Ep 09 | A Child’s Mind Isn’t a Bucket (And Moms Don’t Have Shovels) (Principles #9-10)
We’re not fully aware of how deep the children-have-bucket-minds educational philosophy runs in our world today, but Mason knew of its dangers way back at the turn of the 20th century. It’s an appealing philosophy at first take. Why shouldn’t we treat children’s minds like buckets and just toss in pre-packaged ideas to fill them up? Won’t we guarantee ourselves students who know exactly what we want for them? Does it matter how a child learns if they’re taught a lot?
Mason had much to say about this approach. And it appears I do too.
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Principles #9-10: 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 which it can digest and assimilate as the body does foodstuffs.
Such a doctrine as the Herbartian, that the mind is a receptacle, lays the stress of education (the preparation of knowledge in enticing morsels duly ordered) upon the teacher. Children taught on this principle are in danger of receiving much teaching with little knowledge; and the teacher’s axiom is, ‘what a child learns matters less than how he learns it.’
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Have you read Mason’s chapter on these principles in her sixth volume? Guys, she’s funny. I mean, really funny. Maybe it’s my 21st-century self reading into things, but when she begins the chapter with, and I quote, “I CANNOT resist presenting the Herbartian Psychology in the dry light of Scottish humour…” I hear every 20-something I know saying, I. Can’t. Even.
And she just keeps on rolling. So, before we get to the things that get Mason in such a mood, we need to know a bit about the man who made it, by name, into her tenth principle: Herbart.
Herbart was a German philosopher whose ideas on education have had such an impact that our schools still operate on his philosophy today. Mason spends a lot of time talking about him, and I think she does this so that she can show her eleventh and twelfth principles in sparkling contrast with his. So, if you start wondering why I’m spending so many precious minutes on Herbart, keep that in mind.
But anyway, Herbart believed the child’s mind–or soul as he called it–is something without substance. Its primary characteristic is its inactive. Like, it couldn’t even catch an idea, let alone invite, create, store, or remember an idea. At best, an idea might slip in and out but we really can’t be sure.
I know. It’s crazy.
Because the mind is inactive, the job of the teacher is to deposit ideas and allow them to collect and order themselves. He believed that the ideas are the ones doing the work, not the mind. Think of it as a big fight to get to the best spot in a room–ideas wiggle and jostle into groups in the mind and the idea groups that become the strongest will be the ideas to dominate the mind. But it’s the teacher who organizes and links the idea groups for the student. This means, that if a student fails to learn something, it’s the fault of the teacher.
And just a fun side note: Herbart called the idea groups “apperception masses” and I think I heard Mason sigh at the name when she wrote it.
But she spends a whole chapter working this idea out, showing the practical application of a mind-bucket philosophy, and I couldn’t help but asking, “Why?” Why call this one guy out by name? What not just show us the way of truth, goodness, and beauty?
I think she did it as a warning. By the time Mason was teaching and writing, she could see the first generation of Herbartian students. She saw an alarming reality of spiritually and intellectually wounded men and women. She noted the duplicate persons, meaning the effect of treating all students as exactly the same, giving them the same predigested material, and getting, in the end, the same fabricated minds.
But I think, and I read this first from Lynn Bruce, that Mason believed Herbart trivialized the sacred. He removed the ability of a student to make intellectual connections, which Mason believed was a sacred part of a person’s personality, and acting without that sacred ability would result in futile efforts at educating a person.
So, yeah, Mason really wanted to drive this point home. And she starts by poking at teachers.
Which, in a sense, could be us.
I know, you’re thinking that you’re not a Herbartian mother, or maybe you’ve been around The Commonplace long enough to think you might accidentally be a Herbartian mother, but I’ve been thinking about how we may be moms who know that our children are persons with minds like living organisms but we can often treat our children like their minds are little receptacles awaiting our input of ideas. Why do we do this when we know we don’t want to? Well, Mason noted the bucket-mind is incredibly appealing and satisfying for teachers.
If we, as the mother-teachers, hold the role of shoveling in the correct ideas that mold a new creation–well, aren’t we incredibly important and indispensable? We’re the ones doing the major work of education, which means we gather the collection of ideas, order them in the most effective sequence, and form the groups that will take over the child’s mind, resulting in our desired outcome.
