

Uscolia

Gabriel Lanyi

Sycorax Books

Boston

"Words count"

First Sycorax Books edition 2016

Copyright © 2016 by Sycorax Books

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Uscolia / Gabriel Lanyi – 1st American ed.

ISBN 978-1-941245-11-8

First edition
Contents

Chapter I — In the Fog

Chapter II — Awaking in Uscolia

Chapter III — Native Fluency

Chapter IV — Thanks for the Memory

Chapter V — The Art of Doing

Chapter VI — Impossibility of Teaching

Chapter VII — In the Studio

Chapter VIII — Questions

Chapter IX — Native Fluency in Practice

Chapter X — In the Studio Spirit
I

In the Fog

"There has been a crisis in education for the past 2000 years," he said. It was in the waning days of the old world order, just before the dawn of the new era, in the year 2 BG (before Google). "'Tis nothing new." He was taking small spoonfuls of the mango sorbet. I've seen that face, I just couldn't place it.

"But the questions always pose themselves in a different manner," said a woman with a heavy French accent.

"The same question is being asked in every century: What's wrong with how we teach? Why do we fail? How can we do better? These questions have been passed down from generation to generation of teachers and educators. But the teaching-learning model was never questioned."

"With a few exceptions, Ben," interjected a member of generation X in a Greenpeace crewneck. "Most notably, Socrates." Ben... Ben what? It was on the tip of my tongue. Something repetitive, like Benbella.

"Right, William," said Ben. "And look what happened to him." This was intended as a joke, but only William laughed. "There is a long tradition of questioning the way teachers teach. But the problem is not _how_ we teach but _that_ we teach. Learning should be based on something other than teaching." He returned to the sorbet to let this sink in, or perhaps to allow them to disagree. Most of them looked like academic, Oxfam, renewable energy types.

"Like in Uscolia? Tell us about it, Ben. We never heard the full story." Ben Benson! Of course... now it all came back. For a long time I had thought that Uscolia was a spoof, like Ahua, the island "discovered" by the apocryphal N. Aalberg and consisting entirely of a website.

"Uscolia," said Ben, "is too great an object to cram into a few casual sentences."

"Before we go to Uscolia," said Julia, our gracious hostess, on whose terrace in Lausanne we were watching the sunset over Lake Geneva. "What exactly is wrong with the teaching-learning paradigm?"

"For one, much of teaching takes place against resistance," said Ben. "One wonders why, considering that there is nothing children like more than learning and honing their skills." Some said that he used to be a child psychologist, before retiring, although he looked far too young to be retired. Others thought that he was a venture capitalist. I've heard also that he wrote music reviews under several pen names. And he was known as a child advocate.

"Admittedly," replied our hostess. "But in the past hundred years there've been strong deschooling movements." She happened to be vice-chair of the World Forum for Children of the Future, which all her other guests were attending in town. I was the only non-professional at the gathering, having met Julia only the day before, at the art gallery she owned in Geneva. We found that we were both Dada enthusiasts.

"All based on teaching." Ben waited until the last contour of the sun disappeared below the lake. "In many progressive schools students can opt out of classes they wish not to attend, but once they opt in they are still taught. Homeschooled children are excused from attending school, but are taught, by parents or others, at home. The problem is not with the school but with teaching. If only we could create a school without teaching..."

"Then now we've come to Uscolia," said the woman with the French accent. They addressed her as Roxanne. "Julia, bring a large carafe of fresh coffee and some madeleines to help jog Ben's memory."

"True, Ben, you never told us how you ended up in Uscolia to begin with," said William.

Ben shook his head. "I told it many times years ago, but you treated it as fiction."

"We were young and foolish," said Julia, "and above all, single. Now we are all eager and interested parents with young children to raise." Julia pointed in the general direction where William, Roxanne, and myself were sitting, and smiled at me.

"Our children are grown," I said, raising my hands in a don't-look-at-me gesture, not willing to assume responsibility for the course the evening was to take.

"There's no such thing as grown children," said Julia. "Besides, you never know what's in the oven." I was going to answer this, but I desisted because I didn't want to become the center of attention of people I hardly knew. Luckily Julia went on without breaking stride: "It's not every day, Ben, that you are here to give us a first-hand account."

"All this is common knowledge by now," protested Ben.

"Maybe in your part of the world," said Julia, "but we haven't heard it, at any rate, not from you. All we have are rumors. We're in the fog. And we know of no one, except for you, who can deliver an authoritative, definitive account, from the horse's mouth. How did you stumble upon Uscolia in the first place?"

"I never dwelt on how I ended up in Uscolia," said Ben. "It is the burlesque part of the story and I care little for it." He poured himself a cup of coffee and took a madeleine from a tray the maid had just brought in. Then he leaned back in the easy chair and began to tell in an even voice the story of a weekend spent in Neah Bay, on the northwestern tip of Washington State, with three entrepreneurs, closing a deal for a venture capital firm in Seattle. They had just taken a break before dinner and were walking on the beach, watching the occasional windsurfers. As the wind picked up, Ben suggested that they hire some equipment at the motel and go out to ride the high swells. His partners, though a few years younger, seemed to be deterred by the wind, and asked when was the last time he sailed. It had been a while, but Ben was confident in his skills, having learned how to windsurf at a young age.

"Could you go out in a wind like this?" asked one of them. It was a fresh breeze. Maybe 20 knots.

"I could go out in a business suit, holding a briefcase, and not wet the cuffs of my trousers," answered Ben. This had to be seen to be believed, so a wager was made for a hundred dollars, and half an hour later Ben appeared on the beach in a navy blue, herringbone suit on top of a white shirt with silver cufflinks and a silver buff solid tie. Under his shirt was a wetsuit, and under his jacket a harness.

"That's not fair," complained one of the bettors. "You didn't say you'd roll up your pants above your knees."

"I didn't say I wouldn't," answered Ben. He was wearing a comfortable pair of black dress Oxfords over bare feet. On his shoulder was slung a black Ferragamo briefcase holding a copy of the contract they were working on and his socks.

Two youngsters carried the 12-foot Mistral MOD board and the rig with its large, 7.4 square meter sail to a launch on the beach, popped the mast into the mast base, and put the Mistral in the water. Ben stepped on the board, grabbed the boom, and as his partners watched from the shore, did a few duck gybes and tacks. It was a perfect day for sailing. Ben hooked into the harness line, slipped his feet into the footstraps for comfortable planing, and with the board skipping lightly over the swell let the wind carry him out in the direction of Japan until his partners on the beach looked no larger than matchsticks. The wind was out of the northwest, and Ben followed a westerly direction on starboard tack.

As the sun set the wind picked up some more, and Ben decided to turn back toward the shore to collect his hundred dollars. Just then, out of the north, a heavy fog advanced like a solid wall, and within seconds enveloped him completely, reducing his field of vision to about six feet. It felt like being in an airplane entering a cloud; with the fog, the wind intensified considerably and the water became choppy. He considered for a moment whether to try to outrun the fog, but concluded that it was not a good idea, and chose to stay the course, trusting that he was headed east on port tack and hoping to see land in about fifteen minutes. He checked his watch. About half an hour later there was no land in sight; he knew that the wind had changed direction and he was not heading east.

He had never sailed in this area and didn't know the wind patterns. And of course, there were no fog horns. He thought that perhaps the wind was now coming straight out of the west, in which case he should soon make land somewhere on Vancouver Island. This didn't happen either, so after some time he had to admit that he had no idea where he was headed. He was advancing at a high rate of speed. It got dark. He checked his watch again. He had been sailing for about two hours. Slowly the fog thinned out and eventually lifted. This was a relief. Ben dropped the sail in the water and sat down on the board to look around and survey his surroundings. He couldn't see a single light, in any direction. The sky was overcast, no stars, no moon. The hundred dollars never seemed farther away, although the cuffs of his trousers were metaphorically speaking still dry. He had no idea which way to turn, and decided to choose a direction and stay with it, hoping that it was the correct one. He stood and uphauled the sail. On the assumption that the wind was blowing from a generally western direction, he continued to sail downwind on port tack looking for a light. There was none in sight. Another hour later the signs of fatigue and thirst made themselves vividly felt.

"I spare you the stages of exhaustion, hallucination, and despair. They have been amply described in countless books about shipwrecked, stranded, and lost travellers. After what must have been a few more hours, I thought I distinguished a light. I was not sure, because I had thought so earlier and turned out to be wrong. I steered toward it. The light grew brighter, and others joined it. I honed in on it automatically, mechanically, and I began distinguishing the shore, the marina, some human activity. I saw a boat launch with a person standing next to it. He wore a uniform. I pulled up. He grabbed hold of the boom and helped me step on the shore. The ground under my feet seemed shaky. He asked me something, which I didn't understand. I remember wondering whether they had valet parking for windsurfers, and I reached into my pocket to give him a tip. Then I fainted."
II

Awaking in Uscolia

"I awoke in what looked like a hotel room. My suit was neatly hanging on a wooden valet next to my bed. I knew not where I was or how I got there. I had no recollection of anything since leaving Neah Bay. I closed my eyes and the image of a sign appeared before my mind's eye, in large letters: ALL NEWBORNS ARE CREATED EQUAL. BUT A DAY LATER THEY NO LONGER ARE. It all came back in a flash. It was the sign I saw above the landing, just before I fainted. I could hear the _Prelude_ of Bach's cello suite in E-flat major reverberating through the building; wonderful poise in the baseline progression. The _Prelude_ ended and restarted right away. Was someone practicing or just pressing repeat?"

Ben washed and dressed quickly and stepped out of his room to discover where he was and how he got there. The _Allemande,_ a tad too slow maybe but clean and light, without dramatic gestures, was just winding down as he walked into the lobby. The style was distinctly Moorish, with elegant, slim teak columns, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, supporting delicate horseshoe and keyhole arches and lattice screens. Lancet windows discreetly filtered the morning sun falling on the mosaic floor. The sparse furnishing agreed with the architecture. Across from a sofa with spires and arches were several straight back chairs, with leather seats and nailhead trim. Between them were small octagonal camel bone tables with inlaid sides. Next to the reception desk stood a large armoire covered with calligraphic ornaments. It all created a light, uncluttered, unassuming atmosphere. Stepping out from behind the desk to greet him was a middle-aged man who shook Ben's hand and led him to a table offering coffee and an assortment of light pastries.

Ben learned that he was lodging at the _Alhambra_ , a small hotel situated no more than a three minute walk from the wharf whence he had been brought the night before, after passersby ascertained that he was uninjured and had probably collapsed of exhaustion. His host, who introduced himself as Hugo, owned and managed the _Alhambra_ , which also served as residence for himself and his family. Ben and Hugo outdid each other asking questions, even as they were trying to answer the other's inquiries—one about Ben's strange appearance in his business suit at the wharf, the other about the identity of the place where he had landed. Ben tried to account for himself in as few words as possible, eager to learn more about his port of call, to which Hugo referred as _Uscolia_. "Is Uscolia an island or a territory?" he asked. "Both," answered Hugo, describing Uscolia as a modest size island, on the continuation of the curlicue that winds around the 49th parallel separating the US from Canada, and about 170 miles from both Seattle and Vancouver. Ben searched his memory. The name had a vague, fairy tale familiarity, like Serendip and Samarkand, which you know exist somewhere, but you are not quite sure where. "There was once a prince of Samarkand..." To be looked up later.

A cup of Arabica and the elegant and uplifting _Courante_ injected some life into Ben's arteries. He asked whether the island belonged to the United States or Canada. "To neither, really," said Hugo. Lying in the path of the meridian that divides the two countries, and awkwardly out of the way, neither bothered to lay a strong claim to it. Captain Cook didn't trouble himself to name it, referring to it merely as "the island." Manuel Quimper didn't even mention it. The Nootka convention, which settled the British and Spanish claims in the area, conveniently ignored it, perhaps because at the time there was no human settlement on it. The first known permanent resident of the island was Bruno Uscolo, former student at the University of Seville, who in 1823, after the defeat of the liberal movement and the onset of the _Década Ominosa_ , embarked in Cádiz as a supernumerary on the _Oriana_ , a 170-ton brig bound for the trading centers and furs of the Pacific Northwest. Before they even went through the Straits of Magellan, Uscolo and the captain quarreled, and by the time they crossed the equator, Uscolo asked to be landed. The captain liked the stubborn young man, despite his liberal delusions, and at first refused, but as they passed the mouth of the Columbia river, and Uscolo realized that the captain was heading for Alaska, he demanded to be put to shore on an island he spotted at starboard. Having had enough of Uscolo's antics, the captain lowered him in a boat, with his trunk and whatever provisions, tools, and weapons were deemed to give him a fair chance at survival, and bid him good luck.

Hugo didn't go to into the details of how Uscolo reconnoitered the island and eventually chose a cove on the east shore for his residence, having found abundant water, fuel, and food; this has been the subject of numerous books and was in the public domain. He did mention, though, that Uscolo chose to build his log cabin on the slightly raised cuff lining the bottom of a promontory, facing east-southeast and overlooking the bay. An overhang of the ridge above provided a natural second roof to weather-fend the cabin, keeping practically the entire structure dry during the heaviest storms blowing from the northwest. Four months later, when the _Oriana_ was returning from Alaska with 400 skins, the captain, thinking that by now Uscolo had sufficiently cooled his heels, sailed by to pick him up and take him home. Not finding him on the west coast, where he had dropped him off, and somewhat contrite about having forsaken the young man, he sailed around the island and finally spotted Uscolo's cabin "right around where you landed," said Hugo. "It is part of the Dry Cuff marina today." Uscolo politely rejected the captain's offer and remained on the island.

The _Sarabande_ sounded as if it was played by more than one cello, so clean were the double and triple stops. For a few years Uscolo was more or less the only resident of the island, except for occasional shipwrecked Russian traders, sailing out of New Archangel, who would land on the western shore until picked up by their company. But some, forgotten, given up for dead, or refusing to leave ended up settling on the island, and Uscolo would stop by and share a meal with them as he was sailing his canoe along the coast. At some point, the Russians established a small trade center on the western shore, and ships of the Hudson's Bay Company, among others, would stop by with increasing frequency. All this traffic began to attract the attention of the growing population on the American coast, which by now contained, in addition to the indigenous people, trappers, farmers, missionaries, and hangers on. With indications that the territory of Oregon Country will sooner or later be organized in some form of government, the more independent minded people, hoping to forestall the inevitable for as long as possible, began moving to the island.

By the mid-1830s the island was already supporting a substantial and mixed population. Around that time, Alasdair Cowen, a Scottish Presbyterian missionary, initially attached to the Whitman-Spalding party, but eventually setting out on his own for less charted territory, arrived on the island with his wife, Fiona, and his daughter, Dot Alice. Alasdair and Fiona were highly educated people, traveling with a trunk full of books and educational supplies. Dot Alice, barely 11 or 12 years old, spoke fluent English, Spanish, and Nez Perce Indian, was an accomplished painter in oil and aquarelle, sang, and played the flute.

The Cowens built their cabin not far behind Uscolo's, but not within sight, as it was not considered good form to encroach on one's private domain. By the dim light of fires dying out, Alasdair Cowen and Bruno Uscolo debated endlessly the utility or futility of teaching the indigenous people how to read and write, the most appropriate religion to preach to them, and the fitting polity under which to organize them. Then, some two years after their arrival, returning one afternoon from a small village of Nez Perce Indians inland, Alasdair was caught in a sudden early winter storm. In the complete whiteout he became disoriented, and as night fell he was unable to regain the trail under the heavy snow. He was found the next morning, frozen, some five hundred yards from his cabin.

Uscolo naturally stepped into the breach and supported the widow and orphan. Two years later, he and Fiona were married. Mother and daughter moved into Uscolo's enlarged cabin, and they boarded up the Cowen's place. After Fiona had two more children, Dot Alice, by now almost 19, asked to move back into the Cowen's original cabin. She never married, and everyone continued to call her Dot Alice Cowen, or Dot A.C. for short. Uscolo expanded her cabin and converted it into a spacious studio, where she could work on her large-scale paintings and other art projects. She learned weaving from the Nez Perce women and acquired a manual loom. Soon, her rugs and tapestries became so striking and original that they ended up being some of the most sought-after items traded on the island, although her sketches and paintings also found buyers. She became so expert in weaving that Nez Perce women would send their daughters to her studio to watch Dot Alice weave and learn the trade from her. And Nez Perce women were not the only ones to do so. Dot Alice had a cheerful, sunny disposition; she was calm, patient, and caring. At any given time there were half a dozen children or more, of different age, crawling or running around her studio as she was weaving or painting, and at the same time singing, telling stories, or just chatting with the children. Usually, the older children took care of the younger ones, so they didn't impose much on Dot Alice's time, who freely shared with them the art supplies in her studio, as well as the books and other paraphernalia left over from Alasdair. The mothers of the children playing in Dot Alice's studio soon discovered to their amazement that their very young sons and daughters could read, write, and manipulate numbers. Around that time, a merchant from Boston, who was particularly taken with Dot Alice's tapestries, asked to meet the weaver.

"The _Bourrée_ just started, and I felt like jumping to my feet and beginning to dance, it was so spirited," said Ben. They brought the merchant to Dot Alice's studio, where they spoke for a long time as he watched her work, and admitted that her mastery exceeded his expectations. He also told her about a new type of loom that had recently been brought over from Europe, more precisely an attachment that could be used to program and then automatically reproduce any design pattern on the loom. Dot Alice didn't understand the term "program." The merchant proceeded to explain how holes in punch cards correspond to rows in the fabric design. A bunch of cards are strung together to assemble a complete weaving pattern, which can be reproduced on the loom. You can then change the patterns of the fabric created by the loom by replacing the punch cards. Dot Alice listened with eyes wide open but couldn't say she understood. The merchant explained how the threads of the warp (the longitudinal threads) are raised and lowered by the harness to allow the shuttle, carrying the weft (the transversal thread) to pass. This Dot Alice knew very well. Well then, the pattern of the weave is determined by whether the shuttle passes above or below certain threads in the warp. This Dot Alice knew also. The attachment controls which threads are raised at each pass of the shuttle by a set of punch cards, in which each hole represents one dot in the pattern of the woven fabric.

"Today we would call that a pixel," said Ben. "But it was not something I knew at the time of my conversation with Hugo." Each position in the punch card corresponds to a hook, which can be raised or not, depending on whether or not a hole is punched in the card in that point. In short, the hooks and needles are guided by the holes in the punch cards. Dot Alice thought that maybe she was beginning to understand, but it all sounded too miraculous to her. For three summers in a row the merchant from Boston returned to Dot Alice's studio and they talked about the programmable loom, and on the third occasion Dot Alice told him to bring one with him next time he comes. And so, the following year, a Jacquard loom arrived at the studio, a machine of the type no one on the island had ever seen. People Dot Alice had never met, from remote villages, filed by to look at it. It took a few days to set up the loom, punch out some cards, and produce the first length of cloth, in a simple pattern. But once the idea behind the control mechanism sank in, Dot Alice was able to design, produce, and reproduce spectacular weaves. And not only she. Fiona and Bruno's children were now seven and nine years old. They and the other youngsters hanging around her studio created their own designs, punched out and strung together their own cards, and made their own cloths.

The closing _Gigue_ was the most difficult part of this most difficult of suites, and not only because of the uncomfortable key of E-flat major, and not only because it had to be played so fast, but because most of the notes were in the low register of the cello, where it is more difficult to play fast. The uplifting energy of it was so compelling that it stopped the conversation in its tracks, as both Hugo and Ben listened in silence. When it ended, although loath to interrupt his host's narrative, Ben couldn't contain himself and asked: "Excuse me, but who is the accomplished cellist whose performance we just heard?" Before Hugo could answer, a door on the side of the lobby opened and a boy of about 13 or 14 years appeared, holding a bow in one hand. "Allow me to introduce my son to you, Ben. Ben, this is Mateo." Ben rose to shake the boy's hand. "Extraordinary sound and voice leading," said Ben. "Thank you," said the boy. "I was just practicing. Are you a musician?" "I cannot call myself a musician, but I have played this suite many years ago. Not nearly as well as you, though, I must say." "Thank you. I must go now." And turning to his father: "Creo que voy a pasar por el estudio." Hugo asked: "Vas a ir a una práctica de tai chi?" "No, he prometido ayudar en el laboratorio." "Vete ahora." Mateo bowed lightly to Ben: "It was a pleasure meeting you," and left the lobby.

Ben inquired why Mateo wasn't in school, and Hugo explained that there were no schools in Uscolia.

"He just said that he was going to..."

"To the studio."

"What kind of studio?" Ben asked. Hugo scratched his head. "What kind of studio?.. Not easy to answer. In a way, it replaces what you would call a school."

"A school by another name, then."

"Oh, no," said Hugo. "Not even close. It has little in common with a school. For one, there are no teachers."

"How can there be no teachers?" asked Ben.

"Quite simply, because there's no teaching."

"How can there be no teaching in a school?"

"I told you it is not really a school. You would have to see it to understand."

"Can I?"

"Of course," said Hugo. "Of course you can. I'll be happy to take you there myself, but perhaps I should first tell you a little about the idea behind how children learn in Uscolia."

"I am wary of theories of education."

"It's not a formal, codified theory, rather a set of practices that Dot Alice followed into her old age, and which have since been adopted by many studios across Uscolia. They are being passed down from one generation to the next. Excuse me, I must attend to some of the guests."

Ben asked for more coffee.
III

Native Fluency

Hugo returned with a fresh pot of coffee and a bowl of black grapes.

"Before I collapsed last night I saw a sign above the wharf. I still remember it. ALL NEWBORNS ARE CREATED EQUAL. BUT A DAY LATER THEY NO LONGER ARE. Does this have anything to do with your studios?"

Hugo considered the question for some time. "Indirectly. It is kind of a motto in Uscolia."

"What does it mean exactly?" asked Ben.

"Imagine the earth as a gigantic experiment in learning," said Hugo. "Every minute 256 babies are born with brains identically wired for inquiry and knowledge. A minute later, however, each newborn in its crib, cradle, bassinet, basket, or carry cot is exposed to different stimuli that begin to shape its brain, and each one embarks on a separate trajectory leading to a different adventure. It is called life. The way the stimuli are organized and presented to these newborns determines the path they take through life. If you are aware of it, you can help guide its course to a considerable extent. But you must have a plan of action, or at least a direction of travel—present at birth or close thereafter."

"And you do."

"We like to think so," said Hugo. "We call it broadly early exposure, and what we aim to achieve is native fluency."

"As in _innate_?"

"No. The _native_ in _native fluency_ is the exact opposite of innate; it doesn't refer to something we are born with, but to something we acquire, similarly to the way we acquire our native language, with mother's milk, in the first months, weeks, and yes, days of life. And according to some, even before... To explain how children learn things, we take our cue from the only complex body of knowledge we know that all humans have successfully acquired: their native language. We all acquire our native language without any instruction."

"Are we not taught how to speak?"

"No. Foreign languages are taught and learned. Native languages are _absorbed_. All you need to do is saturate the environment with the absorbate. The child's brain is the absorbent."

"And you are expanding this insight to learning in general. Is this the method behind the musical training of Mateo?"

Hugo objected to the word _training_. "Mateo was exposed to music early in life, but not for the purpose of becoming a musician. Early exposure to music is not a method for training musicians any more than acquiring a mother tongue is a preparation for becoming a linguist."

"How early is early?"

"The earlier the better. There are not many free lunches in life," said Hugo. "Native language is one of them. It is acquired without effort, almost without noticing. Later in life, some of us expend enormous energy to acquire another language, and seldom succeed in mastering it, often even after living in a foreign country, and despite clear definitions and explanations by dedicated teachers. Yet infants acquire native fluency in not only one, but under the right circumstances, two, three or more languages. If we start exposure early enough, they can acquire other skills the same way."

"What is the technique?"

"We all know it, and I would love to expand upon it," said Hugo looking at his watch, "but I must check whether the gardener has arrived." He excused himself and rushed off in the direction of the entrance.

Ben had never considered the meaning of the term _native fluency_. It seemed to imply a skill we were born with. But evidently, we have no skills of any sort when we are born. So what is it that makes it native and different from all the other skills we acquire throughout our life? Hugo returned a few minutes later and continued where he had left off. "Stop me if this becomes a rant," he said, and proceeded to provide a more or less structured overview of native fluency acquisition, or "nativism" for short, which according to him involves frequent repetition, no explanations, no testing, lots of play, and human interaction. Nativism is a corollary of several somewhat counterintuitive postulates:

What we generally refer to as "teaching" is a fiction; it doesn't exist.

Learning is an internal process that takes place entirely, from beginning to end, in our head.

To learn, children need the opportunity to discover mathematical truths, and to sample the richness of natural phenomena and the variety of human accomplishment.

Learning is self-supporting and exponential, so that all knowledge already acquired facilitates further acquisition (one reason why early exposure is so important).

The enablers of native fluency (usually the parents) can give more than they have.

Native fluency acquired in any field changes the brain.

"If teaching is a fiction," said Ben, "if follows that teachers are characters in a play and schools nothing but stage props. Where does this leave the students?"

"They're the paying audience," said Hugo. The billions of people milling about the face of the earth have all managed to acquire various amounts of knowledge in countless fields. No two brains are the same, and there is no agreement on how exactly learning occurs. Historically, people have used the metaphor of the latest technology to explain the working of the brain: hydraulic machine, clockwork, telephone switchboard, and most recently, electrical circuitry and the computer: CPU plus memory storage. He noted, in passing, that _memory,_ as used in computer technology, is itself a metaphor based on the human brain, but now the tables have been turned. None of this is accurate, of course. There is no CPU in the brain, and human memory is not an array of locations, each with its own address, where data items are stored and later retrieved _as is_.

So what do we have to go on when trying to understand the learning process that takes place in the brain? There is one body of knowledge that all humans have mastered (barring pathologies): their native language. And most of us have had the opportunity to witness the process in our children, siblings, cousins, nephews, and nieces. Language is a complex knowledge web that involves thousands of vocabulary items as well as rules of phonetics and syntax. Yet all children, regardless of the level of their other skills, become competent users of their native language at an early age. From a nativist perspective, this is self-evident, indeed, tautological.

"To the point where it begs the question," Ben interjected. "Some sort of proof is needed."

"Nativism is not a theory or a theorem that requires proof," said Hugo. "It is a thought experiment, based on experience augmented by logic. It can be refuted with counter-examples and logical arguments. We can use several thought experiments to learn from the way in which children master their native languages about the process that takes place in the brain when we acquire other kinds of knowledge."

Julia asked Ben what he thought Hugo had meant by a thought experiment.

In a thought experiment we use our imagination to investigate phenomena that cannot be measured directly, when real experiments are physically or ethically impossible. We cannot cancel gravity, send a hundred newborns into the woods to be raised by wolves in order to see how many survive, or subject children to controlled laboratory conditions in which they are raised, say, without language. But in a thought experiment we can combine what we know about feral children, about language acquisition patterns in normative families, and about the deficiencies of children raised in neglectful environments (various institutional settings), apply to them the rules of cause and effect and logical deduction, use a bit of imagination, and come up with a defensible scenario. We investigate reality without collecting new data, by applying logic to what we already know and trying to extrapolate about what we cannot test.

In a thought experiment of this type, it would be reasonable to assume that a child raised from birth among dogs, without exposure to humans, by the age of two would be barking and howling. It is also quite likely that such a child would be moving around on all fours rather than walking. To take the thought experiment a step further, if ten such children were to grow up together without any exposure to human speech, despite the wonderful mental apparatus at their disposal, they would not be able to develop any type of human language in one generation, "whatever fatuous claims silly linguists might make about innate universal grammar and other such nonsense," said Hugo.

Children raised by humans are a different story. How does a baby come to associate the acoustic image of the word _coat_ with the piece of clothing that protects us from the cold? After a sufficient number of repetitions, a point comes when the child has collected enough samples of the word, pronounced by various speakers, with slight variations but always in association with the object in question, to be able to tell that a somewhat similar sounding word, say, _goat_ is likely to signify something else. What the thought experiment makes clear is that the child doesn't need an explanation of the type "This is a coat," while holding up an exemplar, or "This is a goat," while pointing at one. Repeated mention in the right context is sufficient to make the internal association between the signifier and the signified. Expanding the thought experiment further, we can say that the quality and richness of children's language (and of adults, for that matter) depends on the quality of the collection they sample.

Ben noted that this was almost trivial and rather intuitive when it comes to vocabulary. But what about more complex matters, such as the rules of syntax or mathematical equations? Hugo said that a somewhat more elaborate thought experiment tells us that the same is true for those as well, and ran off to the kitchen to issue some instructions.

"One cannot talk about thought experiments without mentioning Einstein," said a tall man in a tweed jacket, with a permanent five o'clock shadow and impressive white hair, looking rather like a Hollywood rendition of a provincial college professor. "Einstein was the grand master of the genre. These were not just exercises in _what if_? He was able to turn his thought experiments into verifiable equations and to quantify their consequences to prove a theory of physics."

Ben thought that Hugo's objective was more modest. What he tried to prove by thought experiments was a neurological contention: that native fluency causes a change in the quality of the brain, and therefore, that a child raised without language would have a morphologically different brain from ours. By extension, developing native fluency in areas other than spoken language also changes the child's brain. According to Hugo, our thought experiments show that our brain is a mechanism designed to detect patterns, or rules, if you will. We know already that the method of countless repetition of such sentences as "you finished the whole bottle," and "that was one great burp," and "I knew you could do it" have achieved perfect results in conveying to small children that the events mentioned occurred in the past. We can devise a thought experiment in which parents would use no verbs in the past tense with their children in the first three years of their lives, but instead repeat explanations such as "brought is the past tense form of the verb bring" or "the simple past or preterit is used to describe single events or habitual actions in the past," and imagine whether the children would adequately internalize the meaning of the past tense.

"Is the acquisition of native fluency learning, then?" asked Julia.

"I think it would be misleading to call it learning," said Ben, "if by learning you are referring to one constituent of a teaching-learning exchange. Certainly, those greasing its wheels cannot be called teachers." Teaching-learning is a deliberate process, often working against opposition. Acquisition of native fluency is an unconscious process in which the baby randomly absorbs disparate bits from the environment, which then its brain organizes and builds into patterns. But because the term _learning_ is engrained in language, let's use it to refer to the acquisition of knowledge our brain performs, with the qualification that we refer to self-learning rather than teacher-mediated school learning.

Children discover the meaning of _key_ as the object that locks and unlocks doors, the meaning of _will bring_ as what the postman will do tomorrow, and of _bringed_ as what he did yesterday, by accumulating samples (or taking statistics), using the pattern detection and identification function wired into their brain. They don't need a teacher for this. The formalization that _bringed_ or _brought_ is referred to in grammar as _past tense_ is information, not understanding; it is not required for using the past tense correctly. The rules needed to signify that an action took place before now are discovered independently, based on the accumulation of samples, and speakers who have never heard the term _past tense_ apply these rules correctly without fail. What teachers teach us are not the patterns the brain uses to understand and produce speech, which are constructed internally, but external information about them: metadata, as it were. The so-called explanations that teachers provide are items of information that learners may or may not accept and retain. Understanding is generated internally, by the brain applying its pattern-detection function to the accumulated samples.

