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He is like a tree, planted beside streams of water In Principle 9 and Principle 10, Charlotte Mason establishes what the child's mind both is not and is. It is not, as she says, an "empty sac" waiting to be filled. It is not a blank slate, a bit of unformed clay, "without form and void," as the uncreated universe is described in Genesis. That really is the point: the mind IS CREATED. When God creates, He creates out of nothing – ex nihilo – but he doesn't create nothing. If you've had a chance to read Fr. Herbert McCabe's essay outlining the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, then you know what Thomas, and therefore the Church as a whole, has to say about the human person and his intellect: the same thing Thomas, and therefore the whole Church, has to say about anything that God creates: "[T]he works of human intelligence are an even greater manifestation of God's power. The things we do because we decide to do so for our own reasons (and not because we are the playthings of physical causes), these free acts, are not brought about by any created things, but are directly created by God." God's life, says Thomas, is present is all created things, because it is by that life that those things exist at all. That is to say, His grace is present in all created things, including the human mind. How could it not be? He made that mind. If He withdrew His grace from it entirely, it would cease to be. Nothing that exists can exist outside the thought, the life, the love of God. This is the idea underwriting Principles 9 and 10: that the mind, being created by God, is full of life, thought, idea, action, all on its own. Or rather, not all on its own, but because God is present there. What this idea means, then, has ramifications for the teacher and the way the child, with his God-given mind, interacts with his education. As we've seen, the child doesn't benefit from being treated as a passive object. Why? Because he isn't one. That idea simply isn't true. It may be satisfying for the teacher to teach-teach-teach all day long, with eloquence, humor, and creativity – but for whom is this education intended? A room full of rocks? A room full of mirrors? Is teaching meant actually to inspire learning to happen? Or is it just a performance art? I guess by now you know what I think, which only matters because it's what Charlotte Mason thinks, too. If our teaching does all the child's thinking for him – because we can't bring ourselves to believe that the child is capable of thinking for himself, because we can't trust him . . . which is the same thing, friends, as saying that we don't trust God to have made him well – then, as we saw in the discussion of these Principles in Volume 6, what we end up with is an entire population of starved and atrophied minds. Having laid this foundation of ideas, Charlotte Mason turns her attention to their practical consequences. If this, then that: if the child's mind has its own life, which needs feeding and exercise in order to grow and thrive, then . . . But we, believing that the normal child has powers of mind which fit him to deal with all knowledge proper to him, give him a full and generous curriculum; taking care only that all knowledge offered him is vital, that is, that facts are not presented without their informing ideas. (source) Yes, we've established – I hope thoroughly – that the child has "powers of mind which fit him to deal with all knowledge proper to him." Every part of this construction matters: that the child has "powers of mind;" that those powers "fit him to deal" with knowledge on his own, without needing it dealt with for him, as long as that knowledge is "proper to him." Again, nobody is proposing that your six-year-old needs to understand the Pythagorean theorem. Saying children are "born persons" is not the same thing as saying that children are little adults. But it might be saying: your six-year-old is capable of discerning that he doesn't have to think the same way that people think in the books that he reads. Or that he does think that way, because some reactions, judgments, and prejudices simply are natural human responses in given situations. I think, for example, of the first chapter of H.E. Marshall's This Country of Ours (which actually my own children read on their own at twelve and thirteen, not six), which retells the narrative of the Viking discovery of Vinland, from the Saga of Erik the Red. In the actual Saga, the medieval Norse record the reactions of Leif Erikson and his company to the native people, or "skraelings," whom they encounter. One translation that I've read uses the term "ill-favoured," and goes on to describe what, exactly, the Vikings thought was ugly: that the people's hair stuck out in what they considered to be a disorderly way, that their cheekbones were wide and their eyes were large. Of course, the same passage spends a lot of time on a German, Thorkur, who is traveling with them (Leif's godfather, I think, if I've got all the names straight, which I might not!), and how funny-looking they think he is, too. So the idea you come away with is that Vikings find everybody who isn't like them unattractive. Which . . . is, as Thomas might say, a deficit in virtue, but it's a pretty universally human deficit. Charlotte