What does it mean to love God? How are we to love Him? What are we to love about Him? What parts of ourselves are we to employ in this endeavor? 

It has become popular in church circles today to emphasize loving God through the heart, the seat of our desires, affections, and emotions. Scholars such as James K.A. Smith promote recalibrating these desires through implementing intentionally formative habits, liturgies, and rituals. This whole-body approach to worship, Smith teaches, will form over time our desires to long for God’s kingdom above all else.

Smith is writing in response to what he believes has become a key error in the western church today: an overemphasis on human rationality. Smith does not deny that the human capacity to think, remember, and understand is essential to being human. But, Smith contends, it is not sufficient. Therefore, a full-orbed approach to discipleship and education will include the intentional formation of the heart, specifically through encountering beauty in communities through art, music, poetry, nature, and feasts.

In general, I agree with Smith and have interacted closely with his writing, such as here. A human is more than a brain on a stick. At the same time, it is important for Christians today to not swing to the other side of the pendulum and ignore human rationality altogether. In 1994, Mark Noll, who taught at Wheaton College before Notre Dame, famously wrote The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Spoiler alert: The scandal Noll refers to essentially is that, at the time of the publication of the book, there was not much of an evangelical mind. Conservative, Bible-believing Christians too often settled for tweet-length quips (before Twitter), proof texting, and feel-good theology as an alternative to quality research. 

Similarly, in 2018, Jonathan Haidt, an agnostic social psychologist at New York University, wrote The Coddling of the American Mind to raise the alarm that many Americans today have exchanged a rigorous pursuit of truth for group think and emotional reasoning. As a result, we have sidelined the mind from doing the intellectual work God intended it to, specifically the task of thinking through complex topics with lucidity and care.

In this second article in my ongoing series on the life of the mind, I want to dig deeper into Jesus’ command in the gospels to love God with the mind, alongside heart, soul, and strength. According to Jesus, one’s intellectual life is not spiritually neutral. What we think about, how we think, and our approach to learning itself all contain import for the way we know and love God. A key aspect of Christian discipleship, therefore, becomes cultivating the life of the mind for a vibrant love of God to grow. Let us now explore how this might be.

Jesus‘ Pursuit of Wisdom From the Past

One distinctive characteristic of the Christian classical education renewal movement is an enthusiasm for gleaning wisdom from the past. This knowledge of ancient wisdom provides students with a broader context for the history of ideas and helps them better discern truth from falsehood in their own day. 

To illustrate this insight, C.S. Lewis uses the metaphor of a clock. He writes, “If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said…Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeking certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period” (“Introduction” to On the Incarnation, p. 4). 

When we read the teachings of Jesus, we find that our Lord shared this deep appreciation for wisdom from the past. As a faithful Jew, Jesus was a faithful follower of the Old Testament Law, which he believed was wisdom revealed by God himself. In Luke 10:25-28, a legal expert approaches Jesus with the goal to put this knowledge of the Law to the test. With a striking blend of authority and compassion, Jesus showcases his commitment to the Law while counter-testing the legal expert with his own question.

The Shema with Two Additions

The legal expert’s test question is about how to inherit eternal life, the answer of which both he and Jesus agree is found in the Law. Quoting the Pentateuch, the expert recites to Jesus, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” (Deut. 6:5). Without pause, he continues “and [love] your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18).

It is important to note that the Deuteronomy passage is one of the most well-known in Jewish history and culture. It begins with the injunction, “Hear, O Israel,” which becomes the inspiration for the passage’s name, Shema (the word for “hear” in Hebrew is “Shema”). For faithful Jews, the Shema is handwritten on a small parchment and placed at shoulder height on the doorposts of observant Jewish homes (see Joel B. Green’s The Gospel of Luke of the New International Commentary series for further background on this passage). This practice is in accordance with Moses’ command in the passage to teach the words of the Law to Hebrew tradition throughout all facets of everyday life.

