One consequence of these trends is the exclusion of literature and humanities from the broader conversation about education, its goals, methods, and ideals. Charlotte Mason, for one, found novels, fictional literature, and poetry to be a potent source for her educational philosophy. While certainly we can understand the reticence to feature too prominently the imaginative portrayal of a person’s education or development in exact recommendations for how to teach, literature and the humanities have as their subject matter what it means to be human. Therefore, they concern the education of human beings in all their complexity, glory, and fallenness. 

Poets, novelists, and fictional writers might not be good guides as to the length of school days and the exact details of curricula and lessons. But they have a farsighted imaginative perception that has the power to shake up, challenge and inform our philosophy and practices. Because of the very unreality and singular nature of their imaginative portrayals, they are able to shock us out of our complacency and restore our ideals and vision for the educational art.

In this article, we will be transported to the 19th century post-Napoleonic era in France to witness the education of Edmond Dantès, a poor first mate of a merchant’s vessel in the south of France. In the classic adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, young Dantès, who is on the brink of perfect happiness, about to marry his love Mercédès, is fatefully betrayed by two seeming friends, and sentenced to imprisonment without trial (Barnes & Noble, 2011 edition).

While in the dungeons of the Château d’If, an island fortress off the coast of Marseilles, Edmond Dantès receives a first-class education from one of his fellow prisoners, a learned Italian man called Abbé Faria. He also will learn from Abbé Faria of a tremendous fortune hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo. After Abbé Faria’s death, fourteen years in prison, eight of which he spent learning from the Italian, he will escape to become the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo. His education has transformed him and enabled him to seek out the hidden crimes of his persecutors, who have only grown in power and riches since his own demise. 

In this article I will avoid any spoilers about the end of the book, which I myself am still reading–I also have not watched any movie version–and instead will confine myself to an analysis of the education of the future Count of Monte Cristo.

The Teacher-Student Relationship

When Edmond Dantès is found by his future teacher, he has all but given up hope in despair. Without seeing another soul than his jailer for six years, he has committed to starving himself to death, when he begins to hear a sound of file and digging. He breaks his resolution to try to discover what this is and Abbé Faria reveals himself in answer to Dantès’ prayer:

“Oh, my God! my God!” murmured he, “I have so earnestly prayed to You that I hoped my prayers had been heard. After having deprived me of my liberty, after having deprived me of death, after having recalled me to existence, my God! have pity on me, and do not let me die in despair.” (111)

Their relationship comes about as a result of God’s mercy, providentially arranging for Dantès to be lifted out of his despair in a dark and unjust world. Dantès’s relationship with his teacher has a unique beauty about it because he has been starved of human-to-human interaction; he is open to friendly and familial love in a way that few students are. As he says to Faria at their first meeting, “If you are young, I will be your comrade; if you are old, I will be your son” (113). 

The Abbé Faria quickly develops a paternal affection for Dantès. Like an expert psychologist and counselor, and with the piercing perception of a Sherlock Holmes, Faria helps Dantès discover from only his memories who it was that thus betrayed him and sentenced him to his unjust and torturous imprisonment. But their relationship has a moral and spiritual mentorship at its heart rather than a professional detachment:

Faria bent on him his penetrating eyes: “I regret now,” said he, “having helped you in your late inquiries, or having given you the information I did.”

“Why so?” inquired Dantès.

“Because it has instilled a new passion in your heart–that of vengeance.” (136)

As their relationship develops Dantès’s promise, “I shall love you as I loved my father” (113), holds true, and after 8 years Faria will adopt Dantès (“whom Faria really loved as a son,” 154) by granting him the secret of his treasure.

Unlike the situation of many modern classrooms the teacher-student relationship of Faria and Dantès is of long duration, spans multiple subjects of study (as we’ll see), and is more akin to personal mentoring and tutoring, with a familial father-son air. The mutual interest, joy in companionship and holistic integration challenges our factory model assumptions. Why is it that we have abandoned the tutorial or the multi-year influence of a teacher on a student’s life and development? Perhaps it is because we have also abandoned a traditional vision of the ideal teacher.