"What does it mean to know something?" asked William. "Not quite clear anymore."

"That was my question, too," said Ben. "All this will make more sense after you visit the studio," said Hugo. "In Uscolia they use the word _knowledge_ to mean two things: having the _information_ and _understanding_ how items of information hang together. That Paris is the capital of France does not require understanding. It is merely information. What a capital is, however, we understand only after accumulating enough samples and finding out what generally happens in capital cities, so that we can construct internally the understanding of a capital. Information comes from outside; understanding we manufacture internally."

"We can also discover what a capital is by someone giving us a quick definition," said the professor.

"Correct," said Ben. "You can take someone's word for it. This works best for simple facts. But I hope to eventually persuade you that you will remember complex facts longer if you figure them out based on information you collect yourself rather than accept them because someone says so."

"I'd say there is a third component of knowledge," said Julia. "It is identity, that which we believe to be true without having to prove it. Identity is famous for being shaped at a very early age."

"Let us not open that can of worms now," said Ben, "lest we become embroiled in religion and ideology. I wanted to understand how information and understanding are related. Hugo illustrated it with the example of how reading develops. After seeing the shape of the pictogram _key_ in association with the word _key_ pronounced by various speakers (information), and both of these in association with the object that we insert in the keyhole to lock and unlock doors, the connection is made internally that one stands for the others (understanding). Once the knowledge is created internally that the spoken and written words can stand for objects, the rest (that the visual and acoustic shapes of _refrigerator_ stand for the object where we store our food, etc.) is merely information."

"It is clear how this works for _key_ and _refrigerator_ ," said the professor. "What about things you've never seen, like the Everest, or abstract ideas, like friendship?"

"I don't see any difference," said Ben. "The brain has many ways of collecting statistics, not only by show and tell. Why shouldn't it be able to figure out the meaning of the terms _friend_ and _friendship_ based on sufficient mentions in the appropriate context?"

"What about mathematics?" asked the professor.

"What _about_ mathematics?" asked Ben.

"What does it mean to know that 3x2=6?"

"For example, I can take your word for it, as in the case of the definition of a capital. But it is fair to say that I _understand_ that 3x2=2+2+2 (or 3+3) when my brain can independently create the internal representation, a mental picture, of 3 sets of 2 pebbles, or alternatively, of 2 sets of 3 pebbles. This is likely to happen after seeing enough samples of 2 being added to 2 being added to 2. In short, to understand that 3x2=2+2+2, I must be in a state where the expression 3x2 automatically fires in the brain the image of three 2s added together to make 6. An outsider may or may not be able to help me identify this pattern by various explanations, but cannot implant it in my brain; eventually, I must develop it myself, and generally I will be able to do it if I collect sufficient samples, even without outside explanations. It will become clearer what I mean when I tell you what's happening in the studio."

"What about 7x7?" asked the professor. "Do I need to visualize seven set of seven pebbles added together to know that they amount to 49, and do I need to discover this myself, or is it enough to just take someone's words for it (in this case, a readily available chart or table), once I understand the general principle of multiplication?"

"Once you _understand_ that 3x2=2+2+2," explained Ben, "it is enough for you _to have the information_ that 7x7=49 in order to also understand this information to mean that 7+7+7... etc. amounts to 49, without having to conjure it up in your mind. This is because multiplication always follows the same rule, and once the brain has detected the pattern it can easily apply it to any data."

The brain is continually collecting samples, in every area, and identifying patterns to achieve understanding. The incidental information that the shape _naughty_ stands for behavior that is generally frowned upon, and that the four notes we hear in the theater lobby announcing the beginning of the show form the G major chord, are precisely the kind of information our brain is perpetually on the lookout for to use as raw material for its pattern detection.

Ben spoke at length about the approach to music in Uscolia, and cited the so-called perfect or absolute pitch as an excellent example of how the brain collects samples with respect to sound waves. Uscolians believe that there is no such thing as perfect pitch, any more than there is such a thing as perfect color discrimination, which is to say that everybody is capable of both. All the hardware you need in order to have perfect pitch is to be able to differentiate between higher and lower pitches (just as we differentiate between higher and lower frequencies of light waves), and someone to tell you that the sound made by an object vibrating at a frequency of 440 Hz is called _la,_ and to tell it to you many times, as many times as you were told in infancy that objects reflecting light waves in the range of 430-480 THz are called _red_. Of course, you need not know exactly how many Hz is called _la_ and how many THz is called _red_ , but you do need someone to sing a _la_ and tell you that this is what it's called, and to show you a _red_ object and name it. "Why should the way in which our brain processes aural information be different from the way in which it processes visual information? Both pitch and color are perceptual properties to which we assign names: _mi_ , _fa_ , _green_ , _yellow_."

"Then why don't we all have perfect pitch?" asked Ben. "In practice, not potentially."

"Because our parents couldn't point out to us the pitch of the birdsong and of the doorbell a hundred times a day, the way they pointed out the color of the bird and of the door."

"There is a reason why our mothers were able to point out to us the color of the tomato and of the grass but not the pitch of the car horn or the thunder," said the professor. "Being able to differentiate between colors is a selected trait; those who couldn't tell the color of the mushroom ended up eating the poisonous one. Knowing the pitch of the cat's meow has no consequences for survival."

"That may be so," said Ben, "and it may explain why so few of us have perfect pitch. We're in a vicious cycle. The fewer parents have perfect pitch, the fewer are able to help their children retain it. But it does not disprove the mechanism by which it is achieved and achievable, or the benefits that can accrue to those who have it."

We know that infants begin collecting samples through their hearing apparatus before they are born, because as soon as they come into the world they show a strong preference for their mother's voice; her voice resonates much more clearly in the womb than do the voices of external speakers. We also know that hearing matures early, unlike vision, which is not fully developed at birth (not much to see _in utero_ , but plenty to listen to). Early in life, while our hearing is as good as it can be, we can distinguish sounds roughly between 16 and 20,000 Hz, which means nearly 20,000 different pitches. The 88 pitches that are sounded when pressing the piano keys are the "official sounds," the ones that have been assigned names. We can call them _notes_ : C, D, E, etc. or _do_ , _re_ , _mi_ , and so on. Infants are exposed to a variety of sounds already in the womb, but most of these (car horns, vacuum cleaners, bird calls, etc.) cover the entire spectrum and do not necessarily fall on C, D, E, or G-sharp. For Western ears, the named notes have a significantly higher chance of sounding than do some incidental frequencies between, say, A-flat and A, because these notes are used in music of every type: classical, jazz, pop, rock, etc. So as the infant samples the sounds in the environment, the named notes are slowly gaining on the random sounds. Still, someone needs to do the naming. This piece of information, that the sound we just heard vibrating at such and such frequency is called _la_ , is still missing and needs to be conveyed to the infant. The child need not know the frequency, naturally, but needs to hear the vibration and the associated name. There is no reason why a child who can tell the difference between a higher and a lower pitch, and every child is wired to tell the difference, shouldn't remember the name of a certain pitch if told a sufficient number of times early in life.

Native fluency in music is not an end in itself in Uscolia. Changing the brain is. Hugo mentioned again and again how native fluency changes the brain **.** Why is it that adults have such a difficult time learning a foreign language? Why do Japanese have trouble differentiating between "l" and "r," Arabs between "p" and "b," and Eastern Europeans between the short and long "e" (/i/ and /ē/) in _kill_ and _keel_? Until about 8-10 months of age, every child can distinguish all the phonemes (sounds that discriminate one word from another) in all human languages. In Romanian, for example, the word "chil" (pronounced /kil/) is short for "kilogram," and it means the same thing even if you were to pronounce it /kēl/. Because in Romanian the speech sounds /i/ and /ē/ are perceived as equivalent, babies stop differentiating between them after a while; the difference doesn't carry meaning, and therefore it is not reinforced hundreds of times a day, so babies cannot collect statistics on it. In other words, a tiny mental ability, that of differentiating between the sounds /i/ and /ē/, disappears. No big loss; the worst that happens is that Romanians who speak English are liable to say things like "I fill good." But consider that of the some 2,000 phonemes that newborns are equipped to identify, speakers of only English end up with 44, and of only French with 37. The rest are lost. And so are all the pitches of the sounds, which stop having any meaning associated with them if they are not reinforced. Can an innate ability disappear without a change in the wiring of the brain? (Hugo used the metaphor _wiring_ to refer to the morphological structure of the brain, as opposed to the synaptic connections that are established through learning.) Saying that the loss of an innate ability through disuse changes the brain is just another way of saying that acquiring native fluency through early exposure changes the brain. The two are the obverse sides of the same coin.

"This means that native fluency achieved in _any field_ changes the brain," I said.

"It does," said Ben, "because by definition, native fluency refers to a quality of performance that cannot be achieved later in life. If the brain remained the same, there'd be no reason why you couldn't reach the same level of fluency later, but it is a fact that you cannot."

"Isn't that the same as saying that anything you learn changes the brain?" I pressed on.

"Everything you _understand_ in infancy changes the brain," answered Ben, "because it prevents the loss of an ability to recognize and discriminate between certain patterns. Information you acquire expands your store of knowledge, but does not necessarily change your brain. The many samples babies accumulate may not change their brains, but the patterns they discover based on these samples do."

"How is all this different, then, from the old saw that repetition is the mother of all learning?" asked a gaunt man looking like a worn-out Raskolnikov, just released from the Czar's camp in Siberia and in bad need of a haircut and a beard trim, but who had miraculously acquired a New Jersey accent.

"Night and day," said Ben. "Narrow mechanical repetition is not conducive to native fluency because it does not allow the brain to collect statistics. At a certain age, most children learn to recite the numbers between 1 and 10, just like they learn to recite the ABC. This recitation is not tied to the quantities the numbers represent or the values of these characters in the words they form. It is useful information, but it does not change the brain. Repeating the names of the numbers and letters in order does not provide examples of the facts of arithmetic and language that the brain can sample and use to detect the patterns needed to manipulate numbers or to read. For these to develop, arithmetic facts are needed, not numbers, and words, not letters. But enough of this. I have no wish to belabor the obvious."

I asked whether native fluency applies only to fields of mental knowledge, like reading and arithmetic. Ben said that according to Hugo it applies also to physical knowledge the brain stores about the instructions it must send to muscles in the body to perform certain operations. Some of these are acquired natively, by imitation: walking, handling various common tools and utensils such as spoons and forks, speaking (controlling the many muscles needed to articulate words in exactly the same way other speakers of one's native language do). We all learn to do these. Beyond that, some of us become fluent in selected physical and manual tasks—playing the violin, dancing, shooting a basketball, skateboarding—what Hugo referred to as "the art of doing."

Hugo was careful to point out, however, that native fluency should not be mistaken for mastery or expertise; it is merely competence acquired without conscious study. If the desire is present and the conditions are right, it is possible to build expertise upon it with practice and deliberate effort to achieve excellence. Expertise builds on native fluency but it is not an automatic consequence of it. A member of a culture acquires native fluency in the language of the community, and may use no more than 500 words to go through life as a shepherd. He still has native fluency in his limited use of language, and communicates in it with natural ease. If in due course he apprentices himself to the local bard, learns by heart a number of epic tales, expands his vocabulary and begins using it to create stunning images and vivid descriptions, he becomes an expert in the use of his language.

By changing the brain, native fluency gives its beneficiaries an enormous head start. This is quite obvious in music. Because native fluency is achieved so early in life, it is often difficult to reconstruct later what exactly the parents did to facilitate it. But in the case of musicians of proven abilities we often have quite a bit of information to go on. Ben cited the environment that produced the masters who for centuries have defined our musical experience. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Stravinsky, and so on began their exposure and sampling early, in families of professional but generally undistinguished musicians. Mozart gained native fluency while lying under Nanerl's piano during her lessons. The mothers of Horowitz, Gould, and Van Cliburn were piano teachers of local renown. Schnabel and Rubinstein, like Mozart, spent their early years under their elder sisters' pianos during their lessons. Everywhere you look, it is the same story. Heifetz: violin teaching mother. Richter: pianist father. Francescatti: violinist parents. Casals: parish organist father. The pattern is not restricted to classical music, and is apparent in jazz (Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson), and no doubt in other genres.

"Genetics," said Roxanne.

"It is what the nature advocates claim," said Ben. "But if genetics were at work, where are the children of these great artists? Nowhere to be found. Because when they were tiny babies, their professional and often successful parents were busy making music and touring."

"I don't think genetics can be dismissed so cavalierly," said the professor.

"Far from me to contemn such a lofty edifice as genetics," said Ben. "But we should not mix the apples of genetically inherited individual traits with the oranges of native fluency. Even if we allowed that a genetic predilection existed for learning, similar to that for diabetes or obesity, an environmental kicker is still needed to turn it on, the same as for diabetes and obesity. And I'm not aware of a learning gene, or an English language gene, or a math gene. Learning is not a trait but a complex human behavior that cannot be attributed to the action of genes. Native fluency in our mother tongue is universal; it is not the product of a plasticity gene but strictly of early exposure."

Early exposure in areas other than our native language may not always be obvious by superficial reading of the biographies, but according to Hugo, you can always find it if you dig deeper. He maintained that if we were able to look closely into the early childhood experiences of other high achievers, we would discover similar stories. He gave the example of Gauss, who according to a famous anecdote, figured out on his own, at age 8, the formula for adding the numbers between 1 and 100 (in reality, between any two numbers). What seems like a non-trivial discovery is based on a very simple insight, which an 8-year old who is fluent with his numbers can conceivably come up with: that 1+100=101, 2+99=101, 3+98=101, and so on, until 50+51=101. Once we understand this, the formula that gives us the sum is reached quite easily. It would be fascinating to catch a glimpse of Gauss's childhood and find the (most likely accidental) circumstances that have led to his native fluency with numbers. We know that he could read and write before he started school, and that he knew how to count and perform elementary arithmetic operations by the time he was three. Few 3-year-olds can do even simple arithmetic operations. By the time Gauss started school, at age 7, he was already marked as a prodigy. Yes, he had a dedicated teacher, and an even more dedicated teacher's aide, but by then he was on an automatic path, clearly demarcated by his native fluency.

Ben questioned the conclusiveness of such anecdotal information. "I wish I could elaborate more on this," said Hugo, "but some tasks I just cannot delegate." He excused himself and went to attend to his other guests.
IV

Thanks for the Memory

When he returned, Hugo brought a tray of fresh pineapple and raw coconut meat.

"Suppose we agree that small children can become fluent in more than one language," said Ben, "that native fluency in music produces great harmonic understanding, and that early reading empowers children before school age. One may still ask: So what? Why rush? Foreign languages can be learned later if desired (perhaps not so easily, but many have succeeded quite convincingly), not all musicians of renown have started their training in infancy, and by far most people have learned to read and write in school, and have reached high levels of literacy. What is it about native fluency that justifies the investment of thought and effort required to create an environment that favors its development? Does it increase IQ? Does it enhance executive function? Does it show up on the SATs? Does it enhance memory?"

"Hold your horses," cried Hugo, raising his hands as if trying to block some onslaught. "You are throwing around terms from different universes, mixing reality with fantasy. You cannot make a soup by tossing IQ, executive function, SATs, and memory into the same pot."

"They're all legitimate performance measures parents may reasonably look at," said Ben.

"Parents, impressionable creatures that they are, may choose to consult the oracle at Delphi, for all I know," said Hugo. "We, on our part, must understand whom the sibyl speaks for to interpret her answers. You have listed here prophets of different deities. IQ is a scale invented by psychologists to measure quantities dreamed up by them. Executive functions are constructs invented by neurologists to characterize certain behaviors. SATs are tests invented by educationists to assess the ability to prepare for SATs. Memory, the only real word among the ones you just mentioned, refers to an actual capacity of our brain, which is to remember things."

"Let's take them one at a time, then," said Ben. "What's wrong with IQ?"

"IQ or intelligence tests," said Hugo, "purport to measure processor speed, the brain's raw processing power, independent of its learning—what is referred to as general mental ability, the _g_ factor." This conjures up a piece of physical equipment with certain absolute properties that it cannot exceed and that serve as a permanent limitation on its ability. There are variations and differences between cognitive theories, but they all pretty much subscribe to this underlying idea. Perhaps one day clever scientists will be able to devise an experiment that measures the raw electrical and chemical properties of the brains of two newborns and will be able to declare unequivocally that Baby A has a brain with a processing power of 0.67 Einsteins, and Baby B has a brain of 0.79 Einsteins. "Until that day," Hugo went on, "I will continue to believe that any cognitive measure reflects the abilities of the brain that individuals have been able to grow in their given environment, since birth. I also believe that even if there is some variation in the hardware of different newborns, such variation is largely irrelevant."

"Such differences could affect one's ability to learn, could they not?" Ben asked.

"They would make absolutely no difference," said Hugo, "because the total capacity of the brain for learning is so far in excess of anything that has been achieved to date even by those with a hyperdrive brain, that it has no effect on the ultimate levels of understanding, skill, or performance that an individual achieves through early exposure and later learning. Our brain, everybody's brain, is inexhaustible."

"Is there any evidence of this?"

"It is the only model of the brain that is consistent with experience. We cannot conceive of the brain as being limited in ways that hardware/software systems are. Our thought experiments would lead to all sorts of unacceptable outcomes, such as the equivalents of _disc full_ and _low memory_ messages from the brain. The potential of the human brain is such that no matter how much we develop it, we can never exhaust it. A natural language, for example, with its huge collection of data and many subtle connections between items, requires enormous mental resources. And yet there is no limit to the number of languages we can learn. All along, our brain grows with us, and our capacity for learning is limited only by our lifespan."

"Does native fluency in music affect executive function?" asked Ben.

"Playing music," said Hugo, "requires maintaining peak levels of concentration for abnormally long periods of time, with zero respite. A lapse of even a fraction of a second—the mind wandering off or briefly going on autopilot—can bring the performance to the brink of disaster." The executive function (control, flexibility, planning, etc.) of musicians is such that usually they can recover in real time faster than the audience can detect the lapse. This type of control is achieved through many years of sustained and purposeful work, but those who are natively fluent in music achieve it effortlessly. "It is what the Italians call _sprezzatura_ , performing with apparent carelessness and ease something that is punishingly difficult." He told the story of how Mateo, when he had just turned six, played for the first time with an orchestra. Before learning the cello, Mateo was playing the piano. They were performing a part of a simple Haydn concerto. At all the rehearsals and performances they repeated the exposition, as specified in the score. But just before one of the performances, the conductor told him that they were short of time and will skip the repeat. Mateo said OK, but during the concert had a brief lapse, and when the orchestra went on to the development section, Mateo started to repeat the exposition, as on previous occasions. It took him a fraction of a second to realize what had happened. Even before the conductor turned to look at him in dismay, he had already improvised a short transition and rejoined the orchestra in the development section, without anyone in the audience noticing the slightest glitch. "The great Schnabel did worse when he got lost in a Mozart concerto and brought the performance, orchestra and all, to a halt."

"In this sense, native fluency is a purveyor of effortlessness," said Ben.

"Definitely. Among others. But it is easy to see how effortlessness doesn't mean only that one can do more easily what another may do with greater difficulty, but that often one can do what another wouldn't even attempt. If one runs more effortlessly than another, it usually means also that, with some effort, one also runs faster."

Hugo had a great deal to say about what he called the "SAT loop." According to him, one of the unique features of SATs was that they measure the ability to succeed on SATs.

"That's a cheap shot," said the professor. "One cannot deny that there is a strong correlation between those who succeed on SATs and those who succeed in college."

"But this is mainly because colleges test the same way SATs do," said Ben, "so that school and college may turn out to be nothing but an ongoing SAT preparation course. SATs keep the gates of colleges specializing in teaching multiple-choice skills. They were not designed to measure native fluency, which is a fount of excellence and creativity, as you will see when I tell you more about the studio. The digital measures that schooling systems live (and die) by cannot adequately reflect the analog gains in creativity that native fluency produces. Our unaugmented reality remains an analog one. In the creative experience of an architect, a chef, a photographer, a nurse, etc., life seldom tosses out problems with solutions that come in neat sets of four (one correct, one absurd, and two dubious), asking practitioners to select exactly one of the choices, then judging the quality of the temple, the soufflé, the picture, and the treatment by averaging the scores." It was not clear whether these were Ben's opinions or Hugo's. "The notion that Eli Whitney's invention of interchangeable parts can be applied to education, and that one tool, one set of questions can be used to evaluate the learning of a million human children without exchanging a single word with them is almost touching in its simple-mindedness." Ben claimed that forward-looking corporations were beginning to realize that the products of the SAT and university systems are not necessarily the ones who create the highest value, who make the greatest contribution to our physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. "By contrast, native fluency, not easily digitized, provides the freedom, the facility, and well... the _fluency_ that lead to excellence and creativity. Native fluency is at the foundation of the ability for self-learning, which is the engine of individual growth."

Quoting Hugo, Ben said that what used to be a luxury was becoming a necessity because of accelerating rates of change. One of the main concerns of young people preparing for life and career, and of their parents, one might add, is the rapid change in all fields of knowledge and the difficulty of keeping up with it, whatever one's skill or profession is. Many young people are bracing themselves for a lifetime of learning to keep up with unprecedented change. "I asked Hugo where was the return on investment in native fluency under these conditions. He answered that the only way to keep up with change is to drive it. This requires excellence and creativity, a key ingredient of which is native fluency."

Hugo repeated on several occasions that there are not many free lunches in life. Even when one appears to present itself, somebody eventually ends up having to pick up the tab. In this sense, native fluency is not an entirely free lunch either because the parents are paying for it. But from the point of view of the child it actually is. We are all entitled by birthright to one coupon for a free lunch: our mother tongue. Everything else we acquire in life in the way of knowledge and skill we must work for, often very hard, or in more than one way. Achieving this level of facility in any other area—math, music, chess—without investment of effort is possible only at the age when we are cashing in our coupon for our mother tongue. Ben asked whether this proved that native fluency changes the brain.

"I believe that all the evidence points in this direction." A liveried footman ran in and whispered something to Hugo that contained the word " _urgente_." Hugo apologized and hurried away. Ben could easily accept everything Hugo said about effortless creativity flowing from native fluency, and all the other qualities that belonged to the realm of cognitive psychology. It was when Hugo jumped into neurology and spoke about native fluency producing permanent changes in the brain that Ben had difficulty following. The brain, in its plasticity, quite likely changes all the time. That native fluency changes it may be a trivial insight, although the way in which it changes it, making exponential learning possible, may not be trivial. Hugo returned a few minutes later and went on without breaking stride. "Recall that the skills we acquire natively cannot be learned later, or at least not in the same way. You cannot develop perfect pitch after the window for doing it closes."

"I thought there were perfect pitch coaches for musicians of all ages?" said Ben.

"There aren't. With training, adults can develop perfect relative pitch, so that they know how to create all the intervals if given an A, but not absolute pitch. If you ask them, when they wake up in the morning, to sing a 392 Hz G they cannot do it, unless they retained this ability since they were tiny babies. Why isn't it possible to acquire this skill at age 25? Where is the difference? Clearly, something in the use-it-or-lose-it brain has changed." On further reflection, Hugo thought that perhaps it was more accurate to say that native fluency prevents some changes from happening in the brain. We can see it in the fact that native fluency in any area tends to survive better the merciless pruning continually going on in the brain, where unused synapses are being discarded wholesale. The last remnants of the disappearing brains of Alzheimer's patients, long after they forgot the names and faces of their spouses and children, are fragments of their native languages.

Native fluency, achieved through self-learning, exercises the learning ability of the brain. Learning is exponential: the more you learn, the more you learn to learn. Learning that 88=64 accomplishes two things: it enriches the brain's treasury of stored knowledge and it expands its ability for understanding more complex matters (for example, powers and binary numbers) to further enrich itself. It is the second accomplishment that makes it exponential. The learning that the brain achieves early in life, natively, unprompted, randomly, and based entirely on its own discovery of patterns, is the most reliable and lasting. Later learning, based on teaching in school, is tainted by explanation; it contains a mixture of self-understood and pseudo-understood knowledge (memorized explanations). Learning from teaching may feel like real learning, but it isn't; the associations in the brain are with the formal, external aspects of knowledge (the text of the theorem, the theory of counterpoint), not with its internal truth. In a way, teaching tries to short-circuit the learning process. In this, it walks hand-in-hand with testing, which usually assesses not real understanding but its short circuit. This is why most school learning, a relatively recent practice, dating back only to the 18th century, is so easily forgotten.

"Nevertheless, students do learn some things in school," said Ben.

Hugo acknowledged that they did, because teaching, among others, also provides exposure, and as such contributes to learning. But only a small portion of the investment in teaching translates into learning. Greater and more beneficial exposure could be achieved with a smaller effort, if properly aimed. Once we recognize that all learning is internal, we want to place the emphasis on giving the brain every opportunity to collect statistics, derive patterns, minimize error, and resolve ambiguity. Maximum exposure leads to maximum learning.

Ben, a product of schooling, had a difficult time renouncing the traditional model. "Admitting that self-learning is superior to teaching, isn't a good explanation, at least in some circumstances, an efficient way of quickly transmitting some knowledge?"

"In a superficial way. But even if such an explanation were to lead to an epiphany, revealed knowledge is always inferior to discovered knowledge."

"But it may take a lifetime before certain topics might take shape in people's mind by sampling the reality."

"Lifetimes go by before we get to learn most of what there is to know anyway. Attempting wall-to-wall coverage of all topics is a futile school strategy, doomed to failure."

"Don't we still first have to lay down some bedrock upon which to build later? Isn't learning a structured process, a pyramid where layer accumulates on top of layer to form the edifice of knowledge?"

"This is how teaching works," said Hugo. "Learning has nothing to do with it, as you'll see in the studio."

The construction metaphor describes the ordered, hierarchical paradigm of teaching: begin with the foundation, build the ground floor on top of it, then the upper floors and the roof. It is a model obsessed with progression from arithmetic to geometry to algebra to calculus, from simple to complex, from morphology to syntax, from harmony to counterpoint, from antiquity to the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and so on. But math is one, language is one, music is one, and you can start learning from any point. According to Hugo, the accumulation of learning is best described by the metaphor of the honeycomb, which if you are a bee, you can begin to build from any point, and it grows simultaneously in all directions. "You'll see what I mean when we get to the studio," said Hugo.

This account completely contradicted Ben's experience, who felt that he did learn a thing or two in school. "Learning is a process that takes place in time. Children cannot grasp everything at once. By necessity, one must learn some things before learning others. Schools conveniently arrange this in some order, with basic coming before advanced, easy preceding difficult."

"They do so for the convenience of the school," said Hugo. "School is an institution of teaching, not of learning. Its every quality reflects hierarchical construction. It is the ultimate teaching engine, which segregates students by age, divides them by skill, ranks them by score, then regroups them into tracks, to be imprinted with knowledge separated into disciplines, split up into levels, sequenced, graduated, scheduled by day of week and time of day, and guarded by prerequisites."

"Does native fluency in music enhance memory," asked Ben, not wishing to press the point about hierarchy any further, "and if so, do we care?"

"In my opinion," said Hugo, "yes and yes." He marveled at how people who take great pride in their mental powers, quite casually admit that their memory is a shambles. Phrases like "I can't remember a thing," "My memory is completely shot," or "If I don't write it down I'll never remember it" are bandied about carelessly, without the speakers feeling that their self-professed deficiency in any way reflects on their intelligence. Hugo thought this was a byproduct of the PC model of the brain, which regards the CPU and the RAM as two separate entities connected by a bus, with the CPU pulling information out of the RAM as needed. Most people's self-image is bound up with the rating of their CPU—raw intelligence arising from an intricately wired calculating machine. Somehow memory doesn't seem to figure in it, probably because it is perceived as just a bunch of identical empty cells waiting for some content to be dropped in them.

This picture is as far from the truth as can be. What cognitive scientists call "long-term memory" (to distinguish it from the function that keeps in mind a phone number for the few seconds it takes to dial it) is a quintessential intellectual function. This becomes quite obvious the minute we stop thinking of remembering as _retrieving_ and begin thinking about it as _recreating_.

The distinction between having the information and understanding how items of information hang together is particularly vivid when it comes to how we memorize. Our memory of information (baseball statistics or a list of international dialing codes) is usually precise but limited, and it fades if it is not reinforced regularly. By contrast, our memory of things we understand (the rules of games, mathematical expressions) is easily refreshed and can last forever.

You can follow the recreative process closely when you try to recall something that is "on the tip of your tongue." Hugo related the story of how he tried to quote in a conversation the first sentence of Flaubert's _Salambo_. "I remembered immediately 'It was in _something_ , a suburb of Carthage, in Hamilcar's gardens.' I didn't even have to think about it to get this far. I knew that the story took place in Carthage and that it involved Hamilcar Barca (Hannibal's father). But what about the name of the suburb? It is not a common name and I couldn't remember it. I did have a vague feeling that it began with _M_ , and I had the rhythm: ta-RA-ra. Malaga? No, that's in Spain. It rhymed with Ferrara. But think Africa. Sahara. No. Then it hit me: Megara! 'It was in Megara, a suburb of Carthage...' This wasn't as quick as described here, and it took some minutes. And clearly, there was no retrieval in this process. It was all recreation, pure and simple."

In 1876, the town of Lucca obtained a ticket to one of the first performances in Italy of Verdi's _Aida_ , in nearby Pisa. They awarded the ticket to Puccini, who was 18 years old at the time and recognized in town as a committed musician, although it was long before he wrote his first opera. On the night of the performance, he walked the 12 miles to Pisa to attend, and then back home to Lucca. The next day, Puccini reproduced at the piano, to the assembled music lovers of the town, the entire opera, more than two hours of music, from beginning to end. He played the piano, sang all the roles, and explained the action. It was a display of recreating something that the brain of a natively fluent musician has thoroughly understood, including all the structural and harmonic relationships between the many components of the opera. Just as we easily comprehend the way in which the love story between Aida and Radames is tightly connected in the plot with Radames's betrayal of his country and with the way the two lovers die together in the wake of this betrayal, Puccini also understood, for example, how the 5 notes of the famous triumphal march in Act II are rearranged into a new melody to form the middle part of the march. Without this type of understanding it would have been impossible to memorize so much music in one hearing. Even Puccini would not have been able to memorize music he didn't understand.

"Like Morton Feldman's _Neither_ ," said Julia.

"Is it ghastly?" asked Ben.

"I haven't listened to all of it yet. My husband brought home the disc this morning. But I read the libretto by Beckett."

"You did?"

"It's all of ten lines. Do you want me to bring it? It should give you a good idea of what the music must be like."