Interestingly, in Jesus’ conversation with the legal expert, there are two notable additions to the Shema. One is the neighbor-love command. The other is the inclusion of the mind to the list of ways humans are commanded to love God. (In the Shema, Moses lists heart, soul, and might, but not mind because the heart in Hebrew anthropology includes one’s rationality.) While both additions are worth exploring, in this article, I will focus only on the second, the addition of the mind as a pathway for loving God.

Love’s Four-Fold Structure

In his new book The Life We’re Looking For (Penguin Random House, 2022), author Andy Crouch references the Shema to offer a biblically-informed summary of what being fully human involves: “Every human person is a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love” (33). 

Crouch distills these four categories as follows:

• Heart: the seat of desire and emotion
• Soul: the depth of self that is distinctive to each person

• Mind: the capacity and inclination to better understand our experience of God and this world

• Strength: the ability to work and play with all our being 

Together, this four-fold structure of what it means to be human finds its underlying goal to love, first and foremost, God, and also our neighbor. Crouch writes, “Most of all, we are designed for love–primed before we were born to seek out others, wired neurologically to respond with empathy and recognition, coming most alive when we are in relationships of mutual dependence and trust. Love calls out the best in us–it awakens our hearts, it stirs up the depths of our souls, it focuses our minds, it arouses our bodies to action and passion (35). 

A Loving Mind

The question, then, is how do we love God with our minds? What does a loving mind look? How do we hold together the deep affections of the heart with the activities of the mind? I will continue this inquiry in my next article, but for now, I will leave readers with three potential categories for how we might answer the question.

What we think about

Paul writes in Philippians 4:8 that Christians are to think about “…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.” It seems to me that one way we love God is by filtering the attention and content of our minds on what is good, true, and beautiful, all of which comes from God Himself.

How we think

While the mind is often connoted with cold rationality, I want to suggest that there is an artistry to mental activity that can be warm, elegant, and connective. When humans learn to think wisely according to the broader vision of wisdom as described in the Book of Proverbs, they flourish in a way that aligns with how God created the world. Proverbs 8 provides clues, specifically, for how the pursuit of wisdom connects to loving God with our minds.

Our approach to learning

In modern society, learning has been stripped of its relational qualities in service of utilitarian ends. Knowledge is power, or at least, the avenue for getting into college. But what if the pursuit of knowledge is meant to be primarily a relational enterprise? We form relationships with whom and that which we know. We can love God with our minds when we seek knowledge about Him that our love for Him may abound.

Join the Conversation

These are preliminary ideas that I will pick up in my next article. For now, I would be curious to hear what you think. How can we love God with our minds? Please comment below and join me in this exploration.

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The Four-fold Manner of Knowing an Object

Among the most important concepts we teach our students in logic class or perhaps in rhetoric class is Aristotle’s four causes. Aristotle writes about the four causes in Physics 2.3, and examining an object or principle from the perspective of the four causes can provide a tremendous amount of knowledge, as Aristotle states, “Knowledge is the object of our inquiry, and men do not think they know a thing till they have grasped the ‘why.’”

The listing of the four causes as laid out by Aristotle can be examined in any order, although we’ll begin here by laying them out as he has written them. First, the material cause has to do with literal materials: a statue is made of bronze, an animal of bones and fur, etc. The second cause is what Aristotle calls the form or archetype (τὸ εἶδος καὶ τὸ παράδειγμα). This cause gets at the essence of the object under consideration. Philosophers have called this the “formal cause.” Taking the examples above, a statue is a work of art and an animal can be a predator or a pet. We can see that there is a growing complexity as we apply these thought exercises to any given object, which was the goal of Aristotle’s exercise.

The third and fourth causes take into account spans of time. The “efficient cause” is described by Aristotle as the source of change (literally “the beginning of change,” ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς μεταβολῆς). A sculptor created the statue whereas an animal was birthed from its parents. One can perceive a chain of efficient causes, for the sculptor was likewise birthed from his parents. This chain goes all the way back to what has been called “the unmoved mover” or what Aristotle calls “the maker of what is made and the changer what is changed” (τὸ ποιοῦν τοῦ ποιουμένου καὶ τὸ μεταβάλλον τοῦ μεταβαλλομένου).

