Ep 08 | The Instruments: Life (Principle #8)
An education for persons should be life-giving. It should nurture and grow the mind, bringing life to it, but it should also form students wholly, leaving them fit for the flourishing life.
It’s time for our third and final instrument of education. What does Mason mean when she says, “Education is a life”?
Video Resource | Let’s get practical.
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Principle #8: In saying that "education is a life," the need of intellectual and moral, as well as of physical, sustenance is implied. The mind feeds on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum.
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What is an idea?
Or, maybe a better question is How does Mason define idea?
But let’s back up.
It’s not uncommon to hear people say that education is a life, that their children are learning in everything. It just happens all the time. Of course, we are learning a great deal all of the time in ordinary life, but that’s not what Mason means when she said, “Education is a life.” Mason means that education is life-giving. It causes life. Or, it should.
When we think about education, we always have to consider the end.
What is a well-formed or well-educated person like?
How do they live?
What do they love?
A true, humane education—by which I mean made for persons—should form people towards truth, goodness, and beauty. I think you know this by now; I probably talk about truth, goodness, and beauty in my sleep at this point. But in that formation, our children should be gifted with the relationships, habits, and knowledge necessary for a flourishing life, a deeply satisfying and sacramental life. Or, to put it really simply: they should be living the good life we, as Christian parents, hope for them. They should, at the end of their education, care deeply about God and his world, seeing an invitation into his love through every thing.That would be a life given, in many respects, through education.
But before we get to the end, we get to today. And right now, a living education is life-giving in that it sustains, grows, and nurtures the mind.
This is the baby step on the pathway to formed adults.
Okay, so back to an idea. For Mason, ideas are more than an image or a picture. It’s more like a seed that has a vital force within it. It can cause more of its kind to grow, like it’s a living creature. Ideas feed, grow, and multiply.
I think I made that sound a little creepy, but you know what I mean, right?
Ideas have an inherent power to bring life to the mind.
Mason understood that living ideas were the only proper food for the mind. You can always feed the mind something else—dry facts or ugly ideas—but the mind will not grow as it should with an improper diet. It’s just like the body. Skittles and soda a strong body not make.
So, let’s touch on facts here because this one can cause a lot of confusion in the classical world. Sometimes, people refer to facts as the pegs of the grammar stage. The notion is that if you just get the pegs in the child’s mind when they’re apt to memorize easily, you can loop back later with the ideas and add to the pegs. What does this look like? Chanting multiplication facts, reciting a list of cloud types, and memorizing dates for events without any knowledge of the events. It’s knowing information without the necessary idea.
Now, I want to make a note here, because I don’t actually think you can just give a child a fact. The human mind was created to find relationships between things, and so even if you fail to offer a child an idea, they will try to find one. The danger, here, is that you cheapen a child’s learning.
If you’ve taught your children something through song, a long list of facts perhaps, you’re in good company. With me. And I’ve been hanging onto this example for this episode because it’s the perfect picture of facts versus ideas.
A couple of years ago, I taught my kids to recite the 50 states in alphabetical order through a song I learned in the fifth grade and still remember. They memorized it easily, enjoyed singing it together in the car, and I thought I had done a great thing by teaching them something so interesting as the states of our country.
Fastforward to last month when I flew to Texas for work. (Did you know I’m a photographer? Yep.) When i came home, I told them all about Texas: the food, the weather, the landscape. I brought them rocks for their collections, told them stories about the people I worked with, and showed them where I was on a map.
The other day, my daughter said, “I want to leave Pennsylvania to go to Texas to see the beautiful plains and eat all of the food. Are there any other states?” I clarified if she meant other states with similar landscapes and culinary options? She meant states. Like, do we have any other ones to visit?This is a child who can sing all 50 states in alphabetical order without missing a beat, but she had failed to connect any meaningful idea to those 50 facts.
Mason would not be pleased with me. Or my fifth grade teacher.
Do you see what happened between the song of facts and the living idea of Texas? I brought the idea of Texas to my children through stories of people, places, and life as I lived it for a couple of days. Within those stories were many living ideas; any one could have taken root but they sparked something in her mind that connected with and created new ideas.
Mason was insistent that facts must be clothes in ideas, and the way ideas are best presented to people is through story, which is why there’s such an emphasis on books in the Charlotte Mason pedagogy. This is true in the larger classical tradition as well. “Words make worlds”, as I’ve shared before, and the human mind hungers for story. The most foundational part of this principle, the thing I really want you to get from today, is that your children need and deserve a steady diet of living ideas. To make real relationships, to gain real knowledge, they must wrestle with and be nurtured by ideas. Nothing else will do.
As we cross the threshold of home education, there can be a lot of self-imposed pressure to make sure that our children are getting the “right lesson” from the ideas we read or discuss. It can be tempting to moralize, to over-explain, or to lead the kids to the answer we want them to get to. So I have the next takeaway for you: it’s not our job to do the work of making ideas come alive in the child’s mind. Here, just listen to some of the verbs Mason uses to describe the behavior of ideas: strikes, seizes, catches hold of, impresses, possesses, and behaves like an entity.