A Portrait of the Ideal Teacher

We are introduced to the learned Abbé Faria as an intellectual, certainly, but also as a paragon of moral insight: “The meagerness of his face, deeply furrowed by care, and the bold outline of his strongly marked features, announced a man more accustomed to exercise his moral faculties than his physical strength” (115). When he learns from Dantès of the removal of Napoleon from power and the restoration of the monarchy in France, he exclaims in a sort of biblical doxology:

“The brother of Louis XVI!–How inscrutable are the ways of Providence!–for what great and mysterious purpose has it pleased heaven to abase the man once so elevated, and raise up the individual so beaten down and depressed?”

And then later, 

“Ah! my friend!” said the abbé, turning toward Dantès, and surveying him with the kindling gaze of a prophet, “these are the changes and vicissitudes that give liberty to a nation.” (118)

Faria’s prophetic gaze is not only political, but has a spiritual or theological source. His later refusal to consider killing a guard during an attempted escape confirms him as a man of conviction and scrupulous character, whatever else he may be (121-122). 

Because of his moral fiber and his endless invention and great learning, he has not succumbed to despair, like Dantès, even though he has been imprisoned much longer (117), but has secretly made himself tools (115) from the odds and ends in his prison, pens and cloth to write his magnum opus, A Treatise on the Practicability of Forming Italy into One General Monarchy (123), and of course he has carried out a multi-year project of digging in an attempt to secure his escape. In addition to all this, he has used his free time in his cell as an opportunity to improve himself, continuing his own personal education. How is such a feat possible? Faria explains to Dantès:

“I had nearly 5,000 volumes in my library at Rome; but after reading them over many times I found out that with 150 well-chosen books a man possesses a complete analysis of all human knowledge, or at least all that is either useful or desirable to be acquainted with. I devoted three years of my life to reading and studying these 150 volumes, till I knew them nearly by heart; so that since I have been in prison a very slight effort of memory has enabled me to recall their contents as readily as though their pages were open before me. I could recite you the whole of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Strada, Jornandès, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli and Bossuet. Observe, I merely quote the most important names and writers.” (123)

In addition to this detailed knowledge of Great Books, through which Faria possesses “a complete analysis of all human knowledge,” Faria also knows five modern languages, as well as Latin and ancient Greek, through which he teaches himself modern Greek. If this description might have seemed to classify Faria as merely another arcane, ivory-tower intellectual, we should note the applied practicality of his slimming of the 5,000 volumes down to a select 150 and his further comment that he names the “most important names and writers.” This is a teacher who can discriminate between various authors and is able to distill for his eager pupil the essence and summation of “useful and desirable” knowledge. He knows how to do this for another because he has first done it for himself. 

It is worth noting again that Faria is not driven to despair by his imprisonment because his vast reading has provided for him an endless source of employment and joy in his own ongoing learning. The flow of thought overrides his unfortunate circumstances. He has spent his time, among other things, making a vocabulary of the words he knew in modern Greek and turning them back and forth in his minds in order to develop facility with the 1,000 he knew in order to be able to express perfectly anything he wanted (123).

But Faria is not a humanist and linguist alone. He also is an eminent source of useful information and scientific knowledge, as well as the inventiveness and crafty resourcefulness already displayed in his tools and excavations:

“The elder prisoner was one of those persons whose conversation, like that of all who have experienced many trials, contained many useful and important hints as well as sound information; but it was never egotistical, for the unfortunate man never alluded to his own sorrows. Dantès listened with admiring attention to all he said; some of his remarks corresponded with what he already knew, or applied to the sort of knowledge his nautical life had enabled him to acquire. A part of the good abbé’s words, however, were wholly incomprehensible to him; but, like those aurora borealis which serve to light navigators in northern latitudes, they sufficed to open fresh views to the inquiring mind of the listener, and to give a glimpse of new horizons, enabling him justly to estimate the delight an intellectual mind would have in following the high and towering spirit of one so richly gifted as Faria in all the giddiest heights or lowest depths of science.” (136)

Such an ideal teacher surely surpasses what any of us who are employed in the profession might hope to attain; nevertheless, he represents an expansive vision of the intellectual life that we cannot do without. Faria’s title, Abbé, names him a member of the clergy, whether cleric or Abbot, and recalls the term for “father” used of abbots and priests. He is a spiritual and theologically grounded intellectual, who has also attained to the breadth of humane learning and obtained a practical and deep scientific understanding. He is a polymath or renaissance man. He is therefore able to situate the various branches of human learning in relation to one another.