If the third cause looks backward temporally, then the fourth cause looks forward to the end or telos of the object. There are many possible ends or goals for which an object tends. For instance, a statue might have as its ultimate goal to commemorate an individual or to bring delight to the viewer. The example Aristotle uses is walking. Why do we walk? For the goal of being healthy. The Westminster Divines who produces the Shorter Catechism begin with the “final cause:”

Q: What is the chief end of man?

A: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

These four topics or tools of investigation can be applied generally to every object. Once learned, these can be a handy structure to guide discussion in a classroom. If you are a teacher of logic or rhetoric, you can use these four causes as a brief exercise at the beginning of class as a warm up.

Applying the Four Causes to Educational Method

One of the projects I put my mind to was thinking through what is a student or learner. This idea forced me to examine more closely my educational philosophy and here I will attempt to bring into conversation Aristotle by way of the four causes and Charlotte Mason from her sixth volume Toward a Philosophy of Education.

A central tenet of Mason’s philosophy is that “children are born persons.” For Mason, this means that children are not blank slates, but are born with all the attributes and capabilities of an individual created in the image of God. Prominent in her thinking is that the mind is a powerful force from birth. The infant shows “that he always has all the mind he requires for his occasions; that is, that his mind is the instrument of his education and that his education does not produce his mind” (Vol. 6, 36). If this is the case for the infant, how much more ought we to appreciate the capacity of the learner at all stages of their educational journey. So, to that end, let us explore what a learner is according to Aristotle’s four causes.

What is a Learner?: The Mind

When we think about the material cause of a learner, our focus turns to the physical traits of the student. As bears of the image of God, we believe that all people are embodied souls. In the Shema of Deuteronomy 6, we are commanded to “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5). In other words, our material includes the immaterial. When Jesus quotes this commandment, notice that he includes an additional part of our humanity: the mind. “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Jesus includes our mental faculty alongside our spiritual, moral and physical traits. The reasoning faculty expressed by Jesus was already inherent in the immaterial heart and soul. However, the explicit expression of the mind subsumes even the reasoning part of us under the dominion of the Lord our God.

The mind itself, the central component of our learning, has its material aspect. Charlotte Mason explores the connection between the mind and the brain:

“A child comes into their hands with a mind of amazing potentialities: he has a brain too, no doubt, the organ and instrument of that same mind, as a piano is not music but the instrument of music. Probably we need not concern ourselves about the brain which is subject to the same conditions as the rest of the material body, is fed with the body’s food, rests, as the body rests, requires fresh air and wholesome exercise to keep it in health, but depends upon the mind for its proper activities.”

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 38.

In this passage, Mason leaves unresolved the mind/brain debate, which to her credit is an unproductive conundrum. Instead, where Mason takes us is to the analogy that the mind is nourished just like the body is. While our brain is composed of “nerved and blood” and therefore must be nourished by food, our mind is nourished by ideas.

What is a Learner?: The Capacity to Understand

The formal cause is the essence of the learner. There is a power within every child, within every human, to understand. It is in the nature of a child to be curious, and this curiosity is the effort to understand. According to Mason, learning is the capacity to “experience all the things they hear and read of” (Vol 6, 40). No matter what subject or lesson is being taught, the child in its essence will feed on ideas. Mason criticizes the teacher, who when presenting a lesson finds that the child is bored:

“If they do not [experience the lesson], it is not for lack of earnestness and intention on the part of the teacher; his error is rather want of confidence in children. He has not formed a just measure of a child’s mind and bores his scholars with much talk about matters which they are able to understand for themselves much better than he does.”

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 41

In this case, the teacher has not properly taken the measure of the learner. When we lecture and prattle on as teachers, we run the risk of diminishing the essence of the learner. But if we draw upon the curiosity and the will to understand inherent in the child, no lesson can be boring for the living ideas will be a feast for the mind.