Can you believe it? We’ve done it! We’ve taught our children—oh wait, it sounds like all we did was teach a unit study.
I’m not trying to pick on unit studies. Mason is doing the picking. I told you; she’s really in a mood in this chapter.
To make her case, Mason dives into a Herbartian unit study for elementary-aged students called “A Robinson Crusoe Concentration Scheme,” which had nine lessons in literature and language arts, followed by ten object lessons, followed by some manual work, reading, creative writing assignments, and composition. If you’re like me, you can think back to your days in the modern education system and guess exactly what these kids were doing for the Robinson Crusoe unit study:
Making a model island and house; drawing a ship, an oar, an anchor; reading only selected portions of an abridged version of the book; writing a personal essay based on the object lessons, and copying sentences the teacher wrote on the board.
Does that sound familiar to you? I can remember it all perfectly.
And I think for a lot of us who are new to the classical world and attempting to educate our children in a different way, it’s easy to fall back into what we know or experienced and to think that is how a child learns. We can lose the anchor of our philosophy kind of quickly.
Often I see beautiful, ‘Mason-inspired’ unit studies for sale on the internet. It’ll take something like Winnie-the-Pooh and offer me a complete lesson book, including licking honey, throwing an alphabet-letter-per-week tea party, buildings Piglet’s house, and coloring a note to Christopher Robin. That’s all cute; don’t get me wrong. But it’s not how a child learns. And that’s Mason’s point.
Her problems with Herbartian unit studies were simple: entertainment is not the same thing as learning, students need to pay attention closely to a single reading rather than re-reading the material through various activities, and education is about making connections. If the student isn’t making the connections on their own, no one is learning.
So, after outlining all the forced relationships and connections that a teacher can drop into a child’s mind via the unit study, she responds to the Herbartian teacher’s claim that one can see how easy it is to develop an entire year’s worth of lessons for reading, arithmetic, and beyond, just from Robinson Crusoe.
She says:
One does indeed. The whole thing must be highly amusing to the teacher, as ingenious amplifications self-produced always are: that the children too were entertained, one does not doubt. The teacher was probably at her best in getting by sheer force much out of little: she was, in fact, acting a part and the children were entertained as at a show, cinema, or other; but of one thing we may be sure, an utter distaste, a loathing, on the part of the children ever after, not only for ‘Robinson Crusoe’ but for every one of the subjects lugged in to illustrate his adventures.
I mean, there it is.
The educational idea that children’s minds are receptacles waiting for us to shovel ideas in reduces children who are capable of and eager for a wide range of knowledge and literary expression to receptacles of nonsense, of pointless trivia. It leaves their minds, after all that fun and entertainment, sick and bored.
The only true food for the mind is living ideas. Mason insisted that to draw conclusions about the mind of a student, one needed to look at the results. She made her case that the results of the growing Herbartian model were producing a people “so much less than they might be, so crude in their notions, so unmoral in their principles, so poor in interests, so meagre if not coarse in their choice of pleasures.” And this was in the early 1900s.
By now, we know that growth and development in the mind are just like the body. Both mind and body have what they need to grow, but we have the responsibility to supply the best nutrition for that work. The mind is a living organism, a spiritual organism, and it needs a diet of ideas. If children are offered true, good, and beautiful ideas—which is usually done through literary quality—their minds will do the work of arranging, sorting, selecting, grouping, choosing, and rejecting ideas. A child’s mind is already equipped with the tools needed to think and learn.
And this is a tremendous distinction from the modern educational philosophies.
At the beginning of this chapter, Mason rightly teases that the idea of a child’s mind as a receptacle makes teachers—or moms—feel important because all of the work rests on their shoulders. She wasn’t being mean, but she was highlighting the misapplication of the natural desire to teach, help, and shape children. If teachers, even mother-teachers, are the indispensable part of education, if everything rests on us, if we need to pick up our shovels and toss little idea rocks into the bucket-minds of our children, then we better work hard to keep our kids’ attention.
Do you see how school becomes a matter of entertaining students? And what do we form students towards when we aim for fun, ease, and apperception masses? Does this help them love the right things in the right way?
What I find most helpful when trying to wade through how I learned in school and what I find out in the curricula world is to remember three questions:
What is a child?
How do they learn?
