I have to say I hesitated before using such a cliché myself in the title of this closing post in the Flow of Thought series, because I know very well how meaningless clichés can become. If everyone says they support the “love of learning,” then what does it even mean if it doesn’t change how we do school or run our classes? Now I do want to pause to indicate that, as far as I can read the education landscape, there has been a growing recognition in several quarters about the importance of inspiring a love of learning in students. More educators now than fifty years ago fear the deadening effect that incompetent and uninspiring teaching can have on students.

Previous articles in this series, The Flow of Thought:

Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake; Part 2: The Joy of Memory; Part 3: Narration as Flow; Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games; Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom; Part 8: Restoring the School of Philosophers.

At general education conferences I have attended educators are discussing more and more how grades and a focus on grades as a measure of achievement can suck the joy and life out of learning. It is not so bad outside the classical education and Charlotte Mason world, in this respect, as it once was, even if many teachers’ practices have not yet caught up with their values. Or perhaps we could say that, while many educators value the lifelong love of learning as a goal, they are currently trying to get their students there through entertainment, gimmicks and classroom management manipulations, rather than through the flow of thought. But we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that their efforts are sincerely meant, even if ultimately ineffective.  

And so, I would conclude that part at least of the reason for the cliched nature of the phrase the ‘love of learning’ is a real recognition of this noble goal on the part of educators. But the other reason I feel entitled to use this cliché in my title is the force of the argument we’ve made thus far in The Flow of Thought series. Our thesis has been, following the famed positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that learning can be enjoyable. If pursued in a way such that the challenges meet our current abilities, learning in any domain of the classical liberal arts and sciences can issue in the flow of thought.

Pleasure vs. Enjoyment

As you’ll remember, flow is that timeless state of focus and concentration that people around the world describe as exhilarating, meaningful and joyful. From rock climbers to scientists, mathematicians to novelists, whether as a hobby or one’s main work, getting into flow promotes something beyond mere pleasure that our psychologist terms “enjoyment”:

“Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some prior expectation or satisfied a need or a desire but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, perhaps something even unimagined before…. Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment. Playing a close game of tennis that stretches one’s ability is enjoyable, as is reading a book that reveals things in a new light, as is having a conversation that leads us to express ideas we didn’t know we had…. After an enjoyable event we know that we have changed, that our self has grown: in some respect, we have become more complex as a result of it.” (46)

It’s this sense of enjoyment that resonates with the love of learning, properly understood. It’s not the titillating pleasure of some entertaining tidbit that leaves you as ignorant as you were before. It’s the transformation of the self, the enlargement of the soul, through an encounter with reality, through a grappling with the forms of existence. Incidentally, this distinction mirrors Augustine’s distinction between to enjoy and to use (Latin fruor and utor), though Augustine reserves proper enjoyment for love of God alone. There is something about enjoyment, in this sense, that is transcendent.

One of the reasons I love Dr. Jordan Peterson’s lectures and his book Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is his ability to express the deep paradox of pain and meaningful transcendence one feels in this sort of grapping with reality. The love of learning is not watching some namby pamby cartoon with its prepackaged tasty morsels of information. It’s the exhilaration felt after facing your fears and wrestling that monster in the dark, or slaying the dragon of chaos just beyond the order of your understanding. It’s struggle and suffering in the pursuit of a meaningful goal. Learning, like life, is not all roses and cupcakes, even or especially when you love it. But in spite of the pain of progressing in the flow of thought, it’s still so enjoyable that we’re even willing to do it as a hobby.

Amateurs and Dilettantes

We’ve already discussed the idea of becoming an amateur scientist or historian. Our psychologist has suggested these avenues as methods to create order in consciousness in the average adult’s leisure time. Since TV correlates with mild depression (119), we need something more challenging to grapple with to experience enjoyment. Learning in any domain presents this optimal challenge for leisure, hence the lifelong love of learning.