"By all means," said Ben. "We can all use some culture." There was no hint of irony in his voice.

Julia returned holding the liner notes. "It says here that Beckett sent the libretto to Feldman on a postcard." She turned the page. Here, _to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither_..."

"Precisely," said Ben. "Impenetrable structures like these are difficult, if not impossible, to understand, and therefore to memorize. If memory had nothing to do with understanding, it would be equally easy to memorize both types of material."

"This may explain," said Roxanne, "why performances of _Aida_ are more frequent than those of _Neither_."

As always, what goes for music also goes for numbers. We saw that to initially understand the idea of multiplication, our brain must be able to create and hold an image of 3 sets of 2s, or something similar. But once the idea of 32=6 is understood, the rest of the multiplication table is just information that needs to be memorized by brute force. There is merit in such memorization, say up to 1515, because it all takes place in the context of multiplication and it furnishes the brain with material it can readily draw on in more complex calculations. These elements of the multiplication table we may remember and then forget, but we never forget the principle of multiplication once it is understood, because that understanding is recreated each time, not merely retrieved. The same is true of more elaborate mathematical truths. Hugo returned to Gauss's formula for adding up the numbers between 1 and _n_. It can be formalized as S=(n+1)n/2. This is not too difficult to remember, and we can probably memorize it quite easily even without knowing much about what it means. But will we still remember it in five hours, or in three weeks, or in twelve years? Unlikely. If, however, we take our time to understand how the formula is derived, our memory of it changes completely. Gauss, who was natively fluent with numbers, figured it out that if 1+10=11, 2+9=11, 3+8=11, 4+7=11, and 5+6=11, then 1+2+3+4... +10 can be expressed as 5 pairs of 11. It is now easy to see that all we need to do is add the first and the last numbers (1+10=11), and multiply the result with half of _n_ (10/2=5). Once we understand this mathematical truth, we can never forget the formula (1 plus the last number multiplied by the last number divided by 2) for as long as we live because our brain will recreate it every time the need arises, although at times this recreation happens so fast that it feels like something has been retrieved from a known address.

The same early exposure to music that leads to native fluency also provides the brain with the raw materials, the samples it needs to identify the patterns from which musical understanding grows. This pattern recognition changes the brain and brokers understanding. It also facilitates remembering, that is, it enhances memory, which is nothing but an expression of understanding, an ability to recreate at will that which the brain has already understood, or in other words, learned. Saying that we have learned or understood something without the ability to recreate it (without a memory of it) is an oxymoron; it implies that our brain (our understanding) is a black hole, into which learning is absorbed but cannot come out. To know is, among others, to be able to recreate what we know. The mechanism that helps us understand is the same one that helps us remember. If computers worked like the brain, the RAM would be internal to the CPU, and the two would develop and expand together.

Native fluency, which helps the brain identify the patterns of complex music, also helps it remember and recreate musical content. Lay audiences are often amazed by the ability of young children to remember long and complex pieces of music. How can a small child remember the disposition of thousands of black dots on page after page of music? The answer is, he doesn't; what is being remembered are not the accumulated dots but the meaning they encode: the melodies, the harmonies, the rhythms, the structures. Understanding is necessary for this kind of memorization, to make it possible to recreate later. We can see the process of recreation at work when a performer has a memory lapse. What happens is not that certain storage locations have suddenly been emptied and information is missing. Generally, there is a momentary loss of concentration, where musicians are not sure where they are in the text: _Have I already played this variation_? Musicians don't freeze in these situations, their memory erased. They make a quick adjustment, perhaps repeat a part despite having just played it, or improvise a short transition to a place where they can comfortably resume. Few people in the audience, if any, notice that anything went wrong at all.

It was Liszt who introduced the practice of playing without the scores, probably out of sheer bravado. But the reason it caught on almost universally is that musicians have no difficulty memorizing the music they play, and after having memorized it they may find looking at the notes distracting. The word "memorize" is misleading here. It conjures up the image of someone sitting at the piano, covering portions of the score and trying to remember the musical text. Nothing of the sort takes place in reality. Musicians generally know a piece by heart shortly after they begin to practice it, and long before they are satisfied with the way they play it. They continue to practice with the notes in front of them only because they keep jotting down comments for themselves about the interpretation. Such knowledge of the piece derives from a thorough understanding of it. Naturally, it is possible to memorize a piece by "brute force," phrase by phrase, without grasping the structure and patterns of the music but by repeating it endlessly until it is retained. Students who lack native fluency in music are often forced to do just that, which is not unlike memorizing pages of poetry in a foreign language, without understanding the meaning of the text. It can be done. But this is Plan B of our brain, often referred to as rote memorization—the deliberate packing of the memory through systematic repetition. This trusty method of old is now deeply scorned by educationists, although lately there may be some dissent. Before taking sides in this argument, we must understand that rote memorization is not involved in any way in the acquisition of native fluency, despite the superficial similarity of extensive repetition in both. In rote memorization, the learner, through an effort of will, deliberately forces the brain to take on board some arbitrarily selected content by repetition. In native fluency acquisition, the young brain naturally abstracts content from the environment, which rises to the surface through random statistical prevalence. Rote memorization is mechanically imposed on the brain, whereas native fluency is absorbed through natural selection, so to speak.

Still, rote memorization is not a waste of time, especially past early childhood. It often provides a shortcut to knowledge that is too important for the learner to wait for statistical accumulation. Pages by Dante, Shakespeare, Pushkin, or Racine (depending on where you grew up), verses from the Bible, the Mahabharata, the Kalevala, the Lusiads, and so on, the partitas of Bach and the sonatas of Beethoven form complex linguistic and harmonic structures. Furnishing one's brain with them provides the building blocks from which it recreates models of language, logic, and musical expression. But we must distinguish between information out of context (trivia about the tallest buildings on earth, the deadliest earthquakes, or the most expensive restaurants in New York), the memorizing of which does not change the brain in any useful way, and structured information in context. Memorizing Shakespeare sonnets and monologs: Yes. In this case Shakespeare stands for all well-written fiction that furnishes our brain with models of excellence readily available and accessible. Handel suites, Mozart sonatas, and Charlie Parker solos: Yes. Memorizing the multiplication table, the first 16 square numbers, the powers of 2 to up to the 15th or even 20th, some algebraic expressions, some theorems of geometry, and scientific facts: Yes. These are the raw building materials the brain uses to understand more complex phenomena.

When music is added to the mix of native skills, the ability of the brain to recognize and recreate, in other words, to memorize musical and other patterns develops dramatically. Neuroscientists tell us that processing, and especially performing music engages more functions of the brain than any other human activity, and memory is one of these. It is the memory function that musicians use to recreate the long pieces of music we hear them play at concerts. A sonata by Schubert or Brahms can alone exceed 40 minutes. A one-part piano recital contains about an hour's worth of music; a recital with an intermission contains an hour and half of music or more. Conservatory students play such recitals routinely. Consider, by comparison, that all of Hamlet's lines in _Hamlet_ amount to maybe 25 minutes of speech. Those of Ofelia to less than 10. And how many of us get to play Hamlet or Ofelia? (We're lucky if we get to be Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.) The quantity of music that any amateur musician, any student of an instrument, gets to memorize is far greater than the amount of text that even professional actors memorize. "Memory is part of our thinking apparatus, of our intelligence, if you will, and native fluency in music does wonders for this apparatus," said Ben.
V

The Art of Doing

"Notice that we haven't lifted a finger yet," said Ben. "We haven't moved a muscle."

"You're right," said Hugo. "And now imagine a child learning to ride a bike. As he sways from side to side, he jerks the handlebar right and left with rough, exaggerated gestures, overcompensating in each direction, until the bike leans beyond the tipping point and crashes. But gradually, the brain accumulates enough samples of balancing moves and their results to figure out what works, and the corrective actions become more and more moderate, resulting in a smoother ride and fewer falls. After many tries, the child achieves fluency and stops having to make a conscious effort to keep the moving bike in balance; the brain automatically issues the correct instructions needed. At this point we can say that the function of keeping a moving bike in balance has been learned. Note that no explanations were necessary, nor would they have helped. The only way to learn how to ride a bike is to do it. True, eager parents run after their kids, holding on to the bike and shouting instructions, but these have nothing to do with the process of learning, which takes place entirely in the exchange between the child's brain, joints, eyes, and ears. A dedicated parent can spare the child a few scrapes, but good knee and elbow guards could probably do the same, with better results."

Ben imagined it. "Why is it instructive to understand how a child learns to ride a bike?"

"Because it illuminates the difference between knowing and doing. You wanted to talk about doing, didn't you?"

Ben wanted to know how children in Uscolia achieve fluent, natural performance in physical activities, not only in purely mental ones. Biking was a good test case. Hugo explained that in the case of knowing, the brain looks only to the outside. All the information it needs to collect is out there, in the sounds people make, in the colors, shapes, and movements of external objects. When it comes to doing, an inside element is added, and the brain collects information also about internal events, in addition to the external ones. Learning to do involves also learning about the self, about how the self is doing things, and instructing the self to do better. The body of a child on a bike is the source of rich information the brain must sample in order to instruct the child what to do. Initially, in the learning stages, the brain instructs in the sense of teaching (the only true teaching that exists, which is of course, self-teaching), and later in the sense of directing and ordering.

This didn't quite solve Ben's quandary. If native fluency can later lead to Mozart-level performance in a related field, what is the comparable prerequisite for a Federer-like performance in a physical domain? In other words, if native fluency is a mental attribute, what is its physical counterpart? The entry level balancing needed to keep a bike on the road is merely the equivalent of playing _Chopsticks_ on the piano. Riding without hands is the equivalent of playing _Für Elise_. If we aspire to a black belt in bike riding (climbing stairs, standing on the handlebar, jumping over fences, riding on handrails...) we must reach an entirely different level of fluency, one that is generally referred to as expertise.

Hugo explained that there is no clear-cut mental _versus_ physical distinction that would allow setting up an analogy of the type "native fluency is to mental activity as _X_ is to physical activity." This is because every physical activity (at least any activity that requires some skill, not only sheer muscle strength), from boxing to playing the violin, has a significant mental aspect. Wherever skill is involved, all physical activity has an overwhelming mental component.

"If the skill is in the brain," asked Ben, "what is the difference between mental and physical activity?"

According to Hugo, the main difference is that purely mental activities, for example, calculating a value, take place entirely in the brain, whereas a physical activity, for example, returning serve in tennis, has a muscled component as well. The main consequence of this difference is one of speed. Purely mental activity is analogous to an electronic operation where no moving parts are involved. By contrast, a physical activity is analogous to mechanical action, and therefore it is about an order of magnitude slower, as an instruction needs to go out to the muscle and activate it. The skill may reside in the ability to reduce the activation time to a minimum. At its highest level, skill should be able to mimic almost instantaneous action, with minimum latency.

"You cannot equate skill in boxing with the ability to box fast."

"Ah, but you may," said Hugo. Being able to "see" a fraction of a second earlier than your opponent where the fist is going to land makes the difference between taking the blow and avoiding it. Put differently, slightly faster processing can make the opponent appear, to a small degree, in slow motion. Imagine a simple thought experiment in which you are boxing with an opponent who moves in exaggerated slow motion. He is never able to land a punch because every time you, moving at your normal speed, have ample time to take evasive action. By contrast, long before he can slowly raise his guard, you are able to reach his jaw with your fist. No such differences exist in reality, but for otherwise evenly matched opponents, even a small advantage in processing speed can make a decisive difference in performance. In this sense, you can definitely equate response time with skill. The faster you respond the more effective you are and the more skilled you appear. There is no inherent reason why some of us should respond to external stimuli faster than others, except that the natural response of some of us has been degraded, and it is now "natural response minus." Our natural response time to external stimuli may be an individual characteristic that improves with training and deteriorates with disuse, like all mental faculties. From this perspective, physical performance looks like a mental function, and can be enhanced as such.

"This is rather counter-intuitive," said Ben. "If we refer to calculating 32 as a mental activity, returning serve seems to belong to a different class."

"Not really," said Hugo. "If we break down the operations that both tasks require, we find that they have much in common. Both are based on internal representations in the brain. To calculate 32 we must be able to visualize the three pairs of 2s. Similarly, to return serve, we must be able to visualize the place where the ball will land in our court and create a mental image of where we need to be and of what movements we must execute to return it."

"A great deal more complicated than visualizing 32."

"But not unlike calculating 2930. Based on the learned skill of how to return serve, we already know the general principle, and need to figure out only the particular details of the serve at hand. The same is true for calculating 2930: we know the principle, but have to work out the details. The question is how long it takes us to do it. If there were multiplication tournaments, the same way there are tennis tournaments, some would win and others would lose. By the way, kids sometimes organize computation tournaments at the studio."

Hugo mentioned Richard Feynman, who once stumped a Japanese abacus salesman in a restaurant, before an audience of waiters, by calculating in his head, within seconds, the cube root of 1729.03 and giving the correct answer of 12.002. He would certainly have been among the winners of a computation tournament. The opponent's serve poses a similarly difficult problem that needs to be solved. It involves many parameters. The problem is stated in the form of the ball landing in your court with a certain angle of incidence, acceleration, spin, etc. At that point, the answer to it (how to return it) is obvious and you know it, having trained long and hard for it. The only question is whether you can solve the problem fast enough to be in place, with correct movement at the ready, when the ball lands. To accomplish this, you must be able to process quickly a large amount of data, including the deceptive moves of the opponent, who tries to disguise the stroke, even before the ball sets out on its trajectory.

Because of the element of motion control, doing is trickier than knowing; it includes all of knowing (you need to know what to do), and then some. To do, the brain must first _learn_ how to do: box, play the flute, ride a bike. Once it knows how to do something, it must instruct the muscles involved to do it. Thus, doing involves all the expertise of knowing what to do, plus the motor control necessary to do it. Both are mental functions that begin and end inside the brain. The brain begins to learn what to do at birth by observation and by collecting statistics. But motor control must wait until the brain can begin collecting statistics on what works. Our two months old, even our two years old, is not ready to begin boxing, playing tennis, riding a bike, or playing the guitar, therefore the brain has no data on self-performance.

"And yet you claim that the window on native fluency closes around the age of one," said Ben. "There is no reason to believe that doing should be different from knowing in this respect. To make young babies into expert doers naturally, surely you must be in a great hurry to create some special kind of environment for them."

Hugo pointed to three enablers that can create the type of environment in which the brain develops expertise in doing: native fluency in some area (any area), play that requires speedy processing, and a combination of imitation and repetition. About native fluency, Hugo didn't have much more to add to what he had already said. Because native fluency in any area improves memory and mental abilities in general, music is as good a candidate as reading or arithmetic. As a natural way of challenging the brain to improve processing time, Hugo cited activities requiring balance. In the area of imitation and repetition he suggested taking our cue from speech development.

"Let's look at balance more closely," said Hugo. "Coping with gravity is a lifelong challenge for upright creatures and it continually engages our response time." To describe accurately the complex act of balancing, we would need to resort to such exalted terms as _vestibular system_ , _horizontal scanning_ , _proprioception_ , _kinesthesia_ , and the like. Using lay terms, it is reasonably accurate to say that for us to remain upright and not to fall, our brain integrates information arriving from our inner ear, eyes, and joints (ankles, knees, hips) about the position of our body relative to our base of support, usually the floor. The brain is continually processing this information, and when it finds that we have swayed too far from the vertical, it issues instructions for micro-corrections (shifting our weight from one leg to another, leaning, turning the handle bar, etc.) until balance is restored—only to be upset again, whereupon the process is repeated. It is a servo mechanism, in which the brain makes adjustments in response to new information, and the results of the adjustment are fed back into the feedback loop and evaluated, then new adjustments are made, and so on. To keep our balance when we are in a highly unstable condition, as when performing some stunt on a bicycle, surf board, or roller blades, these corrections become more and more frequent, and depending on what exactly we are trying to do, the brain may have less and less time to issue the necessary instructions, as information about changing body positions keeps coming in fast and furious. For a small baby, standing up unaided is no less of a challenge. Later, the challenge can be created by standing on one foot or walking on a tight rope one inch above the ground. In all these situations, if the brain cannot process the information in time to issue the instructions for the appropriate correction, we fall.

Having to restore our balance in split seconds challenges the brain's response and its ability to quickly integrate visual and other external information. "Standing on one foot with the eyes closed, or keeping in balance on a skateboard, a tightrope, or a wobble board works as a perfect research and development laboratory for exercising the brain's response time, with gravity to push against," said Hugo. Some activity is guaranteed to take place in this lab because all children learn to walk upright. We can take our cue from this to figure out what other types of age-appropriate activities would give the brain an opportunity to collect statistics on what works in other challenging balancing situations.

The same is true of the speech lab, where the brain is also guaranteed to be busy early on, collecting statistics on what works, as babies begin imitating and repeating sounds long before they develop understanding of what these sounds mean. "Speaking is the only complex, learned doing that, barring pathologies, every person on earth is an expert in," said Hugo. "I'm excluding crawling and eating because they are to a large extent instinctual, not learned. I distinguish here between _knowing_ our native language, an entirely mental function and the domain of native fluency, and _speaking it_ , which has a physical component. We have seen that it is possible to achieve native fluency in one's mother tongue before being able to articulate words. When a child begins to speak he is already fluent in his native language, although not yet an expert." At around one year, children begin to speak words in meaningful ways. This is not an easy job. A spoken word is created by coordinated movement of the vocal cords, tongue, lips, and jaw, all of which interact in making the sounds. There are about 20 places in the mouth and throat where speech sounds are articulated. How close these organs are to each other when a particular sound is made, what the participation of the vocal cords is in any given sound, the degree to which the nasal passage is involved, how breathing is used—all are determined by motor instructions issued by the brain. Unlike _understanding_ language, which is a strictly mental function, _speaking_ it is a mental-physical one. The brain develops understanding of language (native fluency) by observation, without having to move a muscle. In speaking, however, as in all cases of doing, where movement is involved, the brain needs to coordinate complex muscle activity to achieve flawless, easy, automatic performance.

To achieve such motor control, the brain uses the twin strategies of imitation and repetition—and in this case, repetition _performed_ by the child, not merely _observed_ by him. But note the unique and extraordinary nature of speech imitation, and its heavy reliance on the ear. The baby cannot imitate directly the movements of the tongue and lips of the model he copies because most of these movements are not visible to the eye. Instead, he listens to the sounds produced by his own speech organs and tries to make them match those produced by the models he imitates. Native fluency, an entirely mental skill, is acquired by exposure to persistent repetition by others. Motor control, a mental-physical skill, is acquired by imitation, repetition, evaluation, and error reduction—all performed by the learner.

No explanation is needed where to place the tongue and how to shape the lips. Such explanation is often attempted when teaching people how to speak a foreign language, but in speaking his native language, the baby doesn't need to be taught. Based on the auditory patterns it collected, the brain can issue the necessary motor instructions to articulate the words in such a way as to produce the appropriate acoustic output, without the opportunity to witness the process of articulation that takes place inside the mouth of the speakers it imitates.

"I was fascinated by this idea of imitation based on assessing the result," said Ben. "I asked Hugo what this tells us about the ability of the brain to figure out on its own where we need to put our fingers to make a guitar produce a certain sound."

"Easy to conduct a thought experiment," Hugo said. "Imagine a baby who has not taken any guitar lessons, but who is exposed to many samples of guitar playing by different guitarists. Now imagine that at age eight or ten months he gets hold of a small guitar and can begin experimenting. I see no difference between this and speaking." Babies begin imitating sounds and speech early, at 12-18 weeks, with or without understanding their meaning, as the brain is collecting sounds and practicing their articulation. Speech begins with imitation of random sounds, followed by non-words, then words, and finally groups of words. This imitation is hugely effective. Despite differences in the pitch, speed, loudness, etc. of these sounds, the babies' speech retains sufficient identifying qualities to be understandable. The brain knows when the speech is and is not understandable, and makes the necessary adjustments. Imitation remains important into the toddler years, when it helps children form long sentences while their syntax is developing, indeed helping their syntax develop. "We note in passing here the involvement of memory in this process," added Hugo. Babies collect statistics since infancy on which moves succeed in various actions they perform, and start imitating speech long before they have the physical apparatus to speak expertly. They can do this because of their extensive exposure to speech. There is no reason why singing, dancing, or judo should be different. Children can begin imitating and repeating simple components of these and other complex movements in infancy if exposed to them sufficiently. There is a reason why children are so addicted to repetition: it is how the brain learns. Speaking is doing, and it holds the key to how babies learn to do by imitation and repetition, by breaking down large units into smaller components and beginning by imitating atomic units. Speech is a complex activity, and babies begin learning it by imitating its smallest segments: "ba ba ba," "da da da," and the like. If exposed to guitar playing they will do the same.

"Then doing also turns out to be more brain than brawn work," said a woman from the subcontinent wearing a sari of several shades of green. "This is reassuring."

"So that the art and practice part of life must be the mistress of this theory," I added but drew only blank stares, and decided to keep quiet from then on.

"The brain self-learns by collecting statistics," said Ben. "Muscles are developed by brute force training. But behind any physical ability, in addition to raw muscle power, there is always a mental skill of some type, and often more than one such skill, responsible for the physical control that gives us an edge on the tennis court or in the concert hall. To achieve a black belt in any doing, to go beyond _Chopsticks_ and _Für Elise_ , we need the same refined motor control that our brain achieves over the speech organs. But there is no guarantee that we will achieve such control in any area other than speech, just as there is no guarantee that we will achieve native fluency in any area other than our mother tongue. Here too, our birthright entitles us to one coupon for a free gift, and that is speech. The brain needs to be provided with special opportunities to develop the kind of motor control that gets us to Wimbledon and Carnegie Hall.

Roxanne added, "and not _qua_ spectators."

The maid walked onto the terrace: "Telephone for Mr. Benson."

"Excuse me," said Ben and went inside.

VI

The Impossibility of Teaching

The terrace came alive, as we all stood up to stretch our legs. Julia brought out sparkling wine and some canapés. "Physically we all speak the same language, and we don't need translators in the boxing ring, the ice rink, or on the dance floor," I heard someone say behind me.

"Ben brushed off my question about knowledge and identity," Julia was telling the professor. "But I'm not persuaded that the two are entirely different kettles of fish."

"Because he didn't want to get into issues of religion, ideology, and deliberate indoctrination."

"In a way, every exposure, however involuntary, amounts to some form of indoctrination. Every exposure allows the brain to expand, but at the same time it also constrains it by what's left out. There are no neutral choices. Every act or omission is political. Inclusion (of something) equals exclusion (of something else)."

"You're not in the conference, are you?" William said, stopping next to me to refill his glass.

"No, I just happened to wander into Julia's gallery yesterday morning."

"She's one of the foremost art collectors in Switzerland, and an influential philanthropist," he said, "although you wouldn't know it, she's so modest." I said that I was charmed by her conversation. "Not quite sure what to make of all this," said William. I wasn't sure myself. "It reminds one of Thomas More," he went on.

"It does," I said. "But then, Thomas More reminds one of Plato."

"True..." He put two vol-au-vents and a napkin on a small plate. "Halfway through I had made up my mind to just dismiss it all. But as he was talking about the impossibility of teaching, I remembered an experience I had recently, before I joined Greenpeace. On several occasions I attempted to teach writing—technical writing, to be precise. I thought I was richly qualified to do so, as a practicing technical writer and holder of various academic degrees. My students were bright and committed men and women. They attended the program with the intention of becoming technical writers, at some sacrifice and not insignificant cost to themselves, so they were not lacking in motivation. In time, however, I discovered an alarming pattern. Those who started with reasonably strong writing skills ended up learning quite a bit, although as it turned out, this learning involved mostly the formal and procedural aspects of technical writing. Much of it could easily have been gleaned from readily available manuals. Still, these students found the information conveyed in the course handy and the certificate they received useful. What disturbed me was that the other group of students, who struggled with writing in general, wasn't getting any better. I had thought all along that this group would benefit most from my teaching."

"Were you the only person teaching in the program?" I asked.

"No, I was teaching only the general writing course. The program contained a bunch of other technical courses, programming, specialized writing courses, whatnot."

"You naturally thought that the weakest students would benefit most."

"Especially because of the method I used. Students wrote extensively in class and had weekly assignments, which I read conscientiously. I carefully edited their work and commented in great detail. It was disheartening to find that this group of students, class after class, semester after semester, made absolutely no progress. They stubbornly refused to _learn_ , failed to understand why their writing was inadequate, and their last assignment of the term was no better than the first. They were baffled by my comments. 'What's wrong with _the reason is because_?' If I tried to explain the redundancy I was met by glassy eyes. 'Why doesn't _a possible explanation may be_ work?' The same result. 'Why does _to add more parameters_ work better than _to add additional parameters_?' I had begun teaching with great enthusiasm and energy. Two years later it became frustrating and upsetting. I ended up dreading the days on which I had to meet the students. I had to conclude, reluctantly, that adults were probably too old to learn tricky new things such as writing, and I quit, silently blaming my former students' former elementary English teachers."

"You may have been right," I said. "It may not be possible to teach writing to adults."

"That's what I thought," said William. "But just a few months ago I met face to face the said elementary school teachers. My wife and I have, among others, two adopted children. The older one is in second grade, and recently I came across some of her writing assignments. Of course, they were all graded _A_ , with compliments from the teacher on her drawing and penmanship, but the writing... I can't describe it. It was simply awful."

"For a second grader?"

"Yes. Even for a first grader. This time, however, I was confident that finally I could help. I was sure this would be an easy task; after all, this was the age when writing should ostensibly be taught, the age at which my former technical writing students should have acquired the skills they now lacked. But to my astonishment, my seven year old proved as frustratingly teaching-proof as my adult students had been—indeed more so, because the adults were at least courteous. I found it impossible to persuade her that certain forms of expression were preferable to others. I was prepared to accept that my favoring of _Melinda and I_ over _me and Melinda_ had to do also with manners, which is not a writing matter proper. But _I shouldn't of went_? 'What's wrong with it?' she asked. 'Is that how you speak?' 'Yes, that's how I speak.' I didn't know where to begin explaining."

"There's always a good explanation," I said, "but it's usually too long, too complicated, and not very persuasive."

William didn't hear me. "It seems unbelievable. Is it possible that first and second graders are unteachable, just when teaching how to write is supposed to begin? I found no reasonable explanation, and I couldn't accept the idea that age seven was too late for teaching, although I began to suspect that there may be something happening very early in the development of children, something we are not aware of at the time when it happens, that affects later abilities and skills. I had no clue what that might be; the idea of native fluency didn't occur to me, of course."

"Native fluency," a woman was saying to the professor, "is not the end of the road, only the beginning. At some point in life we start moving objects about the face of the earth—or cause them to be moved. Our ultimate objective is to achieve mastery and creativity in our life's work, which involves doing."

"We can look at it from Ben's point of view," I said, "or Hugo's—I'm not quite sure which one is talking when. What was it that you were trying to teach, after all, when you thought you were teaching writing?"

"I always thought that writing was a straightforward matter."

"Writing is. But can it be taught? You weren't trying to convey metadata, information, or facts about writing. You were trying to teach expression, putting thoughts together using words, formulating ideas, bringing into being something that didn't exist before. In short, you were trying to teach how to create, and creativity is the ultimate unteachable faculty." I understood all this in a flash, as I was telling it to William, in a way proving Ben's notions about self-learning. All the while, as I was listening to him talk, I wasn't quite persuaded. When I began reprocessing it, as I was formulating my own ideas, it all seemed to come together. "It is possible to share with students a few formal technicalities, which as you said, can be gleaned from any manual on writing. But the adequate forms of exposition, the patterns of expression that work as opposed to those that don't, the coherent wording, the communicative presentation, the proper phrasing—all these must be _learned_ , in other words, the brain must figure them out on its own, internally, based on the countless instances of oral and written speech it sampled over many years of conversing and reading." Did it even make sense for me to tell William all this? He would have to reach his own conclusions, once he rethinks what went on here tonight. Still, I pressed on, having worked myself into expository mode. "One's writing, at any age, is going to be only as good as the samples of language to which one's brain was exposed: no better. People who have read tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of good writing, who have been absorbing vivid language since a young age, intuitively reach for the construction that works. They need not be taught. They cannot be taught. The many samples they have collected as careful conversationalists and readers have helped identify the patterns of good writing in their brains. Writing, like composition, like painting, like any type of creation is fundamentally unteachable, as we have just been told. It can only be self-learned by reading, by listening, by viewing extensively and repeatedly, and by imitating, doing, and redoing until the brain eventually figures out what works. As a creator, the writer has the normal reactions of an artist. But you can look upon writing as problem solving." Writing as problem solving... I had never thought about it in that way.

William looked rather dazed. "Experts tell us that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in any field," said the woman from the subcontinent. William poured himself another drink and stared into the darkness beyond the terrace. I stopped because I didn't think he was listening to me. But internally, I thought I had figured out something. The impossibility of teaching writing serves as a good illustration of the impossibility of teaching in general, because after all, the difficulties are the same in every mental discipline, be it math, science, or philosophy. Whenever it looks like teaching is successful, it is an optical illusion. Whenever we believe that we have succeeded in teaching something (a belief usually based on testing), what has happened is that we transferred some metadata about the subject we were trying to teach, some technical information about it, which is probably available in countless manuals and nowadays can be found in seconds online. If any real learning occurred in the process, it was by virtue of the exposure that we created in the course of the otherwise failed teaching. Whatever learning occurred was due to examples and illustrations, not to proofs, explanations, and testing. This incidental side-effect of teaching, the learning that takes place as a result of exposure, misleads us into thinking that our teaching effort has partially succeeded. It simultaneously sends us into paroxysms of self-doubt, as we try to figure out the reason for the failure of the better part our effort. But eventually, teaching always fails because, busy as it is explaining and testing, it doesn't provide even a fraction of the exposure the brain needs to collect the samples required for real learning.

"I'm sure that _something_ happened in the early childhoods of Rod Laver, Bob Cousy, and Muhammad Ali," said Raskolnikov. "Yes," said Julia, "that something used to be called talent." The man waved dismissively. "Bah, a meaningless word, like democracy. It's the equivalent of idiopathic diseases—what doctors declare that we have when they can't tell what's wrong with us. Anyway, it contradicts the first axiom of nativism that all newborns are created equal." The professor jumped in: "Saying that there's no such a thing as talent is the same as saying that we all have it." They were all talking at the same time.

"Putting across new ideas that will clearly carry no weight with people prejudiced against them is aiding and abetting insanity."

"If it was good enough for our predecessors, who are we to question their wisdom?"

"You cannot stop the forward march of progress, no matter how much it sets you back."

I felt I needed to say something, as William and I were standing looking at each other.

"You may try with the younger one."

He didn't understand what I had meant. "Try what?.. Ah, I see. It's probably too late."

"How old is she?"

"He. Two and a half."
VII

In the Studio

"Are we driving?"

