We Called Him Tortoise

Hello, Radio Readers. I’m Jane Holwerda. For our Fall 2024 Read, we’re reading and talking about books that depict worlds Through the Eyes of a Child, starting with the classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, a read which offers curiouser and more curiouser encounters on each page.

One of my favorites takes place towards the end of Alice’s Adventures when our heroine is introduced to the Mock Turtle, one of the species from which the soup is made, Alice is told, and this explanation helps account for the sad song the turtle later sings, sobbingly: “Beautiful soup so rich and green, / Waiting in a hot tureen!” The Mock Turtle is so very inauthentic he doesn’t know that he is not an ingredient in the soup he’s named for… Small wonder he’s a sad thing and slow to tell his story, at least up to his description of going to school in the sea even if his malapropisms and puns do sound as if he were more at sea than in one.

His course of study, he says, included “Reeling and Writhing…[,] the different branches of Arithmetic: Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision”; ancient and modern Mystery, Seaogaphy, and Drawling and Stretching. Lessons are so named, he continues, because the length of a school day decreases, or lessens, by an hour each day so that a term is about 10 days long. During the Mock Turtle’s exposition, Alice interrupts with questions, as she does, being a curious girl and a girl of some curiosity and also because she’s been to school herself. She asks if the eleventh day of the sea school term is a holiday, and if so, what happens on the twelfth day, but instead of satisfying her curiosity with answers, the topic is changed. When she asks the meaning of uglification, she is told she is a simpleton (18^th century for idiot) for asking what she should already know. Troubling that her questions go unanswered. Moreso that she is shut down and scorned for her curiosity in the middle of all this fun punning. Yet she doesn’t seem much put off by any of it, much as if it’s standard practice. And like many of us, whether 19^th century or the 21st, she’s most interested in school holidays and days off; the curriculum just seems silly.

Charles Ludwidge Dodgson, the real person behind the pen-named Lewis Carroll, was educated as typical of his upper middle-class standing in reputable boarding schools. He earned a fellowship in mathematics and then a lectureship at Oxford’s Christ Church. Biographers report that his students didn’t want to be taught and he didn’t care about teaching them though he continued to do so for over 20 years while writing books and developing a lasting reputation as a pioneer in photography. All this is to say that rather than offering a critique of schooling, Alice in Wonderland presents a bemused portrayal of teaching and learning that may or may not stand true for us today. Surely, through the passing of some 160 years, we can trust that students’ questions are encouraged and responded to in ways that stimulate their curiosity and make learning a meaningful adventure and not a babble of nonsense. Hmmm.

For HPPR Radio Readers, I’m Jane Holwerda in Dodge City KS. As the Mock Turtle says, “We called [our teacher] Tortoise because he taught us.”