Csikszentmihalyi closes out his chapter on the flow of thought with reflections on how the modern world has lost this notion of the amateur because of what Josef Pieper has called a culture of “total work” (Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 25). Our psychologist discusses the words ‘amateur’ and ‘dilettante” in detail:

“There are two words whose meanings reflect our somewhat warped attitudes toward levels of commitment to physical or mental activities. These are the terms amateur and dilettante. Nowadays these labels are slightly derogatory. An amateur or dilettante is someone not quite up to par, a person not to be taken very seriously, one whose performance falls sort of professional standards.” (140)

This was not always so. The first is derived from the Latin verb amare, meaning “to love,” and referred to a person who engaged in an activity for the love of it, rather than professionally, for mere profit or material advantage. The second comes from the Latin delectare, “to delight,” and referred to a person who could spend his time doing whatever delighted him the most.

We too often forget this, but the sneer used to go the other way around. The upper class nobles and later on in Britain, at least, the upper middle class, looked down upon the professions and the act of receiving payment as being beneath them. This resonates with the classical contrast between the artes liberals and the artes serviles, those arts which a free man could engage in, not for profit but because he had the leisure that afforded him the opportunity to engage in the higher pursuits that would produce enjoyment (ideally, though this often devolved in the mere pursuit of pleasure), as opposed to the need to work for a living.

The irony is that we live in an era in which the noble’s leisure time is accessible to more people than ever before in the history of the world. Yet “total work” has taken over too many people’s lives, at the same time as passive entertainment predominates. In a lecture I attended last year, Andy Crouch, the author of Culture Making, expressed this cultural development as a movement from a rhythm of work and rest, to toil and boredom. And the skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety bear witness to the disorder in consciousness that results.

We have become too accomplishment focused and lost sight of the joy of experiences, according to our psychologist. And this fact is on display in the negative slippage in these words:

“The earliest meanings of these words therefore drew attention to experiences rather than accomplishments; they described the subjective rewards individuals gained from doing things, instead of focusing on how well they were achieving. Nothing illustrates as clearly our changing attitudes toward the value of experience as the fate of these two words.” (140)

Of course, we should note that there are benefits to our focus on achievement and work. The Puritan work ethic is certainly to be preferred to the privileged ennui of a class of nobles. But in a way that is precisely part of the problem I am describing. Without the love of learning we moderns are all at the same time oppressed proletariats and bored, yet privileged nobles, decrying the 1% that we are ironically a part of, if we only took a global and historical perspective.

The solution seems to be recovering the flow of thought in our leisure time as a lifelong pursuit, with the intrinsic goals of enjoyment on the one hand and personal transformation on the other.

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Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation

Ultimately, this distinction between the amateur and the professional resolves itself into a spectrum of motivation. At one end of the spectrum is engaging in an activity entirely for some external reward, like money or a grade. On the other side is pursuing something merely for the experience itself, like popping a candy in one’s mouth because of the tasty pleasure one will experience.

For too many people learning and school have fallen too close to the first side of that spectrum. As our psychologist describes,

“Many people give up on learning after they leave school because thirteen or twenty years of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories. Their attention has been manipulated long enough from the outside by textbooks and teachers, and they have counted graduation as the first day of freedom.” (141)

They have “learned” for the sake of the grade and because of the need to jump through hoops in order to get on with the real business of life, which often ends up being no less extrinsic and utilitarian, as they get through another day of work, to get the money to live during the few short moments of free time before sleep and starting the rigmarole over again. Instead our psychologist would hope that the school system could be seen as the beginning, rather than the end of education:

“Ideally, the end of extrinsically applied education should be the start of an education that is motivated intrinsically. At that point the goal of studying is no longer to make the grade, earn a diploma, and find a good job. Rather, it is to understand what is happening around one, to develop a personally meaningful sense of what one’s experience is all about.” (141-2)

But if learning is conducted in such a way as to encourage the extrinsic rather than the intrinsic, when will that motivation counter slide on over to the other end of the spectrum? This is why Charlotte Mason call grades or marks “our old enemy” and commented in the preface to her final volume Toward a Philosophy of Education, on how “both teachers and children find an immeasurable difference between the casual interest roused by marks, pleasing oral lessons and other school devices, and the sort of steady avidity for knowledge that comes with the awakened soul” (vol. 6, p. xxvi).