How far a cry is this ideal from the high school teacher or college professor, plyer of trade knowledge and skill development in but one area, yet without a comprehensive philosophical understanding of the whole!

The Ideal Student and Course of Study

We have already seen Edmond Dantès’s readiness to learn and relational receptiveness above. In many other ways he represents the ideal student for so grand a teacher. He has the proper sense of wonder and curiosity, as well as the right early experiences to be an attentive learner:

“Though [he was] unable to comprehend the full meaning of his companion’s allusions, each word that fell from his lips seemed fraught with the wonders of science, as admirably deserving of being brought to light as were the glittering treasures he could just recollect having visited during his earliest youth in a voyage he made to Guzerat and Golconda.” (125)

The process of learning or education is here compared to uncovering the glittering treasures of the east (two territories in India known for grand buildings and diamonds). Because of this proper disposition toward the value of learning, Dantès became so “absorbed in the acquisition of knowledge, [that] days, even months, passed by unheeded in one rapid and instructive course” (137). He enters the time-warp characteristic of the flow of thought already possessed by his teacher. But of course, they first determine the appropriate course of study before embarking on a journey limited only by the qualifications of the student.

“And that very evening the prisoners sketched a plan of education, to be entered upon the following day. Dantès possessed a prodigious memory, combined with an astonishing quickness and readiness of conception; the mathematical turn of his mind rendered him apt at all kinds of calculation, while his naturally poetical feelings threw a light and pleasing veil over the dry reality of arithmetical computation or the rigid severity of lines. He already knew Italian, and had also picked up a little of the Romaic dialect, during his different voyages to the East; and by the aid of these two languages he easily comprehended the construction of all the others, so that at the end of six months he began to speak Spanish, English, and German.” (137)

Not all students will have Dantès’s natural qualifications of memory, calculation and poesy. But these are nevertheless the key ingredients in a rapid and effective course of study. It would be incorrect to say that Abbé Faria taught him everything; in fact, he makes an interesting set of distinctions between principles and application, the sciences and philosophy. “Human knowledge,” he says, “is confined within very narrow limits; and when I have taught you mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted, you will know as much as I do myself” (136). He then sets a term of two years as all that would be required to compass the principles, but not the application of this knowledge, noting that “to learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other” (136). 

Faria here alludes to the Aristotelian distinction between true scientific knowledge, which involves the ability to demonstrate, and the mere memory or understanding of a thing. He also describes philosophy as “reducible to no rules by which it can be learned”; it is rather “the amalgamation of all the sciences, the golden cloud which bears the soul to heaven” (137). For such a prodigious intellect, Faria has a proper humility about what the teacher can convey to the student and what the student’s own learning and continuing education after schooling must do to complete the enduring love of wisdom (“philosophy”) that “bears the soul to heaven.” 

For the Count of Monte Cristo in the making, this scientific course of study is enough, and presumably his own efforts at blessing his friends, enacting vengeance on his enemies, and making a new life for himself when all is done, will be necessary to complete his journey. But one further thing is needed to prepare him for that task: the Abbé Faria’s finishing school:

“The abbé was a man of the world, and had, moreover, mixed in the first society of the day; his appearance was impressed with that air of melancholy dignity which Dantès, thanks to the imitative powers bestowed on him by nature, easily acquired, as well as that outward polish and politeness he had before been wanting in, and which is seldom possessed except by those who have been placed in constant intercourse with persons of high birth and breeding.” (139)

We often overlook the powerful effect of the teacher’s mode of being, “polish and politeness,” upon the students, or the natural effect of “constant intercourse” or social interaction with a certain type or class of people. We might describe some of these habits and customs as the result of enculturation, without which a student would be unprepared for certain callings in life. Dantès, for instance, could not have become the Count of Monte Cristo without this “air of melancholy dignity.”

Conclusion

Let us close by summarizing in the form of several propositions what we have discovered in our fictional excursion into the singular education of the Count of Monte Cristo. 

The bond between teacher and student should be more than professional, but friendly and even familial, on the order of adoption or apprenticeship. This reality makes our modern era’s rapid change of teachers and professionalized teaching staff conducted at economic scale a liability, rather than a benefit. Tutoring and tutorials, as well as smaller schools with teachers teaching the same groups of students across multiple years in multiple sub-disciplines, become desirable from the perspective of teacher-mentorship. 