Ideas do the work. We can let the ideas do the work. Do you realize how amazing that is? We have a responsibility to provide for our children what their minds need to grow, but their minds are equipped with what they need to do that growing. We’re at the table as fellow people, offering wise discussions and thoughtful questions, but we’re relieved of the false duty to program our children.
I hope you’re breathing easily now, excited at the chance to learn with your child, to be a gracious guide as you watch the slow, steady offering of truth, goodness, and beauty shape the contours of your child’s inner thought life. For those of us who were public schooled or even private schooled in a more modern way, it can be a real challenge to divorce the idea of education from quantifiable measure. I don’t mean taking note of correct sums or pretending arithmetic is not an objective language of God and open to interpretation. I mean that we’ve been taught to see education in terms of systematized grades and class ranks. We’ve lost the element of education that is without measure. A child can recite facts back to a mother-teacher very quickly, and it gives the appearance of having learned something. But ideas don’t allow a child to regurgitate, to give the appearance of learning. They work slowly, as we often see in narration. A connection may be made immediately, over the course of the week, the year, or the length of a life. Like waves beating on the shores of the coast, you see little changes here and there, but by the end of, say, twelve years or so, the coast is quite a bit different. Over seventy years, even more. This is the impact of ideas on a child.
It’s difficult for me to divorce my pedagogy from what seems so clearly God’s design for people. We’re made to engage with meaningful ideas and be changed by them. Our children’s minds are nourished by the living realities of virtue and wisdom, that something within them is called to life and stirred to action by what is true, good, and beautiful.
I remember the first time I read Mason’s note that the mind is something spiritual—remember: she’s not talking about the brain—and that’s what born of spirit is spirit. Basically, she’s saying that a mind needs ideas because both are spiritual.
Which is why we crave truth, goodness, and beauty, even when we don’t know exactly what it looks like. This is true for adults who’ve been malformed from a lifetime of poor education and a diet of junk food facts and ideas. They still want beauty, but they don’t know what’s beautiful anymore. And, of course, our children are craving these same things. But we have to remember that while our children are born persons, they’re born immature persons, and they must be shown what is excellent, trustworthy, and praiseworthy. Just because a child is a person doesn’t mean everything they think, do, and love is right. This is why we give them living ideas, so they can grow from a steady gift of what they were actually made for: God—who is truth, goodness, and beauty.
Now, I want to pivot to close out the show with a practical tip about home life and ideas.
When things seem to be going off course in my house, like a consistent, steady problem, I stop and take stock of the three instruments of my pedagogy. Yes, even when it’s not obviously school-related I still use atmosphere, discipline, and life like a framework. If the atmosphere and habits of the home seem in proper order, I’ll turn towards ideas. What kind of ideas are coming in my home? Who are the kids hanging out with? What kind of conversations are they in or hearing? What books have they been reading? Did we watch anything? You get the idea.
The thing about ideas is that you never know which ones are going to take root or when; you just know they have the power to seize, take hold of, and possess. So it requires a mother to be a bit of a gatekeeper about what’s coming into the minds of her children. Note: I didn’t say a hyper-vigilant-words-police, just a good ol’ gatekeeper. It’s good to be aware because ideas have power.
Mason has this helpful little phrase in which she says don’t despise your children. Let’s define Mason’s despising, because, I know, you don’t despise your kids. Hang with me.
When Mason says “despise,” she means that we’ve left undone what we ought to have done, or we’ve undervalued our children. One way, she says, that we might do this is by leaving them with an improper nursemaid. She’s not the first to zero in on the childcare of the nursery years. Most of the classical educational philosophers warned against the bad philosophy, manners, vernacular, vice, and what have you in improper nursery maids. The people around your child matter. Which includes us moms too. But anyway, since we’re in the 21st century, I’m going to add improper companions. Mason’s basic argument is that you should never leave your child with an unqualified nurse, or, in our time, babysitter, nanny, or teacher. If you rightly value your child, you’ll want them to be surrounded by good, beautiful influences—even in their babysitters. But, for the homeschool mom, we’re kind of always with our kids, right? So it’s easy to brush this one off. Except, we all leave our kids with companions. Sometimes it’s a book or the neighbor outside or even a screen. And how many ideas come to play then?
You can usually trace a bad idea backwards to a bad companion of some form. This doesn’t mean you’re blaming other things for your child’s sin or struggle, but that you’re aware of the ideas forming your child’s mind and changing what needs to be changed. Like I said earlier, children are born persons, but they’re immature and they may not know which bad ideas ought not to be chased.
So, if you’re having a problem—attitude, attachment, language, whatever—consider finding the root idea at play and how it may have gotten in your home. And, of course, continue to give the better ideas faithfully. There’s so much goodness to lay before them; and sometimes what they really need when they’ve gone off course is an inspiring idea given with a wink.
You know, when I say falling into classical education was like falling through the wardrobe, I mean it. Everything sparkles with order and meaning. I can’t unsee the whole world dancing and delighting to point us towards God in every thing. I no longer miss the little winks all around me, reminding us that what God has made delights him, and so it’s good and right for us to introduce our children to his world with a twinkling eye. The world is bursting with truth, goodness, and beauty for people to know, love, and embody.
What a marvelous, life-giving idea.
I’ll see you guys in two weeks.
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