PRINCIPLE 9: ON THE MIND AS SPIRITUAL ORGANISM

To make a long story short, in this Principle Charlotte Mason makes sport of the notion that the mind and soul (which constitute pretty much the same thing: that particular interior animation that makes you you) are, like the universe before creation, "without form and void." 

Of course I'm going to make a long story long, too. Naturally I'm going to do that; it's what I do. But first I'll let Miss Mason have her say: 

"We hold that the child's mind is no mere sac to hold ideas but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a 'spiritual organism' with an appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet with which it is prepared to deal and what it is able to digest and assimilate as the body does food-stuffs." (source)

"Such a doctrine as the Herbartian, that the mind is a receptacle, lays the stress of education, the preparation of food in enticing morsels, duly ordered, upon the teacher. Children taught on this principle are in danger of receiving much teaching but little knowledge; the teacher's axiom being 'what a child learns matters less than how he learns it.'"

From here – to save you some time – she's going to do battle with a particular school of psychology, the Herbartian, prevalent in her era, which proposed the theory of the mind, particularly the child's mind, as a tabula rasa, or blank slate. And at this stage in our discussion, we can probably anticipate why she's going to war with this theory. 

*It proposes a vision of the child as less than a whole person, created by God. It proposes that he's somehow still waiting to be created by his education (here we might remember King Tommy and that statue on the stairs). 

*It proposes that the teacher's role is precisely that: the role of creator. In this vision, you, the educator, are basically God, and the children you have to educate are nothing more than lifeless clay, waiting for you to breathe not only learning, but life, into them. 

Is any of this remotely true? 

Frankly I have a hard time imagining how anyone who has ever encountered a living child could possibly take this theory seriously, except that it appears as a kind of Desolation, of the sort St. Ignatius of Loyola warns us about, to suggest that all the burden of your children's formation rests on you, the parent and educator, and that you should be worrying about this a lot. 

As Mason notes, however: 

Herbart's psychology is extraordinarily gratifying and attractive to teachers who are, like other people, eager to magnify their office; and here is a scheme which shows how every child is a new creation as he comes forth from the hands of his teacher. The teacher learns how to do it; he has but to draw together a mass of those ideas which themselves will combine in the mind into which they effect an entrance, and, behold, the thing is done: the teacher has done it; he has selected. the ideas, shewn the correlation of each with the other and the work is complete! The ideas establish themselves, the most potent rule and gather force, and if these be good, the man is made.

I suppose – again, considering all this in the language which is a gift to us from the tradition of Catholic thought – that the flip side of the Desolation aspect of things, wherein you the parent actively worry all the time about your absolute responsibility to get your child to heaven, (which is ultimately what we all do worry about, of course), is the danger of our own pride. That really is the reverse of our worry, isn't it: that if our children are intelligent and good and moral, and practice their faith, especially as adults, then all of this is our own creation. Bad parenting makes for bad outcomes; good parenting makes for good outcomes. Beat yourself up; pat yourself on the back. The end. 

As with every dangerous thing, this set of assumptions is leavened with some truth. Bad parenting – neglectful, abusive, dehumanizing, narcissistic, unstable, whatever – can lead to some bad outcomes. It certainly can cause suffering for children who experience it in both the short and long terms. Conversely, there are studies and statistics that correlate what we'd think of as functional family practices – even very simple things like sitting down to dinner together on a nightly basis – with positive outcomes for adult children of those families. There are things you can do (not that you would, but you could) to diminish your children's potential to grow up happy, form stable relationships, and practice their religion. There are things you can do, too, that will foster at least the statistical likelihood of a better future. What you do does matter. This is the leavening truth. And it is true, for all that it's the leaven in a larger, more dubious loaf. 

The danger is in taking too much responsibility, and too much credit, for yourself with regard to these outcomes. The danger is also in looking at other families, whose children exhibit less positive outcomes of whatever sort, and speculating about what those parents did wrong. Additionally, the danger is in assuming that because you haven't done whatever you think those other parents did wrong, or have done whatever they didn't do right, your children's outcomes will be better in every way than theirs. 