The ideal mentor-teacher, especially at the secondary or collegiate level, is a man or woman of moral and spiritual standing, not just an intellect or a capable deliverer of content through an engaging PowerPoint lecture. The ongoing education of the teacher and his active engagement in interdisciplinary inquiry are not extras to be dispensed with at will but necessarily influence the ideal student who is to become like his teacher. We must avoid hiring teachers as subject-experts or mere practitioners, rather than as spiritual, moral, and intellectual guides with a commitment to lifelong learning.

In early youth the cultivation of a student’s interest, wonder and curiosity, as well as habits of attention and strength of memory are crucial to his later development. Students should learn languages and have vivid experiences that will serve as the hinges on which the doors of later learning will swing open easily. In secondary education, 150 Great Books well studied will be a better summation of human knowledge than 5,000 books indiscriminately encountered. In addition, the understanding of principles in the sciences must be supplemented by application and demonstration, in order to bubble up to that highest of attainments, the true philosophy or love of wisdom. 

Life itself will be the test of a student’s education, and especially those decisions and choices of prudential wisdom upon which a life is made new or wrecked upon the shoals of an unjust world. (P.S. I can’t wait to read what happens next in The Count of Monte Cristo.)

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To answer this question we must return to Aristotle’s definition of prudence itself, borrow from Charlotte Mason’s “way of the will,” and consider educational activities that align appropriately with the nature of practical wisdom. These three pieces will enable us to develop a pedagogy of prudence, through which, with God’s help and the student’s voluntary learning, we can pass on prudence to the young. 

The Defining Traits of Prudence

In his Nicomachean Ethics book VI Aristotle’s main goal is to illuminate the nature of phronesis or practical wisdom. In fact, he addresses the other four intellectual virtues (artistry, intuition, scientific knowledge, and philosophic wisdom) mainly in order to define more precisely what prudence is by comparison with other species of the overarching category or genus, intellectual virtue. This makes sense given the fact that it is a treatise on ethics, and so intended to clarify how we are to live in the world. Prudence itself involves the deliberate choices that would lead to a good life.

In one place, Aristotle defines practical wisdom as “a state involving true reason, a practical one, concerned with what is good or bad for a human being” (Reeve, Aristotle on Practical Wisdom, 56; VI.5 translation). It is not simply having good habits but involves the reasoning faculty of a human being, directed particularly at things that are good or bad for us as human beings. Practical wisdom is therefore not concerned, strictly speaking, with what objectively happened in the past or with what might happen in the future or elsewhere, but which has no immediate relevance to us. “Nothing that happened in the past, however, is deliberately chosen–for example, nobody deliberately chooses to have sacked Troy” (Reeve, 50; VI.2). It is concerned with those things that might benefit or harm us as human beings.

In this way, practical wisdom differs from scientific or theoretical knowledge, which makes truth claims about the world regardless of their relationship to us. Nevertheless, there is an analogy between them. As Aristotle explains, “What assertion and denial are in the case of thought–that, in the case of desire, is precisely what pursuit and avoidance are” (Reeve, 48; VI.2). Prudence causes us to pursue or avoid things, whereas knowledge simply asserts or denies. This is precisely what makes practical reasoning practical in Aristotle’s thinking; it is the type of thinking that we engage in as doers, actors in the world. Therefore, our desires and our deliberate choices are involved in the experience of practical wisdom. 

The Way of the Will

These two companions (desire and deliberate choice) might be said to make practical wisdom what it is. But they are uneasy companions even in the best of times. And that is because our desires are often in conflict with one another and with reason. As the apostle James says, “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (4:1-2a ESV). This is why, for Aristotle, the moral virtues are a necessary precursor to practical wisdom, because if a person’s desires are entirely corrupt, he is not able to reason correctly about what is good for himself. His vision is so blurry, so obscured we might say by the log in his own eye, that he cannot see with any clarity what would in fact be good, either for himself or anyone else. 

