I never tire of the symmetry and regular pattern of a coneflower almost in bloom. There is a metaphor here.
We have seen many math books pass through this house. How many of them we've actually finished, or even started, is an embarrassing story for another day, as my college graduates could possibly tell you. The moral here, I guess, is that it's harder to wreck somebody's future than you might think, although I would urge you in all sincerity not to try.
But what I started out to say is that one of these many math books contained an interesting introductory essay about how the brain, physically, forms knowledge. Now, I'm not a neuroscientist – my son is, as it happens, though he's not here to consult right now regarding the accuracy of all this – but as I understood this little essay to suggest, what happens is that as you read or practice something, like your piano recital piece or your math problem set for the day, you actually form new nerve-cell structures, called dendrites, to encode what you're doing into your brain. I will not pretend to understand all this largely chemical process in any great or accurate detail, but the upshot seems to be that as you do something, your brain is creating neural structures to enable and reinforce your ability to replicate whatever that activity is. This appears to be common enough scientific knowledge that a whole Wikipedia page exists to explain it – for whatever that's worth.
In any event, the point of the introductory essay in the math book (Lial's Basic College Mathematics, in case you want to check all this out for yourself) is that it's important to do your math carefully and with accuracy, because it's just as easy to wire wrong answers and processes into your brain as it is to wire right answers and processes. It's important, in other words, to embark on the practice of doing things the right way, with care, because once you start, and as you continue, you are literally constructing that habit, in a physical way, as part of your neural framework.
And it's fascinating that a hundred years ago, without the neuroscientific insights we currently possess, Charlotte Mason could speak of "physiologists" telling us . . . basically what I have just said. When we talk about education as a discipline, this constitutes a large part of what we mean. If discipline implies things like the will and the formation of character, it also fundamentally means doing the right thing a little at a time, because the more you do that, the more you'll be physically able to do it. The weak flesh can be made stronger, to support the willing spirit; the spirit may be all the more willing, the more the flesh (in this case the brain with its dendrites) works in concert with it. If, as Thomas tells us, "grace builds on nature," then this is surely one manifestation of that process. It's striking, in fact, how much our material "nature" is made to cooperate with grace, if we make even the tiniest first step in that direction.
Of course, I love how Charlotte Mason leaps into this idea. "Education," she says, "is not after all to either teacher or child the fine careless rapture we appear to have figured it." If children "get their lessons" with delight, it's because they have been habituated to do so – and because what they've been habituated to do is actually meaningful.
Note how her discussion of habit here sets out the integrated nature of meaningful habits. In other words: You can train somebody to memorize dates on a timeline. You can train somebody to take out the trash. The brain, to paraphrase the parlance of modern neuroscience, will form dendrites to enable the almost thoughtless replication of those activities, whether intellectual or physical. But there is a larger level of habit at work here. She speaks of the habit of attention, which is formed by the repeated "act of knowing," meaning narration. She speaks of "self-respect" as a habit, from which the habits of "neatness and order" grow.
So when Charlotte Mason speaks of the importance of "habit training," it's important to clarify that she's not talking, at least primarily, about modifying external behaviors. What she is talking about are largely internal behaviors, ways of thinking and of perceiving the self and others, which are also habits, though they aren't attained by systems of reward and punishment. They're attained simply by doing . . . and the whole family has to do them. The family has to do them automatically and naturally, as a habit: treating each other with respect, valuing order and peaceful functioning in the home, giving full attention to things without distraction (the irony that I'm writing this on a computer, and that my children tease me about what happens when they try to talk to me when I'm writing on this computer, is not at all lost on me at this moment, let me assure you).
In other words . . . Principle 7 extends Principle 6. We haven't left "Education Is an Atmosphere" behind at all. We've simply extended what we understand about the generation of that atmosphere. We're turning our attention now to the set of deep habits that underlie the kind of atmosphere in which learning can flourish, because people can thrive. Here, again, she takes up this theme, in which I hear the echo of that math-book essay, regarding math problems done carelessly:
At this point I think it's important to acknowledge that the laying-down of these rails of habit comes more easily and naturally to some people – and I'm talking about parents here – than to others. Attention issues are real. Struggles with executive function are real. It's pointless to say, "Just do X. Make yourself do Y," because some people really are on the outside of the World of Naturally Functional Persons, looking in at its activities as they would look into an exhibit at the zoo. I am one of those people, and have been my whole life, and I am here to tell you that this is true. Nobody is making it up. Nobody is trying to make excuses for why they can't get it together. This isn't a character issue, or a moral one. There's nobody who doesn't WANT to get it together. But there are a lot of people who despair of its ever being possible, and who have very understandably accepted their defeat. Again, I'm telling you this because I am one of those people. Not have been one of those people. Am. Present tense.
Here are some thoughts I have about this:
*It's not productive to regret what I haven't done.
