As you may have noticed, more and more as I work my way through these principles, I find it necessary to foreground Charlotte Mason's own words in Volume 6, and to add my own marginal notes to my reading of these key passages. This seems appropriate and, in the sense that I begin to avoid simply digesting these passages for readers via essays of my own, in keeping with Charlotte Mason's own view of the teacher's role. In other words, it's better for me to be a student alongside my readers, and to offer my narrations overtly as narrations, since really, narrating is what I've been doing all along.
As, perhaps, a prep note to our reading today, I might point out again that as we approach each Principle, we're looking for echoes of all the others, and especially of Principle 1, the foundation for everything else. Remember that we're entering a kind of philosophical ecosystem here – a web-of-life of ideas – where everything is connected, and no fundamental principle is going to contradict any other fundamental principle. Rather than getting hung up, in Principle 4, on not being allowed to use punishments, rewards, or other external enticements with children, we look at this Principle through the lens of what's been established: first and foremost, that children are born persons. When we begin to ask ourselves, How do I treat persons? What is likely to be motivating to a person? and so on, then suddenly we start to feel less deprived of tricks and strategies for making children do what we want them to do, and more as though everything we do is about our relationships with them as people, since that is what they are.
It is that web that we're going to explore more fully today – not because we haven't already been there, because we have. In a sense, "Education as Life" is what we've been talking about ever since the conversation began. But as with Education as Atmosphere and Education as Discipline, we're taking some time to define and clarify our terms, and to consider all the resonances of meaning that radiate from those terms, so that we can see how they both define some truths about human life AND suggest some applications in our own human lives.
So let's embark on this final consideration of the Three Instruments of Education. Here is how Charlotte Mason embarks:
We have left until the last that instrument of education implied in the phrase 'Education is a life'; 'implied' because life is no more self-existing than it is self-supporting; it requires sustenance, regular, ordered and fitting. This is fully recognised as regards bodily life and, possibly, the great discovery of the twentieth century will be that mind too requires its ordered rations and perishes when these fail. We know that food is to the body what fuel is to the steam-engine, the sole source of energy; once we realise that the mind too works only as it is fed education will appear to us in a new light. The body pines and develops humours upon tabloids and other food substitutes; and a glance at a 'gate' crowd watching a football match makes us wonder what sort of mind-food those men and boys are sustained on, whether they are not suffering from depletion, inanition, notwithstanding big and burly bodies. For the mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body; there are no organs for the assimilation of the one more than of the other.
Things I consider on reading this first paragraph on "Education As Life:"
Earlier we noted that it's not a parent's job to "make" a child's soul. Remember King Tommy and his parents, and the statue that they poured out all their capital to buy for him, that he might gaze upon it and thus "make" his soul? And we noted that this was both a form of idol-worship AND a form of debasement for Tommy, who already has a soul, granted him by God, and doesn't need his parents to create it in him?
When Charlotte Mason says that the mind only works when it is "fed education" as its fuel, she can't possibly mean that the child doesn't have a mind until we start stuffing books into him.
Why can't she mean that? Well, because that would be inconsistent with Principle 4, and ultimately with Principle 1. Remember that whatever she says, we understand that the baseline assumption is that the child is a human being, incarnate, intellectual, and spiritual, possessing body, mind, and soul, and that although we might have a lot to worry about with regard to our children's education, we never have to worry about creating those things in our children, even if such a thing were possible to begin with. We are not God. Fortunately, God is God, and creating those very things in every human being, without exception, is what He does.
In one sense, the fundamental challenge of offering an education to our children is the challenge to believe that God is actually God, and that we are actually the creatures, made in His image, that the Bible, the saints and doctors of the Church, and the catechism all claim that we are.
This might be a good place to stop and remember that our vocations are meant to get us to heaven. Not our children, directly. They will have their own vocations and their own salvation to work out, and although certainly we are there to help and support them toward their discernment of these things, God will be challenging them directly to do that every day of their adult lives. But it is worth considering that to offer an education to our children is to do something about our own faith first, namely to believe it, and to go forward as if we did believe it.
Here, the engine, which God has made, exists and is primed and ready. We don't have to tinker with the way it works, or put it together ourselves. All we have to do is give it gas and let it run.
And what is it made to run upon? It is made, Charlotte Mason asserts, to run upon ideas, which she differentiates from the "sawdust" of "mere information." We'll look more at the idea of the idea in a moment, but I am reminded here of the Catholic historian John Lukacs, who grew up in Hungary under Communist rule and, in his great work Remembered Past, recalls encountering histories made up of many facts, none of which added up to something true. Charlotte Mason speaks of "informing ideas," and perhaps this is one thing she's getting at. A fact is a naked piece of information which in itself doesn't mean much. An idea clothes a fact in meaning.
