Ep 05 | Habit: Attention
What is attention? I’m so glad you asked. Miss Mason defines attention as the act by which the whole mental force is applied to the subject at hand. It’s giving your full focus to something. And, of course, Miss Mason believed a mother could train attention to be a habit if she’s able to attract and hold the child’s attention through the right motive.
That Miss Mason. Always getting to the child’s heart, isn’t she?
These habits are so much more than tapping a toddler into housework or finishing a school day. You’re offering your child a way in which to live with joy and delight and imagination and pleasure in God’s world.
Just imagine that.
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And bonus fun: today is the day I finally mention Plato. We’re real classical homeschoolers now.
Episode Notes
Continuing Education Picks
‘Habit Training Part 2: The Practice of Habit Training,’ Patrick Egan
The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg
‘Cultivating the Habit of Attention,’ My Little Robins
‘Duty, Being, and Building with Dirt,’ Lindsey Brigham Knott
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
Classical Heavyweight
After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
When I first recorded this episode, I opened it with a funny, ‘Is everyone paying attention? Because I’m only going to say this once.’
But when I started listening to the audio, I realized the sounds from my city block were too loud to ignore throughout the entire episode.
So, here I am. Saying it all again.
But this is really the last time. Okay?
______
I think there’s a point on the Charlotte Mason journey when you know just enough to be really dangerous. You hear about children being born persons and think it means a child-led education. You see enough Instagram posts of kids with nature backpacks that you start thinking this is an education spent frolicking through flowers. You can understand one part of one thing in Charlotte Mason’s philosophy but you miss the full meaning or application because it’s understood out of context.
I don’t want that to happen here.
Of course, we’re limited by how much can be shared in a single podcast episode. By how long it’ll take me to work through twenty principles or six volumes or the thoughts from a woman’s entire life’s work. But I want to do the best I can to help frame these ideas in their full contexts as I’m learning how to podcast and share these thoughts.
So before we jump into the habit of attention today, I want to give some larger context for the habit conversation.
Miss Mason’s PNEU motto is the one you catch early when you enter the homeschooling world: education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life. I’ve mentioned these are the three tools of an education but I haven’t explained how they work together.
Right now, we’re in the middle of a habit series because habit training is important in the early years as a beginning foundation for all learning. But to only focus on habits would be like only making sure your child drinks water. Of course, you need water, but what about food and fresh air? You think of your child’s needs in an interdependent way, and the same is true for the tools of education.
Habits are the discipline part of an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life. Charlotte Mason understood a discipline or habit to be something that creates a normal for the child. So all habit training is aimed towards benefiting the child by giving them inspiring, living ideas, to encourage right, joyful living as their norm.
If the family rule is “ we make peace,” then after forming the habit of repentance, your children will hopefully feel like something is off if they try to avoid making peace in the future. They’ll want their norm.
One thing I particularly love about volume one is how Miss Mason includes habits of truthfulness and obedience with habits of hygiene and nursery tidiness. The point being, that these should be the ordinary ways of life for a child: one should obey and one should keep their room in order.
Now we’ll get to atmosphere and life in more detail later, but for right now, I have two simple definitions for you.
The atmosphere focuses on helping your child learn how to rightly relate to the people and things around them. You must speak kindly to your brother. You may not color on the wall. It’s regular instruction through the many moments of the day. The life focuses on offering a broad, generous curriculum of living ideas to a child through living books, narration, nature study, the fine arts, and so on.
These three things work together to educate your child. You can habit train until you’re blue in the face, but if you never help your child learn how the habit of attention helps them relate to doing good work or never give them stories of repentance to show them the fuller picture of why we ask for forgiveness--you haven’t fully educated the image bearer.
Do you see what I mean about context? We’re not Victorian Englishwomen living in the late 1800s. We can’t assume we know what Miss Mason means without reading Miss Mason in context.
An atmosphere. A discipline. A life.
Now the longer I think about these three tools, the more I start to see them in other classical works. So today, my friends, it’s time to talk about Plato.
Plato divided the soul into three parts: the eros, the logos, and the thymos.
The eros, or the appetites, are your ruling desires. This is where habits or the discipline of an education aims. You want to teach your child to order themselves, which includes their wants and their impulses, toward what’s good.
The logos, or the head, is your reason and regulator. This is where atmosphere aims. If a child understands how to rightly relate to the people and things around him, he is using his reason to engage God’s work and act accordingly.