Charlotte Mason, a British Christian educator from the turn of the last century, offers the “way of the will” as a guide to moral “self-management.” Being aware of our conflicting desires and able to manage them through deliberate choice is part and parcel of what prudence consists of. She explains this explicit instruction that children should be given in order to fortify their wills in vol. 6 Towards a Philosophy of Education:

Children should be taught (a) to distinguish between ‘I want’ and ‘I will.’ (b) That the way to will effectively is to turn our thoughts away from that which we desire but do not will. (c) That the best way to turn our thoughts is to think of, or do some quite different thing, entertaining or interesting. (d) That after a little rest in this way, the will returns to its work with new vigour. (ch. 8)

We might add on to Mason’s categories here by helping our students understand that they often want not one thing but many different things, and that part of becoming wise is not listening to only one of those voices, those competing desires, at any one time. We are prudent if we hear them each out in turn, think through the options rationally to discern what is best for us, and then choose with our will. And at the same time, as we will to follow one particular desire, we stop our ears to the others through tactics like diversion. (I have discussed this tactic and another like it, pre-committment) at some length in a two-part series entitled “Educating for Self-Control”: 1) A Lost Christian Virtue, 2) The Link Between Attention and Willpower.)

Among the moral virtues that are a necessary prerequisite to Aristotle’s course on prudence he names specifically temperance (sophrosune in Greek), noting that it is called this because it saves or preserves (sozousan) the person’s practical wisdom (ten phronesin; see Reeve, 58; VI.5). The temperate and wise man has a strong will, in Mason’s terminology, to be able to resist the suggestions of wayward desires. Of course, our ultimate goal is that a person would desire the right things in the right way and to the right degree. The moral virtues help set the desires straight on things that are actually good for you as a human being and at a degree that is appropriate. But in this life, we know as Christians, we will still struggle against the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life. And so, we must strive for temperance and prudence, baptized by charity, at one and the same time.

But what is the central work of prudence itself? What does it take to will correctly with regard to human good? For Aristotle, the mental act of deliberation is highlighted as the key activity of a prudent person:

Practical wisdom, however, is concerned with human affairs and what can be deliberated about; for of a practically wise man we say that this most of all is the function, to deliberate well, and nobody deliberates about what cannot be otherwise or about the sorts of things that do not lead to some specific end, where this is something good, doable in action. The unconditionally good deliberator, however, is the one capable of aiming, in accord with calculation, at the best, for a human being, of things doable in action. (Reeve, 64; VI.7)

Deliberation then is the golden key that unlocks the door of a prudent life. A wise person must be able to think through options, calculate the respective values of different human goods, and accurately choose the best course of action. 

Training the Powers of Deliberative Reasoning

For Aristotle this deliberation or consultation will take the form of what we might call deliberative or practical syllogisms. They will know fundamental or categorical principles of what is good for human beings (the universal or major premise), and then they will also know the particular facts of this or that situation (particular or minor premise), leading them to reason: 

• Heavy water is bad to drink.
• This water is heavy.
• Therefore, I should not drink it. (see VI.8)

The practically wise person will be able to reason quickly and correctly about the new situations he faces in order to decide optimally about how to act in any doubtful situation (see the end of VI.9). 

From this follows the primary method of our pedagogy of prudence: students should be trained in logic, rhetoric, and ethics. It may seem at first glance that this is a curricular, rather than a pedagogical claim, until we recognize the role of logic and rhetoric as productive arts. When understood correctly, dialectic or logic, as well as rhetoric, are tools for the process of inquiry or deliberation. The process of inquiry and deliberation involves the student in seeking the truth through discovering arguments and reasons. It follows that a student who has a practiced ability to perceive reasons for and against a course of action will be able to deliberate well. If the student has studied ethics, he should have the major premises necessary for his practical syllogisms. Of course, he must also have enough experience of the world, so that he is not at a loss for discerning the particulars of his situation. 

Training in dialectic, rhetoric, and ethics, then, are not merely courses that must be added on in the high school or college years, but are instead a set of pedagogical practices that should be embedded in a student’s study from their earliest encounters with the “humanities,” those subjects that are concerned with instructing the conscience with the hard-won wisdom of mankind. This is why the Narration-Trivium lesson capitalizes on and expands Charlotte Mason’s narration-based lesson structure to explicitly name dialectic and rhetoric as proper responses to a rich text. To be clear, dialectic and rhetoric can face in two directions, as it were. They can be turned toward theoretical knowledge, on the one hand, establishing through reasoning some truth that has no direct bearing on my life or choices. Or else, they can face ethics and practical affairs and engage in the practical thinking of deliberation, where options are weighed about what is best for a human being. 

