In order to escape the technological addiction that has mystified the 21st century, it is not enough to take smartphones, laptops, and video streaming services away. They must be replaced with something better. Something deeper. Something more satisfying.

In this blog, I will put forward one compelling alternative to digital saturation. It isn’t the only alternative, nor is it a sufficient one. But it is necessary. Here I have in mind cultivating the intellectual life. By this I mean the world of story and imagination. Thoughts and ideas. Concepts and principles. The life of the mind. 

The Road to Recovery

Sadly, like some prehistoric species, the intellectual life is all but extinct in some minds. I don’t mean this in a condemning sense. It is merely a diagnosis. We have become so acquainted to consuming that the idea of cultivating the intellect sounds incredulous. At best, it sounds boring. Why think when one can switch to auto-pilot?

In theory, people are first taught to cultivate an intellectual life in school. Or are they? For most of us, school was a pragmatic transaction from day one. First-graders may be six, but they are not dull. Their social acumen is developed enough to pick up on what matters in the classroom. The usual suspects include grades, prizes, and teacher-approval. 

Imagine, however, if the first day of school was an orientation to cultivating the life of the mind. No talk of a syllabus, grade criteria, or course objectives. Instead, the teacher begins by comparing one’s mind to a garden. Gardens don’t pop into existence weed-free and fruit-bearing. They must be tended, weeded, watered, and cultivated. As does the mind. The intentional teacher, dedicated to her craft, inspires her students to cultivate an Eden in order to discover that the labor is its own reward.

People coming from schools who implement traditionally modern methods to motivate learning may struggle to cultivate the intellectual life at first. “What will I get out of it?”, “This is boring”, and “I would rather do something else” are all common reactions. But if one can move beyond these initial obstructions, there is hope for recovering interest in intellectual matters. It will take time and effort, but it is possible.

The Importance of Self-Feeding

Once the intellectual life is conceived, it requires self-feeding for sustenance. This is the brilliant insight of educator Charlotte Mason. She insisted that the life of the mind will die if it remains dependent upon the sustenance of others. This is because the mind is like an organism, a living thing that needs to take care of itself. A nascent organism that depends on other organisms will be parasitical at best and fizzle out at worst. It is up to each individual to cultivate the life of the mind through feeding it regularly.

How does one feed the intellect?

This may sound surprising to some but reading, generally speaking, is not the precise answer. There are two reasons for this. First, not all books nourish the mind in the same way. Tech addiction is one major obstruction for cultivating the intellectual life and another is a diet of shallow books. Stories that are morally vacuous, sensationalistic, and stylistically weak fall into this category. These books won’t nourish the intellect any more than a sugar-glazed donut will nourish the physical body (even if it tastes good).

Good books must be chosen for self-feeding and, subsequently, they must be chewed upon. This is the second reason that reading is not, generally speaking, a sufficient path to the self-nourished intellectual life. Our minds need to act upon that which has been read. They need to do something with the knowledge that has been encountered. How often do we read something, probably too quickly, and try to recall it later with no success? We never gave our minds time to assimilate, or digest, that which has been encountered.

For Charlotte Mason, narration is the ideal way for students to assimilate knowledge. Give children the opportunity to narrate the text without looking back, after a single-reading, and the process for self-feeding begins. The mind comes alive as it processes in real-time what it ingested moments ago. The ideas of the text become part of the mind of the student. 

Making Time for Quiet

To cultivate the intellectual life , one must first recover and nourish it. Then one must sustain it intentionally. 17th century polymath Blaise Pascal famously wrote, “All of man’s problems stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Pascal’s observation is more than relevant for us today as we inhabit this present age of distraction. Technology is one contributing factor for incessant distraction, as I have already suggested.

Another factor is that most of us live in suburbs or cities. We are surrounded by people, pets, activities, stores, restaurants, and things to do. It is very difficult to find a place that is quiet and unoccupied. Professionally speaking, our work may not be physically laborious, but it mentally exhausting. And more often than not, our personal lives provide no respite. We are constantly on the go, bumping into people and things like electrons.