"No, it's only about a ten minute walk," said Hugo and turned into a street heading right up the hill. The road was paved in weathered granite cobblestone. The architecture was modest and unostentatious. The main feature of most of the homes built on the slopes of the northeast shore was the bay view. They were all more or less original variations on a boxy theme. Below a low-pitched roof was a balcony with picture windows stretching the entire length of the house. The ground level façade was usually done in decorative brick or stone, and the second floor was finished in stucco.

Hugo suggested that to understand how studios worked and how children learned, it would take more than one cursory visit, and that perhaps Ben should consider staying over for a few more days. A first encounter with a Uscolian studio may be confusing. "What you'll see is a bunch of projects and initiatives organized and managed by staff and students. Don't look for any rhyme or reason."

"Isn't someone in charge of every studio? A manager or a principal?"

"There's no such function in Uscolia. But every studio has a resident _Dot_."

"A resident what?"

"We refer to it as a _Dot_. Dot Alice was around for so long that she became completely assimilated in her studio and in the institution of studios in general, which had begun to spring up all over Uscolia in her lifetime. She lived into the first decade of the 20th century. My grandfather was in her studio as a child. Incidentally, I'm a great great great great nephew of Bruno Uscolo, give or take a few greats."

"Is there any coordination between the various studios?"

"I'd say there is cooperation, but I wouldn't call it coordination. They sometimes borrow staff and equipment from each other, and organize joint events and projects, but nothing beyond that."

"So there is no official guidance on the part of the island, or some kind of centralized oversight."

"Nothing of the sort. Traditionally, the eldest _Dot_ is referred to as _Dot A.C._ , which is how people used to call Dot Alice in her _dotage_ , so to speak. She remained all her life an inspiration for all other _Dots_ , who frequently consulted with her. After her passing, the "title" of _Dot A.C._ has been unofficially conferred on the senior _Dot_ , a practice that continues to this day. This is the closest Uscolia has come to having an education system."

"Is this the original studio of Dot Alice that we are going to visit."

"No, that no longer exists. The structure has reverted to a residential home. It would not be large enough to house a modern studio. All the studios are specially constructed for this purpose."

Ben asked how many children attended the studio. Hugo wasn't sure. "It changes every day."

"There's no mandatory attendance?"

"It is no more mandatory to attend a studio," said Hugo, "than a country club or a church."

They turned a corner. Behind red cedar hedges or low wooden fences, Ben could see carefully maintained lawns, with an occasional slide, swing set, or tree house.

"You mean, students show up whenever they like?"

"Pretty much. Or when their parents drop them off, especially the younger ones." Hugo explained that the "sitting" function of the studio should not be underestimated. After all, when Dot Alice started to watch the children of her neighbors in her studio, it was mostly to free up their parents to deal with other matters. This function of the studio has never changed. And because there is no mandatory attendance, there is no need for vacations, either. Just as in Dot Alice's time, studios are open year-round. And although a studio is not officially a dormitory, it has room for children to sleep over if necessary or if they wish to. Children may spend weeks at a time at the studio, going home only to visit. Parents are always welcome, and some spend quite a bit of time there, especially if they have very young children attending, and they often help out with various projects to the point where they become indistinguishable from the staff.

"You are making a deliberate point not to use the word _teacher_ ," said Ben.

"I am?" Hugo seemed amused by this comment. "The word _teacher_ is not even in my vocabulary when I think of studios."

Ben thought that it might take more than two or three days to wrap his head around what he was hearing. "If not teachers, who are the staff?"

"There is a permanent staff of people who have an inclination to do, discover, learn, and show, rather than lecture and explain, and of course, who like to do these things with children. It's a profession that demands considerably more than average virtues. The studio also hires experts if there is a demand for them."

"How does a demand manifest?"

"Children who develop a strong interest in a particular area may want to have an expert at hand to consult and work with."

"Like a theoretical physicist or a basketball coach?"

"Exactly. And sometimes parents join if they have the time, inclination, skill, and desire to participate."

"If attendance is not mandatory, who else shows up other than children who need to be babysat?"

"Attendance is quite high," said Hugo. "Students who almost daily have rehearsals and performances to attend, experiments to conduct, and projects to advance are likely to show up." So attendance was the wrong parameter to assess. Ben should have asked about enrollment. Hugo didn't know what was the exact enrollment in each studio, but was definitely of the opinion that size matters. Studios were small enough so that all members of the staff knew every child by name. It was difficult to know the exact enrollment because one didn't have to formally enroll in a studio in order to attend. Parents could drop off their three year old for a couple of hours, then not show up again for a month or two. Parents often brought their children only to attend student concerts or sports events, or for an opportunity to go through some basic moves in the gym with a black belt judoka.

"And here we are," said Hugo, pointing to a two-story stone building, of more or less square Palladian architecture, with a pitched red-tile roof that looked like it contained a low attic. The front of the building was divided into three equal parts, with the central third projecting outward somewhat, beyond the two sides. On the top floor there were nine tall, arched windows, three in each section. On the ground floor, instead of the middle window was a double door of dark mahogany with small glass panels, wide open, through which Hugo and Ben walked in side by side.

All of us on the terrace were full of expectation and eager to finally step inside the studio. Ben paused to take a sip from his drink and decide how to proceed. "It required a continuous mental effort to eradicate from my mind the ingrained ideas of what an institution of learning should look like, and to think of the studio as a different type of space. All things appear incredible to us in proportion as they differ from our customs." First, the space in which they found themselves, past a small foyer at the entrance, resembled a theater hall more than anything else. Across from the entrance was a large, elevated stage, and a heavy chandelier hung from the middle of the ceiling. The hall took up both floors in height, but on three sides, above the entrance and on the two flanks, was a gallery, where one could see doors leading into various rooms. Above the stage there was no gallery, as the stage reached all the way to the ceiling. At the moment Hugo and Ben entered the hall, however, the general organization of the space was overshadowed by the activity taking place in the middle, and the general din rising from every corner. The seats where the audience normally sits had been removed, and practically the entire floor area was covered by four huge tarpaulins of tarred plastic, sewn together, on top of which were enormous piles of every imaginable type of debris, trash, and garbage: household rubbish, scrapings of food, broken furniture and junked electronics, batteries, empty bottles and containers, scrap metal—all in a few heaps six foot tall.

"Did you people offend the garbage truck driver?" Hugo asked a girl who was helping another youth push a large conveyor belt onto the tarpaulin.

"We are building a new automatic garbage sorting machine," she answered and asked Hugo if he could hold down the tarpaulin while they were pushing the conveyor belt on it. From other corners of the room appeared spinning discs, objects that looked like oversize egg sorters, a compressed air device, tubes of glass, magnets of various sizes, and components of what might have been an erector set in Brobdingnag.

"Ah, yes," said Hugo. "The Uscolian obsession with garbage. Give us a bag full of rich and varied refuse, and we don't ask for more. Garbology is our national pastime."

"For those who might wonder," said the professor, "garbology studies sustainable methods for managing waste. The term _garbology_ was coined in the 1970s by a somewhat wacky fellow, A.J. Weberman, as he was digging through Bob Dylan's garbage looking for clues that Dylan's songs were in fact addressed to him."

" _Garbology_ is a misnomer," said Julia. "Technically, it should be called _garbageology_."

"Reserving garbology for research of Greta Garbo," said Roxanne. "Like bardology."

"And dietrich studies," added Ben. "The fortunes of garbology have risen dramatically since the 1970s, and today it is on the curriculum of many a respectable university. And although most everywhere else Weberman himself is ridiculed, in Uscolia he is held in high regard. Citizens, mostly children, routinely dig through their garbage, as well as that of their neighbors, to discover what other items, which they had overlooked earlier, could be profitably preserved, reused, recycled, or converted." Garbology projects are among the most popular in studios, and children continually come up with new ideas of how to sort garbage into its end products of plastic, paper, textile, metal, glass, toxic, electronics, biomass, and so on. They use optical readers, sound analyzers, magnets, air guns, and whatever else they can think up to differentiate, classify, divide, sort, and convey materials to designated containers. "I'll have more to say about this when I describe their projects in the natural and environmental sciences," said Ben.

After recovering from his initial shock, Ben looked around the studio more carefully. Loud noises came from most of the rooms downstairs and upstairs, although with the smell from the main hall rising, doors were beginning to slam shut everywhere. Above and below the cacophony of conversations in several languages one could hear the whir of electrical motors, the buzz of electronic devices, and the tuning of string instruments. Children and adults were walking in and out of the rooms. Ben inquired whether it was recess, only to be told that there was no recess in a studio; activities were going on uninterrupted and in parallel.

"But those rooms up there, and down here, aren't those classrooms?"

"There are no classes, so I wouldn't call them classrooms," said Hugo. "You have to disembarrass yourself of the school metaphor. Try to imagine what a learning place without teaching might resemble. Think of a museum, except that its exhibits don't have to be unique or original. Or think of a lab, but perhaps not so well organized as a research lab. The objective of the museum-lab-studio is to provide rich opportunities for observing, experimenting, and experiencing."

"So those rooms... what do you call them? Labs?"

"Usually we refer to them simply as areas. For a while, some may have equipment and materials suited for science and engineering, the arts, music, data processing, whatever. But their designation and use can change at any time. And others are just areas where kids hang around and read books, watch movies, or play games."

"And there is no separation by age?" Ben asked.

"Now what would be the good of that?" Children can start attending the studio at any age. They can join activities they like, if it is appropriate for them, and sometimes even if it isn't. Anyone can participate in any project, at times as a spectator. Older children help care for the younger ones, and those with less advanced skills learn from those more advanced than they.

"So there is no division by skill level, either," said Ben.

"There is no division of any kind. It doesn't matter what the reading level of a child is when a bunch of kids decide to read a book or watch a play and then talk about it. Children in the studio learn by doing and by observing. Age and what you call levels have nothing to do with any of it."

Ben asked whether all the studios were built based on the same design, but before Hugo had a chance to say a word Ben already knew the answer: obviously not. Nothing was like anything else in Uscolia, there was no reason why studios should be an exception. He would have to ask who was paying for any or all of this, and how the island collected its taxes. He wondered also about employment, industry, trade. He might have to spend a week there. And what about the form of government? Maybe two weeks.

"There's too much noise here," said Hugo. Let's go up to one of the rooms." There were two staircases, on either side of the hall, leading to the second floor. As they stepped over the piles of garbage, Ben noticed through the half-open curtains of the stage a double bass leaning against the back wall, and next to it a grand piano and a drum set.

Ben followed Hugo up the staircase on the left to the second floor. From the gallery they had a complete view of the garbage sorting machinery in the making, and a powerful experience of the smell rising from it. The doors to all the rooms had by now been closed. Hugo walked to the last room along the left gallery and opened the door. "This is what you might call the math area for now. There are limits to the scientific experiments that can be conducted in the studio, but not to the math that can be learned, of course as long as there's interest in it on the part of the kids."

It was a fair size room, with two large windows, hardwood floor, high ceiling. About eight to ten children were milling about, between the ages of 1 and 15 or so. The one staff member in the room was busy with the one year old. There were no student desks and no gigantic board covering any wall. Several tables, a few chairs, a couch, and two mattresses were scattered about, evidently occupying non-permanent spaces and being repositioned as needed. On the wall to the left of the door was a large white board, about 6 feet in length and 4 feet high, some 10 inches above the floor. A boy of about 3 was kneeling on a mattress in front of it and drawing parallel doodles, holding two markers of different colors in one hand. In the corner to the far right, three 10-year-olds were having a Rubik cube contest. A somewhat older girl was timing them with a stop watch. Whoever completed a run, threw the cube on the table, which was supposed to stop the clock. In the opposite corner, designated as Mad Hatter's Quarters, two 9-year-olds were sitting on the floor with cassette players in their laps and headphones over their ears, speaking far too loud. "Four times five equals twelve," said one of them, and the other, after shuffling through a stack of charts, answered: "Base eighteen." Then "four times six equals thirteen," and after another shuffle: "Base twenty one." Hugo gestured to them to keep their voice down. "Must be calculating the latitude and longitude at the center of earth," he said. "Quite handy, if you fall far enough through the rabbit hole." A few other children were busy with computers, and one girl was slumped on the couch with a notebook in her lap.

The one year old was sitting on top of one of the tables, playing with an Etch A Sketch. "This is Carla, our math guru," said Hugo, introducing the staff member who was keeping a hand on the child's shoulder to make sure she doesn't tumble off the table. "And this is Lian," said Carla, "and she's making a fabulous drawing for us, aren't you, Lian?" Lian obliged and scribbled energetically on the Etch A Sketch. "That's fantastic, Lian," said Carla. "Now it's my turn." She erased the pad and quickly drew the X and Y axes of Cartesian coordinates, saying "This is X, and this is Y, and now we draw a sloping line through the point of origin, and we call it X equals Y." She made the drawing and wrote "X=Y" below it, then erased the pad. "Now it's your turn." Ben's jaw dropped, but before he could say anything Lian grabbed the stylus and made another energetic drawing in a style similar to the previous one. "That's amazing, Lian, you're getting better and better at this. Now my turn." Carla erased the pad. "Now we draw again the Cartesian coordinates..." she redrew the X and Y axes, "and make three tick marks on each, one two three on the X axis and one two three on the Y axis... there... and we draw a horizontal line through the first tick mark on the Y axis and we call it Y equals one." She wrote "Y=1" below the drawing. "Now you erase it." Lian took the Etch A Sketch and shook it vigorously until the drawing disappeared. "More?" asked Carla. Lian nodded affirmatively and said "More." "OK, your turn then."

There was a burst of cheering downstairs, accompanied by loud clapping. Lian dropped the stylus and clapped also. Then she picked up the stylus and drew, this time very slowly and deliberately, the same scribble she had made before. "I love it," said Carla. "Now my turn. Shall we do some trigonometry?" Lian nodded affirmatively. Ben was ready to jump out of his skin, but didn't want to interrupt. "OK, here we go," said Carla, taking the Etch A Sketch and quickly drawing a right triangle. "This is angle alpha, and you remember that the sine of alpha is the ratio of the length of the side opposite the angle, let's call it a, to the length of the longest side of the triangle, which of course is the hypotenuse, and we can call it c." Below the drawing she wrote "sin α = a / c" then erased the drawing. "Your turn." Ben couldn't contain himself anymore.

"You don't really expect her to understand any of that, do you?!"

Carla laughed: "I can see you're an elf. That was capital, Lian. I really like this last one best. Shall we do the cosine?" Lian nodded affirmatively and erased her drawing.

"I'm a what?" asked Ben.

"Oh, I'm sorry," said Carla. "It's what we call tourists sometimes."

"You're teaching math as if it were a language," said Ben.

"I don't teach math," said Carla. "I speak it. And yes, it is a language. Now cosine is similar to sine, but it is the ratio of the adjacent side to the hypotenuse, so we write it like this." And she wrote "cosine α = b / c" below the drawing, then erased it.

"But she obviously doesn't understand a word of what you're saying," said Ben in exasperation.

Carla held Lian's shoulders with both hands and turned away from her to look at Ben. "If you only spoke things to a newborn that she understood she'd grow up to be a dimwit."

Ben couldn't parse all this. "But you are not just speaking. You are teaching. These are definitions."

"I narrate, I don't explain. What I say is no different from _four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie_.

"What happens later?" asked Ben. "Where do you go from here? At some point she must actually begin to understand what all of this means."

"I trust her brain to do that. She's wired for it."

A teenage boy with Asian features walked into the room, followed by the heavy smell of garbage. He handed out surgical masks. "Sorry. We didn't realize it was going to be so bad."

"Why don't you guys do this outside?" asked Carla. The boy answered in Mandarin. There followed a brief exchange between him and Carla, which Ben and Hugo didn't understand. "What was that about?" Hugo asked after the boy had left. Carla said that the equipment they were using was too sensitive and they were afraid to leave it outside in case it rains overnight.

"Then why not just bring it in at the end of the day."

"That's what I asked too. Apparently it takes too long to set up. He said they'd be done in two days, and were going to wrap it all in plastic tonight. Smells like a landfill here."

Lian reached for Carla's neck, so Carla picked her up. "Is the lesson over?" Ben asked.

"It wasn't a lesson."

"Sorry, what do you call it?"

"We don't usually call it, but if you must, I'd refer to it as a conversation."

"How many of these conversations do you have a day?"

"We don't count them. However many feels right."

"And how long do they last?"

"Depends on how Lian feels. They can last anywhere from half a minute to five, six minutes, right, Lian?"

Lian shrugged her shoulders and buried her face in Carla's hair. Ben had an urge to reach out and pat Lian's head to reassure her that he wasn't hostile despite his excited state. "I still don't understand how you later convert this math babble into knowledge of math. How they become mathematicians."

"We don't expose children to mathematics to turn them into mathematicians," said Carla, "any more than we expose them to language to turn them into poets. A few may end up becoming poets and playwrights, but this is not our objective. Language is the basis for interacting with human beings and with ideas. Competent users of language are generally good thinkers. Mathematics is the language spoken by nature. We want them to be conversant in it."

"But you cannot go on speaking math to teenagers. Presumably at some point they will need instruction. They will not be able to learn advanced calculus and analytical geometry by recitation."

"Of course not. At that point they will learn the only way it is possible to learn effectively such difficult stuff, which is by discovering and understanding it."

"And who will help them do that?"

"Their own work with these concepts. That's how I learned," said Carla, and pointing at Hugo, "and you can see that as of today I've become a guru." The best work is individual, Carla explained. Naturally, it is enriched with debate and conversation, but it always originates inside, does not come from outside. As kids engage with progressively more difficult problems, their knowledge and understanding expand. Occasionally they get stuck or are unsure, and they need to discuss some issues. "This is why we are here, although they often don't need us and can talk it over among themselves. There's always someone who knows a bit more than you do about something."

"Then anybody can do what you're doing," said Ben. "I could do the recitation. I don't need to be a math guru for that."

"Yes, you could certainly do at first what we're doing with Lian here." She gave Lian a tight hug. "But after the kids develop their mathematical language and thinking, they need interlocutors to converse with. The more these interlocutors know, the better the conversation will be."

If I had not witnessed this myself, thought Ben, I could not have been easily persuaded to have believed it upon any man's report. The girl who was sitting on the couch walked over and showed something on her notepad to Carla. "Did you know that the Nash equilibrium doesn't always work in a mixed strategy?" Carla looked at her notepad. "No, I didn't. Now calculate for σ ∈ Δ. You must define the gain of player α ∈ _A_ i _._ " She turned to Hugo and Ben: "Keyla was working on an auction problem and she discovered game theory. Not exactly my strong suit. I'm really just learning with her. Would you watch Lian for a bit, Keyla. I have to go see what these guys are doing downstairs. I can't take this smell much longer."

"Sure," said Keyla and took Lian from Carla's hands.

"She needs to be changed," said Carla, as she walked out.

"Well, then we'll just have to change you," said Keyla and walked with Lian toward one of the mattresses. "Look, Lian. Powers of two." She pointed to one of the posters on the wall and read out loud the large numbers printed on it: "Two four eight sixteen thirty-two sixty-four a hundred and twenty-eight two hundred and fifty-six five hundred and twelve one thousand and twenty-four two thousand and forty-eight four thousand and ninety-six. That's two to the power of twelve."

Along the walls, hanging low, at eye level for toddlers, were large posters with the numbers from 1 to 100 in ten rows, numbers by twos to twenty, by threes to thirty, by fours to forty, and so on, and other representations of the multiplication table and of powers of numbers up to twenty, of algebraic formulas, geometry theorems, and a few others that Ben remembered vaguely from high school. Was that called Pascal's triangle, next to Escher's _Sky and Water_? He didn't feel comfortable asking. There was a large, iridescent poster of a nautilus shell spiral, with the Fibonacci series superimposed, right next to the recent _Scientific American_ cover with the colored fractal image of the Mandelbrot series. And that must be Newton's binomial theorem to the power of _n_. But he would have no idea how to use it or what to do with it. Surely, the many hours he had spent doing math homework appear to have gone into a black hole, together with all the explanations, which seemed so clear when the teacher was giving them, but completely evaporated when he tried to use them later to solve a problem. The Rubik cube competition had ended, and the cubes were thrown all over the floor in one corner, together with other mechanical puzzles of various interlocking designs.

Hugo explained why he had wanted to start in this room. Of all disciplines, he said, mathematics is the one that people are least likely to agree that can be learned without teaching. Even those willing to concede that it is possible to learn a foreign language by exposure alone, would probably balk at the idea that math can be learned without the explanations of a good teacher. "This is precisely why I wanted to begin in this room, because if I can persuade you that children can learn math without being taught, merely by self-discovery, you will be more inclined to accept the possibility of learning other content in this way. But this is an unusual room by studio standards. It is rather relaxed. The others are much more project oriented and intense."

Ben looked around the room again trying to grasp its special features, but there was really nothing in particular to recommend it.

"This room is in the process of being rethought," Hugo said. "The staff is deliberating whether to introduce more computer equipment or to stick mostly with paper and pencil. There's a debate going on in Uscolia about it, which in some way is part of a larger controversy surrounding mathematics. The college hosted a three-day conference about it a few months ago."

"There's a college?

"Yes, there's a college in Uscolia."

"I bet they don't teach there either."

"Of course not."

"Then what's the difference between the studio and the college?"

"In the college students usually have a principal affiliation with one of the labs. And the college is much better equipped for basic research."

The controversy apparently involved the relationship and specific weight of mathematics relative to that of the other sciences. A minority of scholars in Uscolia argued that there is only one science, and those who know how to set up and solve the equations can freely choose to apply their mathematical skills in areas that used to be designated by such terms as chemistry, physics, physiology, and so on (terms that only the Swedish Academy takes seriously these days). In their opinion, it would be difficult to isolate the chemical and electrical processes that take place in the cells of our brains into separate domains of physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, neurology, and perhaps other disciplines. The same minority believed that for those who can handle the math the rest of science is merely information, freely available in books and increasingly online. The majority of scholars, however, believed that there was independent value in encouraging the learning of the specialized knowledge of individual scientific disciplines. The outcome of the controversy somehow affected the future configuration of the math area, but Ben wasn't able to follow Hugo's account of it.

"Let's go downstairs and grab some lunch," said Hugo, "before deciding where to go next." As they walked out, half a dozen 6-7 year olds, looking like little surgeons in their green masks, rushed into the room wielding tape measures in inches and centimeters. Hugo and Ben had to put on their masks as they walked past the ground floor to the basement, which was taken up almost entirely by a gym and the kitchen-dining room. The gym had been reconfigured for an orchestra rehearsal because the stage was unusable on account of garbage sorting. After peeking into the gym, Hugo led the way to the dining room, which was not as noisy as it might have been because the orchestra inhibited some of the conversation.

"Lunch, as you might have guessed," said the professor, "was cheeseburgers and French fries, with a Coke."

"Right," said Ben. "And a choice of cappuccino fudge or milkshake for dessert."

Hugo proceeded to the kitchen. "This is where I thought she was," he said, and introduced Ben to Dot. "He windsurfed over from Seattle last night."

"Oh, my!" said Dot. "That's a long way."

"Not quite," said Ben. "More like from Neah Bay."

"That's also long enough. Wasn't it rather stormy last night?"

"I'll say..."

"Let me just finish these granolas. I'll join you in a minute in the dining room. We have quite a bit of help today. They don't need me." There were three staff and several children helping in the kitchen.

Lunch was on an Indian motif. Lentil soup with carrots and green beans, _masala_ bell pepper, and _dosa_ for bread. Desert was date-sesame _ladoo_ , which look like large truffles and are not as good but a great deal healthier. The granola was for snacks later in the afternoon. "Both Dot and her husband are prominent agronomists in Uscolia," said Hugo. "You should see what's going on in the back yard of the studio. There is a proper farm out there." Ben inquired whether all Dots were women. Most of them happened to be, but there was no such requirement.

Dot sat down at their table, with a bowl of soup. "At least the smell doesn't propagate in this direction. We closed all the doors to the basement. Now all we have to do is survive the orchestra rehearsal." The orchestra was indeed rather pronounced, especially in the brass section. It sounded like music from the 1920s, but Ben didn't recognize it. Britten? No, earlier.

"Ben is staying at the _Alhambra_ for a few days. He's fascinated by our learning."

"But our studio is rather modest. Why didn't you take him to some of the more representative places?"

Ben asked which way were graduates of the studio turning. "Graduates?" asked Dot. "One doesn't graduate from a studio."

"Kids just stop coming?"

"They usually start doing something else. Many go to the college."

"At what age?"

"Whenever they like, but especially when they become interested in something we cannot support."

"The college accepts everyone?"

"The college is like a studio."

"There is no minimum age or skill or something?.. Could a six year old attend the college?"

"Very young children seldom have what it takes to hold their own in college, but I've seen kids as young as twelve join some of the labs if they have a very strong interest." But not all former students of the studio went to college, and of those who did, not all did so in Uscolia. Some attended American or Canadian universities, and others took jobs in Seattle or Vancouver, usually staying over during week days and coming home on weekends. Some commuted every other day. It took a little over two hours to reach either Seattle or Vancouver by hydrofoil.

Hugo had business at the hotel and excused himself, leaving Ben in Dot's care. "What have you seen so far, other than the garbage sorter in the making?" she asked. "Only the math area," said Ben.

"So what would you like to see next? Arts, literature, and music? Engineering? Data processing? I think we'll leave the environmental sciences for later, because you've already gotten a bellyful of it."

"You choose the one that is most appropriate."

Dot nodded and putting on her surgical mask led Ben into a corner room on the first floor, where as soon as they walked in they were hit by a strong smell of potassium that easily overpowered the garbage from the main hall. A couple of older teenagers, wearing heavy rubber aprons, gloves, and goggles were handling a contraption consisting of a barrel hanging above a large bucket with a hole in it, which was dripping into yet another bucket below it. They all looked very absorbed and kept inserting pH strips into the lower bucket and inspecting them. A staff member, similarly clad, was also in attendance.

"They're making potash by leaching spent wood ashes," said Dot. Ben must have had that "why would they do that?" look on his face, so she added: "They need it to make a battery." That didn't help. "Which in turn they need for the telegraph they are constructing." This now began to look like some interlocking projects, so Dot motioned him to the back of the room where there was a whiteboard and a small meeting area with a coffee table surrounded by some chairs. A few younger children were making drawings and looking through manuals. One of them was taking notes on a computer. On the coffee table there was an open copy of Jules Verne's _Mysterious Island_. "Have you read that?" Dot asked. "Oh, Lord, decades ago. The guys who end up on an uninhabited island, somewhere in the south Pacific, right? And Captain Nemo is also somehow in it, if I remember. Or maybe not? That's the _Twenty Thousand Leagues_. But no, he's in the _Mysterious Island_ too, isn't he?"

"He is," said Dot. "But that's beside the point. We are not interested in him right now."

"I didn't know we were interested in the others," said Ben.

"We are."

Ben looked at his listeners on the terrace one by one. "I don't know how well you remember the _Mysterious Island_ ," he said. "If I had been more of a snob, I would have said, 'as I'm sure you remember,' but the truth is that I didn't much remember the book myself, so I'm going to edify you now. When I returned from Uscolia it was the first book I reread. No, actually it was the second. I'll tell you about the first later."

The novel was published in 1874. It tells the story of five Yankees who, in March of 1865, escaped in a helium balloon from Richmond, where they had been held prisoner during the Civil War. They are a civil engineer, a sailor, his adoptive son, a journalist, and a former slave. The five are joined by a dog. After being carried along by a violent storm for thousands of miles, the balloonists crash on an uninhabited and uncharted island somewhere in the Pacific. When the balloon started leaking gas and losing altitude, the passengers threw all their provisions overboard, even their pocket knives. At some point, they cut loose and let fall the basket, hoisting themselves on the net enveloping the balloon. The aeronauts eventually landed on a deserted island, their only possessions being their clothes, two watches, and a notebook. Using these objects and whatever materials they discovered on the island, relying on the best engineering of the 1860s and on some Yankee ingenuity, in the space of several years the castaways managed to reconstruct enough of the accomplishments of human technology to recreate for themselves the comforts of civilized life. In short order they learned to make fire by turning two covers taken from their watches into a magnifying glass to concentrate the rays of the sun. They were able to manufacture bricks and mortar for building and pottery for storing food, make glass, forge iron and tempered steel from coals and ore to make axes, spades, chisels, hammers and nails, make felt, produce sulfuric acid for candles, make soap, glycerin, and nitroglycerin, make batteries, create a telegraph, build an elevator, develop explosives, grow a crop of corn from a single grain found in the lining of a jacket, build a bark canoe, a boat, and a seafaring ship, and construct a windmill.

"By now you must realize what was going on in the engineering area," said Ben. "Verne describes in great detail the theory behind each undertaking, and shows how it was carried out, almost step by step. I say _almost_ , because to actually replicate the processes additional details must be filled in."

One of the students who had read the book the previous year suggested replicating some of the projects—there are at least twenty described in the book in some detail. He coopted a dozen students, and the _Mysterious Island_ became the official undertaking of the engineering lab for the year. Some of the projects are quite easy to do, and all are highly instructive. For example, Jules Verne describes how a few days after landing, the five determine their geographic coordinates using the position of the sun and stars, as well as Richmond time, from where they had set out and which was preserved on the still functioning watch carried by one of them. Being able to carry the time from one known location to another in the course of travel was the first effective way of establishing the longitude of a ship at sea (Harrison's marine chronometer won him the huge Longitude reward of the British government, at the end of the 18th century). Using this method, and their well-stocked minds, which contained, among others, such arcane information as the coordinates of Richmond, Virginia, the settlers established their location at around  35°S and 150°W. Longitude can be calculated with precision on June 14, September 1, December 24, and April 16 (the last one is when it is done in the novel) because on these days the true and average solar noon coincide. To complete this first and simple project, on any of the four specified days, students needed only a clear day so that they can ascertain noon, pick an imaginary point of origin in some distant location on earth, and check on an atlas the coordinates of that place. They also need to know the local time in that place, which today is not a challenge.

Teams of students, and some members of the staff, were reading and rereading the book, individually and in groups, and choosing which projects to replicate. Potash was one of the dangerous materials necessary to make the batteries; students needed it for the telegraph. The other one was nitric acid. Although potash, nitric acid, and zinc was all that was needed to make the batteries, Dot believed that the telegraph project may turn out to be more complicated than they had initially thought. "If, as some of the kids insist, we end up drawing our own wire and have to first manufacture a drawplate, it can get quite involved. The book may end up keeping us busy for two years, or even longer if the children decide to redo most of the experiments. Right now they have three different teams working on various sub-projects, and more want to join after having read the book."

"But is this mid-nineteenth century science and technology of real use to us today, on the threshold of the millennium, as it were?" asked Raskolnikov.