In this series too, we’ve seen how joy in learning is not some mysterious, unattainable holy grail of education. Instead, training the attention and the memory, the trivium arts of language and quadrivium arts of mathematics, history, science and philosophy—all the domains of knowledge and mental skill present games and puzzles for the mind fit to occupy one in delightful contemplation for centuries. And this amateurish love of learning is marvelously democratic in nature:

“We have seen that the mind offers at least as many and as intense opportunities for action as does the body. Just as the use of the limbs and of the senses is available to everyone without regard to sex, race, education, or social class, so too the uses of memory, of language, of logic, of the rules of causation are also accessible to anyone who desires to take control of the mind.” (Csikszentmihalyi 141)

And freedom is found in this free flow of thought afforded by the classical liberal arts and sciences. Even a secular psychologist can acknowledge that “a person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free” since their “thinking will be directed by the opinions of his neighbors, by the editorials in the papers, and by the appeals of television” (141). Thus joy and freedom go hand in hand and issue from the use of leisure in meaningful pursuits.

Falling in Love with Learning

But this requires what Charlotte Mason called an “awakened soul.” We must fall in love with learning. This has analogies to the experience of the newly converted Christian who reads her Bible ecstatically and shares excitedly about the gospel with her friends and acquaintances. There is all the rush, obsession and passion of a lover in the pursuit. In the same way, our psychologist quotes a passage out of Plato’s Philebus to describe the disciples of Socrates:

“The young man who has drunk for the first time from that spring is as happy as if he had found a treasure of wisdom; he is positively enraptured. He will pick up any discourse, draw all its ideas together to make them into one, then take them apart and pull them to pieces. He will puzzle first himself, then also others, badger whoever comes near him, young and old, sparing not even his parents, nor anyone who is willing to list….” (as qtd in Csikzentmihalyi 142)

How can we bottle this true spirit of philosophy, this genuine love of wisdom, so that we can share it with our children and students, our friends and neighbors? Nay simply to drink a draught of it ourselves and restore again the fire that has burned low? What does it take to stoke up the joy of learning in our own lives?

Susan Schaeffer Macaulay talks about how this occurred for her children after attending a “small PNEU school [the organization Charlotte Mason founded], run in a classroom built onto the back of someone’s private home, looking into an English country garden” (38). Previously, one of her children at six years old was “happy enough,” what with the “hamsters, plants, paints, and lots of little booklets” or the “special TV programs, the cute sort that are intended to grab the child’s attention.” It wasn’t all bad. As Susan Schaeffer Macaulay says, “When she came home, she sometimes talked about something that had happened. But there wasn’t much to discuss.” The story was much worse for her older sister: “She was frustrated, had a low opinion of her own achievements, and had no interest in education” (38).

But attending a school inspired by the love of learning that took seriously the challenge of the liberal arts tradition caused a transformation:

“After the first day, Kirsteen came home glowing with life and interest. ‘We had the most exciting story today, but Mrs. Norton stopped at just the wrong place. I can’t wait to hear the next part of the story!’ And what was this exciting, vitalizing story? To my astonishment it was Pilgrim’s Progress, read to them in the original.

“The quite electrifying change in those two children is really indescribable. They had so much to talk about! A wealth of literature, history, art, which was so glorious to work through. Their eyes became brighter, their minds alert. We had grand discussions, again and again. Shakespeare had become a friend whose writing was much loved. The children would argue about the actual characters; for instance, whether Hermione was right or wrong, and what the old shepherd was actually up to (they were enjoying The Winter’s Tale).” (38-39)

The challenges inherent in cultivating this revolutionary experience of falling in love with learning are worth it. And they are worth it not only because of the enjoyment we experience. They are worth it because learning, knowledge, wisdom and skill are, in their very nature, both intrinsically and extrinsically valuable. The dichotomy between joy and usefulness ultimately resolves itself into a paradox.

