Nevertheless, when I say we have lost sight of the significance of the human mind, I am not referring to the significance we ascribe to our brains. We require young children to wear helmets when learning to ride a bike. We instruct people to cover their heads when walking through a construction site. We are taught in wellness classes how to care for our brains through exercise, eating proper nutrients, and turning off screens. The brain is well cared for in many respects.

The mind, not so much. Apart from mental healthcare, which is on the rise today, the mind is taken for granted as the faculty we possess to focus on whatever we please. These days, online video streaming is one popular option. Another is listening to music and podcasts. Too often, however, these objects of the mind do not offer it real sustenance. The sort of nourishment that comes through contemplating knowledge, the truth, and worthy ideas.

Why did God give us minds? What are they for? These are some of the questions I will explore in this new blog series. By digging deeper into what it means to be human and how we come to know, I hope to put forward a fresh vision for cultivating and caring for the life of the mind.

A Biblical Starting Point

Proverbs 3:5-7 notably instructs the listener to, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD, and turn away from evil” (ESV).

Although this passage does not use the word “mind” specifically, it is a helpful starting point for digging deeper into what it means to be human. In the ancient Hebrew conceptual world, one’s heart and mind are inseparable. As Timothy Pickavance notes in Knowledge for the Love of God (Eerdmans, 2022), the Hebrew word translated as “heart” can mean a number of things, but predominantly the whole of a person. In this way, it both individually and collectively refers to one’s will, emotions/desires, and even the intellect (20).

This conception of a human being’s inner life helps us make better sense of Proverbs 3:5, specifically how the verse connects heart to both trust and understanding. Intellectual activity, what we typically think of as the life of the mind, cannot be so easily disentangled from the emotions we experience, the decisions we make, or the things we love. The mind, we can say, is involved in whole-self flourishing. 

Getting the Self in Order

Contemporary culture, as we know, promotes self-authenticity and the importance of expressing our selves to those around us. What we need to wisely decipher is where biblical and cultural views of the self align and where they differ. 

One way to test this alignment is through looking at specific cultural examples. For instance, the cultural anthem of the past decade is, arguably, “Let it Go,” featured in Disney’s 2013 film Frozen. In the story behind the song, the main character experiences a crisis of self-identity as she seeks to keep secret a magical power, all within a fast-paced narrative featuring a talking snowman, ice palace, and snow monster. At a key moment in the story, the character finally accepts her identity, magical powers and all, and belts out a solo, promising to hide her true self no longer.

The salient point, illustrated through “Let it Go,” is that in contemporary culture, the self is fundamentally what one feels, in a psychological and emotional sense, about one’s self. The will and the intellect are eclipsed by feeling, steering the mind to a myopically inward focus. (For those interested, Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, helpfully traces the intellectual history of this view of what it means to be human.)

Alternatively, the biblical view observed in Proverbs 3:5 affirms the complexity of a human’s inner life, even while upholding its unity. A human is physical, but she is more than a body. A human is emotional, but she is more than her feelings. A human is intellectual, but she is more than the summary of her beliefs.

Descartes’ Cogito and the Foundation of Knowledge 

With this view of what it means to be human, we can now turn to the pursuit of knowledge. As J.P. Moreland observes in Kingdom Triangle (Zondervan, 2007), the Bible has a rich focus on knowledge and the importance of knowing. For example, the prophet Hosea laments,

My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I will also reject you from being my priest. Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.

Hosea 4:6 (NIV)

Here we see an emphasis on both knowledge and forgetfulness. It turns out that the pursuit and recollection of knowledge is no mere intellectual endeavor. It has real-life implications for those who would seek to live as the people of God. It is therefore of fundamental importance that we not only pursue knowledge, but get it right.

In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Rene Descartes (1596-1650) understood precisely this in his own modern context. It was the pursuit of certain and unadulterated knowledge that led him to what he believed to be the only sure foundation of knowledge: belief in his own existence. Descartes’ well-known cogito— “I think therefore I am”– became his starting point as he realized that the only truth he could not coherently doubt is his own self-existence. For, the ability to even doubt one’s existence is evidence for it.

As intriguing as this argument is, a foundation of knowledge centered on the self should give us pause. Though the logic holds up, and no doubt sheds some light on what we can know with confidence, the cogito propelled Descartes and modern philosophers who came after him down a path illuminated by human reason alone. In doing so, they lost sight of divine illumination and the limitations of the human mind to fully understand.