"Nineteenth century science and technology is nothing to be scoffed at," said Ben. "Some discoveries are as true today as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. If you can use an acid, a base, and a metal conductor to generate electricity, this tells you something about the properties of these materials that was always true and will remain so forever. Besides... there are very few people left today who can make anything. By which I mean, really make something, from scratch, not from components purchased at Home Depot and soon over the Internet. I doubt that studying formulas and poring over diagrams is a substitute for the learning that can be accomplished by making. It is an experience of an entirely different quality.

"I was enchanted by the _Mysterious Island_ project, combining science, engineering, and literature. What better way to provide food for thought for one or two years for several teams of students of various ages? I spent a long time watching the children at study and at work. By late afternoon I was more exhausted than they were. I told Dot that I needed to take a break and would be back the next day. I wanted to digest all this. And I had to call my associates back in Neah Bay. I had phoned in the morning to call off the Coast Guard search, but I needed to advise them that I would not be back for a few more days."

"So tell us what's the first book you reread when you returned from Uscolia," said Julia. The rumble of distant thunder reached the terrace.

"At the end. That project takes the cake."

The next day Ben was back at the studio bright and early, refreshed after a good night's sleep and a relaxed breakfast with Hugo, where they chatted about food, windsurfing, and money. When Ben asked how the studios were funded, Hugo explained that most of the money came from the island, with parents contributing voluntarily in proportion to how much they could afford. Health clinics were also supported in a similar way, with the basic costs covered by the island and patients making voluntary contributions. The college and the hospital, however, were funded entirely by the island. Ben asked how residents were being taxed. Uscolia had a unique system for raising revenue. There was no income tax or sales tax; four resources were taxed: land, water, energy, and air (in the form of emissions), matching the four classical elements of earth, water, fire, and air. In a somewhat different order, they were referred to by the acronym AFEW. It made for an extremely simple taxation system and entirely eliminated the need for accountants. With such an elementary revenue raising mechanism, there was no need to pass budget legislation every year, because officials could adjust the revenues by merely adding or subtracting small percentages to or from the taxes levied on any of the four resources, as needed to meet expenses. Administration was kept to a minimum, and entrusted to a handful of professional bureaucrats who were responsible for making the wealth (industry, trade, tourism), for spending it (health, education, welfare), for the infrastructure of the island (transportation, communication, environment), its security (fire, police, emergency services), and justice (making the laws and appointing judges).

At the head of each of these five departments was a civil servant, appointed by a council of five _govs_ , who were chosen by lottery, served for one year, and had ultimate responsibility for island affairs. Judges were appointed by the department of justice for various terms from among upright citizens who then underwent special training at the college. There was always a reserve of trained judges to replace those who were quitting, retired, or dismissed. The department of justice also wrote all the laws, which were not many and were formulated in simple language that every citizen could understand. The judges had wide discretion in interpreting the laws, but the crudest interpretation was always assumed to be the right one. When, in the course of applying a law they found it to be wanting, they asked the department of justice to amend it. There were only a handful of lawyers, dealing mostly in contracts and commercial transactions, many with foreign partners. The govs were selected by lottery one year before their term began, and spent the year training for the job. Citizens had to contribute two years of national service to the island, between the ages of 20 and 30, when they were employed, according to their skills and preferences, in public works, health clinics, the hospital, or the studios. It was a straightforward system, "attested to by the fact," said Hugo, "that I was able to completely describe it to you in less than ten minutes, in the space that it took you to have one piece of toast with rhubarb and ginger jam and a cup of coffee." For the rest of breakfast Hugo expounded on special pancakes and muffins made in Uscolia with a berry referred to locally as "brackenberry," which looked very much like lingonberry but was a bit darker and more bitter.

Hugo had a hotel to run, however, so Ben set out alone for the studio. Dot was nowhere in sight. Carol thought that she might be out in the vegetable garden or the orchard, and suggested that Ben roam around the building and look for an attractive place to settle, or alternatively try the data processing room on the second floor, across from the math area, which was always one of the busiest. But at ten o'clock, she told him, there was a chamber recital in the gym, the stage being unusable. So Ben headed downstairs, where the gym had been set up as a temporary performance hall. The piano from the dining room had been wheeled in for the occasion. The performance was by a piano trio from another studio, which was touring the island. They played Haydn's short Trio in E major, the one that starts with the string pizzicato, and followed up with Beethoven's arrangement of his Symphony no. 2 for piano trio. The musicians were extremely young. The pianist could not have been more than 12, the string players a little older. The Haydn was a bit bland, but in the more energetic Beethoven youthful enthusiasm made up for some minor lapses in technique and errors in style. The audience, about 50 strong, applauded generously after the rousing finale.

Leaving the gym, and without stopping on the entrance floor, Ben went upstairs to the data processing and computer science room, a chaotic space, loosely partitioned, with groups of children arguing about unrelated matters. The quietest spot was a corner in which several 5-6 year olds were snapping the beads of abacuses as if they were maracas. In the middle of the room, a large contingent was running around an object that looked like a robotic dinosaur, which they attempted to control from a laptop computer, except that there were about half a dozen children and only one laptop, and they all had a different idea of what the dinosaur should be doing. Another group was running coax cables along the floor trim, apparently trying to interconnect a set of computers distributed in various locations through the room.

In another partition there was an ant farm, with several children tracing the paths of the ants through the sand. There were also a couple of termite farms, with pieces of wood encased in Plexiglas and covered with what looked like steel wool. Behind one partition, taking up fully one third of the room, was a massive loom, rising practically to the ceiling. To one side, sitting by something that resembled a stamping machine, was the most mature resident of the room, a youth who looked a bit too old to be a student, but not quite old enough to be staff. When Ben asked him about it, he shrugged his shoulders: "Sometimes I don't know myself." Ben interpreted this to mean that he was a student with broad responsibilities. He was rapidly pressing a heavy metal pedal, making an awful noise. Two preteenage girls, standing next to him, were watching his every move, and he theirs, to make sure their hands didn't come near the machine. "What exactly are you trying to do?" Ben asked him. "I'm translating a design into punch cards. This is a card cutter. It punches holes into these cards. I'm following this pattern," he said, showing him a sheet of paper with a fabric design. "The holes in the cards allow rods to go through, which in turn pull the hooks that raise the threads of the warp." Ben didn't quite get it. "It is for the Jacquard loom, over there."

"I've heard of this contraption," said Ben.

"It would be difficult to spend half a day on the island and not hear about it."

"Well, yes. As you can tell, I'm an elf. My name is Ben."

The young man laughed. "Yes, I can see you're an elf. Hi, I'm Wen."

"Hi, Wen. So let's get back to this translation business. I'm not sure I got it. How exactly are you translating the design into punch cards?"

"OK, let's go take a look at the loom. It'll be easier that way." Wen took with him a recently punched card, about 11 by 4 inches, with 4 rows of holes punched into it. A young boy, not more than 12, was operating the loom. "This is a manual loom, so you can see how it works one step at a time. Right there, on top, is the Jacquard head, with the punch cards. Each card corresponds to one throw of the shuttle, in other words, one row of the fabric. You know what the shuttle does, right?"

"I think so," said Ben. "It's that piece of wood with the thread wound around it, right? It runs the transverse thread through the longitudinal ones."

"Correct. We call the transverse thread the woof or the weft. Every time Luis presses that big pedal and throws the shuttle, right now, watch, the shuttle slides from right to left and runs one thread through the warp, which is the longitudinal set of threads. Except that when the shuttle goes through, some of the threads of the warp are raised by hooks, and others stay put. This is what creates the pattern of the weave. Which threads are raised is determined by the holes in the Jacquard card, at the top, see there? There are 384 holes in our card," he gave Ben the card to hold, "which means that we have 384 hooks that can raise warp threads. This is the lateral resolution of our weave, as it were, 384 pixels. The 384 holes on this card are arranged in 4 rows of 96, but that's just for convenience. All 384 represent one row, one pass of the shuttle through the 384 threads of the warp. Facing each of the 384 positions on the card is a rod. If a hole is punched, the rod goes through the card; if not, not. When a rod goes through the hole in the card, it pulls at this string here, which is attached to it, and the string pulls at the hook attached to the thread. If all 384 holes are punched, all the rods go through the holes and pull at the hooks that raise all the threads of the warp, and the shuttle passes below them. If none are punched, none of the rods can go through, none of the threads are raised, and the shuttle passes above them all. Simple binary logic. Of course, if all the threads are raised, or if none of them is, there's no weaving. But usually some holes are punched and some are not, so some of the threads are raised and others are not. The cards are laced together in a chain, the last one to the first one, so that they run continuously, and after the last card is reached the pattern repeats. You can have as many cards as you like, depending on how long your pattern is. Watch, now Luis pressed the pedal again, the cards were advanced, there's a new card in front of the rods, and the harness, it's that piece there, raises all the hooked threads at once, and now he throws the shuttle from left to right, and the shuttle passes through the shed, which is the space left between the raised and unraised threads. You can't see it, but different threads are raised because the card has changed. That's all. He made another row in the cloth. Do you want to try it?"

"I would love to."

"OK, Luis, let Ben make a few rows."

Ben walked up to the loom and found the pedal.

"OK, press it." He tried. It didn't budge. "Hard!"

Ben leaned heavily on the pedal, and with the loom shaking, the harness went up opening a narrow space between the threads.

"Now slide the shuttle through the shed." He did, but it got stuck half way. Luis leaned over to push it through. "OK, take it out on the other side. Right. Now repeat."

He did. "This is hard work." He relinquished his post and Luis resumed his weaving. "I want to do some more of this later, after you're done. It's an excellent workout."

"Because it is entirely manual. We must press a pedal to advance to the next card and pass the shuttle manually. Still, one person can operate it alone. We can do maybe 15 rows a minute. An old power loom might do 90 rows. Modern ones can do 600 or more. But this is not our agenda. Besides, although a manual loom is much slower, it gives us huge freedom in painting with threads. We can keep a whole bunch of shuttles, with different color threads, and for each row pass a different one through the raised and lowered threads of the warp."

"I can see this was a big deal 150 years ago. But why is it important now? Why all this frantic activity around it?"

"It is more important now than it was then," said Wen. "Then, this is all there was. If you were a weaver, you figured it out. In the meantime, this method, which way back then was nothing but the automation of a manual task, has become the cornerstone on which computer logic, flow control, loops, and integrated storage are based. But in electronic systems all this is abstract. Electrons are racing through transistors opening and closing gates as instructed by weird-sounding coded commands like _parser set X to 4_ and _parser set Y to 5_. The connection between the software and the physical objects it controls is so mediated that it is impossible to build a proper mental image, or at least, it is very difficult to do."

"And you think that experiencing work with the Jacquard loom helps make that connection..."

"I know it does," said Wen. "I can't think of a better mechanical representation of the concept of algorithms, automated control, and data storage. These cards are software proper. They're the precursors of the IBM punched cards, and were still in use as recently as a decade ago. Looms were not the only machines these cards were driving in the 19th century, but they're the ones that illustrate most clearly how the intricate patterns of the weave are encoded in the punched cards. Jacquard's invention is essentially an automatic card reader, nothing more. It reads the program encoded in the cards, allowing the loom to follow the algorithm and create the pattern. Do you know, by the way, that Jacquard used about 10,000 cards to program a loom to weave a cloth with a portrait of himself in black and white silk?"

"You can lace together 10,000 cards?"

"There is no limit to the number of cards you can use. They run in a loop. The cards are storage media for machine-readable data, like digital media, which can be reused indefinitely to recreate the same patterns automatically. Sets of cards, especially those of intricate designs, were very valuable. Textile mills used to steal them from each another."

"An early instance of software piracy," said Ben. "Does every studio in Uscolia have one?"

"Some version of it. Some are more simple, like this one, others more complex, but all are quite tangible. Does this machine look terribly complicated to you?" Wen asked.

"No, not after I got it."

"You'd be amazed how poor the understanding of people is, even in high-tech. Last year, one Sunday morning, we had a street fair here, featuring technologies of the past: olive presses, piston pumps, saw mills, that sort of thing. A lot of people came from Seattle, mostly techies. Elfs. I was demonstrating a Jacquard loom, a little larger than this one. I was weaving a small carpet. At some point a pair of yuppies in their late twenties stopped to watch me. I thought they might ask some questions, but they didn't. After about two minutes, the guy shook his head: 'I can't believe,' he said, 'that these were invented before computers.' His girlfriend laughed, and they moved on. He was trying to be funny, saying how insanely complex the operation of the loom looked. But he had no idea why, in fact, they were invented before computers, or how closely related the two are."

Ben spent most of the rest of the day by the loom. Wen taught him how to use the card cutter. Ben made a simple pattern, with a few cards, and used it to make a cloth on the loom. In between, he was watching the children copy their patterns from carefully drawn grids onto the punch cards and mount them on the loom to weave them.

"So they use the programmable loom to help children discover the principles of symbolic processing and control systems," said the professor. "Not bad. There are simpler ways to do that today. Looks like they had a Lego-Logo type setup also. There are many more today, even for little tots, perfect for experimenting with controlling physical objects using high-level software tools."

"But it's not the same thing," said Julia. "These are all high-tech devices, many of them nerdy and unsavory."

"Not to mention that they are all electronic systems. In Uscolia they would call them indirect or mediated," said Ben. "To get from the controlling device to the controlled one, a young child would have to construct a technological metaphor. Not the same as the mechanical loom where the connection is physical and palpable."

"And some people are squeamish about throwing technology at very young children," said Roxanne. "I know I am."

"I'm not sure how all this translates into higher-order thinking," said the professor. "What is going to be the task of the next generation, after all, of the children we are advocating for? In my opinion, it is to develop self-learning machines. I don't see how this is a step in that direction."

"Hugo would say that our task is to create self-learning humans who can outlearn the machines," said Ben. A lightning flashed across the lake. All eyes turned to the sky, but the stars were in plain view. "The loom was not the only project going on there. I spent some time watching the kids watching the ants and termites, a perfect example of neural networks and of the use of external memory. Some of the older children were programming anthills on their computers."

"So you see," said the professor. "There are many ways of grasping symbolic processing other than using a loom."

"Yes, but what about the fascination of watching thread becoming cloth?" asked Ben.

Ben enjoyed himself thoroughly in the data processing room. He broke briefly for lunch at the studio, and went right back to punching cards and weaving all afternoon. He even played for a while with the dinosaur robot and watched the simulated ants discover the virtual drop of honey and leave a chemical trail behind for the other ants to follow back to the honey until the entire drop was gone.

He returned late to the _Alhambra_ and had dinner alone because Hugo was engaged with other guests. He was too tired to go for a walk, and needed to make some phone calls, so he picked up a local paper at the desk and went to his room. The paper was a bore. The lead story had something to do with a disagreement between the bureaucrats and the govs about taxing the income earned by Uscolians who worked in the US and Canada, and there was a related story on increasing the millage on property owned by churches and other houses of prayer. There was also a controversy about whether they should allow commercials on public television and radio. And a long investigation about foreign companies laundering money through Uscolian banks. Ben fell asleep in the chair.

The next morning there was great commotion at the studio, as the garbage sorter, finally consolidated into a permanent, protectable configuration, was being moved out into the back yard, to everyone's great relief. Dot was all smiles. "It had to be done," she said. "There's a theater performance this afternoon. I hope we can air the place out by then."

"I was amazed you allowed it in the first place," said Ben.

"I try not to disallow too many things," said Dot. "Besides, the natural scientists are our toughest customers, and their area is the most difficult to maintain."

"Why is that?"

"Because of the type of support they require. Computer scientists need only a laptop, and the world of data processing is open to them. They can do real work. Musicians need an instrument and some notes. Painters a canvas, paints, ink, and such. Mathematicians, writers, philosophes don't even need that. Paper and pencil. But biologists and natural scientists cannot really do world-class, cutting-edge stuff with our equipment. We can spring for a few microscopes, an incubator, and even those are far from the state of the art. But this is small potatoes. Even the college has difficulty getting the equipment they would need for some of their projects. So if they can work on a real garbage sorter and make meaningful progress on it we'll put up with bad odors for a few days."

This happened to be Dot's area of professional interest, so she was rather emphatic and empathic about it. Disciplines are not all the same, she explained. In the life sciences practitioners need to accumulate a great deal of knowledge before they can make a meaningful contribution of their own. It is not like some branches of mathematics, where even relative newcomers can develop deep insights and figure out some things that others overlooked. In biology one needs to acquire a critical mass of specialized knowledge before being able to produce original work. This takes a long time and requires much stamina. Projects extend over many years and encompass the cycles of life and death, decomposition and germination. They require the handling of living organisms and of dedicated equipment. "We try to give them as much space as possible, both indoor and outdoor, to make up for what we cannot provide," said Dot. "And still, we must be realistic: it is not feasible to do serious innovative work here, so we try to pack them off to the college as soon as possible if they are really committed to this field."

"At any age?"

"Within reason, and if we find a good match with one of their labs. It's to everyone's benefit. In the meantime, we take advantage of the opportunities nature offers, in its infinite variety. The field is enormous. Unexpected new angles of observation appear every day. There are endless opportunities for drilling down. We exploit the fractal property of nature, where every detail has its own depth, to use every apparent dead end as the starting point of a new journey. And those who still don't find something that suits them can create their own province. If we are flexible and willing to accommodate students, there is no limit to the activities they can come up with, matching the resources available locally with their personal interests. The garbage sorter is one out of hundreds of examples."

The natural science area is the most dynamic one in the studio, continually changing and reinventing itself. It also varies most from one studio to the next, depending on local conditions and the composition of its students and staff. Each facility grows its own indoor and outdoor crops, depending on climate and the preferences of the students. It raises its own animals and maintains anthills, termite mounds, beehives, or whatever the children are curious about. As part of their projects, kids are also busy improving the environment of the studio as a whole, reshaping its physical layout, reusing, recycling, conserving, composting, and so on. While at it, they also redesign the space for esthetic and functional purposes, changing its shape, size, and appearance to meet their needs and follow their inclinations.

"So we're giving it everything we've got," said Dot, "which is quite a bit, if you look at it the right way. We're surrounded by life. It is not difficult to organize expeditions and discovery tours if the mission is to observe, collect, and explore. We usually associate the idea of an expedition with some exotic place in Africa or South America, but in truth, the copse beyond one's back yard can be just as fascinating and full of curious and unfamiliar creatures. We can work with whatever we find where we happen to be."

"Does this greatly limit your scope?" asked Ben.

"Precisely my question," said the professor.

"Not according to Dot," said Ben. "She doesn't believe in the need to exhaust the field. Classification and systematic coverage are obsessions of teaching. Learners are more interested in discovery and exploration. Many of our schools may not have a copse beyond their back yard, certainly not in urban areas. This should not stop students from seeking opportunities for exploration. The environment of the school alone is rich enough to provide all the material needed for inquiry. When students are in discovery mode, the focus is on depth and detail, not on completeness. It is possible to learn by examining the ecosystem in the trap of the sink drain. You are sure to find salmonella, E. coli, staphylococcus, and many other interesting microorganisms."

Dot walked with Ben through the organic garden behind the studio and showed him the bug zoo. They had a small stable past the garden. With some engineering help, they constructed an energy-from-horse-manure boiler. The kids chopped and mixed the manure, dried it, fed it to the biomass boiler, and pumped the hot water through radiators that heated the greenhouse in the winter. There were several composting projects going on simultaneously, exploring various methods of sorting and turning. And of course, like in every studio, there was a garbage reduction and repurposing program. All these were long-term projects, some taking years to set up, and they went on as long as the children were interested in them. When interest was at a peak, kids co-opted their friends and the projects thrived. If interest waned, participation fell off and the projects were shut down or converted, the equipment reused or donated, and new ideas were taken up.

Ben spent the afternoon in the natural sciences area, which was redesigned for passive solar energy, with reversible windows that heated in winter and kept the room cool in summer, and an automatic retractable awning that regulated the amount of sun the room was exposed to. One section of the room housed a walk-in rainforest terrarium. A giant self-sufficient biodome took up another partition.

In mid-afternoon they all assembled in the main hall for the play. Some of the children spent the morning reinstating the chairs and airing out the place, while the visiting amateur theater group was setting up the stage and props. Now the curtains were closed and the hall looked like a proper theater before a show. Playbills were available on music stands on either side of the hall.

The play, called _CCTV_ , by an Uscolian playwright, was a lighthearted comedy about Cvetko, a middle-aged immigrant from Slovenia, working as a night guard at a Silicon Valley high-tech park. At his desk, at the entrance to the building, Cvetko is looking at a large screen showing the feeds of security cameras throughout the building. If he clicks on any of them, he can also listen to the audio feed. After hours, along the corridors covered by Cvetko's multiple cameras, a wealth of relationships develop between the late-working techies at various start-ups. Cvetko witnesses it all and sees the pieces of the intricate puzzle of false promises, betrayals, and sellouts, but because of his rudimentary English and lack of familiarity with American mores, he misses most of what is actually taking place. When in their distress, the young professionals seek solace from the avuncular Cvetko, he is eager to share his rich life experience, which usually boils down to some untranslatable proverb, but the advice is always inappropriate or inapplicable. "It was all rather benign, and it's only so much that English idioms misunderstood by foreigners can do for me," said Ben. "But the staging was ingenious, and the actors quite good for an amateur troupe."

"You spent most of your time in the science rooms," said Julia. "You probably assumed that the studio would be a natural setting for the arts and humanities, and that these areas were easily covered."

"After initially hearing Hugo's ideas about native fluency, self-learning, and exposure, I was more skeptical about math and the sciences. I also understood early on that the brains of the kids who arrived at the studio were already changed by native fluency and wide exposure to languages and the arts."

Ben related how during lunch at the studio, on his first day, a few kids came up to Dot and were arguing with her about some aquarium simultaneously in English, Spanish, and Mandarin. Eventually, Dot excused herself and followed them out of the dining room. Ben turned to Hugo: "You must have a strong foreign language program."

"We don't have a foreign language program at all," said Hugo.

"There must be some language specialists in the studio."

"There are lots of them," he said. "Do you see that little girl over there, at the low table, dangling the bottle from her teeth? It's Sara. She's two years old. Her mother works at _Alhambra_ as a receptionist. Her family is from the Colombia. Her husband, Sara's father, is from Sichuan. She's a specialist in Spanish, Mandarin, and English."

"I finally understood," said Ben, "that the studio is naturally, among others, a living language lab." In a heterogeneous community, teaching a foreign language is entirely pointless. The natural variety of students and staff serves as the immersion vehicle for learning foreign languages. It is impossible to properly _teach_ a foreign language, and all foreign language courses are largely a waste of time.

"Me, I learned the English at school," said the woman with the French accent, "and I speak currently."

"You, madame," said Raskolnikov, "may think that you speak English. In reality, you speak French with English words."

"There are many effective foreign language programs," said the professor. "They cannot all be a waste of time."

"They are, as long as they teach lists of words and a set of grammatical rules, asking students to connect the words with the help of the rules." said Ben. "What do you need to do to learn a language? I see only four activities that can be helpful: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. None of these require teaching, only doing. There is plenty of material to read and listen to. Everything else, like translating or memorizing, is a derivative of the above four. Poring over charts of paradigms, trying to memorize conjugations and declensions is the absolute worst use of time possible, and entirely useless. No explanations are needed or indeed possible. It just so happens that in Russian, the person you help is an indirect object—you extend help to him, as it were—as opposed to English, where it is a direct object. Pointing out this fact to a Russian trying to learn English is completely futile; the learner needs to hear many constructs such as _I helped a little old lady cross the street_ , not explanations about the dative and accusative cases. The reasons why Americans choose to help a direct object and Russians to extend help to an indirect object may be of interest to linguists, but are utterly irrelevant to learners of either language."

"How exactly would you teach classical Greek and Latin by immersion?" asked the professor. "Borrow some two year olds from Sparta and Latium?"

"I happened to take four semesters of Latin in college," said Ben. "It was only in the last semester that I understood what I was doing wrong all along. Yes, you can immerse yourself into a dead language by reading, by reading alone, using a bilingual text. It was a line that I found in a bilingual book of Latin proverbs that finally taught me how to do it. I still remember it: _Gutta cavat lapidem non vi sed saepe cadendo_. It means, loosely, that the drop of water excavates, or caves out, if you will, the stone not by force but by frequently falling. The grammar here is not trivial. You have to correctly translate the ablative in _vi_ as an instrumental, _by means of force_ , and the present participle in _cadendo_ , which is also in the ablative, as _by the act of falling_ —in Latin, after you finish conjugating a verb and come to the present participle, which is a nominal form, you get to decline it, you see... In short, it is not easy to put all this together in your head, and what you end up doing, with all this parsing and translating, is read the sentence in English using the Latin words. It doesn't work and it doesn't get you anywhere. But I liked the sound of the Latin phrase and its hexameter cadence, _Gútta cavát lapidém non ví sed sáepe cadéndo,_ and I kept repeating it over and over, while looking at the translation. And then suddenly, as in the figure-ground illusion of the Rubin vase, the meaning of the sentence jumped out at me _in Latin_ , as it was meant to be said and understood, and I actually understood it in Latin, without having to translate the words and without having to think about any of the grammar. I understood it as if I were a native speaker of Latin and someone had just said that to me. It was so simple. So clear. So obvious. And truly, for that one sentence, I became a native speaker of Latin. At that moment I realized that I can throw out all my grammar books and dictionaries. They were useless anyway, because for every word I looked up they gave me at least five options, and the combinations this created, when there were several words that I didn't know in a sentence, were just maddening. All I needed was a good bilingual edition of any text to immerse myself in. It can be done with any language, even a dead one. With dead languages this may be the only viable method. But how much easier it is with living ones, were we have native informants whose services we can avail ourselves of to help us immerse."

In the studio, the mixture of students and staff reflected that of the community. It was a natural environment in which to immerse students in various languages. No paid teacher can help a child learn a foreign language as well as another child who speaks it natively.

"In the same way," said Ben, still on the topic of the arts and humanities, "the studio is naturally, among others, also a museum." Art is hanging on all open walls, in all rooms, at eye level, not high near the ceiling, leaving enough space on the walls for children to draw and produce their own graffiti. Artists in residence expose the children to the masterpieces that allow them to appreciate and absorb the mastery of composition, drawing, and coloring.

In the art room practically all the walls are available for kids to draw on, although except for the youngest ones, most prefer to use other media. Every studio has at least one artist in residence, who among other things, spends a great deal of time copying masterpieces. In museums worldwide we find art students sitting on the floor, in front of paintings, with sketchpads in their laps, making a copy. Masters of the Renaissance learned how to paint using this trusty method. In the studio, students reproduce paintings from posters or from slides projected on the wall. Those who become enthralled with this process begin practicing it in earnest, and younger children start imitating the older ones as they imitate, so to speak, the works of the masters. Painters are often joined by sculptors and calligraphers. Every task requires making many choices of materials, method, approach, degree of precision, and so on. The artist in residence and the more advanced students advise the beginners, and together they form a community of practitioners of different ages and skill levels. In a classroom situation you have a teacher who can do most everything, telling a homogeneous group of students, with much lower abilities, what to do. In the studio there is a range of ages and skills, with everyone learning from everyone else, in an atelier atmosphere. In a way, this is what happens in the other labs as well, but there projects are often cooperative, each student contributing according to his abilities, so that individual performance level is not always obvious and there is no opportunity for competition. In art, almost all work is individual, and therefore the level of skill of each child is obvious. There are some group projects, but they are rare. Therefore, the dynamics in the art room are entirely different, and the emphasis is on each student absorbing individually, by observing and doing, the qualities and patterns that produce esthetic results. "We all agree, I hope, that taste cannot be taught."

In some studios the art room also includes a frame shop, where students learn to mount and frame their work. Other studios operate ceramics and tile shops, or have workshops for jewelry, printing, glass blowing, and other crafts, depending on local interest, resources, and the skills of the staff.

The grounds of the studio provide varied opportunities for displaying the students' work, but there is a distinction between what happens inside and outside the art room. Inside the art room almost anything goes. Works are exhibited usually for short periods of time, turnover is high, and the critical bar is set rather low. Outside the art room much more attention is paid to quality, and in the prime locations, as in the main performance hall, only what students consider to be their best work is exhibited. The art room also holds two exhibitions every year, one in the spring and one in the fall, when they take over the entire studio for a long weekend and exhibit the works of the students and staff to the public at large. These are serious exhibitions, with professionally produced catalogs, designed and written by the students.

"Where do students learn how to write?" asked William. "Is there a writing room, or perhaps a writer in residence?"

"There is no writing area, and I haven't seen a writer in residence," said Ben. "But the studio is naturally, among others, also a well-stocked, multilingual library and a reading and writing workshop." Books are not checked out but freely taken, even taken home, and returned whenever. Donations are encouraged, so that inflows generally exceed outflow. At the end of the year students and parents are asked to return books they no longer need, but they are free to keep the ones they want to hang on to. It is important that books be where they are read.

In Uscolia, writing, like anything having to do with literacy in general, is not considered a generic activity, for its own sake, but it is always about something. It is not different from speaking. Just as students are expected to be able to express themselves coherently in speech, they are expected to do so in writing, whatever they happen to be writing about. But writing is never divorced from its subject. Artists write exhibition catalogs, musicians write program notes, environmentalists write reports, engineers write specifications, and playwrights write plays. The theater group at the studio stages plays not only by Pinter and Lorca but also written by students. Children at the studio generate a huge amount of written material daily, which gets read and reviewed. As far as writing is concerned, in Uscolia they turned the clock back by about a hundred years, to the time when writers were not a specialized, professional class. A hundred years ago only people who were writing fiction were referred to as writers. There were no technical writers, or copywriters, or speech writers. Engineers who needed to document their work were expected to be able to do so, and politicians who needed to deliver a speech wrote it themselves. The notion of writing as a separate mental function from thinking did not exist. Writing about their everyday work was as much part of the activities of scholars and professionals as talking about it. In the same spirit, students in Uscolia write about their interest and their work routinely, without considering it a separate activity.

"We understand the theory," said William. "But how does this play out in practice? How does it improve the students' writing?"

"One's writing is only as good as one's reading, thinking, and practice. This skill cannot be faked, and kids who don't read good prose, who can't think straight, and haven't developed a practice of writing cannot write well. It is not something that can be studied apart from one's overall mental work. In Uscolia, a technically accurate but poorly written project proposal is not considered a good proposal but a bad piece of writing; it is considered simply a poor proposal. The project is not approved until it is properly rewritten. Writing about whatever they do is an organic part of that doing."

"I think that our education systems have pretty much given up on writing as a skill," said Julia.

"It is precisely because it was separated from thinking, and it is now conceived of as a stand-alone skill, which can be studied independently," said Ben. "The connection between writing and thinking has been lost, and with it the recognition that writing is a means of forming and formulating ideas."

"We're headed for a post-verbal world," said Raskolnikov, "where soon the need to formulate ideas will be greatly reduced, and all we'll have to do to communicate is point and click, and wave emoticons."