The solution to such mental crowdedness in order to sustain the mind is to carve out space for solitude. To be sure, minds can be nourished in social settings. Engaging thought-provoking questions, spirited debate, and penetrating discussion are all worthwhile intellectual activities. But the mind also needs time alone with no immediate distractions. It needs time to slow down, process, and reflect. It needs time to be alone.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Most of us begin feeling antsy after sitting still with no distraction for more than a few minutes. Our minds grow nervous, eager for something new to seize our attention. In reality, however, what the mind needs, even if it doesn’t realize it, is space to think. Perhaps surprisingly, making time for the mind to work brings unexpected rest.

The Benefit of Such a Life

Despite what has been written thus far, some readers may continue to struggle to see the value of the intellectual life. “What benefits will it bring?” they will wonder. “How will this support my personal advancement?” 

Questions like these miss the mark. To be sure, there is productive value in the intellectual life. I have already alluded to some examples. The nourished intellect, on average, will be more resilient than one that has been depleted. It will be more efficient in work settings. It will more effectively grapple with everyday problems. 

But here lies the paradox. The real benefit of the intellectual life is the joy of learning. One in pursuit of a nourished intellect for the sake of external benefits will eventually fizzle out. The work will grow too difficult and the benefits will no longer be perceived as worth it. Joy must accompany the process for the intellectual life to remain viable.

The good news, though, is that there is grace. As humans, we often begin our pursuit of good things for wrong, or imperfect, reasons. But amidst these mixed motivations, God can use these moments to transform us. He graciously conforms us to His image, revealing to us the goodness of Himself and the eternal reward of life with Him. When it comes to cultivating the life of the mind, we pray for God to reveal truth to us through the Holy Spirit and shape our affections to desire it and Him more and more.

Conclusion

As the apostle Paul writes in his closing remarks to the Philippians:

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you (Phil. 4: 8-9 ESV).

Amidst the busyness we all face in the modern world, may we make time for the intellectual life, reflecting on what is true, honorable, lovely, and just. Ultimately, as we engage in such reflection, may our minds turn to Him who is the manifestation of all these, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word who became flesh.

Recommended Reading:

Mind to Mind: An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason and Karen Glass

Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pense’es by Blaise Pascal and Peter Kreeft

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster

The post Rest for the Weary: On Cultivating the Intellectual Life appeared first on .

I’ll never forget when as a child I encountered the idea of the Roman Empire. In the family room we had an entire bookshelf dedicated to World Book encyclopedias. Categorized alphabetically, these tomes catalogued more knowledge than my youthful mind could possibly take in. And while encyclopedias might not exactly fit Charlotte Mason’s criteria for a living book, I can assure you that a feast of knowledge was underway. I was just about through the third course of the meal when I encountered for perhaps the first time the political climax of the ancient world: Imperium Rōmānum. I was hooked. 

Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience. It may not have been while browsing encyclopedias, but there you were, reading some text or perhaps going on a walk outside with a friend, when some previously unknown aspect of the world hit you square between the eyes, sparking a desire within you to learn, discover, and connect what you had learned with your current base of knowledge.

The Life of the Mind

This is the power of ideas. And unfortunately for many modern schools today, this power lies largely dormant. In the present educational landscape, ideas are not sought after largely due to the hubristic assumption that there are hardly any left to find. As a result, students are left scrambling and sorting the intellectual table scraps of others, what is called information. The real adventure of learning, encountering ideas, has been counterfeited and massed produced for the unsuspecting modern classroom. An educational renaissance is desperately needed to discard this counterfeit and replace it with a feast worthy of young growing minds.

This is precisely what the educator Charlotte Mason sought to achieve roughly a century ago. She taught that education is a life, referring to the life of the mind. Just as the human digestive system assimilates food, providing the body with the nutrients and sustenance it needs to survive, so the mind requires its own food in order to enjoy health and vitality. 

Charlotte Mason writes,

“Under the phrase, ‘Education is a life,’ I have tried to show how necessary it is to sustain the intellectual life upon ideas, and, as a corollary, that a school-book should be a medium for ideas, and not merely a receptacle for facts. That normal children have a natural desire for, and a right of admission to, all fitting knowledge, appears to me to be suggested by the phrase, ‘Education is the science of relations’” (Preface to the “Home Education” Series).