Modernism: From Progress to Desolation

Postmodernism, along with its offspring relativism, is feared by many Christians today (and for good reason). However, what some fail to remember is that late modernism was no friend to Christianity either. While it is true that Descartes did reason from the cogito to the Christian faith via deductive logic, it was not long for subsequent modernists to reach a different conclusion, using their minds to argue for a naturalistic view of reality.

The chief problem with modernism is that it puts too much stock in the power of human reason to know. While modernists held to universal and objective truth, what they failed to see is that knowledge of the truth is a gracious gift of God. In a post-Fall world, every facet of a human is fallen. This is what Calvinists mean by the phrase “total depravity.” There is not a single square inch of a human person that is free from the effects of sin. This includes the mind.

As a result of this optimism in human reason, it was not long for the modernist conception of knowledge to simultaneously achieve impressive outcomes and run off course. With the success of modern science and technology, mastery over the natural world accelerated quickly, and with it, impressive advances in everyday life, from efficient machinery to increased life spans. However, at the same time, philosophers and scientists began to imagine life without God’s existence as not only possible, but probable.

Of course, we know that the era of modernism did not end well. The same modernistic philosophy that led to the birth of modern medicine paved the way for the creation of the atomic bomb. It need not be hypothesized what unbridled human reason leads to: two world wars, nuclear weapons, and multiple instances of genocide.

Postmodernism and a Post-Truth World

While modernism was correct to assume the existence of objective truth, it lost its way by untethering the quest for this truth from theology. Our modern scientific era has led us to believe that belief in the supernatural is unfounded, dubious, and impossible to reasonably defend. And yet, for as long as humans have existed, common wisdom has pointed to the existence and need for the divine. It takes a fair amount of hubris to disagree with millennia of sagacious insight on the deep questions of existence, and yet, this is precisely what the modern era has maintained. 

That is, until the emergence of Postmodernism. Nowadays, it is acceptable to believe in God so long as one does not claim that truth about God’s existence is objective. Truth now resides communally rather than universally. How did this shift come about? 

In Knowledge for the Love of God, which I quoted earlier, philosopher Timothy Pickavance suggests that the turn came, in part, with the shift from Newtonian to Einstenian physics (35). Isaac Newton (1643-1727), like other modern scientists, conceived of the world within a closed system. As he discovered and articulated the laws of physics, the universe was perceived to be orderly and predictable. However, with Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, this mechanistic view of the universe was displaced (see video below). Today, scientists know that the laws of the universe are relative to the space-time relationship and that atoms can be broken down into smaller, unpredictable entities called quarks. The upshot is that a purely materialistic conception of the universe turns out to be nothing other than a bunch of tiny things endlessly bumping into each other.

Postmodernists, conscious of this scientific discovery as well as the maladies of the 20th century, continue to feel the human longing for meaning but can no longer confidently ground it in something universal and objective. The result is that truth is now posited as subjective and relative to communities. These days, the deposing of truth as the final authority, especially biblical truth, has left the door wide open for Friedrich Nietzsche’s “will to power” prediction to come true. The emergence of different critical theories which offer totalizing power-centric explanations of society is the result of a world that left confidence in objective truth behind. Throw in the internet’s ability to fragment information and stoke mob-appeal instincts, and you have a recipe for the confusion so many people experience today.

Conclusion

To cultivate the life of the mind, we need to have clarity on the nature of the mind and what it is for. In this blog, I have attempted to show that the mind is one faculty within a complex, fully integrated self. As we observed in scripture, the mind is not so easily separable from the heart as contemporary culture would have us believe. The thoughts, beliefs, desires, decisions, and feelings we experience are all bound up together into what it means to be an embodied soul. To care for the mind, therefore, is to likewise care for all areas of one’s inner life. As we seek together to foster an educational renaissance in our modern era, a pivotal first step will be to retrace our steps to this full-orbed view of the mind. When we take this physical-spiritual perspective, we will not so easily lose sight of our need for divine grace in the pursuit of real knowledge, a trap into which both moderns and postmoderns have fallen.

The post The Life of the Mind, Part 1: From Proverbs to Einstein appeared first on .