If you're thinking that way, just stop. And believe me, I'm saying this to myself as much as I'm saying it to you. This is a real thought-trap for parents. I think it's a particular danger for parents who are also their children's educators, because your sense of control, however illusory, is extended that much farther. 

So I say to myself as well as to you: discern the messages that cross your mind very carefully. Decide very carefully what's true and what's not. This, after all, is what your own living mind was created to do. You may not know anything about Herbartian psychology (I didn't, really), but you can discern where its messages have come from. 

Consider: 

What's true is that the things you do certainly form your child's atmosphere, help to establish his disciplines of thought, and support the life of his mind. You're not unformed and powerless, any more than your child is. There are positive things you can and should do to smooth the road in the direction you want it to go. You are capable of choosing good things every day and, with God's help, putting your choices into action. All of this would be the kind of message you'd receive from the Holy Spirit. 

What's false is that you create all of that ex nihilo, and that it's therefore all your fault if he goes wrong, and all to your credit if he goes right. Whether you're eaten up with worry that somehow you're going to ruin your child, or whether you're congratulating yourself that your child is not as that publican's child over there . . . either way, these would be messages from hell. Fortunately, with God's help, you have the power and discernment to reject them. 

So anyway, there's that. 

Charlotte Mason spends a LOT of time in this section going over both this essentially behaviorist approach to the human person (you are nothing but clay until I mold you!) and various problems inherent in the British schools of her time, which may all, I think, be gathered under the philosophical umbrella of utilitarian superficiality. She quotes at length from the work of Alexander Paterson, whose 1915 book Under the Bridge deals with various aspects of life among London's impoverished; in the excerpts she includes in Volume 6, the point clearly is to emphasize educational impoverishment: 

"The syllabus was designed to leave a boy at fourteen with a thoroughly sound and practical knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic and with such grounding in English, geography and history, as may enable him to read a newspaper or give a vote with some idea of what he is doing. But these are all subsidiary to teaching the three 'R's' which between them occupy more than half the twenty-four hours of teaching in the week. It is certain that the present object in view is dispiriting to master and boy alike for a knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic is no education and no training but merely the elementary condition of further knowledge. In many schools the boy is labouring on with these mere rudiments for two or more years after all reasonable requirements have been satisfied. The intelligent visitor looking at the note-books of an average class will be amazed at the high standard of the neatness and accuracy but he will find the excellence of a very visible order. The handwriting is admirable, sixteen boys out of thirty can write compositions without a flaw in grammar or spelling. Yet it will occur to him that the powers of voluntary thought and reason, of spontaneous enquiry and imagination; have not been stirred. This very perfection of form makes him suspicious as to the fundamental principles of our State curriculum. In Public Schools boys are not trained to be lawyers, or parsons, or doctors, but to be men. If they have learned to work systematically and think independently they are then fit to be trained for such life and profession as taste or necessity may dictate. But at our Elementary Schools we seem to aim at producing a nation of clerks for it is only to a clerk that this perfection of writing and spelling is a necessary training."

Now, before we decide that this is all very quaint, like the backdrop to a particularly socially-conscious episode of Downton Abbey or something, but not relevant to us in our more enlightened age, we might like to read this 2017 article from the Atlantic Monthly, emphasizing the deficits that occur when education consists, for years and years, entirely of skill-based endeavors, and sacrifices content:  

As I looked around, I noticed a small girl drawing on a piece of paper. Ten minutes later, she had sketched a string of human figures, and was busy coloring them yellow.

I knelt next to her and asked, “What are you drawing?”

“Clowns,” she answered confidently.

“Why are you drawing clowns?”

“Because it says right here, ‘Draw clowns,’ ” she explained.