The thymos, or the chest, is your spirit that obeys the head and defends. Plato often discussed this as fueled by anger, but I think a rightly ordered chest defends the good, the true, and the beautiful. A good, godly anger would respond to the violation or perversion of what God calls good, true, and beautiful. So, this is where the life, or a curriculum of living ideas, aims.
When we think of how to form a whole person, we must think about what a whole person needs.
If you only habit trained, you’d only ever touch a child’s affections. It’s good to teach a child what is good and what is not. But it’s bad to train behaviorism because you’ve forgotten to bring along the heart and spirit behind right action and feeling. The same is true for a strong reason without emotion or an education of intellectual virtue that fails to give a picture of how to live it out.
None of us want to handicap our children by misusing the tools. I know, because I did it to myself.
A couple of years ago, my reading habits took a major shift. In the years prior, I had unintentionally focused solely on what I call ‘practical theology’ reads. It was by no means a bad thing to do, but like a gym-goer who only ever works out their arms, I was only reading for my sense of reason. I wanted to understand, to dig into theological nuances and doctrinal details. And now that I’m thinking about it, I’m pretty sure that during the same time, when I studied my Bible, I only read the epistles. I had a one-legged approach to learning, and it was just through reason. But that year, I put The Chronicles of Narnia on my reading list. Just seven little slots on a long list of Puritans and pastors and philosophers.
And they changed my whole world.
When Aslan breathed his warm breath onto the statues in the White Witch’s castle and they opened their eyes, face-to-face, with the one they most longed to see, I felt a taste of the deep joy that is to come when we see Christ. And I cried.
When Eustace meets Aslan at the water and suffers the pain of his dragon skin being torn away, I felt more hopeful about the hard sanctifying parts of motherhood. And I cried.
Edmund was met with mercy instead of a traitor’s death. Shasta found a name and home. Digory saw Narnia birthed through song. Reepicheep left for Aslan’s Country. Death started working backwards and I just kept crying.
Because truths my head knew were stretching down to my heart through story and living ideas.
What my reading had lacked was what two-thirds of my soul needed. My spirit and my appetites were atrophying and falling behind because I was only cultivating my reason. It wasn’t that all of my practical theology was of no use, it was that it was isolated; living all in my head, waiting for a good debate, but never trickling down to my chest or my appetites to translate the truth into something I could see, taste, hear, smell, or hold. Knowing Christ as your Savior is an excellent thing, but knowing you are the traitor boy who knew love and yet ran from it settles the truth in your identity.
And this is why Scripture follows the same formational approach. The Word of God was given for the image bearer, so God speaks to all parts of a born person: the mind, the spirit, the appetites. He gives instruction, history, poetry, story. He instructs reason, calls to order the spirit, and shapes appetites. He speaks to all parts of the soul.
And so a mother should do likewise.
That’s what Miss Mason understood. And that’s why I’m here.
So now that we’ve covered the need for all three tools to teach a born person, we’re going to keep working through habits. And next up, is the habit of attention.
What is attention? I’m so glad you asked. Miss Mason defines attention as the act by which the whole mental force is applied to the subject at hand. It’s giving your full focus to something. And, of course, Miss Mason believed a mother could train attention to be a habit if she is able to attract and hold the child’s attention through the right motive of love of knowledge.
That Miss Mason. Always getting to the child’s heart, isn’t she?
Left on their own, thoughts will always run from one to the next in a loose series of associations. You may comment on a crayon to your child but they answer about the wall their friend drew on and how their favorite princess dress is pink which makes you wonder if the friend who drew on the wall was wearing a pink princess dress but you can’t ask because your child has already walked off to find a fairytale book.
We all do this. It’s the law of sequencing: ideas follow one another in a general way. That’s a good gift but a terrible master.
When anyone is at the mercy of whatever thought just pops into their minds and is dragged about by the train of thought with no intention of where it’s going, that’s a bad thing.
One, you just waste time when you can’t attend to something. Two, you reduce your own capacity for mental effort. Attention is vital to learning. We can’t learn anything if we can’t attend to it. Whatever natural gifts your child has, their ability to use those gifts well is directly related to how well they can pay attention.
Just consider the command in Scripture to take every thought captive. It’s a vigorous effort of will to fix our thoughts, to choose to think on whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable.
But a vigorous or strong will is something young children don’t have; it’s why we habit train, to help them form such a will. How do we do it?
Miss Mason, of course, recommends starting in infancy. When a baby’s attention is caught by a little flower, a colored block, or his own hand, help him hold his focus for a few minutes. Point to a detail, name the object, repeatedly put it back in his hand each time he drops it. Teach him to marvel, to notice, to encounter the world.