In this series on child development, I will take a look at a few of these matters bridging historical debates with modern research on topics such as the nature of the mind, the stages a child goes through as it develops and the goals or purposes of child development. Along the way I will also have in view practical take aways that will enable us to make the most of our resources as teachers creating optimal learning environments for our students. In this first part, we will tackle the issue of what the mind knows and how it knows.

We begin by going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. What we will see is that they come to different conclusions about the mind, especially with regard to how the mind comes to know things. In a previous post I looked at some of the neuro biology of the mind, using Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows as a point of departure. Now we can go way back in time to see how the mind was thought of by a couple of classical thinkers. Plato will assert that knowledge is innate, whereas Aristotle will contend that the mind is a blank slate and knowledge comes to the mind from the eternal world. We’ll take a long look at Plato and Aristotle, since they initiate the long debate about how the mind acquires knowledge. Along the way we will see that despite their differences, both situate their understanding of the mind within a broader context of educational goals. The virtuous citizen is the goal. For one, virtue is innate and must be drawn out. For the other virtue must be acquired through habituating the mind in the direction of virtue.

Plato on the Innate Mind

Plato addresses education primarily in two works, Republic and Laws. In his Republic, a system of education is outlined that would best support a just and orderly city-state. This Socratic dialogue devotes much space to the means and ends of educating everyone in society, yet the ultimate goal of education is to create a ruling class composed of guardians and philosophers. Plato’s Laws was written later in life and is a dialogue with an Athenian stranger. Like Republic, education is considered to be foundational to a properly just and ordered society. A summary statement occurs in Laws 643e, “the education we speak of is training from childhood in goodness (ἀρετή), which makes a man eagerly desirous of becoming a perfect citizen, understanding how both to rule and be ruled righteously” (trans. R.G. Bury [Harvard University Press, 1967]).

For Plato, the chief end of education was to create a ruling class that would ensure the freedom of society. “Our Guardians were to be freed from all forms of manual work; their function was to be the expert provision of freedom for our state” (Republic 395b-c; trans. H.D.P. Lee, [Penguin, 2003]). In order to promote these ends, virtue or arete was the purpose of education. In order for society to be free, its leaders must understand and practice virtue. Plato considered it essential that all children receive education, even though it was only the males of the ruling class that would go on to advanced study in mathematics and philosophy. So there is something democratic in Plato’s view on education (education for all children) that eventually funnels into something much more aristocratic.

Plato divided educational stages into three basic groupings. In primary or elementary education, students would learn music and gymnastics. Around the age of 18 students would then enter into military training. Then around 20 select students would enter into higher education studying mathematics, astronomy, musical theory, logic, metaphysics and so forth. It seems that Plato desired all children, even girls, to participate in primary education, although whether that was applied in practice is difficult to tell. In Plato’s thinking, we can see the emergence of something like stages of development leading to a stratification of education into three levels of education: primary, secondary and higher education. We will keep this three-fold division of education stages in mind in anticipation of part two in this series, which will delve deeper into stages of child development.

The rationale behind Plato’s understanding of primary education is worth exploring. In Laws (2.653d) Plato posits that children are like the young of other animals in that they are incapable of “keeping either its body or its tongue quiet.” This is why the primary mode of education should occur through singing in choir and dancing. “The well-educated man will be able both to sing and dance well” (Laws 2.654b). The proviso is that the person should sing good songs and dance good dances (2.654c). We can relate this back to Plato’s general understanding of education as aimed at virtue in The Republic where he posits that the child ought to have presented to them good speech (εὐλογία), good music (εὐαρμοστία), good forms of dance (εὐσχημοσύνη) and good rhythms (εὐρυθμία) in order that the mind and character of the child be well formed (Republic 3.400d-e).

Now what Plato proposes as the central method of education is mimesis, or the art of imitation. One key passage will suffice to convey his thought here. When a person is presented with items of eternal goodness and beauty “he will endeavor to imitate them and, as far as may be, to fashion himself in their likeness and assimilate himself to them” (Republic 6.500c). Thus, if a person is to be made into a virtuous creature, it is imperative that there is virtuous material for that individual to imitate. They become like the virtuous thing, which is why they must be presented with good speech, music, dances and rhythms.

