In her senior year in college, my eldest daughter discovered a love for and a talent in ceramic art. That feeling when the professor says, "So, why exactly aren't you an art major," and you, an English major six weeks from graduation with a teaching job in hand, are saying to yourself, "Come to think of it, I really don't know. . . " Anyway, she made me this cute little face mug, which I think is supposed to represent a portrait of me, and which is good for growing succulents in. Somehow the image seemed apposite to what I think I'm about to write.
To some extent, I think I covered Charlotte Mason's Principle 10 in my discussion of Principle 9. Charlotte Mason's own discussion of these principles, in Volume 6: Towards a Philosophy of Education, is really one integrated discussion, but then, as we've noted before, that's true of the entire set of principles. These principles represent not twenty separate conversations, but one, continually unfolding from the first principle, that "children are born persons."
Principle 9 articulates that the mind is a spiritual organism, alive, active, and hungry, not an "empty sac" waiting to be stuffed with information. You can see how, before you've gone very far in establishing this idea, your thoughts shift from the mind of the child to the role of the teacher. If the child's mind is not simply a passive receptacle, but alive, active, and hungry, what does that then mean for the educator? If you are the educator, what do you do or not do in response to this mind?
This is where Principle 10 picks up, though again, it's hardly a separate idea at all. If you glance at the summarized and annotated 20 Principles chart which Ambleside Online provides, you see at once that there's a shift in the imagery used to illustrate how the mind does and doesn't work. Having established that the mind is "no mere sac," like a mailbag waiting to be stuffed with the day's letters, we now see something else that the mind is not, or is not like: an empty stage, waiting for some drama to be enacted upon it, with the teacher as director or puppeteer. What I visualize, reading this little snippet, is a marionette theater, with someone hovering backstage, lowering puppets into view and pulling their strings, constructing an entertaining but fleeting reality which the stage itself, dumb and inanimate, receives in utter passivity – and being dumb and inanimate, forgets as soon as the show is over.
Now, like any metaphor, this one falls short in some ways. It's hard to grasp that anybody, having met, or having been, a child, could really believe that children are quite that inanimate. The stage is made of wood; the child, manifestly, is not. I have no idea to what extent a Herbartian psychologist would go to the wall for this idea of the total nothingness of a child's interior life – though of course behaviorism, with its overtones of biological determinism, wherein we are merely complex organisms which respond to stimuli, is very much with us. I hope I don't have to point out that as Catholics, we don't believe that stuff. We believe, as Thomas affirms, that human beings are made in God's image, with minds, "intellectual lights," as he has it, made to recognize the Source of all light, the Light of the World, through both divine revelation (the gift of God to us), and our own human reason (also the gift of God to us). I hope I don't have to reiterate that this is what Principle 4 is all about: that we don't use systems of manipulations, bribes, punishments, and rewards, precisely because human beings, including children, are not merely complex organisms which respond to stimuli. We are born persons. Our minds can enact their own dramas, thank you, without any prompting from backstage.
Having gotten that off my chest once again, and also having, in my discussion of Principle 9, gone over a good bit of territory already with regard to the teacher's role and responsibility, I'd like to look at what really emerges to me today in Principle 10 as a distinct, though related, idea. Specifically, I'm interested in this idea of "much teaching with little knowledge." You might infer a causal relationship between the two, and I think Charlotte Mason would say that you'd be correct to do so. But why?
Let's look first at the idea of "much teaching." In Charlotte Mason's day, as in our own, much was made of what we might call the art of teaching.
A scheme which throws the whole burden of education on the teacher, which exalts the personality of the teacher as the chief agent in education, which affords ingenious, interesting, and more or less creative work to a vast number of highly intelligent and devoted persons, whose passionate hope is to leave the world a little better than they found it by means of those children whom they have raised to a higher level, must needs make a wide and successful appeal. It appeals equally to Education Committees and school managers. Consider the saving involved in the notion that teachers are compendiums of all knowledge, that they have but, as it were, to turn on the tap and the necessary knowledge flows forth. All responsibility is shifted, and the relief is very great not only so but lessons are delightful to watch and to hear; the success of jig-saw puzzles illustrates a tendency in human nature to delight in the ingenious putting together of unlikely things, as for example, a lifebuoy and Robinson Crusoe. There is a series of small triumphs to be observed any day of the week, and these same triumphs are brought about by dramatic display, so ingenious, pleasing, fascinating, are the ways in which the teacher chooses to arrive at her point. I say 'her' point because women excel in this kind of teaching, but men do not come far short. What of the children themselves? They, too, are amused and entertained, they enjoy the puzzle-element and greatly enjoy the teacher who lays herself out to attract them. (source)
Well, what's wrong with all of this, you might ask. What's wrong with the idea of teachers as "compendiums of all knowledge?" What's wrong with turning on the tap and having the knowledge just flow on out into the world? Isn't that what some people go to college to learn to do? Those people for whom teaching provides a creative outlet are happy doing it; school systems are happy to let them do it; children themselves are happy to have all this entertainment set before them – and surely happy children are learning something, aren't they? What could possibly go wrong?