Our chaotic world is so complex, so unique and so endlessly varied that true knowledge, deep understanding of reality is always useful. We may not know how some particular branch of learning will benefit us or the people around us, but it will. Our spectrum between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards is really a mountain peak, with the perfect blending of the two standing at the summit. Whether we approach the mountain of learning from the easy slopes of pleasure or the rocky crags of rewards, we must ascend the hill if we are to find the delights and benefits that knowledge afford the life well lived. The sights will be glorious, the exertion of the ascent will be exhilarating and view of the terrain will most certainly help us in getting where we want to go next.

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

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

The Life of the Mind

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

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

Charlotte Mason writes,

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

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

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

Education as the Science of Relations

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

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

On this point, Charlotte Mason writes,

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

Nourishing the Mind with Ideas

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

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

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

Ideas vs. Information

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ideas for Life

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

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

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

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

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Given the hype for STEM, defending the value of the humanities (as Martin Luther did, for one) is an important move in the broader education dialogue. And it’s one that’s not very hard to make, when there are articles like this one on how Google was planning to hire more humanities trained employees rather than more programmers. It turns out that technological change and the job market aren’t making the humanities irrelevant after all.

But for a while I’ve felt that the trade-off between STEM and the humanities is an unfortunate false dichotomy. (Logic lesson: false dichotomy – when two things are posed as mutually exclusive options when both can be embraced at the same time.) The seven liberal arts of the classical tradition encompassed BOTH the language arts of the trivium (grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, or perhaps humanities in a general sense) AND the mathematical arts of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy).

In a way, astronomy was the paradigmatic STEM discipline, since it wove together the science of the natural world with mathematical calculations to “save the appearances” and had applications to the travel technologies of the day.

Problems with the Trade-Off Between STEM and the Humanities

Part of the problem with the whole dichotomy is that we’re left arguing about whether to privilege STEM over the humanities or the humanities over STEM, when embracing both would be mutually beneficial. After all, scientists still need to write and publish those rhetorical masterpieces we call academic papers to advance the discipline. And what culturally savvy hipster could not benefit from some of the scientific precision of mathematics and design thinking?

But the other problem, which is more to the point for this blog article, is that a utilitarian focus doesn’t serve either the humanities or STEM careers very well. And that’s because too much focus on money-making skills for the job market doesn’t end up creating the best professionals in either domain. That comes from deep work, passionately and regularly pursued. The best programmers get good at it because they love programming!

STEM and the humanities, or the seven liberal arts of the trivium and quadrivium, were discovered and developed in the first place, because getting into the flow of thought is a source of happiness and joy for human beings. Thinking along the lines of the liberal arts is more like a mental game than a utilitarian bid for power, money or success.

We get support for this notion from an unlikely source, the modern positive psychologist Mihayli Csikszentmihalyi. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial 2008), he writes:

“It is important to stress here a fact that is all too often lost sight of: philosophy and science were invented and flourished because thinking is pleasurable. If thinkers did not enjoy the sense of order that the use of syllogisms and numbers creates in consciousness, it is very unlikely that now we would have the disciplines of mathematics and physics.” (126)

The background for our psychologist’s claim is his idea that our consciousness as human beings is naturally disordered and chaotic, and so one of the primary ways to build human happiness is to engage in activities that order consciousness. While he explores many other ways of achieving flow, that optimal state where our skills meet our challenges and our focus is absorbed by a meaningful activity, one of his chapters is on the flow of thought, or how thinking itself can be an avenue into flow.