Here Charlotte Mason alludes to two central themes in her educational philosophy. First, as I’ve been emphasizing, the intellectual life is sustained by ideas, not by mere facts. While information is important, it does not itself propel a mind to inquire. When I was devouring encyclopedic information about the Roman Empire as a child, it was not the information itself that was beckoning me to continue. It was the ideas embedded within the text that were impressing upon my imagination. 

Second, children have an innate desire for knowledge, which is understood to be both multifaceted and interrelated. While philosophers may debate whether reality is ultimately simple or complex, there is no doubt that the world, as humans practically experience it, is infinitely complex and full of variety. We live in a world of physics and metaphysics, nature and culture, mathematics and language. Each of these facets contains ideas that are uniquely interesting and enticing to the human mind. Moreover, each of these facets are interrelated through their corresponding ideas. A discussion of astronomy can quickly turn into a discussion about the history of astronomy. A Bible lesson can naturally integrate knowledge of geography, archaeology, or poetry.

Education as the Science of Relations

The interrelatedness of knowledge is what led Charlotte Mason to believe that education is rightly understood as “the science of relations.” Children, as persons, are essentially relational creatures who naturally enjoy “…relations with a vast number of things and thoughts” (Preface to the “Home Education” Series). Therefore, the task of educators is not to create these relations, since they already exist, but to activate or strengthen them. As children encounter the world for themselves, both through vivid texts and experiences in nature, their minds take in a multitude of ideas, assimilating the knowledge and making endless connections. 

Once education is understood as the science of relations, it becomes clear why Charlotte Mason was so critical of textbooks. Textbooks all but eliminate the possibility of idea-sharing. They provide an accurate account of the subject matter to be sure, but they do so blandly. Rather than directly connecting students with knowledge itself, textbooks offer a summarized, diluted, or what Charlotte Mason called “predigested,” substitute. As a result, textbooks don’t harness the imagination or stir the emotions. They mechanically convey information rather than nourish a living entity, the mind.

On this point, Charlotte Mason writes,

“I believe that spiritual life, using spiritual in the sense I have indicated, is sustained upon only one manner of diet––the diet of ideas––the living progeny of living minds. Now, if we send to any publisher for his catalogue of school books, we find that it is accepted as the nature of a school-book that it be drained dry of living thought. It may bear the name of a thinker, but then it is the abridgment of an abridgment, and all that is left for the unhappy scholar is the dry bones of his subject denuded of soft flesh and living colour, of the stir of life and power of moving. Nothing is left but what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls the ‘mere brute fact’” (School Education, 169).

Nourishing the Mind with Ideas

Although Charlotte Mason lived in the heyday of modern materialism, she was greatly influenced by the counter-reaction to materialism within modernity: Romanticism. She wasn’t afraid to suggest that there is more to this world than what is rendered by the five senses. As a result, she spoke confidently about the spiritual realm, referring to that ethereal reality that extends beyond the physical. Mind, soul, heart, imagination and spirit, thought the British educator, are aspects of reality that merit a central place in the task of education. Additionally, flowing from her view of children as persons, not mere blank slates or undeveloped humans, she firmly believed that the minds of these children deserved the spiritual food of ideas. Under this conception, hollow summaries or abridgements of real knowledge wouldn’t do.

Ideas, and ideas alone, bring life to mind. Charlotte Mason believed so strongly in the power of ideas, she offered this advice:

“Give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information; for the child who grows up with a few dominant ideas has his self-education provided for, his career marked out” (Home Education, 174). 

Ideas vs. Information

Now don’t get me wrong, information is important. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to make much sense of the world or even comprehend ideas for that matter. Information is necessary for strengthening one’s foundation of knowledge and growing proficient in any field of study. Hopefully our positive interaction with books like Make it Stick, which highlights superior techniques for information recall, demonstrates precisely this. But even the authors of Make it Stick emphasize the shortcomings of information, even as they praise its necessity. 

In a particular section of the book in which the authors are defending information recall against critiques that honing higher-order skills is a more valuable use of class time, they write,

“Pitting the learning of basic knowledge against the development of critical thinking is a false choice. Both need to be cultivated. The stronger one’s knowledge about the subject at hand, the more nuanced one’s creativity can be in addressing a new problem. Just as knowledge amounts to little without the exercise of ingenuity and imagination, creativity absent a sturdy foundation of knowledge builds a shaky house” (30). 