What is a Learner?: Nourished by Ideas

The efficient cause of learning centers on the mind. An efficient cause, as Aristotle considers it, pertains to the principle or agent of change for the object under consideration. For Mason, “Mind must come into contact with mind through the medium of ideas” (Vol. 6, 39). A learner grows as a consequence of the mind growing. When the mind comes into contact with another mind, it is able to absorb knowledge just as nutrients are absorbed into our bodies through ingesting food.

“We must begin with the notion that the business of the body is to grow; and it grows upon food, which food is composed of living cells, each a perfect life in itself. In like manner, though all analogies are misleading and inadequate, the only fit sustenance for the mind is ideas, and an idea too, like the single cell of cellular tissue, appears to go through the stages and functions of a life. We receive it with appetite and some stir of interest. It appears to feed in a curious way.”

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 39.

The analogy can be spelled out more when we consider that the nutrients our body needs come from living things: plants and animals. Ideas are also living things. They grow, building off of one another and generating new ideas. So our minds grow not in physical size, but in greater intellectual capacity, through the ingestion of living ideas.

What is a Learner?: Fitted for the Good Life

The final cause is the aim or goal of the object. In our modern era, this has be a point of confusion. Is the end or goal of learning a good grade, an entry into a good college, or landing a good job? When these aims are teased out, we find that they fall short of the true glory of learning. It may be surprising what Mason sees as the goal for learning:

“Enough, that the children have minds, and every man’s mind is his means of living; but it is a great deal more. Working men will have leisure in the future and how this leisure is to be employed is a question much discussed. Now, no one can employ leisure fitly whose mind is not brought into active play every day; the small affairs of a man’s own life supply no intellectual food and but small and monotonous intellectual exercise. Science, history, philosophy, literature, must no longer be the luxuries of the ‘educated’ classes; all classes must be educated and sit down to these things of the mind as they do to their daily bread. History must afford its pageants, science its wonders, literature its intimacies, philosophy its speculations, religion its assurances to every man, and his education must have prepared him for wanderings in these realms of gold.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 42-43

In this, Mason anticipates the masterful work of Josef Pieper. In his Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Pieper argues that we have mixed up the aim of life. We have succumbed to a philosophy of “total labor,” adhering to the maxim “one does not work to live; one lives to work” attributed to Max Weber (Leisure 20). Pieper proposes an alternative view drawing upon Aristotle such that we work to have leisure. Now the problem is that we have not been sufficiently trained as learners to know what to do with our leisure time.

Mason envisions the monotony of world of work for work’s sake. Instead, if we truly understand that we are being fitted for living the good life, our educational aims take on new scope. Science, history, philosophy and literature are not aimed at getting a good job. Instead, they are aimed at making us the kinds of people that take joy in these areas of knowledge. We grow up to be people who retain the curiosity of childhood and seek understanding where it may be found.

Mason the Classical Educationist

I cannot be certain that Mason had in mind Aristotle’s four causes as she wrote about the learner. But what strikes me as I read through Mason is how compatible she is with the contours of the classical Christian education movement. Mason strikes me as someone as much steeped in the classical educational model as were Dorothy Sayers and C. S. Lewis. It was the prevailing model until the progressivist model of education set in with the onset of 20^th century industrialism.

I am often surprised when I hear speak of how Mason and classical education are incompatible. It is true that Mason is not spelling out the liberal arts trivium and quadrivium as our classical school tend to parse them out. But I think this has more to do with an undue focus on the structure of classical curriculum. Reading Mason as frequently as I do, it is in the cadences and tenor of her writings that one gets the sense of her indebtedness to the Greek and Latin philosophical tradition, to a Western cultural heritage that is accessed through great books, and to the centrality of Christianity to nourish our souls as much to feed our minds. Perhaps this unique take on reading Mason in light of Aristotle’s four causes will inspire you to further investigate Charlotte Mason as a classical educationist.

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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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