Mathematicians and physicists didn’t make their greatest discoveries and push the bounds of human knowledge because of utilitarian motives, but because they got lost in the joy of thought. As he goes on to explain, this claim flies in the face of many historians’ standard explanations of key discoveries:

“The evolution of arithmetic and geometry, for instance, is explained almost exclusively in terms of the need for accurate astronomical knowledge and for the irrigational technology that was indispensable in maintaining the great ‘hydraulic civilizations’ located along the course of large rivers like the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Indus, the Chang Jiang (Yangtze), and the Nile. For these historians, every creative step is interpreted as the product of extrinsic forces, whether they be wars, demographic pressures, territorial ambitions, market conditions, technological necessity, or the struggle for class supremacy.” (126)

Yes, these developments in arithmetic and geometry coincided with applications to “irrigational technology,” but that doesn’t mean that the individuals who invented them did so for such utilitarian reasons. Often it happens that the knowledge necessary for some practical application is discovered first with no thought of its usefulness or application. Then only later, and often by someone else, that knowledge is applied to a practical problem felt by the civilization.

For instance, Csikszentmihalyi tells of the discovery of nuclear fission and how the arms race of World War II is often urged as the inciting historical factor. However, the advancements in knowledge necessary to its development came before and were discovered in a more pleasurable and altogether collegial manner:

“But the science that formed the basis of nuclear fission owed very little to the war; it was made possible through knowledge laid down in more peaceful circumstances—for example, in the friendly exchange of ideas European physicist had over the years in the beer garden turned over to Niels Bohr and his scientific colleagues by a brewery in Copenhagen.” (126)

The joy of thought, of discovery and of solving abstract problems lies at the base of the advance of knowledge, in every age, time and place. As our psychologist summarizes:

“Great thinkers have always been motivated by the enjoyment of thinking rather than by the material rewards that could be gained by it.” (126)

This is supported by several quotations from the Greek philosopher Democritus, a highly original thinker: “It is godlike ever to think on something beautiful and on something new”; “Happiness does not reside in strength or money; it lies in rightness and manysidedness”; “I would rather discover one true cause than gain the kingdom of Persia” (127).

The seven liberal arts of the trivium and quadrivium are those tools of knowledge that are so pleasurable in the handling. Let’s take some time to break down a few of them and see how they work, just for the joy of it.

Gaming the Liberal Art of Grammar

In the classical tradition grammar referred to a much broader category of skills that the modern subject does today. It included all the complex skills involved in reading and interpretation, as well as the mechanics of writing. The term was derived from the Greek word for ‘letter’ (gramma), and thus referred to the holistic study of letters. The famous Roman orator and teacher Quintilian explained in the 1^st century that the best Latin translation of the term was the Latin word litteratura from which we get ‘literature’ (see Institutes of Oratory II.1).

It’s not an accident that in our psychologist’s many studies, one of the most cited ‘flow activities’ that people self-report is the act of reading (Csikszentmihalyi 117). Deep reading, getting lost in a book, is for many a pleasurable activity—the title of Alan Jacob’s book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (which I highly recommend) says it all.

Of course, the foundation of this great grammatical activity of piecing letters together into words is the activity of naming itself. Brining order to consciousness relies on some sort of ordering principle and words provide that. They name persons, places, things or ideas, therefore creating order in the mind for an experience or phenomenon, where only chaos existed before:

“The simplest ordering system is to give names to things; the words we invent form discrete events into universal categories.” (124-5)

In both the Judeo-Christian worldview and the Greek roots of the classical tradition, this primacy of the word is endorsed:

“In Genesis 1, God names day, night, sky, earth, sea, and all the living things immediately after He creates them, thereby completing the process of creation. The Gospel of John begins with: ‘Before the World was created, the Word already existed…’; and Heraclitus starts his now almost completely lost volume: ‘This Word (Logos) is from everlasting, yet men understand it as little after the first hearing of it as before….’” (125)

Readers of the Bible will know that in Genesis 2 God assigns the task of naming the animals to Adam in the sequence leading up to the creation of Eve. Adam, whose name means ‘humanity’ in Hebrew, is given the honor and joy of naming the animals that God brings before him—a task that is fitting for him, given how human beings were made in the image of God according to the chapter before.