For this reason, and not simply for their own rhetorical training, should students be asked to deliberate about the best course of action for a character in a novel or a figure from history. By living vicariously through the decision-points of many people who have come before them, students gain facility with externalizing the thought-process of deliberation. While this is not the same thing as their own deliberate choices, it is an incredibly effective way to engage the faculty students will use in their own lives. This process of deliberation can be put on display in the classroom in any number of ways, whether it be through set speeches or essays, where a student endeavors to persuade others of the right course of action in a fictional or historical situation, or through harkness table discussions and socratic seminars, where the teacher poses some ethical dilemma. The important thing is that teachers regularly discuss, and get the students to discuss, human values and choices, using biblical moral categories. How else are students to grow in prudence if they never deliberate? 

A helpful tool in this regard is the pro and con chart, where students list out the positives and negatives of a possible choice in terms of its effects on self and others. The discipline of pausing long enough to think through all the ramifications not only develops a student’s analytical thinking, it also improves their invention, or ability to think of reasons or arguments. Traditionally, listed as one of the canons of rhetoric, invention will benefit from a student’s frequent use of common topics, like the more and the less, the better and the worse, the greater and the lesser, etc. (see Aristotle’s Topics).

In addition to vicarious exercises in deliberation, parents, teachers and mentors should utilize every opportunity that arises to assist a young person in their own deliberation process. We will be able to do this by acting as counselor rather than decision-maker. The college and career guidance counselling process is perhaps the prime example, because often in our culture this is a decision that parents hand over to their teenage children, even if some constraints are imposed. Parents and mentors should be asking questions, providing students with an awareness of the experiences of other students, and raising categories of what might be valuable or desirable in a college or career choice. It is not a matter of doing the thinking and deciding for these older students, but of helping them engage in a genuine process of decision-making that is not short-circuited by one or two considerations. These big decisions of early life will make a deep impression on students and act as guides for their process of making all the other important decisions of their life.

In the next article, we will see how this training in deliberative reasoning not only prepares our students for a wise personal life, but also enables them to lead in their homes, communities and churches.

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Mentoring as a Program

When we think of mentoring programs, we often picture something like Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBBSA), a non-profit organization that pairs adult volunteers with youth. Para-educational programs such as this have been the focus on numerous studies conducted over decades and show various results. For instance, the 2011 study published in the journal Child Development found mixed results in the BBBSA program.[1] Students tended to improve academically, and yet these improvements were limited with students not sustaining higher academic performance after the first year of mentorship. Mentoring programs like this also tended to have little impact on behavioral issues.

Another study aggregated over 5000 mentoring programs in a meta-analysis of over 73 studies on mentoring programs directed at children during the decade 1999-2010. The study, published in 2011 in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, found that mentored youth exhibited positive outcomes whereas non-mentored youth showed declines in outcomes.[2] This seems reasonable enough and is what we might expect. When non-parental adults invest in youth, that investment predominantly yields positive returns in the life of the child. We can conclude that mentorship of youth, even if it results in modest social, emotional and intellectual gains, is superior to the alternative: leaving children to their own devices.

As I think about mentoring programs, much of the emphasis found in modern studies of mentorship focus on para-educational programs. But mentorship does not depend on an outside organization, it can happen within a school by training teachers who help establish an atmosphere of learning. The implementation of mentorship within a school utilizing teachers strikes me as a way to leverage the benefits of mentoring without the encumbrance of an outside organization. The idea here is that if teachers are the mentors, we create a culture of mentorship that leverages the relationship between student and teacher.

On Permissiveness and Micro-managing

So what is the opposite of an atmosphere of mentorship? It strikes me that there are two opposite kinds of atmospheres. One atmosphere that is easy to create is one of permissiveness or a laissez faire approach to the care of students. When a school is oriented solely toward the delivery of course content, the teachers are not inclined to reach students in the hallways, playground or cafeteria. The permissive approach is a justifiably rational approach. For one, the faculty already devote so much time to planning, teaching and grading, that it feels a burden to have them spend more contact hours with students. This approach has also been justified on the rationale that if students are going to leave for college and have an abundance of independence and self-direction, shouldn’t they be given lots of freedom now in order to succeed at the next level. In this way of thinking, only students who are struggling academically or morally receive interventions, whereas the rest are left to their own devices.