Last week a good friend of mine asked what the first shift in perspective should be to think classically. I think the answer lies in how we attend to the world. In our postmodern framework, we’re almost unaware that we wrongly engage the world. The modern and postmodern man is one who, as CS Lewis said in the Abolition of Man, believes he masters nature. We believe only in the material world, breaking apart whole things into their parts, or facts, so we can understand in order to use, to control, to master them. We ignore the immaterial, the eternal, the weight of glory in the world. You’d probably never say this is your formal belief, but for most of us, our functional belief is it’s us who rules nature.
And yet, God’s world still offers an invitation to encounter his lovely, enchanting creation. The classical tradition is one of encountering and embodying; of loving, thinking, and doing the things God designed an image bearer to do. And what we do does things to us, as God intended for our formation.
Our basic duty is to attend to God’s world. These habits are so much more than tapping a toddler into housework or finishing a school day. You are offering your child a way in which to live with joy and delight and imagination and pleasure in God’s world.
These humble beginnings and repetitive days and unseen work in your home are a marvelous gift for your kids and for you.
This is usually the point when I expect you’re thinking, “Yes! Yes! Okay yes! I love this but I’m beyond habit training a baby. What do I do with my four, seven, eleven year old? How do I help them build this habit?”
Miss Mason offers suggestions in her first volume about habit training attention. Let’s see if we can get to them before the music ends.
First, if a child is struggling to give his full attention to something, don’t let him start dawdling or mooning over his task or work. Send him off to do an activity completely unlike the one before him. He should return with a renewed will.
Second, consider what’s best suited for your child’s age. This could be schoolwork, activities, or chores. Think of how to make these things attractive, how to vary the rhythm so your child’s mind has rest after effort.
Third, offer a natural reward. Just like we discussed natural consequences last episode, there are natural rewards as well. If you give your child ten minutes to unload the dishwasher and it only takes five, then they’ve earned those five minutes to spend as they’d like. Legos, mud pies, picture books? Great, these are their minutes now.
Fourth, offer them living ideas. The mind needs to feed on knowledge, on the very best. Anything dry and boring is just hard for a child to attend to. (I mean, it’s hard for me, as a born person, to pay attention to something dull. This is probably a good time to make the point: there is a difference between something being dull and you wrongly thinking something is dull. For example, you may not like math, but math is a language of God and therefore it is good. It doesn’t have to be your favorite thing, but if you dislike math, you’re in the wrong.) Anyway, find the living idea that sparks the imagination; it’s there for anything good.
Fifth, for the six and older crowd, Miss Mason says to only read things for school once. I think we could use that idea in other parts of our home life because we all know that if we think we have multiple times to hear or do something, we don’t pay attention.
Sixth, keep an eye out for a developing habit of inattention. I think of this one often when I hear of a mom forcing a pre-k or kindergarten program on their young children. Their child is fidgety, they’re whining, they cry. And yet the mom continues on in the name of the good, the true, and the beautiful. It sounds to me like all that’s really happening is some runs on the habit track of inattention and disinterest in learning. The day will come when we’ll all have to teach older children to attend to their work regardless of their feelings. But in these early years, remember to honor the image bearer in your home, giving the mind, the heart, and the body what it actually needs in this stage of life.
Lastly, allow your children a great deal of time outdoors. It’s one of the most natural ways to teach a child to attend to their surroundings.
The more these principles settle into your mind and rhythms, the more you see the larger picture form. You begin to see how to mother a whole person through every part of life.
Over the last few years, we’ve slowly worked our way up to that rhythm of six-ish hours a day outside. It used to feel so impossible, and even still I have those days, but the more I’ve observed my own children climbing on fallen trees, chasing butterflies, and rock hunting in creeks, the more I’ve seen the wisdom in Miss Mason’s words. Helping children learn the habit of attention opens a door of wonder and curiosity and delight to them. They were made to be intimately aware of the creation around them, of that which they are themselves made.
They need these first-born affinities, as Miss Mason calls them, these natural relationships with the world around them which are best formed in the early years. If a child has learned to attend to nature or story or relationship, how much more will they grasp the natural metaphors of faith in scripture? How much rest and solace will they find in their older years when they remember the details of grassy fields and star-gazing nights when they first learned that the God who flung out galaxies with the power of his voice cares more for them than the birds and the flowers? What if your children, at the end of their home education, attend so well to God’s grace in the world that they habitually find, in the commonplaces of their lives, the good, the true, and the beautiful?
Just imagine that.
I’ll see you guys in two weeks.