In its broadest sense then, grammar and the other trivium arts of dialectic and rhetoric involve the practitioner of them in the process of bringing order out of chaos. It is a godlike activity, to borrow the phrase from Heraclitus, to name and distinguish and describe reality. Why should we wonder that such a process would be pleasurable?

Aside: Download the Free eBook “5 Tips for Fostering Flow in the Classical Classroom”

Wondering how to practically apply the idea of flow in your classroom? These 5 actionable steps will help you keep the insights of flow from being a pie-in-the-sky idea. Embody flow in your classroom and witness the increased joy and skill development that result!

You can download “5 Tips for Fostering Flow in the Classical Classroom” on the flow page. Share the page with a friend or colleague, so they can benefit as well.

Embarking on the Quest of the Quadrivium

As with the language arts, it is to the ancient roots of the classical tradition that Csikszentmihalyi goes in order to explain the flow of thought along the lines of the quadrivium:

“After names came numbers and concepts, and then the primary rules for combining them in predictable ways. By the sixth century B.C. Pythagoras and his students had embarked on the immense ordering task that attempted to find common numerical laws binding together astronomy, geometry, music and arithmetic. Not surprisingly, their work was difficult to distinguish from religion, since it tried to accomplish similar goals: to find a way of expressing the structure of the universe. Two thousand years later, Kepler and then Newton were still on the same quest.” (125)

The point that our psychologist is eager to make in this recitation is that the quadrivium arts were not abstract skills aimed at utilitarian ends. Instead, Pythagoras and his students had religious goals of a monumental nature in their numerical and mathematical work. The birth of the quadrivium was nothing less than a “quest” to “find a way of expressing the structure of the universe.”

We can easily see how such a pursuit would catch the hearts and minds of students. Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain present a similar picture of the quest of the quadrivium in their book The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education (which is coming out soon in a revised and updated version!). They point out that “there was deeply spiritual element to it as well…. Pythagoras thought that the harmony of the spheres, part of the liberal art of music, was established by the power of ‘the One’” (version 1.1, p. 53). This, along with their suggestion that “the study of mathematics ought to strike a balance between wonder, work, wisdom and worship,” seems suggestive of the type of joy and pleasure attained in a flow activity.

Of course, for that to be the case, there would need to be, not only a transcendent quest, but also a series of sub-goals and intermediate tasks with clear feedback and of limited scope, so that the rules for a flow activity could be met. When a challenge exceeds the person’s skills by too much, anxiety tends to crush the possibility for flow; likewise, make the activity too easy and boredom ensues (Csikszentmihaly 74).

The development of rules, representations and proofs seem to assist in the process of defining discrete next steps in the grand quest:

“Besides stories and riddles all civilizations gradually developed more systematic rules for combining information, in the form of geometric representations and formal proofs. With the help of such formulas it became possible to describe the movement of the stars, predict seasonal cycles, and accurately map the earth. Abstract knowledge, and finally what we know as experimental science grew out of these rules.” (125)

It seems that the experience of flow and the advancement of discovery almost require the phenomenon of the absent-minded professor. That is because one of the demands of flow is that the mind be wholly absorbed in a meaningful activity. The scientist or mathematician so absorbed has “temporarily tuned out of everyday reality to dwell among the symbolic forms of their favorite domain of knowledge” (127). A great example of this is how the philosopher Immanuel Kant placed his watch in a pot of boiling water while holding carefully onto his egg in the other hand, ready to time out its cooking.