What is a well-educated person?
We’ve covered the first two through most of the principles in the first half of this season. But for the third, we need to have a well-formed picture of a whole person. What do we want our children to be like when they’re older? Are we teaching, depositing facts into their brains, so we can get them to a good school so they can get a good job? Is this a utilitarian adventure? Or are we submitting to the natural laws of the image bearer, educating “according to their natural capacity to know and their natural desire for knowledge, that desire to know history, poetry, science, art, which is natural to every man”?
The telos of every child–the thing for which they exist–is so much more than to be popped out of school, able to work a job.
Now, do we want children capable of good, hard, noble work? To have a job? Yes, of course. But Mason reminds us to reach for something far greater, and in that process, you’ll certainly have adults able to learn and work a job. The job just isn’t the point.
Your child’s mind isn’t a bucket, and you don’t have a shovel. We’re joining our children in the pursuit of knowledge of God, of man, and of the universe. We’re encountering the sacramental life with them, learning to engage with truth, goodness, and beauty through ideas in books and creation. I love how Mason says it:
We forget that it is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God shall man live,—whether it be spoken in the way of some truth of religion, poem, picture, scientific discovery, or literary expression; by these things men live and in all such is the life of the spirit. The spiritual life requires the food of ideas for its daily bread.
Do you know what Mason’s response is to the Herbartian unit study on Robinson Crusoe? That her students simply read Robinson Crusoe—the whole book—and engage with the ideas through narration and discussion. They do the work. And they reap the benefits of learning and knowledge.
But, what do you do if you have a child who wants to build a Robinson Crusoe ship? What if they want to have a Winnie-the-Pooh tea party? I know; my kids would love this too. Go for it during your leisure time; there’s nothing wrong with imagination at work. But forcing relationships between ideas and exchanging the living ideas within Robinson Crusoe (things like honoring your parents and repentance) for lessons on shipbuilding is a travesty. No one buys a copy of Robinson Crusoe to learn about shipbuilding or to study the geography of the seas. These are questions and curiosities that may naturally occur in the mind of a child—which is great—but they’re not why we read books or what we learn or even how we want our children to engage with great ideas. If this is how we primarily approach literature, our children will completely miss the gift of learning.
It matters both what and how a child learns, and there are appropriate times for personal projects and formal lessons.
We’re tempted to think that much teaching is the point of education when in reality, we want our children to gain much knowledge. While we don’t stand by silently in our children’s education, they’re the ones upon whom the responsibility to learn falls. They have the minds—the spiritual, living minds—that feed, develop, connect, inspire, dream, challenge, and learn all on their own. When we educate with this pedagogy, we teach our children to engage with the text, narrate, and we ask questions for further discussions. We believe what we offer our children, in the form of ideas, is pleasing to their minds, interesting all on its own. And we also believe a child will come to the feast of ideas as his own person, naturally interested by some of what’s offered and in need of learning to love what doesn’t appeal to him as easily. Yes, it’s 100%-going-to-happen that your child will not love some beautiful idea you lay before them. You’ll probably be told it’s the worst, or you’ll see an eye roll, or they might even tell you they’re bored.
Guess what. The solution is not to start performing tricks or dressing up lessons or striving to be fun. It’s to remember that education is about forming right loves, that there’s something wrong with your child when they don’t love truth, goodness, and beauty; just as there’s something wrong with you when you don’t. We’re all learning to love rightly, aren’t we? To trust what God says is good is the path of life and joy, to grow more and more into the image of his Son, delighting in what he’s made for our formation and enjoyment. This is the picture of the well-educated person. This is the point at which our method aims.
We know God gave our children minds hungry for his ideas. We know God gave our children bodies to embody his ideas. And we know God gave our children hearts to love his ideas.
So, really, all we can give them in education is truth, goodness, and beauty.
I’ll see you guys in a month.
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Hey there. Can you believe we’re halfway through the principles and the season? We’re doing it! After every five principles, I take an off week, but while I’m gone, I wanted to make sure you know about Commonplace Market. If you’re interested in developing family rules that bring in the instruments of atmosphere, discipline, and life or take a dive into the function and formation of the imagination, you’ll find those resources in the market. You can get there through the link in today’s episode notes or by visiting thecommonplacepodcast.com/market.
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