Yes, if I could time-travel, I'd love to go back and be the marginally more organized and orderly person I am now but wasn't then. I can't do that. Time moves one way: forward.
*It's not productive to focus on what you can't do.
No, you can't reorganize your whole house and overhaul your entire family in every particular today. You're not going to go from total chaos to total peace, harmony, and order overnight. Just don't even think in those terms. All they'll do is drive you to despair.
*It IS productive to focus on what you CAN do.
Organize my whole house and schedule today: impossible.
Give each child a crate to hold his/her school books: possible.
Put up a note on a whiteboard to yourself and everyone else daily that the school books are to be returned to the crate when not in use: possible.
Put up a hook to hang your car keys on, and hang them there: possible (I can't tell you the level of peace this one thing has generated in my own life).
Set an alarm for the Angelus, and use that as your trigger for a regular lunchtime: possible.
These are all relatively small things, and in themselves they might seem kind of arbitrary. But each one is tied into the deep habit of generating order. Any one of those things relieves some area of decision fatigue. You know where the keys are. Your children know where their books are. You know when one key event in your day is going to happen. Doing any one of these things means that this is an area of your life in which you do not have to fly by the seat of your pants, and make it up as you go. It's made up already. You don't have to worry about it.
Again, I want to stress: any ONE of these things. Not all of them, right now. You will not and cannot accomplish all of them today. But maybe you can accomplish ONE of them. Pick one, and work to make it happen. Don't worry about any of the other things that might be on your list until you have that first one well under your belt.
And here's something important: not worrying about it is also a deep habit. The amount of peace you can generate in yourself just by hacking your life so that you don't have to worry about the same small things over and over is immeasurable. The amount of peace you can generate in your entire family just by not worrying about all the small things all the time is also immeasurable. One of the key skill sets implicit in "executive function skills" is the whole skill set related to emotional self-regulation. If you can regulate your own emotions, which is to say, if you can keep your daily stress level down, then – the executive-function coaches say – this helps your children stay calmer. This is how you help them to that deep habit of not worrying about it.
ADDENDUM: If it sounds as though I'm talking about habits for parents here, and not habit-training for children, you're right. I am. The end goal of habit development is order and peace in your home, so that it is a good atmosphere for learning and life. And that has to start with the adults in the home. Children don't adopt habits in a vacuum. Children won't acquire habits if the atmosphere generated by the adults is chaotic and inconsistent. Habits are about the family system as a whole, and again, parents are the center of that system.
Again: Work on not worrying about it, but work on ONE thing not to worry about at a time.
Charlotte Mason says, further:
This really is what habit-training is about. It's not about "right-away obedience" as an end in itself, or really about child behaviors primarily at all. It's about the functioning of the whole family system, which does affect child behaviors. It is about creating a system (as in an ecosystem, not as in a factory production line) in which life is made not laborious at every turn, because people aren't continually wondering what to do, and parents aren't continually worn out by having to come up with answers to what to do. Repeating the same small actions consistently – getting the books out of the crate, narrating at the end of a reading, putting the books back, setting the table for lunch, saying the Angelus, going to daily Mass, taking a bath – all these things build dendrites, which are the physical rails the brain lays down for life to "run upon." Once the rails are laid, the "running" in these areas ceases to be an issue, in the sense that it ceases to have to be a conscious decision about which there might be argument.
As I might have said, there are certainly a number things I regret not doing when my children were younger, the doing of which might have made our life run more smoothly, on better rails. At the same time, I feel good about the rails we have managed to lay. After a lifetime of reading and narrating, narrating is something even my most naturally resistant children do automatically, without any pushback, and that's no small thing. We don't argue about going to church. It's just what we do. We don't, I should add, try to micromanage our children's interior lives – habit-training does not mean that you can make somebody believe something. That has to be an action of their own "intellectual light," as Thomas puts it, in cooperation with God's grace. As a parent, you can't make that happen in your child. But things like we go to Mass and we say our prayers before bed can be non-negotiables, and even a young adult struggling in this area personally can cooperate in those rituals without arguing a whole lot, because that's just what you do, as reflexive as breathing.
In other words, yes, I've said because I said so, but really, if you're going to require people to do things, especially if they're going to have to do things over and over (get up in the morning, eat regular meals, say your prayers, do your schoolwork), those actions must be rooted in some meaning, some informing idea. They have to add up to some larger picture of a good life. Even little children can be invited to answer the question what makes life good? The things you ask them to do aren't arbitrary and silly – they are all things that contribute to the living of a good life, in one way or another. You don't just sit up straight because that's what ladies and gentlemen do; you don't even sit up straight to make your body healthy. You sit up straight because you respect yourself and have dignity, because God made you and loves you. That's the kind of vision I mean, and I think Charlotte Mason means, too.