"I don't see how studios could function if they had to enroll the children who arrive at our schools," said the woman from the subcontinent.

"They don't have to," said Ben. "The children who come to the studios bring with them native fluency in several key areas, music being one of the most important ones."

"And what do studios do with this native fluency in music?" asked Julia.

"The studio is naturally, among others, also a conservatory," said Ben. Music is not a secondary subject, squeezed into the schedule once a week. It is a constant activity, and some students engage in it every day, even those who do not consider themselves musicians. The orchestra is packed with mathematicians and painters. In addition to the concert pianos in the main performance hall and in the dining room, there are upright pianos in most of the other rooms. Instruments of every type are part of the standard equipment of the studio. There are several convenient places where musical performances are being held almost daily. Children band together naturally to form ensembles, and collaborative playing is a constant source of fun and games. Which finally brings me to the first book I reread after returning from Uscolia. It was Thomas Mann's _Doctor Faustus_."

"Why would you do such a thing?" asked Raskolnikov.

"Because it was related to the project that astonished me more than the many wondrous projects I saw in Uscolia. I am almost afraid to tell lest you think it so extravagant as to be hardly credible. They called it the Adrian Leverkühn Festival. It wasn't a local project, but several studios were involved. It was initiated by a staff member, an orchestral conductor who worked with children at several studios. _Doctor Faustus_ is a Bildungsroman describing the fictitious career of a brilliant German composer, Adrian Leverkühn, who in 1906 makes a deal with Satan in return for 24 years of creative genius and artistic inspiration. It is a complex book, with many political, philosophical, and theological layers, but at the heart of it is music. Thomas Mann made a thorough study of musicology before beginning to write it, toward the end of the war, in Santa Monica, where he had taken refuge from the German regime. The fictional narrator of Adrian's life story is his childhood friend, Serenus Zeitblom, who begins writing Adrian's biography in Germany, in 1943, as the country is disintegrating. The multi-layered narrative covers in one breath both Adrian's upbringing and career, from about the beginning of the century until 1930, and the period of the telling of the story, between 1943-1946. It's like a _camera obscura_ with an extra lens; viewers peeping in through the first lens glimpse, inside the box, a second, 1943-1946 lens, through which in turn they can view the image of the 1900-1930 period, projected onto the back of the box."

Mann positions Adrian Leverkühn at the point when late Romantic music is expiring in a convulsion of sensual sound, around the time of Mahler's death and the rise of Strauss, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. It is the moment when classical music, in a quasi-suicidal move, divorces itself from its natural audience and changes forever. Adrian is an exact contemporary of Alban Berg, ten years younger than Schoenberg and Mann himself, and his 24 years of creativity cover the period between 1906 and 1930, roughly between Strauss's _Salome_ and Berg's _Lulu_. Among the long lectures on the lives and works of German composers and on musicology in general, Mann includes detailed descriptions of many of Adrian Leverkühn's most important works at various stages of his development as a composer. Some of the descriptions go into great structural and harmonic details, dwelling at length on thematic development and associations, polyphony, tone, color, tempi, registers, rhythmic patterns, dynamic variety, how the instruments converse and take the lead on various subjects, and on and on. The organizers of the Adrian Leverkühn Festival set out to recompose Adrian Leverkühn's music, which of course had never been composed in the first place, or to reverse engineer it based on Thomas Mann's detailed description and technical analysis of these pieces. Naturally, there were many ways of "composing" these descriptions, as long as they remained consistent with the text.

"Like the different words it is possible to create from a phone number using the letters on the dial pad," said Roxanne.

Ben waited a few seconds for the echoes of this sentence to die out. "It was a mind-boggling project in its scope and sheer intellectual audacity. Nobody dared tackle the two massive cantatas, Apocalypse with Figures, and the Lamentation of Dr. Faustus, Adrian's last work. But many of his orchestral and chamber works found takers." The conductor himself composed an early orchestral work, Marvels of the Universe, and the Violin concerto. A flautist from a nearby studio signed up for the Septet for three strings, three wood-wind instruments and piano. Mateo took the Trio for violin, viola and cello, Adrian's penultimate work, "scarcely playable" in Thomas Mann's description, and a colleague was writing the String quartet. Any number of children undertook to write songs from the many cycles described in the book, settings of Dante from Purgatorio and Paradiso, Songs on poems of Paul Verlaine, Songs on poems of Blake and Keats, the Brentano songs, and Ariel's songs from the Tempest for soprano, violin, oboe, bass clarinet, celesta, and harp. And somebody was doing the Quartet for flute, clarinet, basset horn, and bassoon.

The festival had been a year and a half in the making. "I later found out that the rehearsal in the gym that I had heard on my first day was of Marvels of the Universe. Unfortunately, I was not going to attend, because it was still two months away, although they were considering bringing at least portions of it to the US. But I did postpone my departure from Uscolia by one day to be able to hear a rehearsal of Mateo's Trio, in the music room. I'm happy I stayed. I don't want to describe it here, so I don't end up producing a description of a musical work based on a description of another musical work, but I can tell you that it can be mastered only by three virtuoso players, and that the combinational fantasy produced by the three instruments is unparalleled, fully doing justice to Mann's description of it. I think Mateo was up to the task, even if their performance still required a lot of work when I heard it."

Ben stopped speaking and looked around the terrace as if waiting for some comments or questions. There was complete silence. Then he added simply: "This ends the account of my visit to the studio."

VIII

Questions

The silence continued for some minutes, as everyone seemed to be processing Ben's account in different private ways. My first reaction was a desire to go for a walk to think matters over alone. At the same time, I had many questions I wanted to ask Ben, and I didn't think I would have another opportunity like this; I was leaving Geneva the next day. I wanted to know how the Uscolian population was divided along socio-economic lines. Ben said hardly anything about it. Also, why was it that students, and above all their parents, so readily renounced the highly structured educational settings that we all have been taking for granted for so long? In my experience, our students, however much they complained at times, seemed to clamor to be regimented, taught, tested, and ranked. Does social class have anything to do with it, and if yes, how? What was their position on identity issues, which Hugo deliberately avoided to discuss: on religion, nationality, ethnicity, and so on? Did studios or parents provide any direction in these matters, or was there some consensus mechanism operating below the surface? And were all Uscolian children near-ideal types, or did Ben happen to meet some unrepresentative sample? Were there no rivalries between children in Uscolia? No discipline problems? No bullying? Ben mentioned that they did away with accountants in Uscolia. Did they also do away with psychologists?

These were only a few of the questions that were on the tip of my tongue, and I had to hold them back, lest they escaped in the open. Others, coming from nether regions, I was still struggling to put into words. Something in particular was gnawing at me, but I didn't know how to formulate it as a concise question; I didn't want to sound as if I was lecturing or interpolating lines from a different play. The other people on the terrace may have been having similar thoughts. The professor was first to break the silence: "Uscolians seem to me self-consciously and unapologetically elitist."

"Not to say snobbish," added Raskolnikov.

" _Snobisme_ ," said Roxanne in three syllables, "can be good or bad. It depends."

"How exactly?" asked the professor.

"The bad type despises the others for lacking some quality the snob possesses or values," said Roxanne, "ignoring elevated qualities the scorned person maybe possesses which the snob lacks."

"And the good type?"

"Ah, well. The good type refuses to join in the general applause of something he considers detestable, even if this leaves him in a minority, and has the courage to make his disapprobation public."

"And may also engage in certain activities that others disapprove of, but without looking down on anyone," added Ben. "There's a saying on the island that all Uscolians are snobs." This generated considerable interest on the terrace. Ben explained that it seemed to go back to Uscolo, who in the last decade of his life, having retired from fishing, spent most of his time in his garden, trimming the boxwood hedges and developing chrysanthemum hybrids. A neighbor who had tried on several occasions and failed to get him involved in some civic matters, reproached him that he had the rather snobbish attitude of a gentleman gardener. Uscolo responded that they were all snobs in the original sense on the island, having left their titles behind when they sailed over. This was a reference, no doubt, to the folk etymology of the word _snob,_ ostensibly an abbreviation of _sine nobilitate_ , designating students of bourgeois origin at Oxford, or passengers on ship lists who were not candidates for the captain's table. "In truth, it's only dialect for shoemaker," clarified the professor. "It would be nice to know what holidays they celebrate in Uscolia and hear more about their myths and legends."

Ben seemed to hesitate before he answered this. "I don't think Uscolian culture is old enough to have spawned any myths or legends." Then he added with a smile: "But I can think of a few amusing stories that have become part of Uscolian folklore. One touched me personally. On several occasions Uscolians referred to me as an _elf_. I understood that it was some sort of nickname for visitors from outside, but I couldn't tell whether it was meant in good cheer or whether it was derisive. I asked Hugo one evening to reveal its deeper meaning." Hugo explained that that term originated in the 1960s, when numbers of foreign students, especially from Brazil, came to the college in Uscolia to learn about the pioneering work they were doing on renewable energy. Some were even accompanied by their instructors from universities in São Paulo and Rio. The students dispersed among the labs, but were having serious language difficulties. One of the Brazilian professors then made a suggestion that caused some consternation among students and staff at the college: "Why no create," he said, "a lab for English as a language foreign?" The Uscolians were puzzled. "Why do such a thing?" they asked. "To teach us to speak," answered the professor. "Such departments are actual worldwide. They are actual in Brazil. Teach English as a language foreign." Understanding dawned on the Uscolians of what their guest wanted, and not only of that. "There is no such language," they said. "There is no English as a Language Foreign or as a Foreign Language. They have been cheating you. There is a language called English, but we don't teach it in a lab. We speak it, and you could too, if you'd like. English as a Language Foreign is something that might be taught in a lab, but who would want to learn such a thing?" Now the _centavo_ dropped on the Brazilian side too. "I comprehend. It is loss of time. I wronged the question." But the Uscolians had the right answer anyway. They promptly dispersed the Brazilian students among the neighboring studios, where they joined various activities as part-time staff. After interacting with the children for a few months in the studios they were fluent in English. The term English as a Language Foreign, however, and especially its acronym, ELF, spread quickly across the island and remains associated with visitors to this day.

I think I reproduced here faithfully the essence of Ben's account and the first part of the conversation that took place on Julia's terrace in Lausanne that evening, based on careful notes I took as soon as I got back to the hotel. I even wrote to Julia on several occasions after returning home, to verify the accuracy of my memory, especially with regard to some direct quotations. On a few issues I asked her to check with Ben, if possible, although I heard that he had disappeared entirely from view and had gone off to Bali to study gamelan music.

When Ben finished the elf story, the guests became quite animated and all started asking questions at the same time, so it was difficult to follow all the simultaneous conversations.

"Why is it that we hardly know anything about these people," asked the woman from the subcontinent, "in today's world of open communication?"

"They are not particularly good communicators, and are not trying to advertise their ideas or to promote their approach," said Ben.

"It looks almost as if they're trying to conceal them."

"I don't think this is their intention. But they are naturally reticent. Today they prefer to show visitors their beaches, marinas, and handicrafts, because the reaction of outsiders who have visited over the years and were exposed to their methods, especially the studios, ranged from disbelief to derision."

"How much of this ground is covered by democratic schools and such streams as Montessori and Waldorf?" asked Julia.

"Very little, because mostly they teach," said Ben. "But not all of these are cut from the same cloth. One group is that of the teachers from birth, like Glenn Doman and Shinichi Suzuki, who have discovered the amazing mental capabilities of tiny babies and have achieved miraculous results. But naturally, they teach, and with a vengeance. Montessori schools also teach from birth, and without separating the children by age. Perhaps the most imaginative among these were the Nikitins, in Moscow, in the 1960s. Having failed to receive approval to set up an experimental school to test their unconventional ideas in education, Boris and Lena Nikitin proceeded to turn their home into something reminiscent of a Uscolian studio for their seven children. They called it an _enhanced educational environment_. Taking their cue from language acquisition, like the Uscolians, they started teaching their children from birth, placing equal emphasis on physical and mental development. They designed innovative games and toys for the children, and encouraged involvement in all kinds of activities, without coercion and without making them do schoolwork. Children and parents worked together on tasks as a group. The children were given space to figure things out on their own, without explanations. But the Nikitins were greatly concerned with structured instruction, hierarchy, and the order of increasing difficulty of the topics they taught, and seemed obsessed with IQ and performance. Probably under pressure from the authorities, which didn't take kindly to their enterprise, they prepared the children to integrate into the Soviet education system. Eventually, they did so, and in forms above their age because of their high performance."

"What about the free school movement?" asked Raskolnikov. "Not much teaching in their schools."

"It varies. In some there is very little teaching, and not much learning either. If the teachers from birth are at one end of the spectrum, the free schools occupy the opposite end. They don't much care if the children can't read by age 13. Their emphasis is on freedom and children's rights."

"These are the same as the democratic schools," said Julia.

"Or Sudbury schools, after Sudbury Valley. In one form or other, they all hail from A.S. Neill's Summerhill School, which was the original democratic school. Think England in the 1920s. Neill advocated child-centered, progressive education, participatory democracy, self-governance. Children enjoy a great deal of freedom and spend a lot of time voting. The schools are highly structured, have a thick book of rules, and elect legislative and judicial committees. They flourished in the US in the 1960s, coincidentally, at the same time the Nikitins were active in Moscow. But for obvious reasons, the Nikitins wouldn't touch ideology with a ten-foot pole. The free schools thrive on ideology and reform. Today there are democratic or Sudbury schools all over the world, from Kathmandu to Vancouver, for middle and upper middle class children whose parents can afford the tuition."

"And since you speak about child-centered pedagogy," said Roxanne, "let us not forget the Freinet couple, Célestin and Élise."

"I was coming to them," said Ben. "The Freinet pedagogy contains many Uscolian elements. Tell us about it, Roxanne. I'm sure you know more about it than I do. When exactly did they open their school?"

"Right after the Second World War. At the heart of Freinet's philosophy was... how would you say tâtonnement expérimental?"

"Hmmm... maybe experimental groping," said Ben. "It's a form of inquiry-based learning."

"Right. And the méthode naturelle, which is the natural method."

"Naturally... and it is reminiscent of Uscolian nativism," said Ben. "Freinet was sharply criticized for downplaying the role of teachers, which of course would have elicited praise in Uscolia. Ultimately, the Freinet pedagogy didn't achieve the following that Summerhill did."

"But some teachers in France remain devoted to Freinet flavored teaching," said Roxanne.

"Isn't there anyone who reconciles teaching from birth with freedom of choice?" asked Julia.

"You cannot reconcile teaching with non-teaching," said Ben. "The Nikitins tried it, with limited success. The Uscolians don't have to reconcile, because on one hand they expose from birth and on the other they never teach. Whenever you hear the word _school_ , you can be sure that the word _teach_ is not far behind. To the best of my knowledge, the Uscolians are the only ones who preach and practice non-teaching."

"Reminiscent of the Taoist method," said the woman from the subcontinent. "The way to heaven is to take no action. No result is sought, but results are achieved."

"I think that Uscolians definitely expect results, but they expect to achieve them without teaching."

"In every area?" asked Julia. "Certainly Mateo could not have reached his level of playing without having had at least one excellent teacher of the instrument."

Ben started to answer then stopped and considered Julia's comment for some time before resuming. "Mateo could not have reached this level of playing without some serious conversations with outstanding performing cellists who listened to him play and commented on it. Whether I would call these _teachers_ is a different matter. American basements and attics are cemeteries of betrayed guitars, pianos, flutes, clarinets, you name it—unstringed, broken, and silent. They were betrayed by millions of what you call music teachers, who taught the playing of these instruments the way they teach languages foreign in school."

The professor wasn't persuaded. "This doesn't quite answer the point. All it says is that there are a lot of bad teachers out there. It says nothing about the good ones."

"It also says that there is a great deal of self-learning among successful musicians, who often persevered in their trade despite questionable teaching, and in the process figured out many things on their own. More than other professionals, musicians often disavow their teachers and claim to be largely self-taught. They often do so by claiming, for example, to have learned composition from Beethoven and Wagner. When a musician says that he learned everything he knows from Beethoven, you know that this is shorthand for saying that he is self-taught. I would love to have a chat with you sometime about learning how to play an instrument, but that is a different story for another day."

"As many of my colleagues would suggest," said the professor, "further research is needed to assess the variety of the exposure provided by the studios."

"Consider that all I spent in Uscolia were a few days, in which I saw only a handful of projects at a single studio," said Ben. "Imagine the activities going on there year around, in the various facilities, the ideas that staff and students come up with to suit each particular mix of children. Consider the degree to which, without any teaching, they cover and exceed the breadth of disciplines generally represented in our schools."

"But what happens," someone asked, "if a child simply doesn't show up at any studio and doesn't learn a thing at home? What will happen to him?"

"Nothing," answered Ben. "He will end up working in jobs that require lesser skills. It happens, and roads need to be repaired, beaches cleaned, timber carted. In practice, social pressures are such that most children follow their siblings, friends, and neighbors to the studios and develop their minds."

Many people didn't like this answer at all, and a new round of general arguments began. Somebody said: "There are no schools in Uscolia, and yet its government seems to be a school system." I didn't take part in this discussion, but there was one question that had been growing to a point for quite some time, all through Ben's account of his experiences at the studio. Seizing the opportunity of a brief hiatus, I asked: "You told us that children arrive at the studio with native fluency in a variety of areas: several languages, music, reading, arithmetic. How exactly is this native fluency achieved in practice? What happens between the time they are born and the day they first show up at the studio?"

A general silence settled on the terrace, everyone looking at Ben expectantly.

"This is a subject for another madeleine," he said. Julia declared a fifteen minute break to resupply the terrace, while most of the guests dispersed throughout her garden. When we reconvened, Ben provided a detailed account of how Uscolians raised their children from age zero, as he had gleaned it from lunchtime and dinner conversations with Hugo, Dot, and several staff members. I do not retell it here, because in the intervening years I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to put some of these ideas in practice, away from Uscolia but keeping faith with the spirit of their culture. So I will now leave the company on Julia's terrace behind, and as an appendix to Ben's account, in the next two chapters describe my own experience trying to apply some of the ideas that seemed to work so well in Uscolia.

IX

Native Fluency in Practice

All the way home, from Lausanne to Jerusalem, I was turning around in my head Ben's extraordinary story, thinking how wonderful it would be to try out at least some of the many ideas he recounted. Then, shortly after my return, we found out to our delight and surprise that my wife was pregnant. I say to our surprise, because we were both past our first youth. Some seven months later, in the year 1 BG, our son was born.

I described in detail to my wife everything I had learned about Uscolia, and showed her all the notes I had taken. After some deliberation, we found that we agreed in principle with the general tenets of the Uscolian method. We formulated objectives for the education of our son, consistent with Uscolian ideals, and resolved to create an environment that conformed to Uscolian standards to the best of our understanding of Ben's account. Our first resolution was to bring up our child in three languages: English, Russian, and Hebrew. The first two, spoken at home, required careful attention and separation; the third, spoken in the street, we took for granted. To this I wanted to add a fourth language, music, so that he would develop native fluency in it. As I learned from Ben, music is a language, after all: pitches are its phonemes, motifs its vocabulary, harmony its syntax.

If our son's conscious memory reached back to the day of his birth, his autobiography would begin something like this: "In the beginning I thought that all music was written by Bach and played by Glenn Gould. Gradually, other composers began to differentiate themselves, to emerge out of Bach as it were. Haydn came first; then Bartok; then, Vivaldi, Albinoni, Marcello, Telemann, and Mozart. I thought all these people were alive at the same time—now—and that Kavakos, Rubinstein, Rostropovich, Brendel, Casals, and Lipatti were all performing around the corner."

This was 19 years ago. To eliminate any suspense, and because I don't want readers to try to guess where we landed, but rather to want to know how we got there, our son is now a student at the Royal Academy of Music in London because at some point he decided to become a musician. But being a musician is by no means the only effect that music has had on his brain; I would call it a side effect. Along the way, in parallel with music immersion, many other things happened. True, if a pair of cats jump on a piano, he can name every note that was pressed. But there is more. Those who have seen the documentaries about him, have heard him perform in London, Paris, Rome, or elsewhere, or have watched one of his many videos on Youtube, have seen, in a way, the cover of a very thick book; it is merely the output that 10 fingers manage to produce from the enormous material accumulated in his head and from the complex processes, not all musical, taking place there. His memory is like a pillar of ice in which past and present are equally visible at all times. He began reading at a very early age, before he started speaking (Uscolians have already shown that reading is easier than speaking). Before he was two years old, he could read notes. Native fluency in music did not merely instill yet another skill but it changed his brain, as Ben and Hugo said it would. Finally, as you discover in this chapter how our son achieved native fluency in several areas, keep in mind at all times that no instruction or testing of any kind were involved, in keeping with Uscolian principles. As you read the following account of our deliberate steps, with narrative tightly focused on our young child, you are liable to form the mistaken impression that we were engaged with him every minute of the day. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Although both my wife and I worked from home most of the time, and although we tried to pay him the attention he deserved, we both worked 50-60 hour weeks throughout the entire period our son was growing up, and in the years described here I traveled extensively for work.

De la musique avant toute chose

This wonderful French line is intended to mean "music above all," but literally it can be translated as "music first" (before everything else), which suits my purposes just fine because music is the ideal first candidate for acquisition of native fluency. This is because of the importance of the ears in the early stages of life. Vision is not fully developed at birth. Taste and smell are not much to write home about either, given the predictable character of early inputs and outputs. Touching is important, of course, and parents are naturally good at hugging and cuddling. But very early in life most cognitive content comes in through the ears, which are on the job 24/7, and newborns are ready to develop native fluency in music from day one.

We subscribed to the Uscolian view that native fluency in music changes the brain unlike any other skill. It is different, for example, from acquiring another language (say, Hindi and English in addition to Tamil). Another spoken language is a valuable expansion of the brain, but in a sense, more of the same because we have already acquired native fluency in at least one language. Native fluency in music is a skill that if not present, there is nothing else like it to expand the brain in this particular way.

**The Mozart effect**. In Uscolia they pooh-pooh the Mozart effect. They point out that every now and then, a new study is published discovering that the Mozart effect is a myth. "Not clear what exactly the researchers were after," Ben said. "I haven't seen any of the Mozart effect CDs, but I imagine they contain some of Mozart's better known pieces played by the Nokia Symphony or similar. After playing the CD for their babies three, five, twenty times, parents probably expected their one-year-old to pick up the Rubik cube from the corner of the crib and in 25 seconds arrange it in perfect order. Bingo!"

Listening to the Mozart CD a few dozen times may be enjoyable, but it is not enough for the brain to detect the patterns of harmony needed to develop native fluency in music. And it certainly doesn't change the brain. Reading Shakespeare for a few hours to a child raised by wolves is not going to make much of a difference. To understand _All the world's a stage_ one needs to know what _world_ and _stage_ mean.

When speaking about the samples of speech and music that babies need to be exposed to early in life, Ben stressed the increasingly finer, subtler discrimination between sounds and words that the acquisition of spoken or musical language involves. Babies learn to discriminate not only between octaves and fifths but also between perfect and augmented fourths; not only between _cable_ and _gable_ but also between _enable_ and _unable_ —nuances that may defy explanation, and yet native speakers distinguish them effortlessly even when the context is ambiguous. Listening to the ambient speech, as they gradually consolidate the meaning of individual words, babies also begin figuring out the syntactic relationships between them and the patterns they form. Similarly, as they learn to identify the individual notes, by listening to Bach and Mozart, they also begin to figure out the harmonic relationships between them and the patterns they weave. No explanations are needed. "Parenthetically," said Ben, "note that babies use the same mechanism to develop higher-order understanding and glean the non-referential, indirect, figurative meaning of words, having heard many times that _this house is a zoo,_ and _the kitchen is a pigsty_ , and _your room is a disaster area_ , all of which they come to know not to be literally true." This is what prepares them for _All the world's a stage_ , which is one more instance of the same type of metaphoric use of language that develops naturally with exposure to enough samples. And again, the process is the same with musical content; babies need no explanation to understand the indirect, symbolic meaning of music in lullabies, hymns, leitmotifs, etc.

There are countless ways in which to recreate for music the conditions that enable babies to acquire their native language. Many have done so; some deliberately, others unwittingly. The path I describe below is not a curriculum, because creating an environment for acquiring native fluency is not teaching. Nor is it a rigid scheme, but rather a flexible framework. There are a thousand different ways of setting up this environment, and parents in Uscolia choose the one that best suits their inclinations, skills, and pockets. For strictly narrative purposes, I have broken down the tasks we followed with our son to create this environment into three areas of activity, which I arbitrarily named:

\- ambience

\- conversations

\- naming that key

Creating the ambience

"From birth, babies are immersed in a language soup and grow up in an ambient atmosphere saturated with speech," had said Ben, quoting Hugo. It is a passive form of immersion, with bits and pieces of language, not necessarily addressed to the baby personally, floating around day and night. All children grow up against this rich backdrop of their native language being spoken by a large number of informants: parents, grandparents, siblings, other relatives, and strangers. It amounts to enormous exposure to many variations of the same, and to a great deal of repetition—all of it occurring naturally, without deliberate effort. There is no comparable musical variety and richness in the environment of most infants. We therefore had to create this ambience deliberately.

Admittedly, there is quite a bit of music in the background of all children, but as Ben had pointed out, it is mostly pop and rock. "What's wrong with pop?" Julia had asked? Nothing, except that it doesn't provide enough of a variety, as Ben explained. It's low information content music. Most of it is written in the same few keys (more than a quarter of pop tunes are written in C major, or its relative minor, A minor), and very few chords are used, usually I, IV, and V. "It's like learning to speak from Tarzan; small vocabulary, simple syntax," had said Ben. By contrast, Baroque music modulates from key to key within the same piece, and the variety between pieces is astonishing. There is more going on harmonically and rhythmically in a two-minute piece by Bach, written for violin solo, than in half an hour of pop music played by a ten-piece band with a singer. I recently read a blog claiming that "if pop and classical music were bicycles, then classical would be the one with the 21 gears and complicated braking mechanism, while pop would be the solid fixed-wheel."

Our aim for the ambience stage was to create a home base for classical music, a safe haven for it. We know that people overwhelmingly like the music they grew up with. It is difficult for someone who didn't grow up with Arabic or Chinese music to understand its appeal, yet hundreds of millions of people would rather listen to it than to anything else. To make Western classical music our child's preferred choice, we decided to bathe his brain in a pool of Baroque and classical harmonies. Consistent with Uscolian practice, it didn't matter that there was no musician at hand, not even an undistinguished one, because in Hugo's words, "Parents can give more than they have. One doesn't have to be Leopold Mozart to create an environment that kickstarts the musical brain of a tiny baby."

The musical ambience we created was remarkably simple, almost trivial. It consisted initially of all of two tapes. (We lived in a primitive world in which cassette players were still around.) I made two tapes of 90 minutes each, 45 minutes each side. Our baby heard both tapes at least once every day for about the first two years of his life. You might think that repetition is boring, but not when it is Baroque music. He relished these tapes and absorbed them thoroughly. And so did we. This was rich, high information content music. The first tape, which was ready before he was born, was entirely Bach. It contained a mixture of solo piano, violin, and cello pieces of various lengths—one instrument at a time, to make the musical elements explicit. I cannot overstate the importance of listening to the same tapes every day. Repetition is the mother of native fluency. Playing a Beethoven symphony one day and a Wagner opera another is cool, but it doesn't provide the brain with the substance it needs to become conversant with the complex patterns of harmony.

Our son first heard this tape, which opened with the C major prelude of Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier, about an hour after he was born (we had a rooming-in arrangement at the hospital). The second tape, which I added a few weeks later, contained music for violin and piano by Bach and movements from Haydn string quartets. In addition to these two tapes, all kinds of music was being played in the course of the day, some hand-picked and some dished out by the classical radio station. The hand-picked music progressed slowly from the early Baroque onward, and it included some 20th century composers, such as Bartok, Prokofiev, and others, to familiarize the brain with different tonalities. We decided that it was alright to be eclectic as long as the 2-3 hours of the basic diet were available daily, and the musical brain was exposed to the repetition it required.

Conversations

We hold countless short conversations with children as they learn their native language. Here is a typical simple conversation:

You: I'm going to eat your left foot.

Baby: Ooooooooo...

You: Can I eat your left foot?

Baby: Uggugugooo...

You: Here. I ate your left foot. Shall I give it back to you?

Baby: Bababaaaaaaaah...

The baby may want you to repeat this conversation a few times, and again later. This is no surprise. It is a marvelous learning opportunity and there is nothing that babies like more than exploring and learning.

These little conversations are one of the foundations of the child's native language acquisition process. Children need similar conversations to acquire native fluency in music. If you have perfect pitch and can sing freely any note you like, these conversations can take place anywhere. Otherwise you must hold them, ideally, next to a piano, although a keyboard or xylophone will also do.

Here's a short conversation of the type I had with our son, usually in the vicinity of the piano, but also in the back yard, with the aid of a xylophone:

I: Listen to this tune: do re mi fa sol la si do.

He: Dadayayaya...

I: Do si la sol fa mi re do. It's called C major.

End of conversation. It took 10-15 seconds. If it looked like the baby enjoyed it, I would repeat it. The conversations are exercises in naming. This activity is best carried out when the baby is calm, happy, and eager to pay attention. It is in the course of conversations that the associations picked up by the brain from the ambient environment are reinforced—when it becomes unequivocally clear that the left foot is the left foot, that the pinky is one of the fingers, and that A-C-E form the A minor triad. Conversations can be as varied and disorganized as they come. There is no sequence, no curriculum, and no plan of any kind, because no teacher or teaching is involved. The child's brain is the only teacher. We trusted this brain to discover the patterns and to integrate all the data.

Conversations can be of many types. I would play a note on the piano and name it or sing it at the same time. I would play a chord and name the notes. I would play the same note in different registers, singing and naming it each time: "mi... mi... and also mi." A conversation takes 10-30 seconds. It is analogous to pointing out to the baby the color of a ball or of a fruit. To maintain the innate perfect pitch of babies, we must keep telling them what the names of these pitches are. Parents who don't know much about music need not panic. This is all simple stuff. As they learn a bit about scales and chords, they can expand the conversations to include major and minor chords, intervals, different scales, and such. Even those who never had an hour of musical training can learn these simple facts quickly, from countless sites on the Web. And there is no reason to fret about method, because we remember that Uscolians don't observe any hierarchy between topics: all chords, scales, keys, intervals, etc. are created equal; it doesn't matter where we begin. It is important, however, to name everything accurately and consistently. These are the same chords and scales the baby hears when we put on a CD with a Mozart sonata or a Handel suite. We never explained anything. We trusted our baby to make all the necessary connections. Parents who engage in these conversations won't have to wait long—two to three years at most—to find that, unless they're musicians, their child already knows more than they do.