I think Plato’s idea of imitation or mimesis has merit to it. We can perceive the connection between mimesis and narration, for instance. When we narrate or tell back, we are imitating and assimilating great ideas along the lines of what Plato envisioned. To learn more about the classical background to narration, see Jason’s second article in his series on the history of narration. I also appreciate how the CiRCE Institute has raised awareness of mimetic teaching as a method in the classical Christian movement. However, we might question Plato’s view of the child as dismissive of the child’s true potential. The view of the child is that it is a being that is not fully adult. In many respects this is true; many of the capacities of adulthood are absent in the child. But as we explore this concept of child development, Plato represents a particular view of the child as not adult and therefore lacking in some way.

Vocational Training or True Education?

There is much value in pausing here to consider a key aspect of Plato’s educational program. In Laws, Plato begins his analysis of education by looking at vocational training. He recommends, for instance, that a good builder should be directed to play with toy houses in the nursery (643b-c). This kind of vocational training enables the worker to be happy and possess mastery in a trade (643d). Plato then pivots to a definition of true education. If it was granted that the most happy and skilled craftsman was presented with miniature tools in the nursery, how much more would a virtuous citizen be trained to maintain a good state if presented with virtue in the nursery?

Based on his consideration of Plato’s Laws, Andrew Domanski provides a scathing comparison of Plato’s principles of true education and modernist education. Domanski writes:

“Plato insists on value-based education from the very outset. In so doing, he provides a moral and ethical impetus which is almost entirely absent from today’s secular systems of education. The general absence of Platonic virtue from modern early education goes a long way towards explaining the ills that increasingly beset our societies.”

Domanski, “Principles of Early Education in Plato’s ‘Laws,’” Acta Classica, vol. 50, 2007, p. 71.

As we consider how classical education seeks to renew lost educational principles, Domanski’s remark poignantly addresses a key critique we share. The failure of the modernist educational experiment has left generations adrift in a tempestuous ocean without any light to guide the way. The reduction of education to vocational training, Domanski argues, is not true education in the Platonic sense.

“It is clear by now that the bulk of what we call education today is, in Platonic terms, little more than vocational training. It follows that the majority of highly skilled professionals (for example doctors, engineers, nuclear scientists and economists), who have not received intensive early instruction in virtue, must be regarded as uneducated in Platonic terms. Conversely, a street-sweeper or labourer who has received early instruction in civic and moral values, would be considered to be education in the true, Platonic sense” (“Principles,” p. 72).

It is difficult to swim against this stream. Many students and parents come to us with the assumption that true education is merely vocational training. Many of us in our educational renewal movement were raised in this cultural assumption, making it difficult to not let the classroom collapse into mere vocational training. That’s why we need not only to train in virtue, but also to be advocates for a virtue-based education.

Aristotle and the Blank Slate

Aristotle inherited many of the views on education Plato put forward. In many respects, Aristotle’s views are nuances of Plato. For instance, Aristotle views the goal of education as happiness. Aristotle highly esteems virtue along with honor, pleasure and intelligence, but one pursues these for the sake of happiness (εὐδαιμονία) whereas one does not choose happiness in order to pursue virtue (Nic. Eth. 1097b). Now regarding happiness or eudaimonia, Aristotle puts forward that true happiness is conceived as the good life, which we might also call a life well lived. Aristotle considers that all people would agree that it is the good life that produces true happiness, but that what constitutes this happiness is a matter of dispute (Nic. Eth. 1095a). So from the outset, Plato and Aristotle are not in fundamental disagreement about the goal of education, they simply are emphasizing what we might consider two sides of the same coin. Virtue and living the good life go hand in hand, with both being necessary to promote a civil society.

Another development Aristotle puts forward is the role habit plays in education. He proposes that intellectual virtue comes about through instruction, whereas “moral or ethical virtue is produced by habit” (Nic. Eth. 1103a). Aristotle sees an etymological connection between the words ethic (ἠθική) and habit (ἔθος). A student is therefore to gain moral virtues through repeated exercises that build the character of the individual. You can read more about Aristotle’s view of habits in Jason’s article “Excellence Comes by Habit.” In addition, you can download my eBook “A Guide to Implementing Habit Training.”

Like Plato, Aristotle divided a child’s educational program into three stages. Aristotle’s view of the child was less animistic, as he included alongside music and gymnastic reading, writing and drawing. There was still a belief in the limitations of the child, however, with higher intellectual pursuits reserved for males in their twenties. Between the primary level of education, which tended to be more mechanical, was the military training of youths as they learned strategy and tactics alongside their military drills. The stages of education in both Plato and Aristotle were not based on a fully articulated understanding of stages of human development, so we will wait for the next article to really dive into this matter.