It is a fact that in North Carolina in the last week we have exceeded 50,000 cases of COVID-19, and that consistently, over a three-day period, positive COVID tests comprised 10% of overall test results. All of this is what we call information.
What a given mind does with this information – how it synthesizes it with other facts, orders those facts, and assigns them some meaning (evaluation of social-distancing measures during our state's reopening, perception of causal relationship between mask-wearing/non-mask-wearing and disease spread) – is an idea.
Of course it is always the job of the mind, when it encounters another mind's ideas, to discern, as best it can, whether those ideas add up to truth or not. If the mind is an engine, and ideas are its fuel, then it's meant to WORK, not just sit there dripping oil on the garage floor. As parents, we can trust even an immature mind's innate ability to sift, order, and discern, and be comfortable with our role in facilitating discernment through listening, asking further questions, and encouraging the making of connections between various sets of ideas as they are presented in reading.
It's NOT our job to find that unicorn, the book that presents the absolute actual factual indisputable truth about everything in every minute detail, so that all our children have to do is drink it down and believe it without question. That's not what the mind was made to do. Anyway, with the exception of the Bible (whose truths often aren't factual and do require discernment) that book does not exist, so you might as well not knock yourself out trying to track it down.
Here, meanwhile, is how Charlotte Mason defines that key term, the idea:
If we enquire into any person's habits of life, mental preoccupation, devotion to a cause or pursuit, he will usually tell us that such and such an idea struck him. This potency of an idea is matter of common recognition. No phrase is more common and more promising than, 'I have an idea'; we rise to such an opening as trout to a well-chosen fly. There is but one sphere in which the word idea never occurs, in which the conception of an idea is curiously absent, and that sphere is education! Look at any publisher's list of school books and you shall find that the books recommended are carefully dessicated, drained of the least suspicion of an idea, reduced to the driest statements of fact. Here perhaps the Public Schools have a little pull over the rest of us--the diet they afford may be meagre, meagre almost to starvation point for the average boy, but it is not destitute of ideas; for, however sparsely, boys are nourished on the best thoughts of the best minds.
It's worth noting here that when she says "Public Schools," she means what we would call the elite private schools attended by the aristocracy – Eton, for example – whose curriculum in her day chiefly consisted of readings in Latin and Greek, of the great minds of antiquity. She objected to the elitism of these schools, and to the notion that one had to learn antique languages in order to access great thoughts, as if those thoughts themselves were artifacts of a lost era, inaccessible to the average person and irrelevant to normal life. In this moment she's saying, however, that at least they do meet some ideas, which the average child in his average British Victorian education does not, at all.
I love the phrase she uses to describe what an idea does: that it "behaves like an entity." An idea is something which has, in itself, the qualities of personhood. I think again here of John Lukacs, and his insistence that knowledge is "personal and participant." It is something that engages us personally – as Charlotte Mason says, it "strikes" or "seizes" us, even "possesses" us, as if it were a spirit. It doesn't simply fill us up and wait to be regurgitated; it invites us to some kind of participation in it. Someone says, "I have an idea," and immediately people are drawn into conversation, if not action. Here I think Mason and Lukacs are speaking the same language, saying the same thing. If we wonder what kind of "fuel," exactly, the mind requires for its work: this.
She spends some time in the following paragraphs talking about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet, philosopher, and theologian. Most of us are familiar with Coleridge as the author of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and the rather dreamy (not to say "opium-fueled") "Kubla Khan." Particularly from a Catholic standpoint, Coleridge's personal life, early radical politics, and the Unitarian theology of his youth don't comport very closely with Christian orthodoxy, though he did later return to the Church of England, and wrote some important and valuable theological treatises. All that aside, his articulation of the necessity of the informing idea, even the triggering idea, was potent for Charlotte Mason, and I think we can certainly accept the following assertions as true without argument:
She spends some time in the following paragraphs talking about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet, philosopher, and theologian. Most of us are familiar with Coleridge as the author of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and the rather dreamy (not to say "opium-fueled") "Kubla Khan." Particularly from a Catholic standpoint, Coleridge's personal life, early radical politics, and the Unitarian theology of his youth don't comport very closely with Christian orthodoxy, though he did later return to the Church of England, and wrote some important and valuable theological treatises. All that aside, his articulation of the necessity of the informing idea, even the triggering idea, was potent for Charlotte Mason, and I think we can certainly accept the following assertions as true without argument:
"From the first or initiative idea, as from a seed, successive ideas germinate." "Events and images, the lively and spirit-stirring machinery of the external world, are like light and air and moisture to the seed of the mind which would else rot and perish." "The paths in which we may pursue a methodical course are manifold and at the head of each stands its peculiar and guiding idea. Those ideas are as regularly subordinate in dignity as the paths to which they point are various and eccentric in direction. The world has suffered much in modern times from a subversive and necessary natural order of science . . . from summoning reason and faith to the bar of that limited physical experience to which by the true laws of method they owe no obedience. Progress follows the path of the idea from which it sets out requiring however a constant wakefulness of mind to keep it within the due limits of its course. Hence the orbits of thought, so to speak, must differ from among themselves as the initiative ideas differ."