It is my contention that this little insight has some direct connections with Charlotte Mason’s emphasis on ideas. More specifically, I want to suggest that ideas, as she understands them, fuse what the authors are referring to as “knowledge” and “creative thinking” together. When an idea strikes a person’s mind, it doesn’t just bounce off. It lands, attaching itself to the host, not parasitically, but generatively. This is because ideas themselves are generative: as ideas make contact with the mind, they interconnect and reproduce. Not before too long, given the proper sustenance, these ideas have created a whole new area to one’s web of knowledge. Within this dynamic web, which is durable yet flexible, one’s knowledge base grows while thinking skills are honed.

Here’s how Charlotte Mason explains the generative nature of ideas: 

“An idea is more than an image or picture; it is, so to speak, a spiritual germ endowed with vital force––with power, that is, to grow, and to produce after its kind. It is the very nature of an idea to grow: as the vegetable germ secretes that it lives by, so, fairly implant an idea in the child’s mind, and it will secrete its own food, grow, and bear fruit in the form of a succession of kindred ideas. We know from our own experience that, let our attention be forcibly drawn to some public character, some startling theory, and for days after we are continually hearing or reading matter which bears on this one subject, just as if all the world were thinking about what occupies our thoughts: the fact being, that the new idea we have received is in the act of growth, and is reaching out after its appropriate food” (Home Education, 174). 

Ideas in John Milton Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching

Let me make one final point about Charlotte Mason and the power of ideas. In the broader home-school/classical education/Charlotte Mason movement, there is discussion, sometimes debate, over whether Charlotte Mason and classical education are compatible approaches to education. Of the many apparent differences, one common argument for incompatibility is that while Charlotte Mason emphasized the power of ideas, classical educators, at least those following Douglas Wilson’s popularization of the trivium, focused on fact memorization.

I’ll provide a fuller response to this point of view in a future article, but for now, I want to reference what has become a popular teacher training text in the classical school world: The Seven Laws of Teaching by John Milton Gregory. While this text does not serve as a universal authority for classical educators, it has earned a credible voice in the movement. It is curious, therefore, to observe one key section of the book in which this text discusses the power of ideas. Gregory writes,

“Knowledge cannot be passed, like some material substance, from one person to another…Ideas, the products of thought, can only be communicated by inducing in the receiving mind action correspondent to that by which these ideas were first conceived…It is obvious, therefore, that something more is required than a passive presentation of the pupil’s mind to the teacher’s mind as face turns to face. The pupil must think” (41)

Although this passage indicates some noticeable differences, there remains an even more noticeable similarity: the focus and power of ideas. It is not enough for a teacher to merely pass knowledge to his students as he would a football. In order for a student to truly learn, her mind must actively receive and digest ideas. She must think on ideas, the products of thought. When the pupil’s mind is attending to the task at hand, in the flow and focused intently on learning, the germination of ideas is the result.

Now, I am not suggesting that this insight from Gregory solves the Charlotte Mason-Classical divide, but it does show that perhaps the sides needn’t be as polarized, at least on the topic of ideas vs. facts, as they are. As much as Gregory measures learning using the retention of facts as a core metric, here he seems to be acknowledging that the key for any learning to occur in the first place is a meeting of the minds and the sharing of ideas.

Ideas for Life

Let me leave readers of this article on the power of ideas with this word from Charlotte Mason:

“The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?” (School Education, 171). 

In this post, I have tried to make the case for a reinstatement of ideas in education. Ideas are powerful. They are generative. Unlike facts and information, they have the capacity to support life, the life of the mind. Ultimately, education is not about information recall, creative thinking, or knowledge acquisition. It is about cultivating the mind, shaping the heart, and passing on the tradition. Through harnessing the power of ideas, we can help our students see all of creation as a world of connections, and over time, by God’s grace, watch them flourish in it.

Did you enjoy the article? Want to read more about Charlotte Mason? Request Jason’s eBook on Narration or Patrick’s eBook on Habit Training.

The post Charlotte Mason and the Power of Ideas appeared first on .