Mason suggests that your child is capable of understanding this business of human nature, and that because he's not an empty sac or a vacant theater stage, he won't learn to be prejudiced by reading about people who are. For one thing, literature – including historical narrative – doesn't work that way. It's not a prescription for human behavior. It's a description of human nature, a mirror we hold up to ourselves. Children do have some knowledge of what goes on inside themselves; certainly knowledge that other people experience the same deficits of virtue – and that because of those deficits, things don't always go well in human interactions – constitutes "knowledge proper to him." The other word which stands out to me in my reading of this little passage is the word vital: "taking care only that all knowledge offered to him is vital." Here, vital doesn't mean urgent or crucial, which is how we often use it. The word here means what it really means: living, alive. She elaborates on this idea by explaining that "facts [should not be] presented without their informing ideas." And . . . well, you might be asking, what does that mean? Let's answer that question via that first chapter in This Country of Ours. What's an example of a fact presented without informing ideas? One example might be for you to say, "It's bad to be prejudiced against other people." Now, naturally, you are right about this. It is TRUE that to be prejudiced against other people on any basis – that is, to form judgments about them without actually knowing them – is a sin against charity, which is to say, a deficit, a falling-short in charity. That's a fact. But it doesn't mean much unless you know what that looks like in actual life. Enter the Vikings. At the beginning of the chapter regarding them, H.E. Marshall makes much of the fact that the Vikings are (to themselves) extremely good-looking and heroic. But by the end of the chapter, your picture of them is a lot more nuanced. They are brave, yes. They are not utterly lacking in virtue, after all – God made them, and through the whole story God their author has not ceased to think of them and love them as His creatures. The human author's writing about them reflects precisely this reality, in fact, even as she's describing first their thoughts about poor old funny-looking German Thorkur, and then their thoughts about the "ugly" natives. By the end of the chapter, the reader has learned some history, but more importantly, has also learned something complex about human nature which is hard, if not actually impossible, to boil down into a tidy moral. The idea that this chapter advances isn't that prejudice is good or bad, but that human beings, being essentially good but fallen, are often, in one way or another, just like this. That is the true and living idea. Edited to add: This true and living idea is, incidentally, WHY we study history. We don't study history to know that Leif Erikson discovered Vinland. We study history to know that Leif Erikson, who discovered Vinland, was a human being, like us, and that we – if we are honest with ourselves – are like him, complexes of virtue and of shortcomings in virtue. That Leif Erikson discovered Vinland is a fact (at least, as attested to in the Saga of Erik the Red). That Leif Erikson, who discovered Vinland, was a human being like us, and that to be human is always to be a complex of virtue and of shortcomings in virtue, is a fact clothed in an informing idea. As Charlotte Mason notes, children are actually capable of taking all this complexity on. The age range for reading a book like This Country of Ours is pretty wide – some people use it in early elementary, while others, like me, have chosen to assign it as independent reading for later elementary or middle school. Either way, though, I think that fears about this book's teaching children to be prejudiced – or to put it really bluntly, racist – are not rooted in reality. That is to say, they're not rooted in the reality of the child as a human being with a living mind. Children aren't parrots. They aren't blank pages to be printed upon. Assuming that the child's entire diet isn't made up of one viewpoint, and that that viewpoint isn't absolutely, seamlessly reinforced by his environment – brainwashing IS of course possible, but hardly desirable – I think you can trust your child to make sense of things, to sift the Vikings into all the rest of his life experience and reading. After all, as Thomas says, God's grace is at work in the child's mind, just as it is in yours. And the mind is made to seek more grace, not less. That mind will naturally find more grace, not less, if what you are offering is "a full and generous curriculum," which is the antithesis of brainwashing and indoctrination. It is a feast of ideas, and those ideas speak to each other in the child's mind, as that mind orders and synthesizes and makes sense of them. And again, that is precisely what the mind is made to do. That is how the mind thrives – on ordering, synthesizing, and making sense. That is both its food and its healthy exercise. Principle 12 will expand on this idea. Watch this space for more. (Also, I don't know why this post appears in italics. Blogger seems to enjoy doing this from time to time. I've stripped out formatting repeatedly, to no avail. Sorry about that). |