Scroll down the page in Volume 6. I quoted some of the following passage in my examination of Principle 9, but it bears repeating here:
"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."
What could possibly go wrong? Only this. If the teacher has always done all the child's thinking and learning for him, syringe-feeding him his education in a glucose suspension, then what he has not learned to do at the end of all that syringe-feeding is think. What happens to his mind is precisely what happens to your biceps if I do the weight-lifting for you. Granted, you might actually prefer that some other person lift the weights. I personally prefer that someone else in my house lift weights while I sit here typing. The morning is made far more comfortable and enjoyable for me if I get to sit here on the porch typing, typing, typing, while somebody inside is doing the 35 reps with the little barbells. But guess whose arms look better.
In the same way, the teacher can do all the heavy lifting, and for a time it seems to suffice. The child comes home with his head full of impressions, and seems to make progress. But guess whose mind looks better in the end? Not the student's.
Meanwhile, what does this "doing the heavy lifting" look like?
*It might look like unit studies, designed by the teacher to connect any number of individual subjects – math, science, geography, art, history, literature – around some central theme, thus relieving the child of any responsibility for making connections himself, or considering that there might be concepts and connections beyond those that have been presented as important by the pre-organization of the unit study. His own mind is robbed of the opportunity to organize and synthesize knowledge – which it was made to do, but will not grow in its ability to do unless it is given that task for itself.
*It might look like a lot of "creative" projects, as in "drawn from the teacher's own creativity and then assigned." I find it very telling that parents and teachers tend to remember with great fondness "all those projects we did." Students, too, remember projects. They remember that diorama, that skit, that poster. Do they remember . . . whatever it was the project was supposed to represent in terms of learning? Sometimes, maybe. But they sure do remember having to do the project. Projects, themselves, in fact, consitute a kind of common culture among former students, a lingua franca, readily understood by everyone, whereas the concept of the polis, say, or the process of photosynthesis or mitosis or the consequences of the Franco-Prussian War of the early 1870s or the relationship between nature and grace as articulated by Thomas Aquinas . . . generally do not. When parents and teachers defend the whole creative-project thing by saying, "THAT's what my kids/my students remember most about their education," I always want to ask . . . well, I'll leave you with your active mind to fill in the question I want to ask.
*It might look like a lot of "creative" projects, as in "drawn from the teacher's own creativity and then assigned." I find it very telling that parents and teachers tend to remember with great fondness "all those projects we did." Students, too, remember projects. They remember that diorama, that skit, that poster. Do they remember . . . whatever it was the project was supposed to represent in terms of learning? Sometimes, maybe. But they sure do remember having to do the project. Projects, themselves, in fact, consitute a kind of common culture among former students, a lingua franca, readily understood by everyone, whereas the concept of the polis, say, or the process of photosynthesis or mitosis or the consequences of the Franco-Prussian War of the early 1870s or the relationship between nature and grace as articulated by Thomas Aquinas . . . generally do not. When parents and teachers defend the whole creative-project thing by saying, "THAT's what my kids/my students remember most about their education," I always want to ask . . . well, I'll leave you with your active mind to fill in the question I want to ask.
*It might look like infotainment, predicated on the idea that since kids like cartoons and can repeat what happens in an episode of their favorite show, the way to get them to repeat things you want them to repeat is to make those things exactly like that favorite show. If you have minds eager to learn, but what you give them by way of learning are interactions that suggest that all reality is an extended episode of Phineas and Ferb, then what you get are people deprived of the opportunity of understanding or dealing with reality in any other way. (My husband, incidentally, for years took groups of college freshmen to the symphony, and found that he had to explain to them that the people on the stage were alive and present and would know and be both distracted and insulted if they got their cell phones out during the performance, or talked or laughed. This phenomenon seems not unrelated to what I have just been saying.)
*It might look like the teacher's exhaustively explaining everything the students have read and assigning meanings to it, which the students dutifully write down to regurgitate on the test, but otherwise let flow over them, blah blah blah blah blah. Maybe they haven't even done the reading, because they know the teacher is going to tell them what they needed to "get" from it. Students aren't stupid, and paradoxically enough, part of not being stupid is knowing exactly how much they can participate in the cultivation of their own ignorance and get away with it. First graders can learn to do this just as readily as college students can.