Naming that key

In my experience, nothing demonstrates better the brain's pattern recognition ability than the exercise I refer to as "name that key." Since early on, I made a practice of saying out loud the key in which a piece was written whenever I put on a CD. I'd say things like "Haydn quartet in F minor" or "Mozart sonata in A major." I'm not a musician, so I have only the most general idea of what it means for a piece to be written in F minor. I know that it will have to end with the F minor chord (F-A-flat-C) and probably begin in that key. Beyond that, how the piece modulates to the dominant and other keys, how the cadenzas are built, and how dissonances are resolved—I have no idea, and even if I were able to understand some of this if shown on paper, I would never be able to pick out any of it with my ears. The beauty of the "name that key" game is that all you need in order to play it is to know how to read; the information is readily available on the CD cover. And I didn't worry for a second about whether our infant understood that Haydn was a composer, that quartet is a type of composition, and that F minor is a key. I was confident that it would all fall into a place when the brain sorts out the patterns from the many samples it accumulates. It is not entirely clear when this happens, nor is it important to know with any precision. At some point, when he was three or thereabouts, our son said to me: "I just figured out that Chopin wrote the Chopin etude in C minor." My first reaction was that this was a joke, but then I realized: there must have been a time when he thought that _chopinetudeincminor_ was the name of a piece. So be it.

To get a general idea of how this exercise works and what one might expect from native fluency in music, here is an episode that took place shortly after our son turned three. We just got into the car, and as I started up the engine the radio came on, playing our favorite classical station. It was in the middle of the first movement of Beethoven's second piano concerto.

He: I want to hear it from the beginning.

I: Ve-ry-fun-ny... You know it's the radio.

He: What is this?

I: A piano concerto by Beethoven.

He: In?

Hmm... I didn't have my trusty CD to look at. I was quite pleased with myself to have recognized the piece. Expecting me to remember the key was too much.

I: I don't know. I didn't hear the announcement.

He: In B-flat major.

I (looking at him through the rearview mirror): Really? Are you sure?

He: Yes.

I have no idea for how long he had been able to do this, because one of the Uscolian rules of engagement is that we never test. So it was entirely by accident that I discovered this ability. But chances are that he'd been able to do it for some time. It will not come as a surprise that as soon as we got home I reached for the concerto to check the key: B-flat major. At this point I couldn't quite resist the temptation to check whether what I heard was for real. There are 24 possible keys, and even if some are rather esoteric, at least a dozen are commonly used. The chances of hitting it at random are small. I asked him whether he could do it every time. He said he could. There was a 3-CD box on the player, with Stern and Istomin playing Beethoven's 10 violin sonatas. With pangs of guilt for breaking the Uscolian no-testing policy, I went ahead and put on the first few bars of each of the 10 sonatas, asking him to name the key. He got them all, as I expected.

I was in awe at what the brain had been able to achieve on its own in three years of fun and games. Even picking out a clean B-flat major chord (B-flat-D-F) played clearly on the piano is not exactly trivial for a toddler who not long ago was still in diapers. Picking out the home key instantaneously from the middle of a complex orchestral piece, constantly modulating from one key to another, is quite another matter. Working with the samples to which it had been exposed, the brain of a small child was able to identify the home key of a symphonic work with the same precision it identified a shoe or a palm tree if shown one.

Hugo would explain the process in the context of language because it is easier to think of it that way. The two are similar, as the brain identifies the patterns of both harmony and syntax based on the samples of sounds and words it collects. Today our son says that he learned all the music theory he needs from Bach. This is not a metaphor. He means it literally. Consider language again. Imagine explaining the concept of a relative clause to a native speaker of English who has no knowledge of syntax. For example, you might point out that in the sentence "The evil that men do lives after them," "The evil lives after them" is the main clause and "that men do" is a relative clause. He will probably say something like "OK, if that's what you want to call it..." Whatever this particular construct is called, no native speaker has difficulty making it. Now imagine trying to teach English to a foreigner by having to explain the use of relative clauses, when you need _that_ and when you need _which_ , and when you can do without either of them. Not easy. The same happens when you want to explain to someone what an augmented dominant seventh chord or a retrograde inversion is. If the person already speaks the Baroque idiom natively, he will respond the same way as the native speaker of English: "OK, if that's what you choose to call it." But the instances of it are immediately familiar.

It must be clear by now that this account illustrates a method and points in a certain direction, but it is not a recipe for specific actions. Except for a few examples here and there, I have deliberately omitted detailed descriptions of the activities themselves. This is because parents who wish to use this as a blueprint must fill in the missing pieces and custom tailor the immersion program to their children. As Hugo would say, "parenting cannot be outsourced."

A word about equipment

Uscolians never encourage the use of technology for its own sake. They are interested in computers only if something can be learned from them about computing, or alternatively, if they can grant children some independence in their individual inquiry. We tried to follow this principle in our decisions about the equipment we made available to our son.

By the age of two and a half or so, his preferences were quite clear and he was pretty much in command of the content to which he was exposed. He was certainly able to remove a disc he didn't like, put on one that he did, and search for the track he wanted. In his case, early reading, about which I'll have more to say soon, affected his musical brain, which in turn affected his reading, so a feedback loop was established. He made many decisions on his own about the way he spent the time at his disposal, and often much of what we did was to provide services on demand. One of these services, in this case provided on our own initiative, was a computer setup that contributed greatly to his independence. The setup included a keyboard attached to a computer. This was not what is called a "musical keyboard," with speakers and sound effects, but a piano-touch keyboard controller, which had no "sounds" of its own. Its output went, through a MIDI connection, to a Roland synthesizer, and from there to a regular amplifier and speakers. But the keyboard was also connected through a MIDI cable to the computer, where we had installed Mozart 5.0, a rather simple music notation program (the poor man's Sibelius or Finale). Mozart 5.0, however, had the ability to capture input from the keyboard directly. Now picture the following. When one pressed an F on the keyboard, one heard the sound (through the Roland) coming out of the speakers. Simultaneously, on the computer monitor, Mozart 5.0 displayed on the staff the note that was pressed. This tied together the position of the F on the keyboard, the sound heard through the speakers, and its notated position on the staff. It was a powerful vehicle and huge fun. We played for long stretches of time at the keyboard, watching the resulting compositions on the computer monitor. The compositions could also be saved and replayed later.

The possibilities for play were virtually endless. We had hundreds of MIDI files that played "sequenced" music. A MIDI sequence is a complete rendering of a score, of each instrument in it, with all the dynamics. Enthusiasts create and post these sequences, some of which are better than others, which can be downloaded and played using MIDI player software. The beauty of MIDI players is that they display the notes as the music is being played, highlighting the sounds being played in real time. It is exciting to watch and listen, and highly instructive at the same time. (If this sounds like gibberish, look up MIDI on the Internet. In ten minutes you'll come up to speed.) Now here is where it gets even curiouser. The sound card in every computer has two sections, both routed to the audio-out connector of the card: an audio section that plays audio files from, say, a CD or from the computer's disk, and a MIDI section, which is actually a synthesizer that converts MIDI information into sounds (much like the Roland, but not quite of the same quality). The two sections are independent of each other and can be activated concurrently. So the kid could play Paganini's first _Capriccio_ with Heifetz from a CD, and after a few bars start a MIDI file of the same piece, stored on the computer. The two would play at the same time, a little out of phase with each other. But the tempo of the MIDI file was a bit faster than Heifetz, so the MIDI was slowly catching up with Heifetz, and for a brief moment the two were in phase. Then the MIDI pulled ahead, leaving Heifetz in the dust. His comment at the time was: "I think what slows down Heifetz on the computer is the _Cinematheque_ anti-virus." (What a wonderful instance of a child's brain becoming aware of two similar-sounding foreign words, Symantec and cinematheque, but not having yet collected enough statistics to differentiate between them!)

I'd like to end this account about native fluency in music with an episode illustrating how it changes the ability of the brain to understand patterns and to recreate them at will. When our son was about two years old, and before he had seen any daycare, we would go once a week to a play group where home-raised kids would get together for an hour and a half, play games, listen to songs, dance about, and engage in general fun. The meetings were held in an energetic woman's large living room. About a dozen kids and their parents would assemble each time. She had a well-structured program of activities, and used a variety of props, including a bubble machine, a cassette player, ribbons, whatnot.

One week we were first to arrive, and while we were taking our shoes off, our hostess was cuing up her cassette player for the meeting. She was quickly pressing the Fast Forward and Rewind buttons, looking for a particular spot. Each time she pressed Play, some one-second portion of a tune would be heard, before she stopped and continued winding the tape. On one occasion there was a brief sound of an orchestra—one or two chords at most—before she stopped the tape. My boy looked up and said "Magic Flute." She put down the cassette player and stared at me, not sure she heard right: "What did he say?" I don't remember what part of the Magic Flute it was, but it took no more than one or two chords for him to recognize it. This seems somewhat miraculous, but only if we disregard the fact that we are talking about someone for whom music was a native language. If the tape had played "how that bump made us jump," or even only "how that bump," and he had said "The Cat in the Hat," which could easily have happened, it would have elicited only an understanding smile. We expect a young native speaker of English to recognize such verses, and our brains are wired to recreate this content when prompted.

Early Reading

Everybody agrees, even outside Uscolia, that our brain learns throughout life, at every age differently. We can learn many languages over time, some quite well, but we develop native fluency only in the ones we learned at a very early age. Uscolians believe, however, that in this time window we can acquire native fluency in many different areas, not only in our mother tongue. Music and additional languages are obvious examples. Reading is another.

We don't remember learning to speak because it happened so early in life. We were never explained how to speak. We just did it. But most of us remember learning how to read in kindergarten or school because we were taught, we were explained how to do it. It was work. Uscolian babies who learn how to read at the same time they learn how to speak don't remember learning either, and perform both with equal and natural ease.

A simple thought experiment can confirm that reading is easier than speaking. If a child can recognize the auditory pattern _window,_ which we know children can do even before they start speaking, why can't he also recognize the visual pattern "window?" Speaking, which most children begin doing around age one, is a much more complex operation than reading. Saying "window" requires a more developed apparatus. It is not enough to recognize the auditory pattern, it is necessary to articulate it, which demands fine control of many small muscles, and coordinating the movements of these muscles with breathing. Reading, by contrast, does not involve any faculties beyond what is needed to understand spoken language. The only difference is that the text reaches the brain through graphic symbols, by way of the eyes, instead of auditory symbols, by way of the ears.

There are many ways of creating the exposure that babies need to acquire native fluency in reading. Although at the time the exposure we created seemed to progress along a smooth and continuous path, in retrospect we can see that activities fell into three groups:

\- being alive to the ambience of printed words

\- progressing from words to phrases

\- progressing from phrases to books

The ambience of printed words

Just as we are bathed in music and speech, we are also surrounded by printed words. To understand speech, the brain needs to tie together two elements: an acoustic pattern (spoken word) and its associated real-world object or concept (bottle, drinking, etc.). Both occur naturally in the environment and are available in abundance for sampling. To learn to read, however, the brain must associate the graphic image of a word with the spoken word as well as with its corresponding object in the real world. Although there is an abundance of such images in the environment (printed words), their association with spoken words or objects in the real world is not routinely made, as it is in the case of speech. For babies to be able to collect statistics on them, this association must be made explicitly and deliberately, otherwise the many printed words make no sense. Uscolians insist that the same way we need to point out to babies the names of the notes they hear to help them develop native fluency in music, we need to make explicit the connection between the printed words they see everywhere in their environment and the objects or ideas these words represent.

In Uscolia they expose babies to the written word shortly after birth. They believe that generically associating the acoustic and graphic shapes of certain words very early, before their meaning is fully understood, pays dividends in the future. This is quite likely true, but here we chose to deviate from Uscolian practice, and to begin exposure to writing when we had concrete proof that the baby understood the meaning of spoken words. We created the exposure not to written words generically, but to words we knew specifically that he was able to identify. This happened, naturally, before he could speak.

Our son was 8 or 9 months old when we determined beyond the shadow of a doubt that he understood the meaning of one spoken word. It was "lamp." He was sitting on the carpet, in the middle of the living room, and every time someone said the word "lamp" he turned and looked at the lamp overhead. It was the first time something like this happened, and it was our signal to begin the exposure. I sat down on the carpet, in the spot usually occupied by the baby, camera in hand, and took a picture of the selfsame lamp from the same angle he was viewing it. When the prints came back, I trimmed and pasted the picture on one side of a 35 inch index card. I printed the word "lamp" in lower case, 72-point (1 inch) letters, cut it out, and pasted it on the other side of the same card. I wrapped transparent tape around the entire surface of the card and rounded the four corners. The result was a resilient card that could be bent, chewed, and abused in every way imaginable. Ben had mentioned having seen cards like this in Uscolia. Hugo still had some left over, in English and Spanish, from the time Mateo was a baby. I threw the card on the floor, among the other toys, without mentioning it, as I heard they were doing in Uscolia.

I repeated this procedure with other objects for which we had clear evidence that they had been added to our child's vocabulary: spoon, cube, stroller, etc. I didn't photograph all these objects, but started looking for good, clear pictures in magazines. It wasn't easy to find candidates because pictures had to be not only the right size but also clean of all clutter and background; a chair or a hat had to be a pure representation of its Platonic ideal, to leave no doubt as to its chairness or hatness.

The cards multiplied on the floor, and occasionally we pointed out one or another to our son, who handled them as he did his other toys. Following strict Uscolian rules in this respect, at no point did we "read" the cards for him, or said something like: "You see, here it says fish, the same as the picture on the other side. See? Fish, fish." There was nothing of the sort. Nor did we show him how to hold the cards, or suggested in any way that there was a right and a wrong side up. The cards were heaped all over the place, every which way, in many orientations. Another important Uscolian principle was never to mention the individual letters that made up these words, and we followed it scrupulously. It didn't take long before we found that if we said something like "Can you give me the house?" or "Have you seen the crocodile?" he would reach directly for the correct card, regardless of which side was facing up (picture or writing), and regardless of the angle at which the card was lying. All this started happening before he was able to say any of the words in question, and accelerated after he began to speak.

In addition to a certain amount of bewilderment, our child's interest in the cards elicited mild to pronounced disapproval among family and friends who witnessed it. There was an implied reproach that we were robbing him of his childhood by beginning to teach him before he was even one year old. They correctly identified that learning was taking place, which outside Uscolia was naturally associated with teaching. "And anyway," came the finishing blow, often delivered with a slight smirk, "this isn't real reading."

We thought that it was actually real reading.

"Ha! He's just learned to recognize the words by their shape. Memorized the words. Give him a word he doesn't know. Let's see him read it."

My initial answer to this was: "And if I give you a word you don't know, can you read it?"

"Of course I can!"

"In a way... You can pronounce it. Maybe. But what good does it do you if you don't understand it?"

If reading means understanding, can we properly read words we don't know? Perusing a page in Italian without understanding a single word cannot be called reading. (Some people made the weak argument, "If I don't know a word I can look it up in a dictionary," but of course, once they start speaking, children can achieve the same result by asking their parents.)

Soon, however, it became clear that the baby could also read words he didn't know. The pattern-detection machine in his brain taught him very quickly how to break apart words into components and reassemble them. No explanation was necessary. After we met a little girl named Maya, I wrote her name on a napkin. He had never seen that word before and there was no picture associated with it. But he read it immediately and correctly. I'm not sure what mechanism was at work. Maybe he put it together from parts of words he knew, like "marbles" and "yard." In any case, we quickly found that he was able to read words he hadn't seen before and didn't know, without receiving any explanations of how to do it.

From words to phrases

I made a total of 100-120 cards over a period of 4-5 months, after which we reached a point of diminishing returns. It took me half an hour at least to make a card, and it took the child five seconds to get it, maybe less; there was no way I could have kept up the pace. But there were other developments that made a change of strategy necessary. The most important of these was the fact that he started speaking, and we started writing out some of what he was saying, which wasn't just words. Another important change was the fact that at some point, I'm not quite sure when exactly, he just _got it_ , his brain figured out that spoken words, written words, and things stood for each other or represented each other. This is something learned, based on the repeated collection of innumerable samples. But once the realization is made, yet another card, with the word "leaf" written on one side and a leaf glued to the other side, is just information; and for that we didn't need cards anymore. They were not efficient enough.

Uscolian scholars contend that after they start speaking, kids learn about four to five words per day. That may not sound like a lot, but five words learned every day and remembered permanently, or about 150 words a month, is quite a bit. At this point our focus changed; we stopped paying attention to new words and started listening for new phrases and sentences. The cards were replaced with sheets of paper folded in two in the landscape direction, to form an 11-inch horizontal strip. Still using 1-inch letters, I printed a short phrase on each side. It could be anything he had said that day: "a white string" or "more juice" or "goodnight moon." There were no pictures. The folded strips of paper were lying around all over the place to be played with, read, torn up, scribbled on, or chewed. They were unassuming and dispensable. Every now and then we would read through some of them together. Many hundreds of these strips of paper were accumulated and destroyed in the next half year or so, until our son's reading became so fluent, before he was two years old, that we had to start creating books for him.

One other prop that played a key role in early reading was a large white board we installed in the first year. It was one of the best and hardest-working investments we made. Almost identical to a board Ben reported to have seen in Uscolia, it was 6 feet 6 inches wide and 4 feet high. Its bottom was 10 inches off the floor. We bought an abundance of color markers. Our toddler would draw and scribble at the bottom, and we at the top. On occasion, we would write things on the board as he was saying them: the titles of pieces playing on the radio, the words of songs, the names of visitors and of the places where we had been or were about to go. To this day, when friends with small (and not so small) children visit us, the children (and not only the children) immediately go for the board. And we still use it to write "Happy Birthday" in large letters to the occasional celebrant, and "Welcome home" messages to returning travelers.

The strips of paper and the board have also changed the character of reading. As long as reading involved only cards, direction and orientation were not an issue. But once we started writing on the board, it became clear that letters followed from left to right, and their orientation became unmistakable. Still, these facts were not mentioned (come to think of it, I don't believe they ever were), and not a word was ever said about individual letters or their names. We never had an ABC book, and our toddler never learned to sing "ABCDEFG..."

From phrases to books

Finding appropriate reading material for very young readers is a challenge. Most books that are adequate reading for two year olds are intended not for self-reading but for parents to read out loud. Therefore we decided to make our own books.

We had to make decisions about both content and format. Concerning content, we decided to retell well-known mythological and folk tales in a natural, friendly, lightly humorous language, without dumbing down or overly simplifying the story. We believed that we could pick and choose our topics freely, because this reading was in addition to the many usual children's books we were reading out loud (Dr. Seuss, Mother Goose, Winnie the Pooh, and countless others).

With respect to format, our first consideration was to avoid confusion. Therefore, we made sure to clearly separate between the words and the pictures. Loosely following Glenn Doman's recommendations, we created each book as a series of identically formatted, two-page spreads, with the text on the left (even) page, and the picture on the right (odd) page. We used large print (72-point serif font) with few words (10-30) per page. A friend of ours, a graphic artist, prepared gorgeous illustrations, many of them quite funny, all of them intelligent and surprising, which adults still enjoy as much as the children do. I wrote the text.

The first book we created was called the _Judgment of Paris_. Here is the text of the first few spreads, to give you an idea of the tone of the book. First spread: "A long time ago, in the faraway land of Phrygia, lived a handsome young man named Paris" [Picture of Paris playing a lyre]. Second spread: "His father was king Priam of Troy. His mother was queen Hecuba" [the king and queen sitting on a terrace]. Third spread: "If your father is a king and your mother is a queen, you are a prince" [young Paris in the empty throne room ]. And so on. The book contains 20 such spreads. A couple of years ago I put these books on Amazon. You can appreciate the quality of the illustrations by paging through them with the _Look Inside_ feature of Amazon. (As neither the illustrator nor myself wanted our names on the cover, we used the pseudonym Ariel Setobarko. It is a name made up by the intended reader of the books himself, in the course of one of his fantasy games, when he was about five years old.)

We had planned on creating 7-8 such books, but ended up completing only four. It was an enormous amount of work, especially because some were longer and required more illustrations. But after a while it became clear that there was no need for further books of this genre and quality because the child's reading became so fluent that he could handle regular children's books (those intended to be read out loud by parents), despite the smaller font sizes and the less rigorous separation of text and graphics. By about two and a half he became a competent reader and was for all practical purposes self-sufficient. He could not only read the books he wanted, but pick out the CDs he liked to play and select the tracks he was interested in, and do the same on the computer. I continued making simpler books for him for many years, on specialized topics and in response to sudden interests he would develop in some subject: rocks, planets, certain Shakespeare plays, musical instruments, and so on.

This was a personalized immersion in the printed word, not a generic one, which is not to say that the latter wouldn't be successful. But as a general rule, to quote Hugo, "I believe that the more we let the child lead the way, and the more we tailor the environment to his preferences, the more he will absorb from the environment."

Russian and beyond

By the time our son was two and a half we felt that his English reading was sufficiently fluent and robust to expose him to Russian reading without fear of confusing him. These fears may have been unfounded to begin with, and it is entirely possible that we could have started both at the same time, as my wife always spoke Russian to him. English, however, was the first language in the home because I don't speak Russian, so when all three of us are together we speak English.

We didn't have a clear idea of how to proceed because our original immersion program was designed for a tiny baby who cannot even speak, whereas the child was now two and a half, read fluently in English, and could read notes. Just to test the waters, my wife made a few index cards in Russian and showed them to him, indicating what they said. He took a look at the cards and burst out laughing. For some reason we never figured out, he thought that reading index cards was very funny. Clearly, it was not the way to go.

A few words about the Russian alphabet are in order here. For those familiar with the Latin alphabet, learning the Cyrillic letters can be quite confusing. Trying to match them with the Latin characters, we find that they fall into three categories:

\- characters that look and are pronounced more or less like the Latin ones, like A and K (not many of these)

\- characters that look like the Latin ones but are pronounced differently, like P, which is pronounced R; like B, which is pronounced V; like m, which is pronounced t; like g, which is pronounced d (there are bunches of these, and to make things more confusing, some of them look like their Latin counterparts only in upper or lower case)

\- characters that don't exist in Latin script, like Ж) and Ц).

The combination of these different types of characters makes it a conversional nightmare, and probably the worst method of teaching Russian to speakers of European languages is to try to point out the equivalences and the differences. But because we didn't mention letters at all in English reading either, it made sense to continue ignoring this aspect and just get on with the text. My wife started out by translating some of the English books we had made into Russian, and assembling a few more of her own. They read these a few times together, after which it became clear that the child was able to continue on his own. It took no more than a few weeks for him to begin reading in Russian. Once again, the brain was able to extract from the environment the patterns it needed to make sense of the information and build the rules that associated the written words with the spoken ones. The similarities with Latin script and the differences between the two were never mentioned, and his brain detected the patterns on its own, without fail.

This left Hebrew, the third language. As it happened, the child wasn't even speaking Hebrew at age two and a half because he had been growing up at home, speaking only English and Russian. We put our trust in the general environment to take care of the Hebrew, when he started daycare and kindergarten. Naturally, the sounds were familiar to him because although we didn't address him in Hebrew, he heard quite a bit of it on the street, in the parks, and even at home. When he started daycare, just before he was three, he picked up the language within weeks.

Consistent with our general approach toward Hebrew, we had no plans for his reading, leaving it up to school to take care of it in due time. But when he was four and a half years old, the parents of a boy in his kindergarten copied for us three DVDs with a delightful reading program for young kids. The material was varied, funny, and highly interactive. He wanted to try it out and loved it. Spending small amounts of time with it every day or every other day, he taught himself how to read Hebrew in about three months. We had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Today our son reads fluently in all three languages. English is still his best, followed by Hebrew, and finally by Russian. Still, his Russian is good enough for him to have read some massive books by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, and others. Recently he started to teach himself German, after hesitating between German and French for a while. I believe it was Wagner that tipped the scales.

To conclude this section about early reading, here is an episode from my own childhood, when my parents made an attempt to teach me how to read. This is one of my first memories, although I'm sure it has been reinforced by later retellings on the part of my parents. I was about four and a half, when one day my parents decided to teach me how to read. Like all kids my age, I knew my ABC backward and forward, from _A for apple_ to _Z for zebra_. The conversation I describe took place in Hungarian, which was the language we spoke at home, but for our purposes this doesn't make any difference.

My parents and I sat down at the dining room table and my father wrote on a piece of paper the following letters, in all caps: "GABI." This was my nickname and the name by which they and everyone else called me. My father said: "Can you read these letters?" I readily did so: "Gee aye bee eye," I said. "Correct," said my father. "But can you read them together?" I didn't understand what he meant. "What do these letters mean?" My mind was a total blank. "What do they amount to?" I had no idea what they wanted from me. I repeated what I knew to be correct: "Gee aye bee eye." My parents started shifting uncomfortably in their seats. "Right, it is gee aye bee eye, but how do you pronounce them together, as one word?" I was becoming frustrated, because I understood that I wasn't able to deliver what they expected of me. "Try to say it _together_... fast..." This was a really uninspired instruction. But I jumped on it, knowing that it was probably wrong, and said "gee aye bee eye" as fast as I could. It went on for a few more minutes like this, until finally my father threw up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. My mother tried a desperate, last attempt: "But it's you! You! It refers to you..." Crying with frustration and humiliation, I blurted out, although I knew for sure that it was the wrong answer: "My darling little boy." It is roughly the translation from Hungarian of an endearing term my mother often used in addressing me. This ended the session and my parents' only foray into early education.

Evidently, some two years later, this method, or one quite similar, proved successful. I did eventually learn how to read, as countless others have, using the standard school methods of teaching. It does not mean, however, that this is the most effective way of learning to read, that age 5-7 is the right time to do it, and it does not contradict the notion that teaching is a fiction and that all learning is an internal affair of the brain. I agree with the Uscolian view that exposing the brain early to the samples it needs to learn how to read, around the time babies learn how to speak, has many cognitive payoffs and contributes greatly to the children's intellectual independence and ability to make choices before they reach school age.

Motor Control

When our baby was very young, our awareness of motor control was intuitive at best. Unlike native fluency, about which we had rather systematic ideas inspired by Uscolian thinking, in the area of motor control we had only sporadic and disorganized thoughts because Ben had been rather vague about it. He did speak about the art of doing theoretically, based on his conversations with Hugo, and he did mention that the studio had a large gym, but he did not elaborate on the physical activities taking place there. This resulted in a certain hiatus in our understanding. Still, we managed to get a few things right. We paid attention to balance early on, and our child indeed showed excellent skills on wheels. He learned to ride a bike practically on the first try and stood up on roller blades without any hesitation. There was not much rough and tumble play, however, and he never became competent with any kind of throwing, catching, or hitting. Quick response was sharpened by judo, in which he trained for about 10 years, long past the point where other young musicians quit this sport because of fear for their fingers.

Where we excelled was early exposure to live playing of instrumental music. According to the Uscolian view, doing is learned by observing and imitating, so that watching someone play the piano is as instructive as watching someone speak. On the strength of this general insight, when our son was born I started taking piano lessons. It was not my first unsuccessful attempt to learn the instrument, but this time it was different because I measured success by other criteria. I was utterly hopeless as a pianist, which didn't prevent me from enjoying tickling the ivories, and above all, from serving as a live exhibit of music making, however questionable in quality, to a curious infant. As I was practicing away at my preludes and inventions, the baby was watching intently my moves and listening to the sounds emerging from the instrument. And he started pressing the keys as soon as he was able to get close enough to them, initially sitting on my knees, later standing in front of the piano, and finally climbing on the piano stool. When he reached that stage, his piano playing started developing along the same path as his speech. It was also the age when he started to speak. As Hugo explained, already fluent in their mother tongue, children begin to speak by observing others do it and imitating them, listening to the results of their speech, and adjusting it to match the models they hear. The same thing happened to our toddler at the piano. He was natively fluent in music as much as he was in language, having been exposed to it since birth. He also observed others play the piano and began imitating them, listening to the results of his playing and adjusting it to match the models he tried to imitate as soon as he was physically ready to do it. Without having had a single lesson in piano playing or music, by age four he was improvising in Bach's style, inventing credible little pieces in this or that key, intuitively creating cadenzas, and resolving dissonances. He was speaking the language of music at the piano, using his fingers.

In parallel with the activities at home, we also attended live concerts of every conceivable type where it was feasible to show up with an infant or toddler. We did it in order to expose him to music making, to the "doing" aspect of music, as much as possible, and let him watch the moves that produced the sounds we heard. At first, I was careful to position myself at the end of the last rows, ready to bolt in a microsecond if he were to make the smallest sound. He never did, however. From the first, he was riveted by the sound of live music, propagating from the wood rather than from the loudspeakers we usually hear at home. He was particularly fascinated by the deep tones of the double basses and the cellos. I remember the first time he heard a live orchestra. It was a children's concert, where some speaking would have been tolerated, but for good measure we sat in the last row, by the exit. Our son, who was around one year old, was sitting on my knees, calmly sipping his juice from a bottle during tuning and the applause for the conductor. When the orchestra struck up the first notes of _Spring_ from Vivaldi's _Four Seasons_ he almost jumped out of my lap. His mouth was agape and he was completely mesmerized by the sound. His attention didn't flag for a second throughout the entire movement.

We soon found that there were many opportunities for attending live concerts with a small child, especially one who didn't make any noise during the playing. There were several children's concert series, usually held in the afternoons. There was chamber music regularly played at museums. There were student recitals at conservatories, and public master classes at music centers. And there were many special and private or semi-private events at community centers, churches, clubs, and even private homes. In short order, we became known fixtures on the classical music circuit. Still, on one occasion, we were stopped cold in our tracks by an aggressive usher who refused to let us in to a concert that was broadcast live on the radio. The child was about four years old. "Nobody can go in under the age of eight," he said. I tried to explain to him that we had already attended hundreds of concerts, including live broadcasts, and that we were veteran concert goers. "I don't care," he said. "He doesn't get in here before he's eight." As I turned away in anger, I said: "He'll _play_ here before he's eight." And he did.

X

In the Studio Spirit

In the last trimester of my wife's pregnancy we started looking for a piano. We hired a piano tuner as our consultant and together checked out various options. The process dragged on as we disqualified this and that candidate, until about three weeks before due date we located a Seiler upright that seemed just right. I became quite animated and told my wife that I'd like to make arrangements to have it delivered as soon as possible. My wife didn't understand the big rush. "Why are you in such a hurry?" she asked. "The baby is not going to start piano lessons the day he comes home from the hospital." "No," I said, "but I don't want to bring a baby into a home without a piano."

It goes without saying that we are all enriched by our children. But when we decided to mimic some of the practices of Uscolian parents, our world expanded beyond what parenthood normally promises. In the first years after the birth of our son, small changes we made in the way of doing things, to reflect Uscolian ideals, have produced a sea change in our lives. It happened in two ways. One was immediate and material, the result of upgrading our habitat through small adjustments in the composition and arrangement of the physical objects that surrounded us to accommodate the baby's needs. The other was mental, and it continues to this day. It started with bringing our skills up to date and refreshing our store of knowledge to be able to solve problems, answer questions, and serve as informants and objects of observation. Later, as our child began developing various interests, and as we followed them up, we ventured into areas of knowledge where we had never dreamed of roaming. In trying to reproduce for the growing child some of the qualities of Uscolian studios, we may have created a studio for ourselves, in which we discovered a store of unexpected extravagant artefacts.