However much we might (obviously correctly) quibble with Coleridge's early Unitarian theology, or wish that even at his theological best he had been a Catholic, here he's just talking about ideas, and it seems to me that he's right, especially when he raises the danger of defining knowledge as something strictly empirical, that is, arrived at by scientific methodology. He's basically rolling back the Enlightenment roll-back of Thomas's argument that knowledge may be arrived at by either human reason (in cooperation with God's grace) OR by divine revelation. An empirical definition of knowledge asserts that the only true element in Thomas's formulation is the "human reason" part: you can't arrive at grace or revelation through the mechanisms of human reason, so therefore those things may be said not to exist at all. Again, Coleridge, for all his wonky belief system, IS ROLLING BACK SOMETHING UNTRUE, and noting that that untruth has been damaging, which is also true.
Meanwhile, he is noting that ideas exist independently of the empirical method; that everything is inspired by an idea; that these ideas have a natural hierarchy, depending on what sphere of life they're attached to. Educational philosophy – so I might say in the spirit of Coleridge here – exists farther down in the hierarchy than theology. Its ideas aren't supposed to explain everything, but form a subset of things for which theology itself doesn't really have a system of language. This is why, incidentally, just reading the saints, though of course we should all be doing that, is not going to tell you that much about how to educate your children.
The grand exceptions, of course, would be St. John Bosco and other saints whose particular charism was for education. If you want to find out about education, specifically, you really need to read people interested in ideas about education – saints, but also . . . you know . . . people like Charlotte Mason, whose fundamental ideas overlap with anybody Christian, though her methods may be unique to her. Otherwise, you find yourself extrapolating ideas about education from people who aren't primarily talking about education, in which case you had better hope you have the same level of instinct, intuition, and insight about the human condition that somebody like Charlotte Mason clearly possessed.
But I digress.
So, Coleridge. She's interested in what Coleridge has to say about the whole province of ideas, because he is identifying ideas as distinct from empirical facts, and as "entities," to borrow her word, which include and perhaps are even defined by a spiritual element. Charlotte Mason, as an apparently orthodox garden-variety Creed-professing Trinitarian Christian, would undoubtedly understand that "spiritual" element to derive from the Holy Spirit, as in the triggering image of the fresco in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novello. While Coleridge seems to have had his woo-woo moments – largely as a consequence of opium addiction resulting from a childhood full of illness and pain – there's really nothing at all intrinsically woo-woo about any of this. As Catholics, we know who the Spirit of Truth is. Presumably we also can spot something inspired by any other spirit, and don't have to worry that we're going to be tricked into something occult. If we do worry about that possibility, reference to St. Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises is in order, particularly the section on discernment of spirits. Again, always assess the idea itself, not its human source. Saints can get something wrong. Opium addicts can get something right.
Let us hear Coleridge further on the subject of those ideas which may invest us as an atmosphere rather than strike as a weapon:––
"The idea may exist in a clear and definite form as that of a circle in that of the mind of a geometrician or it may be a mere instinct, a vague appetency towards something . . . like the impulse which fills a young poet's eyes with tears."
These indefinite ideas which express themselves in an 'appetency' towards something and which should draw a child towards things honest, lovely and of good report [Phil 4:8], are not to be offered of set purpose or at set times: they are held in that thought-atmosphere which surrounds him, breathed as his breath of life.
It is distressing to think that our poor words and ways should be thus inspired by children; but to recognise the fact will make us careful not to admit sordid or unworthy thoughts and motives into our dealings with them.