We're not talking here about some phenomenon of Victorian-era education. We're talking about approaches that are with us today, that recommend themselves to us in exactly the manner that Charlotte Mason describes in that first passage that I excerpted. And we're talking about approaches that have precisely the consequence described in the second passage: intellectual atrophy.
Again, what drives this whole process, from "much teaching" to "little learning?" What drives it is the assumption – again, still with us – that children really don't have minds to speak of, that cute as children are, there's really something kind of inanimate about them, something almost sort of AI about them, so that, android-like, they stand in need of a good programmer.
AND again, this is not a Catholic thought. It isn't. Nothing about this thought trajectory aligns with Church teaching regarding the human person. That there are plenty of well-intentioned Catholic teachers and parents operating unconsciously on this assumption as they implement an education for their students and children does not change the fact that to treat children this way is to dehumanize them, in subtle, largely painless, but insidious ways, from the inside out.
What's the answer, then?
The answer is to trust God to have made the child competently, to be competent, appropriately for his level. Notice what I'm not saying. I'm not saying: trust God to have made your six-year-old competent to drive a forklift. Remember that the "atmosphere" which is so crucial an "instrument of education" needs to be "ventilated . . . with common sense." I'm not proposing, and Charlotte Mason isn't proposing, anything that isn't ventilated with common sense.
Common sense says:
1. God is competent (to put it mildly).
2. God, who is competent, made your child.
3. God, who is competent, made your child who is a human being.
4. Your child, a human being, is made in the image of God.
5. Reminder: God is competent.
6. Your child is not God, so is not omniscient.
7. Still, at his own level, your child HAS a competent mind.
8. God gave him this mind in order that he might know God.
9. By this, you know that your child was made to know.
10. Therefore, you can trust your child to learn for himself. You don't have to do that work for him.
If common sense says all this, and I think it does, then you begin to know how to proceed with education. You're relieved of having to put on a puppet show. In fact, you're more or less mandated not to put on the puppet show, because you can see what the puppet show, day in and day out for twelve to fourteen years, will do to your child's God-given and competent mind.
If not the puppet show – or the unit study, or the projects, or the entertaining cartoon learning or the continuous lecture – then what?
That's what the next principles will begin to unpack. Stay tuned.
*** Incidentally, I don't mean, by this, to deny that there are really inspiring teachers. The name of this blog derives from a really inspiring teacher in my own life. But I would propose that inspiring teachers are inspiring not so much in what they do as in what they are. The best teachers are people who model, in themselves, what it means to love something.
When my eldest daughter was small and attended an English infants' school, the school's teachers used to gather on Wednesday afternoons, when the children had gone home, to pray for those children and their families. What was absolutely most effective about those teachers was their sacrificial love for the children they taught, and the most effective and, I hope, lasting lesson they taught those children was that they were lovable. Yes, they also helped them learn to read and do sums. But they were inspiring because of who they were, and how they were with the children.
The best high-school teachers I had, meanwhile, were people who demonstrated in themselves what it looked like to love, really love, be inflamed by love for, literature, for the history of a particular place and period, for a foreign language. They also, crucially, loved us. In fact, when I think of poor teachers I had, and even in my rather chichi girls' prep school, I had a pretty fair selection of outright bad teachers, the worst teachers I can think of were either contemptuous of us as adolscent girls, or just phoning it in. They were sarcastic and belittling, or they were boring and bored. One history teacher, for example, used to read to us straight out of the same history book we were supposed to be reading from ourselves, and her reading was not, shall we say, very enlivening or dramatic. What it said was, "I couldn't be bothered preparing for this class." We were all a lot more fascinated by the particular oleaginous quality of her lip gloss – it was 1978, after all – than by anything else she said or did. A number of teachers, meanwhile, just talked a lot, not very interestingly: blah blah blah blah fact fact fact fact, as if they were talking to themselves, or into a tape recorder, not to a roomful of living human beings.
A couple were just ineffectual, and we ran all over them. If they were afraid of us, then we could make ourselves a force to be afraid of. Teenaged girls, especially in groups of twenty or so, are insanely good at that. One poor woman, who taught Consumer Economics and typing, had a nervous breakdown midway through the year, but I think that whole process was helped along by the boys at the school next door, where she also taught, who sang "Happy Birthday" to her every day until she fled in tears, never to return.
Anyway, all that to say: I know that there are good teachers. But I think their goodness as teachers is rooted in something other, and more elusive, than the actual art of teaching, whatever that even is.