Although it is difficult to imagine studios outside Uscolia, many of the ideas and practices that Ben witnessed there can be adopted separately. Features of Uscolian studios are easy to emulate because there are no rigid requirements of any sort. More than anything else, they represent a way of looking at things that encourages self-learning and discovery. Many practices are easy to implement if family members reach consensus about them, which in our home at least required some negotiations, agreements, and resolutions.

Television-free Zone

The first issue we faced was that of the television set, or more precisely of its permanent decommissioning. I was happy to hear Ben report that most families in Uscolia place their television sets in storage when a child is born, and many never take them out again. I had serious objections to the medium in general, which were not shared by my wife. But the list of Uscolian grievances against television watching, especially by children, and most especially by young children, was too long to be ignored. The idea of an anesthetized child sitting in front of a screen for any length of time would be unthinkable in Uscolia. Ben had quoted Hugo saying that "television was the mental equivalent of chewing gum, the quintessential existentialist activity, which involves movement but has no direction. It is decadent, having no purpose and no consequence. It requires no mind. It effects no change. The end is identical with the beginning and the net result is null." This verdict, which played well to the audience on the terrace in Lausanne, didn't go over nearly as well in the living room in Jerusalem, where it was challenged on several grounds. For example:

"It is important socially for the child to be familiar with what his peers are talking about."

The generic Uscolian position was that if it is socially important for a child to know about Donald Duck, he can acquire all the necessary knowledge by watching a minute and a half of any episode, which totally exhausts the subject. I couldn't agree more.

"Completely depriving a child of television will amplify its attraction, and he will be irresistibly drawn to it whenever the opportunity to watch television outside the home arises." This opinion was shared by most of our acquaintances.

Conventional wisdom in Uscolia was that every day that passes without television is a net gain, therefore I was willing to wait and see. I can say, 19 years later, that our son never developed an interest in television. As a small child, if he walked into a home where the set was on, he never stopped to watch for more than about ten seconds.

We also heard the age-old argument about use versus abuse. The fact that some kids spend excessive amounts of time staring at the tube should not be an indictment of moderate, measured, and controlled viewing. It is all a question of degree.

The Uscolian experience was that parents who ended up having to negotiate hours and minutes with their children had lost the battle even before it started. Uscolians approved of television for the benefit of elderly or house-ridden adults, but did not consider a single minute of television watching as being of any use to a child.

"It can be instructive," some argued. "Take documentaries, for example, or educational programming."

Ben had very carefully quoted Hugo in this matter, arguing that the educational features and documentaries are even more malignant than pure entertainment programs because they pretend to instruct. Entertainment programs at least make no such pretense, and viewers don't expect to learn anything—they merely want to be distracted. But documentaries and instructional programs, especially those targeting children, create the illusion that it is possible to learn by passively watching a screen, without human interaction. In Uscolia, television does not appear among instructional media, and there is no educational TV service on the island. "Television is an instrument of passive acquiescence," said Ben, "that does not demand any participation, any doing, and requires only a vague presence, whereas learning demands the active involvement of all the child's faculties, as it happens in the studio." So-called informative programs often leave behind a foggy and murky picture, as facts glide by the passive observer, linger for a brief moment in consciousness, then slip into oblivion along with a great undifferentiated mass of names, dates, facts, and figures. It reminded me of a passage from Margaret Atwood, which I looked up and read out loud to great effect. She describes the influence such features are liable to have on children:

The program was a documentary, about one of those wars. They interviewed people and showed clips from films of the time, black and white, and still photos. I don't remember much about it, but I remember the quality of the pictures, the way everything in them seemed to be coated with a mixture of sunlight and dust, and how dark the shadows were under people's eyebrows and along their cheekbones.

The interviews with people still alive then were in color. The one I remember best was with a woman who had been the mistress of a man who had supervised one of the camps where they put the Jews, before they killed them. In ovens, my mother said; but there weren't any pictures of the ovens, so I got some confused notion that these deaths had taken place in kitchens. There is something especially terrifying to a child in that idea. Ovens mean cooking, and cooking comes before eating. I thought these people had been eaten.

Even if television were broadcasting Mozart operas and National Geographic specials from morning to night, Uscolian parents would banish it because their principal objection is not to the content of television but to the medium itself.

"The medium is almost identical with that of the movies," said our friends who had just invested in a 30-inch plasma display, the hottest sets at the time.

Not so, according to Hugo. Luckily I had excellent notes on this account. The medium, argued Hugo, is as different from the movies as can be, although it would seem that movies and television are wrought of the same stuff. A film is a self-contained, limited affair, with a sharply defined beginning and end, and it offers a finite experience. You walk in, you watch, then the lights come on and you walk out. If you're so inclined, you discuss it afterwards on your way home. Television, by contrast, is an amorphous lump, in which poorly differentiated shows follow each other uninterruptedly and relentlessly, chained together by _Next_ plugs, stinging the numb viewers and keeping them stupefied for consecutive periods of thirty minutes. There is no break, no respite, no letup in which the viewer can formulate an opinion and reflect on the images flitting by on the screen, let alone focus a conversation around a show.

In the darkness of the theater, under the effect of the gigantic screen and of the big sound, we are temporarily snatched from our reality and we move into the world of the movie. The much smaller television set, playing relentlessly in a corner of the living room, rather than drawing us into its world, intrudes upon ours, becomes a constant background to everyday existence, and clings to us not for a well-defined moment but almost continuously. "Television content," said Ben, "delivered in a frantic mode, creates an artificial sense of urgency aimed at injecting bursts of dopamine into the viewers' nervous system, exactly the way commercials are delivered. It is often difficult to distinguish between the content and the commercials."

Before setting out to the maternity hospital, we moved the television set into the storage room. Removing the television from the home had the effect of making the piano the dominant piece of furniture. It also improved considerably the quality of our lives. Almost twenty years later, we still enjoy the absence of the television set and have no intention of reinstating it, although by now it would have a distinctly retro flavor.

The Playpen Dilemma

As soon as our toddler started crawling, and especially when he began pulling himself up on the furniture, we were faced with the playpen dilemma. Like most modern residences, ours too was a mine field for a tiny baby. Electric socket covers, safety latches, and edge and corner guards provided local solutions to some of the hazards, but not every potential self-destruct button could be elevated out of reach, tied down, nailed to the wall, or anchored to the floor. The playpen option suggested itself naturally for those times when we couldn't engage in full-court press. But playpens are, among others, prison cells, and some even have the bars to prove it. They confine babies to an extremely small area, don't allow crawling, and discourage exploration. We stood in the middle of the living room, staring in perplexity at the menacing objects around us—an electric fan, standing lamps, large vases, protruding shelves stacked with equipment, display cases, extension cords and other wiring, and potted plants. At the same time, there were also many innocent, friendly items that could be safely integrated into the play area, like a soft couch, a loveseat, a recliner, a coffee table, and the like. There was no reason to exile these. What would Uscolian parents do under these circumstances?

Then it hit us. The solution was so simple, so obvious, we were astonished that we didn't see it before. Instead of putting the child in the playpen we could fence off the offensive items. By simply moving a few pieces of furniture around, we were able to concentrate all the traps, snares, and pitfalls in two areas of the living room that could be easily fenced in. The next day we called a handyman who measured the space and produced in short order two modular, articulated fences from plastic, about two feet high. We effortlessly deployed them around the two restricted areas of the living room that contained all the potential hazards. The fences were sturdy enough for a toddler to hold onto and even pull himself to a standing position, but couldn't be scaled. We, on the other hand, could easily step over them if we needed to reach a lamp or a shelf beyond it. This left the main area of the living room open for the child to safely roam, including an exit to the porch. It left a large play area on the floor, where we threw a big comforter for extra comfort, and where most of his toys, books, animals and other tools of the trade were scattered. This doesn't mean that he didn't require supervision, but it created a sizeable open area where we could leave him safely for a while if, say, we went into the kitchen to prepare a meal.

The solution I described here may not always be available, because it depends on local topographic conditions. But I'm sure that it is consistent with Uscolian principles to try whenever possible to put the safety hazards in the playpen and leave the baby in the open.

Art Exhibit at Eye Level

Human accomplishment in the fine arts seems easiest of all to appreciate. It doesn't require reading. It doesn't demand understanding the rules of harmony and counterpoint. One seems to need only adequate visual acuity. And yet, the taste for some of the works, especially the modern ones, is definitely acquired. The art of Velázquez is easily accessible to all, but this may not be entirely true of Goya, and even less of Picasso. To appreciate and enjoy the works, one needs to be familiar at least with the best known styles.

Neither my wife nor I are experts in this field, but we are interested enough to include the key museums in our itinerary on our occasional travels. When the baby was born, we took out a membership at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and in the course of his early childhood we went through it quite systematically, visiting all the important exhibits more than once. He enjoyed the museum, but it was intermittent exposure; we wanted art to be a stronger presence in his life. The few objects that grace our walls, many by friends and family, have rich personal meaning for us, but they are not masterpieces, and in any case, they are all about six feet above the eye level of a baby.

After one of our visits to the museum, we picked up a few posters at the museum store—reproductions of well-known paintings by Raphael, Seurat, Van Gogh, and a few others. We would not normally hang these on our walls, but we thought of experimenting with a changing exhibit gallery at the child's eye level, by hanging the posters a few inches above the floor so that they fall within his line of vision. This was consistent with Uscolian practice. Not to overdo it, we hung about half a dozen posters, rotating and replacing them every now and then. We mixed the styles.

The posters were not a subject of conversation—they were merely part of the general ambience—except for one: _The School of Athens_ , by Raphael, which hung above the couch in the living room, so that it was at eye level when the baby was standing on the couch. At the Vatican, this fresco covers an 18-foot wall, and it is, among others, a puzzle. It represents 53 figures, and one can spend the rest of one's life trying to identify them (attempts began already in the 16th century). Indeed, each character represents two people: a philosopher or mathematician of antiquity and a contemporary of Raphael whom he used as his model. For example, center stage in the forefront is Heraclitus, leaning on a large marble block and taking notes; Raphael's model for Heraclitus was Michelangelo. The two figures walking through the central arches toward us are Plato and Aristotle, represented by Leonardo da Vinci and the sculptor Giuliano da Sangallo (or maybe the architect Donato Bramante). And so on. Raphael even included himself in the painting in one or two roles. In our living room, as throughout history, this painting was a source of endless fascination.

Still, we made no further effort to enrich the environment beyond the eye-level exhibit, until an unplanned event occurred, before the baby turned three. My wife returned from Los Angeles, where she had visited the traveling exhibit of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and brought back an album that had served as an exhibit catalog. The child found the album lying about the house and started going through it, again and again and again. He took his time on every page, asking questions about every painting, and as soon as we finished going through it he wanted to start all over from the beginning. In the next few weeks we went through that catalog several dozen times and got to know it quite well. He seemed to like especially the earlier, less colorful paintings, like the _Potato Eaters_ and the _Skull with a Burning Cigarette,_ and the very last ones, with the crows and the wheat fields in upheaval. Seeing that he took to Van Gogh so much, we bought a large album of all his paintings, and while we were at it, we also got one of Gauguin's. The two albums became immediate hits, and we kept paging through them day after day.

Since our child was leading us in this direction, we decided to follow and resolved to keep buying art books as long as he showed interest and continued perusing them. We went on to Vermeer, Cezanne, Monet, Manet, and to the 20th century, with Klimt and Kandinsky. We also discovered that there was a wealth of children's art books, with interesting stories about the artists and their work. Among the biggest winners were Mike Venezia's books, which combined amusing cartoons and pictures of some of the artists' best known works, with biographic episodes and brief but well thought-out comments about the style of the artists. We probably accumulated four dozen booklets in this series alone, in addition to some two hundred art books of every imaginable type. We also visited other museums in the country that have art collections, and did the same abroad, whenever we traveled. Our son continued showing unabated interest, second only to his interest in music.

When he turned ten, we devised an ambitious 7-year plan that was going to take us to one important art center every year, in somewhat historical order: Florence, Rome, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Paris, and Paris again (we were going to devote two trips to Paris). The idea was to spend a year informing ourselves about each location and planning the visit, then to go and see the actual works. We went to work on Florence, bought a bunch of books, and became gradually more and more knowledgeable. I certainly learned more about art than I had in my entire life. Halfway through the year, we started planning our trip. In time, we ended up mapping all the sites we wanted to visit (the museums, galleries, libraries, churches, palaces, and so on), and before we boarded the plane we had a detailed plan: by and large, we scheduled two sites for each morning and two for each afternoon, unless it was something massive, like the Uffizi. We went in mid-December, when there were few tourists and no lines, so we practically had the town for ourselves. And we knew exactly what to look for and where. Here we are, walking into Santa Felicita and wandering about the nave, peering into the darkened chapels. After a while, my son walks up to one of the priests standing by: "OK, where's the Pontormo?" (as if they were hiding it somewhere). "Aaaah," says the priest, walking us to the _Deposition_ in the corner chapel on the right, "Il Pontormo... le chef-d'oeuvre du maniérisme italien..." For some reason he thinks we are French. I drop a euro into the illuminator and suddenly the painting appears, flooded in light. It is breathtaking. My son gasps, spellbound by the picture he knows so well from albums. "This is where I want to be buried," he says, and I know he means it. He was 11 years old. I had tears in my eyes.

Despite the great success of the Florence trip, the rest of the program fell apart. We bought a few books about Rome, which from our point of view was two cities, the ancient and the Renaissance, involving different preparation and reading. But before our scheduled trip we ended up visiting Rome on two occasions and more or less covered all the sites that would have been the candidates of our program. Paris also became a frequent destination, and our son went through the main venues on several occasions, with us and by himself. London eventually became his new home. Finally, _Las Meninas_ (one of his early favorites) and _The Night Watch_ are still waiting for him in Madrid and Amsterdam.

Our son's interest in the fine arts has proven to be a lasting one. When he travels, in Paris, Vienna, Prague, Moscow, etc., the museums and galleries are among his first stops. I find this appreciation all the more satisfying because it is not prompted by professional interest. He's a true amateur and has no other agenda than sheer enjoyment. I also find it valuable because his interest in art is entirely self-driven. The modest eye-level exhibit at home and the Van Gogh catalog lying about the living room may have had something to do with it, but these didn't come even close to creating the kind of ambience babies are immersed in when it comes to speech and music. When we began exposing him in earnest to the fine arts, it was entirely in response to his appetite for it. In the process, we learned as much as he did, without any teaching.

**The planets**. Music, the fine arts, and literature have been ongoing sources of inquiry for our toddler and young boy, but not the only ones. There have been others, which lasted for a few years at a time. Unlike Uscolian studios, we didn't have labs at the ready, which by their sheer presence could arouse interest in various areas. But whenever our child developed a new interest because of having read something in a book, seen something in a museum, or found something on the Internet, we immediately responded by creating an environment conducive to further exploration. One of the most engaging projects was the result of his fascination with the planets. It started when he was 4-5 years old. I'm not quite sure what prompted it; maybe some book that he came across, or perhaps Holst's _Planets_.

In short order, we accumulated not only several books but a variety of paraphernalia, from simple posters to planet discs and dials, charts of the sky and guides to the stars, even a small home planetarium which at night projected the sky onto the ceiling. We learned more about the stars than we ever intended to. How else would we have found out about the ecliptic and the moons of Uranus, all named after Shakespeare characters, many from _The Tempest_ , including Sycorax, Caliban, Ariel, Prospero, Stephano, and Trinculo? We prepared sundry materials about the planets, and I constructed a solar system that I hung from the light fixture, with the light bulb serving as the Sun. All the planets were hanging off the ecliptic, so to speak, a role played by an arched steel rod. The sizes of the planets were not exactly proportional, but the ones that are larger in reality were also larger in our model. I used a variety of devices to evoke the quality of each planet. Earth consisted of a small metal globe, showing the oceans and continents. For Saturn I cut in two a rubber ball and glued each half onto the two sides of a CD for a fairly credible likeness. Jupiter had four little moons. Uranus was blue, Mars was red, and so on. With the portable planetarium, the planets hanging from the lamp, and the various posters and charts on the walls, the child's room for a while looked like a miniature astronomy lab, and could have passed muster in Uscolia.

The most fun, however, we had with the telescope. It was a 70 mm refractor, what is referred to as a "first telescope." It took some time to set up each time. First we had to check on the Internet what was visible at any given moment in the sky, and where exactly we needed to look. Then we had to assemble the device and try to identify our targets. There are only a few objects in the sky that such a telescope can resolve (for example, stars that appear as points of light continue to appear as points of light in the telescope, although a bit brighter), but the ones that it does resolve are worth the effort. First, there is the Moon, one's easiest target. The picture that appears is impressive in its detail, nothing like what one is used to seeing when one takes the trouble to look. Then there is Mars, which to the naked eye looks like a brighter-than-usual star, but through the telescope appears like a small red disc. Even more exciting is Jupiter, which appears as a disk, clearly showing the four moons, in a straight line, two and two or one and three on either side, except when one of the moons is directly in front or behind Jupiter, so only three are showing. And of course, Saturn, with the ring, steals the show. We weren't able to see any of the outer planets.

Interest in the planets lasted probably three to four years; much of the material we accumulated is still lying around somewhere, waiting to be given away. And although the planets are rarely mentioned these days, I'm sure that some of the knowledge accumulated still remains.

**Stamps**. I never collected anything in my life because, in a strange way, I always felt that it was too late to start any type of collection. When as a child I became aware of stamps as collectibles, all my friends already had respectable acquisitions to show and I had no hope of ever competing with them. My wife, however, has a credible collection of stamps, having also inherited her father's, which was quite extensive. When our son first expressed an interest in stamps, around age 6 or 7, probably having gotten hold of his mom's albums, it was easy to satisfy his demands. We dutifully cut off and soaked the stamps on snail mail envelopes (paper mail was still being sporadically delivered), and we bought packets of stamps from all over at philately stores. These he carefully placed in an album, arranging and rearranging them. Every now and then he managed to trade a few stamps with his mom.

After he accumulated a critical mass of stamps, he began to sort them by country and category. Naturally, musicians immediately emerged as a motif, and a separate album was created for the purpose. We were quite surprised to find how many countries had extensive series of classical composers, and not only countries where these composers had lived or even visited. I remember a series from Burundi. One could form an entirely distorted picture of the status of classical music in the world judging by the abundance of stamps commemorating composers. Another attractive category were stamps from countries that no longer existed, like the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, or from countries that were no longer called by the name that appeared on the stamp, like Upper Volta or Dahomey.

There is something definitely retro about collecting stamps. I don't know many kids nowadays who do; come to think of it, I don't know any. This made it difficult for our son to trade, because of all his classmates only one had any stamps at all, and those were less than a collection. Nevertheless, in the space of a couple of years, while his interest in stamps lasted, he was able to assemble ten albums, and used to spend considerable time going through them, rearranging them, and labeling the pages. For a while, he even branched out into coins and medals, which could also be purchased in philately stores and museums. In time, however, this interest faded. The fact that the original utilitarian function of the stamps has all but disappeared, along with the art of letter writing, has no doubt contributed to it. The act of waiting for a letter to arrive has no meaning for millennials. Maybe in a studio environment, if several children develop an interest in stamps, collecting can become a long-term hobby, and the studio, with its protean nature, may have the ability to become, among others, also a nostalgia shop. It didn't happen in our home.

**Rocks and beyond**. A short-lived but intense interest involved rocks, crystals, fossils, and shells. It may have been prompted by the presence of a few decorative objects around the house, mostly presents from family and friends. As the collection was growing, some rather unusual-looking specimens were on permanent display on tables, shelves, and bookcases. Large containers started rapidly filling up. We already had a few books about rocks and crystals, and we acquired more. We were also able to assemble a few booklets from information available on the Internet. Our son remembered the names of a large variety of rocks and was able to correctly identify them. The collection required sorting and classifying, although I doubt that there was any sound scientific basis for it. He declared some rocks to be more valuable than others, and these received preferential treatment. It is not clear what ended his interest in rocks any more than what had triggered it, but surely it was not meant to be the start of a passion for geology, and there is no doubt that the limited range of activities in this area that we were able to inspire and support had something to do with it. After rescuing the more exalted shells and crystals, the bulk of the rock collection was demoted to the basement.

Over the years there have been many other passing interests, some lasting longer than others. One of them was poker, which started around age 11 and lasted for several years. Initially, I taught him how to play standard five-card draw, the kind I played as a child, many decades ago. I don't think you can have a career in Las Vegas today playing draw poker. But in short order the kid advanced to Texas hold 'em on his own, and opened a "starter" account at an online casino where he won quite a bit of funny money. He read books, practiced, followed all the important Texas hold 'em tournaments, and knew all the top players and their various quirks and antics. He even had a portable travel set with table cover, chips, dealer and blind buttons, and two decks of cards, but it was difficult to set up games for him because kids his age were nowhere near good enough to play with him and adults were uneasy playing poker with an 11-year-old. Most of the games, therefore, were restricted to family and very close friends. Probably as an extension of poker, once he learned how to handle cards, he also ventured into magic tricks, which resulted in the acquisition of magician's paraphernalia, Svengali and stripper decks, disappearing and reappearing coins and balls, magic wand, and all the rest.

He still follows poker, not as closely as he used to, but keenly aware of the tournaments being held and the personalities involved. And he's prepared to play, although few people in his environment have the inclination or the skill to do so. Here too, our limited ability to create a genuine setting may have inhibited the development of a hobby. At a studio, poker and similar activities may be integrated into the math lab and enriched with probability and game theory, with incidental forays into the art of illusionism, and it is entirely possible that the studio can become naturally, among others, also a casino and a magic shop. Our home did not become one.

Other interests flared up suddenly, prompted by unidentified agents, and died out quietly for lack of adequate fuel. There were rivers and mountain peaks worldwide, with their lengths, heights, and unique features. There was Japanese calligraphy, with ink and brushes, short lived. And probably a few things I forget. Not all initiatives produced fruit or lasting benefits. But it is impossible to tell in advance which will and which will not develop into genuine interests. Whenever the unique individuality of a developing child is exposed to the endless variety of human accomplishment, unforeseen random effects occur, and every chance encounter can be the beginning of a lifelong passion or a brief adventure. We therefore supported as best we could everything that our son initiated, without trying to estimate what would succeed. We didn't try to be selective, and followed him in every direction he led, with equal enthusiasm, if not with equal competence.

Shakespeare

I'm leaving for last the first element of a child's environment: the parent. "Parents are tools," Hugo had told Ben. "The sharper they are, the more accurately they can carve out the environment that shapes the paths their children will follow in life." Mindful of how difficult it is to simulate a Uscolian studio, with its diverse staff and student population, I decided to test the limits of self-improvement. I started out by signing up to a gym to bolster somewhat my physical condition, which left a lot to be desired. In parallel, I began reacquainting myself with the main pillars on which our civilization stands. It was high time, anyway, that I reread some books I had not touched for decades. Over the years I managed to delude myself that because I have read, say, _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_ when I was a teenager, I was still able to treat these works as part of my baggage, that the way I understood the books as a youth still had meaning for me today, and that I would be able to say more than the most banal platitudes about them. In reality, I remembered only their contours in the most general terms, and maybe a line or two that were stuck in my memory. As an experiment, I reread Mark Twain's famous pair of books and discovered to my dismay that I had forgotten them almost completely, and to my pleasure that I was able to enjoy them again as if I had never read them. I also found that the overall shape and intent of the books was entirely different from what I had thought long ago, when I had first read them as a teenager. Strengthened by this revelation, I set out to rediscover my library.

I began with the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. Naturally, what I remembered of these epics was insignificant. Of the _Iliad_ I remembered only the feud between Agamemnon and Achilles, and the part about Achilles' shield. I did better on the _Odyssey_. It was so thrilling to reread these epics that I even toyed with the idea of trying to learn Greek. I went on to Plato's _Republic_ and to the Bible, which in truth I don't think I had ever read integrally but had rather sampled it as the need arose. I continued with the _Aeneid_ , which was a complete shock because the only recollection I had were the first three words, some confused images of burning Troy, and Dido's suicide. On further reflection, these books are so rich in ideas, events, and characters that it is difficult to keep them in mind unless one rereads them constantly. Leaving the ancient world behind, I arrived at Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and from there it was only a step to Thomas More's _Utopia,_ Cervantes, and Shakespeare.

It was Shakespeare who provided the most gratifying experience. First, I had never before read all of his plays and poems. Second, I had initially read the plays, as a youth, in Romanian and Hungarian—indeed, I knew long passages by heart in some outstanding translations. It goes without saying that until I got to Shakespeare, most of the above reading was in translation. "Ours is a civilization of mostly second-hand experiences," Ben had said, "mediated by interpreters." Montaigne, one generation before Shakespeare, may have been the _last_ person on earth to speak Latin natively and to be able to read the _Aeneid_ as we read, say, Hemingway. His father, anticipating Dot A.C. by three centuries, was the _first_ person on earth to realize that you don't have to be born in Rome to speak like a Roman: to tutor his son, he hired a classicist, but naturally not a native speaker himself, as there have not been such speakers for more than a thousand years. Still, young Michel received sufficient exposure to Latin as a child to gain the native fluency the tutor himself lacked. Incidentally, before I got started on Shakespeare, I reread also some of Montaigne, in Florio's translation, published in 1603, if only because Shakespeare himself had read it, as we know from the fact that he incorporated a passage into _The Tempest_.

In time, because of my work, English gradually became my dominant language, and I reread some of the plays in the original, but it was only as I was awaiting our child's birth that I read every word Shakespeare wrote (and probably a few written by others) in the exceptional Norton edition, where a light annotation scheme makes it possible to glance at the notes practically without taking your eyes off the main text. Never before have I undertaken such a reading project. I also made an effort to memorize, this time in English, some scenes I still remember to this day in Romanian.

As I read and reread these plays in English, with a translator's eye, I often wondered how this or that quip or quibble might be rendered in some other language—it usually cannot be. How is it possible, then, that of all authors, Shakespeare, on the face of it the least translatable, has survived so well in translation into more than a hundred languages, including Klingon, indeed so much better than simpler texts? I'm in awe of how good translations are, despite the unsolvable difficulty posed by Shakespeare's many puns and double-entendres, which in English create a magical ambiguity, with so many words having more than one meaning. Here is young William Page, in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ , declining the Latin pronoun _hic, haec, hoc_ , _horum, harum, horum_ , as Mistress Quickly comments: _You do ill to teach the child such words. He teaches him to hick and to hack, which they'll do fast enough of themselves, and to call "whorum". Fie upon you!_ One can hear Shakespeare's contemporary audience roaring. It would take an act of God for this punning opportunity to present itself in another language. But translators ingeniously find other instances in Latin that produce adequately lewd homonyms in the target language. There are more challenging instances. In _As You Like It,_ Jacques quotes Touchstone, the clown: _And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale_. Obviously, for the audience at the Globe, "tale" sounded the same as "tail." The translator must choose one of the two meanings, perforce giving up on the one not chosen and automatically impoverishing the text. But the resilience of Shakespeare's text is such that it survives this trial as well unscathed. And there are still more difficult cases. Here is Viola, in _The Twelfth Night,_ telling Sir Toby that _My legs do better understand me, sir, than I understand what you mean by bidding me taste my legs_. The translator is now at a complete loss, having no way of replicating the "understand" "stand under" pun in the target language, short of a miracle. I dwell on translations because I think they demonstrate more concretely than anything else the inexhaustible richness of Shakespeare's text: no matter how much is lost in translation, there is always more left than you can wrap your mind around. I am reminded here of Hugo's model of the inexhaustible brain that has always more capacity than any of us can ever hope to develop. With Shakespeare, our inexhaustible brain finally meets the cornucopial text.

Rereading and relearning Shakespeare's plays in the original pulled together many different threads in my life: decades of immersion in translation, a lifelong pursuit of the writer as creator of the universe, my childhood fascination with theater and with the Bard in particular (bardolatry, in this case, rather than bardology), my concurrent obsession with language, especially English, of which I didn't speak a single word at the time, but made up, with my theater-aficionado friends, long speeches in mock English, occasionally throwing in the name of one or another of the characters, and delivered them in Lawrence Olivier's best nasal voice: _Thay wilmy wo Brakenbury and millow brail, lest wyles and hubbards splay in hispany_. These threads were only the warp, so to speak. Across them now danced the shuttle, carrying yarn of a different color with new themes introduced by our son, product of the spirit of Uscolian studios, if not a proper graduate, native speaker of music and other languages.

If in the beginning was the Word, everything is language. Mathematics is the language of nature. And Shakespeare, not only the ultimate poet and the designer, architect, and builder of words and of worlds, but also the total thinker, the deepest political philosopher and psychologist of all time, inventor of our consciousness, speaks the language of human intellect in all its manifestations. If everything is language, everything can be learned as a language, Shakespeare included. Buoyed by these thoughts and by memories of Uscolia, I was happily reciting my favorite passages as I was pushing the stroller through the park: _And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name_. If Carol could speak math to a one-year-old, there was no reason why I couldn't speak Shakespeare to one: _'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, and after one hour more 'twill be eleven_. After all these years, I finally had an audience to satisfy my failed lifelong ambition of becoming a Shakespearean actor: _O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!_ And a supportive audience it was, patient, tolerant, attentive: _But I am constant as the northern star, of whose true-fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament._ The baby was diligently assembling the patterns that were to become his first language and that later made him into a frequent visitor at the Globe and the Old Vic in London.

For speakers of English, Shakespeare is what the Bible is for speakers of Hebrew. Both are constitutive texts for their respective languages. In his name, our child ties the two together. My wife and I both embraced the name eagerly. She was taken with its meaning in Hebrew, literally "Lion of God," and one of the synonyms for Jerusalem. For me, the inspiration was the eponymous "airy spirit" from _The Tempest._ Although I didn't have Adrian Leverkühn's setting of Ariel's songs to play, as a baby our son often heard other renditions of this enchanting air, associated forever with his name:

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:

In a cowslip's bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

On the bat's back I do fly

After summer merrily.

Merrily, merrily shall I live now

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
Other Titles from Sycorax Books

Fiction

D. Otter – _Nobel Peace Prize_

Miranda Series for young readers

Ariel Setobarko – _The Judgment of Paris_

Ariel Setobarko – _Paris and Helen_

Ariel Setobarko – _Hot Summer in the Plain of Shinar_

Ariel Setobarko – _Prospero's Potent Art_

~~~

I would love to know what kept you reading to the bitter end of this book. If you have five more minutes to spare,  
I would be grateful if you sent me a note to

lanyi@chars.com