Like her, I love that word "appetency." As a poet myself, I know what Coleridge means about the sensation of being about to write something: it does feel like a "vague appetency," a little niggling craving for something, though you can't yet put your finger on what it is you're hungry for. Your response is to start writing toward that craving as much as you can, until you get at what it is you wanted, which you don't know until you get there. What he describes is a profoundly moving thing to experience, and a gift in itself. The 20th-century poet Sylvia Plath referred to this process as "really writing." When it happens, I assure you, it does take the top of your head off. It's completely exhilarating. And . . . you can't teach it, not directly, any more than you can teach somebody to love. People do learn to love, or at least to love well, by being loved, by seeing other people love each other, and this is what both Coleridge and Mason are getting at. There are kinds of knowledge that you can't teach by way of the set lesson. (I tend to think that the virtues fall into this category . . . many admirable curricula exist to teach children the Cardinal Virtues, but honestly . . . living them is the way to learn them as something "personal and participant," which is to say, something known). They're simply things that are in the air around the person – most poets I know report being surrounded by poetry, or music, or both, as children – and something innate in the person responds to them.
I love this moment when, still drawing on Coleridge, Mason connects the notion of the "life of the mind" with the principle of education as an atmosphere:
Let us hear Coleridge further on the subject of those ideas which may invest us as an atmosphere rather than strike as a weapon:––
"The idea may exist in a clear and definite form as that of a circle in that of the mind of a geometrician or it may be a mere instinct, a vague appetency towards something . . . like the impulse which fills a young poet's eyes with tears."
These indefinite ideas which express themselves in an 'appetency' towards something and which should draw a child towards things honest, lovely and of good report [Phil 4:8], are not to be offered of set purpose or at set times: they are held in that thought-atmosphere which surrounds him, breathed as his breath of life.
It is distressing to think that our poor words and ways should be thus inspired by children; but to recognise the fact will make us careful not to admit sordid or unworthy thoughts and motives into our dealings with them.
Like her, I love that word "appetency." As a poet myself, I know what Coleridge means about the sensation of being about to write something: it does feel like a "vague appetency," a little niggling craving for something, though you can't yet put your finger on what it is you're hungry for. Your response is to start writing toward that craving as much as you can, until you get at what it is you wanted, which you don't know until you get there. What he describes is a profoundly moving thing to experience, and a gift in itself. The 20th-century poet Sylvia Plath referred to this process as "really writing." When it happens, I assure you, it does take the top of your head off. It's completely exhilarating. And . . . you can't teach it, not directly, any more than you can teach somebody to love. People do learn to love, or at least to love well, by being loved, by seeing other people love each other, and this is what both Coleridge and Mason are getting at. There are kinds of knowledge that you can't teach by way of the set lesson. (I tend to think that the virtues fall into this category . . . many admirable curricula exist to teach children the Cardinal Virtues, but honestly . . . living them is the way to learn them as something "personal and participant," which is to say, something known). They're simply things that are in the air around the person – most poets I know report being surrounded by poetry, or music, or both, as children – and something innate in the person responds to them.
BUT lest we think we're in unschooler territory here:
Coleridge treats in more detail those definite ideas which are not inhaled as air but are conveyed as meat to the mind:––
Here she lists that catalog of Coleridge's assertions about ideas, which I provided above, and which are meant to illustrate a notion she ventures elsewhere in the same Volume: "Thought begets thought." You read to encounter more thoughts. The parent assigns reading to ensure that the child encounters more thoughts than he might, in his immaturity, choose to encounter for himself.
She concludes this trajectory of ideas thus:
Is it not a fact that the new light which biology is throwing upon the laws of mind is bringing us back to the Platonic doctrine that "An idea is a distinguishable power, self-affirmed and seen in unity with the Eternal Essence"?
Again I think of Thomas and the ways of knowing which he defines: revelation and reason. Coleridge, and by extension Mason, is dealing here with the necessity of feeding the human capacity for reason – understanding that it's not the ONLY faculty for knowing, since he's just dealt with that level of knowledge-beyond-reason (what Thomas would call revelation), but asserting that it IS one faculty, which has its particular needs.
Is it not a fact that the new light which biology is throwing upon the laws of mind is bringing us back to the Platonic doctrine that "An idea is a distinguishable power, self-affirmed and seen in unity with the Eternal Essence"?
Again I think of Thomas and the ways of knowing which he defines: revelation and reason. Coleridge, and by extension Mason, is dealing here with the necessity of feeding the human capacity for reason – understanding that it's not the ONLY faculty for knowing, since he's just dealt with that level of knowledge-beyond-reason (what Thomas would call revelation), but asserting that it IS one faculty, which has its particular needs.
BUT these ways of knowing don't exist as a duality. It's not the case that spiritual intuition, fed by revelations large and small, leads to spiritual knowledge, while reason, fed by ideas encountered in reading, leads to worldly, or merely human, knowledge. Both ways of knowing lead ultimately, say Coleridge and Mason, absolutely in concert with Thomas, to contemplation of the Divine. That Coleridge thought that the Divine consisted of one Person is unfortunate for him. Fortunately for us, the Holy Trinity knows better – and that is Who is there to contemplate, at the end of any good road of knowing.