Running down the left side of the worksheet was a list of reading-comprehension skills: finding the main idea, making inferences, making predictions. The girl was pointing to the phrase draw conclusions. She was supposed to be making inferences and drawing conclusions about a dense article describing Brazil, which was lying facedown on her desk. But she was unaware that the text was there until I turned it over. More to the point, she had never heard of Brazil and was unable to read the word.

This is the kind of thing Alexander Paterson, and by extension, Charlotte Mason, is talking about in the passage above. Assume that people need skills, dedicate all instructional time to the development of skills, and what you end up with are people who can mindlessly perform those skills but can't think, reason, or discern. They can do some things, maybe, but they've never heard of Brazil and are (therefore) "unable to read the word."  

Again Mason quotes Paterson: 

"With the average boy there is a marked waste of mental capital between the ages of ten and thirteen and the aggregate of this loss to the country is heavy indeed. Ten years at school conquer many of the drawbacks of home and discover a quick, receptive mind in the normal child. Many opportunities have been lost in these years of school but after fourteen there is a more disastrous relapse. The brain is not taxed again and shrivels into a mere centre of limited formulae acting automatically in response to appetite or sensation. The boy's general education fails utterly. Asia is but a name that it is difficult to spell though at school he spoke of its rivers and ports. It is probable that the vocabulary of a working man at forty is actually smaller than it was at fourteen so shrunk is the power of the mind to feed upon the growing experience of life. Of the majority of boys it is true to say that only half their ability is ever used in the work they find to do on leaving school, the other half curls up and sleeps for ever."

In other words, if you don't nourish and exercise a growing mind, it will atrophy. Charlotte Mason has already asserted that the mind is alive and hungry, and that it is hungry for particular food, the food of ideas. If you feed it and let it go to work, then it will grow. If you don't, you're letting it starve and waste away. After a while it might even be said to develop a kind of intellectual anorexia, starving itself voluntarily because it's never developed healthy eating habits. And the atrophy, Mason notes, isn't simply intellectual, but moral as well. To nourish a mind on a "wide and varied feast" of ideas is to feed the soul as well, because soul and mind are basically indistinguishable from each other. 

To respond to the child's mind as if it were alive and hungry is to nurture his growth as a spiritual being as well – not simply a cog for whatever machine presents itself as a livelihood. He understands himself as a being possessed of intrinsic dignity, that can reason and learn anything – a "likely lad," as she says, can quickly adapt himself to the demands of any kind of work, provided that he knows how to think. Any person educated this way, as a person, and given "knowledge informed by religion," as Mason puts it, is bound to respect himself more, to see more possibility in his world, to take more pleasure and ownership in his life, to be all the things a utilitarian education can't make him be, because he already is that remarkable creature, body and soul, a human being. 

ADDENDUM: 

Of course being human, body and soul, the child has free will. He has his own thoughts. What he does with his thoughts and his will may not be what you want him to do with his thoughts and his will, particularly as he grows up. This is just the way it is, and it's why every mother should make friends with Saint Monica yesterday. You never know when you're going to need her intercession, or for what. 

And really: there is nothing you can do about this, other than your best. Do your best, let it go, and pray. Your vocation is to get you to heaven, after all. It's how you learn to trust God in all things. This to me seems like a better policy than trying to keep your child from, for example, encountering ideas that might knock him off-kilter. Most people, in one way or another, have to experience that a bad idea is bad or unsustainable, or that a good idea is good – you can't just tell them that it is. One of my sons has a t-shirt that reads, I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you, which I think is a good motto for parenting. You probably will explain a lot, because what parent doesn't do that . . . but it's not your job to understand it all for them. Hard as it may be to watch sometimes, that is, and has to be, their own attainment. 

ANOTHER ADDENDUM: I had wanted to talk about Thomas Aquinas and the mind as the "intellectual light," created and illuminated by the Source of All Light. In Thomas's vision, the mind is the place where light meets Light. It seems to me that this vision undergirds everything Charlotte Mason is saying here, but somehow I ended up talking about a bunch of other stuff that seemed important.