ADDENDUM: This is what I think gets lost in so much homeschooling discourse on the subject of habits, and what I think is problematic about so many Protestant resources oriented this way. One of the things that seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle of a splintered Christian culture is this orienting notion of the person, and of the God-given goodness of our very humanity, from our conception forward. I have witnessed conversations in homeschooling circles in which children are spoken of in terms that are profoundly un-Catholic: as essentially bad or depraved and in need of control, as you would control a dog. The response required of them by their parents is the kind of obedience you would require of a dog, unthinking, unreasoning, on the level of reflex.
What you do to achieve that kind of obedience is the question that gets asked again and again, and the underlying assumption seems to be that if you just hit on the right formula, you will get the right outcome (I used to know somebody whose formula involved a wooden spanking spoon, which horrified me, especially as she spoke of it as cheerfully as she would speak of a spoon used in cooking). All of this, again, is profoundly humanity-denying and deeply un-Catholic as an approach to human persons. It's a conversation, in fact, in which a spiritual virtue like obedience is reduced to the level of habit – a conversation which really isn't even taking the concept of virtue, and the reality that God is already supplying children with grace and virtue, through the gift of their baptism, into account. Catholics should not talk or think this way. We all suffer under original sin, of course, but we must not forget, ever, that the goodness of God is present in us, and in our children, by the very fact of His having made us and marked us as His own with that sacrament.
Too often, though, we do think and talk that way, because our homeschooling culture does cross over so much with that of evangelicalism and Protestant fundamentalism, and we absorb the language and thought habits of that culture without even realizing that that's what we're doing (this also is where modesty culture as we generally experience it comes from, but that's a major digression I won't entertain here and now).
Anyway, it's important to note that either this is not what Charlotte Mason is saying, on the face of it, OR that as Catholics we're inevitably going to read what she says in the light of our faith, which does affirm the personhood of our children and bind us always to behave to them with that essential fact in mind.
But to return to Charlotte Mason's own words:
Nuff said, I think. And the way is paved for the next Principle: Education Is a Life.
ADDENDUM:
I've shared this post a good bit as a response to questions about habit training: what is it; how do you do it; how might a Catholic, specifically, with a Catholic's view of the human person, approach the inculcation of good habits?
I realize that I've sketched a lot of large ideas, but not a lot of how-to. That's because an individual family really needs to work out how the large ideas are going to work in the context of their own household, with its unique cocktail of ages, personalities, and needs. There are some basic how-to principles, though, that I think pertain (and they apply both to the endeavor of education and to family life in general, which really is just the whole context for education anyway).
1. People are motivated by success, not failure. If you want to build a habit – any habit, of any kind – then you have to begin with what the child can do, easily and well. If you want obedience, for example (though really that's a virtue, not a habit), then you have to make it easy for your child to obey you. You cannot expect obedience from, for example, a toddler who is hungry, overtired, or overstimulated. You might be asking too much of a hungry, tired, overstimulated five-year-old, for that matter. If you want a child to do what you want, then you have to ask what is reasonable, when it's reasonable. Never ask more of your child than you would ask of yourself.
2. A tiny step is still a step. You are not going to go from a messy playroom to a clean playroom in one fell swoop, without your having to do a lot supervising, and probably the bulk of the cleaning, yourself. You're just not. You cannot tell your six-year-old, "Go pick up all the toys," and expect that to happen. If your oldest is six, then yes, it's natural to feel that that child is Really Old And Mature, but trust me, six is still tiny. It is not reasonable, in any universe, to issue a general directive to a six-year-old and expect that directive to be followed. Anybody under the age of ten, in fact, is going to need extremely targeted, specific, SMALL instructions if they're going to carry out any task successfully. "Clean the playroom" is going to get you nowhere with the under-ten crowd. "Pick up five toys, let's count them, one, two, three, four, five": that is achievable. That is success. You can go on picking up five toys, one-two-three-four-five, as long as your child is engaged or unfatigued.
3. As with lessons, STOP before disengagement and fatigue set in. Drop the cleaning task or whatever it is, take a break for refreshment, and come back later. That, for a child under ten, is the equivalent of what James Clear writes about the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, who produced an astounding number novels (I know, because I've been reading them end to end for months, and I'm not anywhere near having read all of them) and his "fifteen-minute rule." If you want motivating success in any habit, you have to break it down into small, discrete, short tasks. This really applies to lessons, too – Charlotte Mason's principle of short lessons seems analogous. A lesson seems so tiny that sometimes you wonder whether any learning has happened. Fifteen minutes of writing seems so tiny that the writer might feel that he hasn't done any work at all. But those tiny increments, done consistently, over and over . . . well, they add up. Hindsight makes that clear. If you don't have the benefit of hindsight at the moment, you'll just have to trust Charlotte Mason, Anthony Trollope, James Clear, and me.