While there are many studies on mentorship programs, there are very few studies on permissive environments. The difficulty is that permissiveness in the school environment has to be evaluated through self-report. For instance, one study examined students in government schools in Faridabad, India.[3] Schools were deemed to be permissive based on the self-reports of students. With a study comprised of 400 students, the conclusions must be taken cautiously. But the findings of the study showed that there is a significant correlation between permissiveness in the school environment and underachievement in the field of science. As I read this albeit limited study in a field that rarely gets analyzed, it seems that the strategy to bolster science achievement by allowing students to follow their desires has not been corroborated by this evidence. When it comes to achievement in academic subjects as well as social and moral domains, mentoring seems to be the better strategy to foster success.

A very different environment seeks to root out any deviancy or failure by micro-managing students. Rules and procedures are carried out with exacting regularity. It’s possible to get high performance in this situation, but it is equally difficult to have a deep and lasting impact in the hearts and minds of students. As much as we would want to shield students from deviancy or failure, we must understand the child as a whole person who has an independent and autonomous will. The best conditions for learning occur in an atmosphere where failure or error are met with grace. Often times it is failure and error that provide the most productive avenues for growth. An atmosphere that helps students learn how to learn is essential. You can read more about the concept of ratio in Kolby’s series on Teach Like a Champion.

I really like how Jason put it during our podcast, the optimal learning atmosphere occurs in the “moral and authoritative presence of a caring, thoughtful and wise adult.” (Episode 10, 39:58). So, what we are suggesting here is that mentoring is the golden mean between a laissez faire approach to school atmosphere and a strict, rules-based approach to atmosphere. When we place students under the masterful care of adults who are well trained to mentor and disciple their students, the opportunity for success in multiple domains of life is promoted.

Mentoring and Habit Training

As we think about establishing an atmosphere conducive to mentorship, it is helpful to turn to the concept of habit training. The method that Charlotte Mason spells out provides good avenues for mentorship to occur. In her Towards a Philosophy of Education she writes:

“There is no other way of forming any good habit, though the discipline is usually that of the internal government which the person exercises upon himself; but a certain strenuousness in the formation of good habits is necessary because every such habit is the result of conflict. The bad habit of the easy life is always pleasant and persuasive and to be resisted with pain and effort, but with hope and certainty of success, because in our very structure is the preparation for forming such habits of muscle and mind as we deliberately propose to ourselves.”

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 101-102

From this we learn that mentorship invites a certain kind of conflict. The child becomes internally conflicted in a battle of will. The good habit will only be established through self-discipline all the while the bad habit offers all the allurements of pleasure. Mentorship offers support to the child by providing strength to the child’s will to fight the good fight. Mason continues:

“We entertain the idea which gives birth to the act and the act repeated again and again becomes the habit; ‘Sow an act,’ we are told, ‘reap a habit.’ ‘Sow a habit, reap a character.’”

Philosophy of Education, 102

An atmosphere of mentorship has in view the moral and spiritual formation of the child. And this occurs through the steady and regular influence of teachers who themselves have godly character and the mindset to disciple the children given into their care. Mason goes on:

“But we must go a step further back, we must sow the idea or notion which makes the act worthwhile. The lazy boy who hears of the Great Duke’s narrow camp bed, preferred by him because when he wanted to turn over it was time to get up, receives the idea of prompt rising. But his nurse or his mother knows how often and how ingeniously the tale must be brought to his mind before the habit of prompt rising is formed; she knows too how the idea of self-conquest must be made at home in the boy’s mind until it become a chivalric impulse which he cannot resist. It is possible to sow a great idea lightly and casually and perhaps this sort of sowing should be rare and casual because if a child detect a definite purpose in his mentor he is apt to stiffen himself against it.”

Philosophy of Education, 102

Habit training begins with inspiring ideas and helping the child gain a vision of themselves as mature human beings. Mason cautions against habit training or mentoring originating on the basis of the convenience or manipulation of the teacher or parent. A child can sense this and will stiffen against it. Along these lines, Mason concludes her thoughts by cautioning teachers against permissiveness:

“When parent or teacher supposes that a good habit is a matter of obedience to his authority, he relaxes a little. A boy is late who has been making evident efforts to be punctual; the teacher good-naturedly foregoes rebuke or penalty, and the boy says to himself,––‘It doesn’t matter,’ and begins to form the unpunctual habit. The mistake the teacher makes is to suppose that to be punctual is troublesome to the boy, so he will let him off; whereas the office of the habits of an ordered life is to make such life easy and spontaneous; the effort is confined to the first half dozen or score of occasions for doing the thing.”