We must disabuse our minds of the theory that the functions of education are in the main gymnastic, a continual drawing out without a corresponding act of putting in. The modern emphasis upon 'self-expression' has given new currency to this idea; we who know how little there is in us that we have not received, that the most we can do is to give an original twist, a new application, to an idea that has been passed on to us; who recognise, humbly enough, that we are but torch-bearers, passing on our light to the next as we have received it from the last, even we invite children to 'express themselves' about a tank, a Norman castle, the Man in the Moon, not recognising that the quaint things children say on unfamiliar subjects are no more than a patchwork of notions picked up here and there. One is not sure that so-called original composition is wholesome for children, because their consciences are alert and they are quite aware of their borrowings; it may be better that they should read on a theme before they write upon it, using then as much latitude as they like.
Here I think I'm getting ahead of myself. In the next passage, I think we should think again about that assertion: thought begets thought. I have chewed mightily on those three words in the years since I first read them, and they seem to me to be a master key, on a level with remembering that children are born persons, to open the doors of this educational vision.
Now, remember that the child HAS a mind to begin with. When Mason says, "Thought begets thought," note that she doesn't say, "Thought begets the mind." She simply means that the mind wants to generate things, and that the things it wants to generate are thoughts. But the immature mind, especially – though this is ultimately true of any mind at any stage – can't do that very well without, again, the fuel of ideas. The mind wants to think, and it wants to think a LOT, but it has to have things to think about. A child put on the spot to tell a story will often draw a blank. A child who has been immersed for days in a marvelous tale will often spontaneously start telling stories himself. I think this is what she's getting at in the following passage:
I'll add here that, as a "creative writer," I am no fan of "creative writing" as a school subject. In my experience, nothing shuts a child down faster than "write a poem about spring." Even now . . . I was recently commissioned to write a poem "on the theme of hope," and what I had to do as hard as I could was NOT think about hope, but about something concrete: Rublev's icon of the Holy Trinity, as it happens. And I had to find a form: terza rima, as it turned out. I had to have something in the real world, and in poetic tradition, to respond to, or I'd still be looking at a blank screen and sweating, instead of calmly writing this blog post because the poem in question is done.
Note: I am fifty-five years old, and have been a working, publishing writer for the last twenty-five years, at least. If I can't just "write a poem about hope," out of thin air, then I wouldn't expect a child to do that, either. In any case, writing isn't "self-expression." Emphasis here on self. It is not the sound of one hand clapping. That would be not writing. Writing is the sound of two hands clapping, a conversation. You HAVE to be in conversation with something outside yourself. That's why you have to read, and to engage with the ideas of other minds (whether in writing or in the form of an icon – which incidentally is also said to be "written"). Thought begets thought. It's really true.
And again . . . in this section we're dealing with what is conventionally called "The Life of the Mind," but is really so much more than that. If "wonder leads to knowing," as St. Gregory of Nyssa says, then where does "knowing" lead us in the end? Ideas are, on their own plane, a "bread of life," Charlotte Mason says. They are – the child's whole education is – ultimately a figure for the Eucharist and the life it gives. Education isn't the Eucharist – nobody is saying that! – but it is meant to offer a kind of sustenance that is sacramental in nature, because above all, that is what we hunger for in all our faculties.
"Education is a life" in the same way that the Eucharist is life. Unlike the Eucharist, which of course "contain[s] in itself all sweetness," education comes in "courses," which all together do contain in themselves more or less all sweetness (on their level; again, Christ may be present in any good book, but I hope it's obvious that I'm not equating that presence with His Real Presence in the Eucharist). Also, unlike his experience with the Eucharist, a child may prefer one course of his educational feast more than another, which is a normal state of affairs. Mind you, I think here again a parallel with the Eucharist is apt and useful: you can receive one crumb of the Sacrament and receive everything you need, which is to say, all of Christ, His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. Likewise, in education, while you can't not do science or poetry or whatever else you don't like, it's all right if you don't absorb some things to the same degree as you do other things, because larger, truer truths are fully present in everything you study. And education is about seeking and finding larger truth, which is to say in the end, it is about seeking and finding Christ. One child might find Him in the symmetries of geometry. Another might seek Him through the "appetency" inspired by poetry, while yet another might see His salvific story written in the human blunders and catastrophes that make up history. And that is really the point. Yes, a "broad and generous" curriculum is desirable, because it introduces a "broad and generous" literacy, a feast of things to think about. But where those thoughts lead is to one divine Truth, Who in Himself is both source and end, Alpha and Omega, of all learning.