The main point of debate between Plato and Aristotle comes not in the layout of their educational program, but in their view of the nature of the child’s mind. For Plato, all knowledge is innate, residing in the mind of the individual from birth. The role of education is therefore to unlock this innate knowledge through recollection or remembering. Because the soul is immortal, it has this connection to knowledge so that it is possible to discover what we do not know by courageous inquiry (Plato, Meno 86a-b). Plato illustrates this by Socrates questioning a slave boy and helping him discover his innate knowledge of a geometrical concept (Meno 84d-85b).

Aristotle, however, views the mind not as a storehouse of innate knowledge, but as a blank slate or tabula rasa. The mind of the child is like any other sense organ in that it is acted upon by outside forces. So one can write upon this blank slate by helping the child to acquire knowledge by learning and discovery (Aristotle, De Anima, III.4-7). Unlike Plato, who thinks education is the process of unlocking innate knowledge, Aristotle views education as the process of acquiring knowledge. This has been a longstanding debate for educational theorists down the ages.

The Enlightenment Dead End

The debate between blank slate theory and innate knowledge took on new energy during the Enlightenment. Rationalism had prevailed during the Renaissance era as a new humanistic impulse highlighted the role of human rational faculties as the sole source of knowledge over and against divine revelation. We can trace certain elements of the secularization of Western society to this transition, even though the rationalism of the Renaissance was one of the contributing factors to religious renewal during the Reformation.

Having already devoted so much space to Plato and Aristotle, we will rush our way through the major voices in the Rationalism/Empiricism debate. Several of these figures address education at length, and at some point I should come back to any number of them to further develop their nuanced take on education and learning. For now, however, the aim of this brief traipse through the Enlightenment is to see how blank slate and innate theories took on new emphases. In particular, we will see how both theories became divorced from the goal of education to form learners into virtuous individuals.

The Enlightenment questioned whether human rational thought was indeed the source of knowledge, pitting several figures against one another. Rationalists such as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz were contested by Empiricists like Bacon, Locke and Hume. A new emphasis on scientific method placed more confidence in sensory experience as the true source of knowledge, placing doubt on the role of rationality. The concept of the mind and its nature figured prominently in this debate.

René Descartes (1596-1650), regarded as the father of modern philosophy, argued that ideas are innate, divinely supplied and accessed through the application of logic. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1678), on the other hand, was an early proponent of empiricism, believing that human behavior can largely be explained materialistically. Ideas, he posited, are external to the human mind. This combination of materialism and non-innate ideas meant that Hobbes viewed though, imagination and memory as instances of sense experience working on the matter of the brain.

John Locke (1632-1704) took up the debate, directly opposing Descartes’s view of the mind, believing the mind to be devoid of all ideas at birth. It is experiences acquired through sense that become imprinted on the mind. Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) then categorically critiques Locke point by point. He posits that universally assented truisms must be innate. Anyone not assenting to a universal truth demonstrates that they have not become aware of it, not that it is not innate. This goes against Locke’s idea that universally assented truisms are actually acquired through experience, just that people have forgotten when and where they learned it.

The idea that human knowledge is solely gained through experience is then championed again. David Hume (1711-1776) essentially views human experience as sensate, making us nothing more than a bundle of nerves. For Hume there are no norms, only facts. This move in the empiricist camp moved rapidly toward skepticism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a rationalist who took a different view on norms, finding morality to be natural or innate. Surprisingly, though, he proposes that society has a negative influence impinging on the child’s innate perfectibility.

This review of the rationalist/empirical debate is far too succinct, but it lands us in a place where both innate knowledge and blank slate notions are no longer tied to the sense of virtue espoused by Plato and Aristotle. On the one hand, the blank slate theory of the empiricists leaves the individual a mass of sensate nerves, and knowledge as a store of facts disconnected from a sense of “ought.” On the other hand, innate knowledge can be likened to the “noble savage,” or humans in their natural state. Civilization corrupts this innate knowledge in the attempt to indoctrinate the individual with some moral code.