Philosophy of Education, 102-103

My hunch is that permissive environments occur when we grown ups feel uncomfortable with the authority we have. When we are at peace with our authoritative role, however, we can mentor children because we can see how we have been placed in this child’s life to help support his or her betterment. The best part of the child wants to be punctual, and we are here to support that. Permissiveness comes in when we shy away from supporting the child due to our own fear of manipulation or a sense that by challenging the child we are somehow not loving the child.

Train Up a Child

Raising children today is no easy task. Mainstream culture is a factor we all have to deal with, and good parents and teacher will come to different decisions about how much exposure to the artifacts of culture (television, movies, music, social media) to let into the home or classroom. Proverbs 22:6 advises parents to “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” A well-trained child is one who knows the right way to go. The path of life is laid out before them, and they stay the course. I am reminded of the quote by Miyamoto Musashi, “If you know the way broadly, you will see it in everything.” True mentorship of children and youth provides them with insights about the nature of life and how to live a life with meaning and purpose.

As we train up children, we must have a genuine picture of what it means to live life. Because life is full of adversity, pain, suffering, challenge and failure, it is important to prepare children to meet these on the battlefield of life. In addressing the nature of life in this way, the value of genuine happiness, true friendship and the strength of conviction are magnified. We need to be careful not to shelter children from the challenges of life. Instead, we should walk alongside them to so that they can meet the challenges they face with grace and dignity. I want to highlight a great insight Jason shared in our podcast on atmosphere. He says,

 “Many of us unfortunately, and for understandable reasons, have the sheltering issue completely backwards we have flipped it on its head. We’re sheltering them from the wrong things so that they won’t have to face the pain and suffering and challenge of the world but can have things handed to them and life just smoothed and eased for them. But we are not willing anymore to shelter them from the bad moral and spiritual influences in their lives, which is exactly what we should be sheltering them from until they’ve got the training and are standing on their own two feet as mature Christians. I think the idea that we would send out our children to be missionaries in public schools, that’s not how the New Testament, as I read it, thinks about missionaries. You send your solid, spirit-empowered, well-trained and discipled apostles out to be missionaries to the world and to proclaim the gospel to them. You don’t send weak, frail, young-in-the-faith children out to be gobbled up by a world that is completely contrary to where they are coming from.”

Educational Renaissance Podcast, Episode 10 – “Atmosphere,” 46:14

The impulse to shelter our children from pain, suffering and challenge is understandable. We want what is best for our children. But it is far better to train children to be strong to meet life’s challenges rather than keep them safe from them, or to exist in ignorance of the many challenges that surround them.

As I mentioned above, we want children to encounter genuine life, which means they must experience pain, suffering and challenge. C. S. Lewis in his book The Problem of Pain reasons, “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.” From this idea I would advise educators to consider the following two ideas. First, we as teachers must be people who are experienced at encountering life in its manifold nature – full of pain, yes, but also full of deep and profound joy. It is really only from this position of genuine living that we can hope to mentor the young ones given into our care. I am not saying that we share every struggle and burden with them, quite the opposite. What I am saying is that as mentors, there is a mantle of genuineness that becomes part of the learning atmosphere when we have partaken in real life. In a word, we must be mature. Second, we as teachers must be prepared to seize the opportunities that present themselves regularly to meet our students at the moment of challenge or pain to support them. We cannot shelter them from all challenge and pain. So we must therefore help them to encounter challenge with courage and perseverance.

May the Lord uphold you in this high calling. And may you take deep and profound joy in this work.

[1] Herrera, Carla; Jean Grossmen; Tina Kauh; Jennifer McMaken. “Mentoring in Schools: An Impact Study of Big Brothers Big Sisters School Based Mentoring.” Child Development 82 (1): 346–381.

[2] DuBois, David L., Nelson Portillo, Jean E. Rhodes, Naida Silverthorn, Jeffrey C. Valentine. “How Effective Are Mentoring Programs for Youth? A Systematic Assessment of the Evidence.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 12 (2011): 57-91.

[3] Kapri, Umesh C. “A Study of Underachievement in Science in Relation to Permissive School Environment.” International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology 4 (2017): 2027-2032.

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