodorous pool around my desk. The following day, I had to be stripped behind the fives court and then retrieve my clothes from the branches of various trees. Passing teachers again showed no surprise at seeing a slightly podgy boy climbing a tree in the nude to retrieve his underwear. I thought at first that this was dislike of me, personally; but as time and a half went by, I observed that it happened to all newcomers and staff even made jokes about it – except when a boy complained, in which case they made pompous remarks about the communal value of initiation ceremonies. Then there was the French teacher (reputedly an infantry colonel in the 1939 to 1945 war) who made us run around the grounds in our underwear, shooting each other with water pistols containing red ink ... and refused to teach us unless we took part. Let's not get into the strange behaviour (not, I hasten to add, paedophilic ... just ritualistically odd) of the games master during pre and post sports changing times.

Things have improved immeasurably in the decades since 1965 ... but I have heard of both the ducking and the stripping ceremonies in different schools within the past year, and while games masters are generally respected professionals, the occasional exception is not unknown.

Moving back in time, at ten years old I briefly attended a primary school on the Sussex coast. Daily assembly contained a number of mystifying rituals, including the singing (every day) of Sussex by the sea, then British grenadiers and finally Men of Harlech. (Each of these is available in different versions; the links are to the closest I can find to those we sang.) That sequence is interesting because, while all of them are of a martial cast, they become progressively more so. By the time we started the day's lessons we had imbibed enough blood and guts for a schlock movie. Furthermore, they become increasingly distant from we who sang them daily. Sussex, I concede, was relevant; but the clearly male voice, culminating in “the girls so kind that we left behind”, was odd for a school whose students were 50% girls. British grenadiers had no obvious relevance to anything at all. Harlech was the other side of the British isles and several centuries; not to mention the other side of the Saxon/Celt divide.

No ... I still prefer the British model to the US one; it has more flexibility, more freedom to choose ideas, less pressure to rigid conformity; the US system is at the "bizarrest" end of the spectrum, the British equivalents "merely bizarre" ... but we are not ideally housed for unlimited stone throwing.

Rambling in two directions

Julie Heyward keeps forcing me to spend money on buying books I hadn't otherwise encountered ... most recently, The philosophy of childhood.

The final chapter of this book considers, at length, a favourite hobby horse of mine: the assumption, a priori, that art generated by children is necessarily inferior to that of adults. Every now and then, somebody enters a painting by a child into a prestigious art competition and then, when it is accepted, crows that this shows the meaningless of that competition, or of modern art, or of the sponsoring institution, or the incompetence of the judges, or whatever ... whereas to me it seems more to suggest poverty of perception on the part o the prankster. Why should this assumption of inferiority be made? Many things are (or, at least, can be) gained and refined with time as we grow ... but many things are lost, too. It seems to me that at the root of the assumption is a subjectively ruthless and objectively unjustified need to believe that we are better "now" than we were "then" ... whether or not it is actually so.

Moving back from the book to the person who suggested it ... I continue to prepare the lecture series on landscape art, and intend to use one of Julie Heyward's "composited" photosculptures to illustrate particular points. But which one? Yesterday I spent several hours wrestling with the task of choosing not just a single example but even the preliminary selection of a series from which that example is to be chosen. As today draws to a close, I am no farther for'ard. Any choice made is going to leave a forest of heartbreaking choices regretfully abandoned.

Ah, it's a hard life...

---

• Gareth B Matthews, The philosophy of childhood. 1996, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 0674664817.

Gauguin