Confronted by Neuro-biology and Cognitive Science

Recently Steven Pinker challenged this state of affairs in his book The Blank Slate: The Denial of Human Nature (2003). Pinker’s concern is that people have committed to a view of human development as a blank slate to explain problems like racism or sexism as learned behaviors. He draws upon advances in neuro-biology and cognitive science to demonstrate that there are elements of the mind that are innate. He points to Noam Chomsky’s theory of language to show that underlying all human language are universal concepts of grammar. There is a certain amount of genetic code that determines, to some extent, cognitive behaviors. Furthermore, the brain has sets of neural networks that preprogram the mind to accomplish different cognitive functions, such as learn language, calculate quantities, or put one thought with another.

Pinker combines this notion of innateness with breakthroughs in neural plasticity to show that even though the mind is not a blank slate, the innate aspect of the mind is not predetermined solely by our genetic code. Yes, genes do a fair bit of work to determine certain outcomes, but genes work with feedback from the environment. Interestingly, the sense perception work that was so powerful an argument for empiricists in the Enlightenment didn’t account for genetic code. What Pinker shows is that aspects of our personality and temperament, which are genetically determined, create something like a sieve that regulates how we interpret our environments. Nature and nurture are working with and against each other, causing our minds to develop in somewhat unpredictable ways. Even though Pinker demonstrates how our minds are composed of far more innate factors that the blank slate accounts for, he also shows how neural plasticity means our brains change as they learn, acquiring new, non-innate knowledge. Pinker’s work, then, seems to move us in the direction of a synthesis of innate and blank slate theory in helpful ways.

One last idea I want to draw out from Pinker, which is why I have devoted so much attention to him, is that in light of the innate yet malleable mind, he demonstrates that morality is a universal. Every culture shares a great deal of common moral code traits. This concept reminds me of Jordan Peterson’s connection between the snake reflex and dragon narratives. Our brains are wired to flinch away from snakes or anything that looks like a snake. This is an innate, hard-wired reflex that requires no conscious thought. If we were to see, think and then react, we would already be bitten by the snake. This deep neurological structure is something Peterson connects to a universal fascination with dragon narratives. It seems that just about every culture has stories of heroes confronting dragons to rescue the maiden. What Peterson is observing is something that seems to be universal in every culture and that has a basis in our neurological brain structure. This corresponds well with what Pinker is talking about. Whereas the result of the Enlightenment project left us with a material brain and no virtue, Pinker has applied recent science to show a more nuanced understanding of the human mind connected with virtue.

Practical Take Aways

Having walked this long road through philosophy and theory, let’s consider a few practical results of this study of how the mind develops. First, we see how theories of the mind brought us to a fairly destitute place devoid of values. As an educational renewal movement, we can now understand that the goal toward which the mind is developed is a value-rich end. We are cultivating virtues. Certain aspects of virtue are inherent in the child, while others require us to bring virtuous knowledge into contact with the mind. We can agree with Plato that courage already resides in the person and only needs to be unlocked. But we can also agree with Aristotle that a truly courageous person is one who is practiced in courage, who has formed the habit of courage. Let us not shy way from connecting learning to values.

Second, the mind seems to come preprogrammed for learning and that certain avenues of learning are optimal for acquiring new knowledge. I was struck by this quote from Charlotte Mason which seems to anticipate some of Pinker’s conclusions:

“I have so far urged that knowledge is necessary to men and that, in the initial stages, it must be conveyed through a literary medium, whether it be knowledge of physics or of Letters, because there would seem to be some inherent quality in mind which prepares it to respond to this form of appeal and no other. I say in the initial stages, because possibly, when the mind becomes conversant with knowledge of a given type, it unconsciously translates the driest formulae into living speech.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, pp. 333-334

Notice how she finds that the mind has a certain “inherent quality” that enable the mind to acquire knowledge. That quality is a literary bent. The mind really likes story. So when presenting new information, embedding that knowledge in story form optimizes learning. I think this is why a vast majority of Scripture is in narrative form and why children love to hear stories. Let us not shy away from placing before our children great stories full of rich ideas and noble values.

Finally, the notion that children are persons takes on new significance when we realize that their minds are composed of innate qualities and yet are capable of learning much new knowledge. When we consider how children are beings with genetic data and predispositions but are also beings capable to tremendous change, there is a sense of marvel we should have when beholding a child. When we educate there is untapped potential that will grow and learn regardless of our influence on the child. In this way the teacher really needs to get out of the way so that the child can flourish. But because the child can also be molded, we as teachers must be careful to place before the child that which is worthy of his or her attention. Let us not shy away from promoting a growth mindset among our children.

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