As our psychologist concludes:

“The point is that playing with ideas is extremely exhilarating…. Not only philosophy but the emergence of new scientific ideas is fueled by the enjoyment one obtains from creating a new way to describe reality.” (127)

The Games of the Mind and the Tools of Learning

Such observations about how the liberal arts of both language and number are pleasurable activities may raise a brow of confusion for some teachers and parents.

After all, knowing that great professors, scientists and philosophers can have a grand old time in their work doesn’t solve the angst of my child or the child in my class, who is either bored by a particular discipline or filled with anxiety and self-consciousness.

So how can we help turn the tools of learning into games of the mind for our students who struggle?

Part of the advice our psychologist’s book seems to imply is a reframing of the teacher’s task. While we might be inclined to think that teachers are primarily supposed to deliver correct information to students, perhaps instead teachers should be designers of flow activities within the discipline. If our goal is to cultivate a love of learning in students, then they will have to experience the challenge and discovery of learning for themselves. Receiving the answers is not an empowering, godlike task that optimally challenges your current skills (unless you’re at least required to narrate them back…).

Some examples are probably in order here. In a humanities class, perhaps students should be involved in the process of naming new experiences and ideas that they encounter in their books. How often, I wonder, does a humanities teacher think of the work of reading as an activity in which students will encounter new realities that they will then try to make sense of through concept formation? Are we asking them to notice and describe, to discuss and distinguish? That takes a lot of time devoted to classroom dialogue and is not so efficient as telling students the answers that teacher or students have diligently culled from SparkNotes.

For mathematics instruction Ravi Jain has discussed the importance of puzzle, proof and play. If we can get students puzzling and playing with numbers and formulas, then they will get in flow and start loving the process of discovery. Answers and alternate methods will generate excitement and be stored in their memory, as they strive for greater levels of skill along the quest. It can’t just be about chugging problems and memorizing formulas for an extrinsic reward, like a grade. The best programmers weren’t grade-chasers in their programming class (if they took one and weren’t just self-taught).

After all, the quest for ordering reality through language and number isn’t just about money and success. It’s a transcendent human activity, naturally pleasurable and desirable in and of itself. When we treat it as less than that, we fail to initiate our students into their full God-given inheritance as image-bearers and culture makers.

What other ideas do you have for turning the tools of learning into flow activities?

New Book! The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow Through Classical Education

Enjoying this series? Jason Barney revised and expanded it into a full length book that you can buy on Amazon. Complete with footnotes and in an easy-to-share format for teacher training or to keep in your personal library, the book aims to help you apply the concept of flow in your classical classroom.

Make sure to share about the book on social media and review it on Amazon!

Past installments – Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake, Part 2: The Joy of Memory, Part 3: Narration as Flow. Future installments – Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom; Part 8, Restoring the School of Philosophers, Part 9, The Lifelong Love of Learning.

The post The Flow of Thought, Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games appeared first on .

Flow is his term for the experience of focused effort at some worthwhile pursuit at a level of challenge commensurate with one’s skills. Whether a hobby, work or a meaningful conversation, the experience of flow is immensely rewarding, but it requires full engagement of one’s consciousness and a high level of what Csikszentmihalyi calls “psychic energy.”

It’s because of this requirement that we too often engage in passive entertainment, like TV watching, and less meaningful experiences. We are too tired. And instead of resting fully, we try to avoid the disordered chaos of our untrained minds (no doubt a result of the Fall) by resorting to these attention grabbers and timewasters.

As I mentioned, our psychologist’s findings mirror Aristotle’s claim that the life of virtue, and more specifically the theoretic life, is the happy life. Human flourishing is found in a life of active striving after excellence, in whatever domain surely, but most of all in contemplative pursuits. In his chapter on the Flow of Thought our psychologist breaks down the many paths of the contemplative life, or how to achieve flow in thought, and in so doing provides more arguments for the value of a classical education per page than many of the classical education movement’s best-sellers.

In this article we’re exploring the joy of memory in order to discover how training the memory can contribute to a happy life.

Csikszentmihalyi begins by explaining why remembering something is in itself a pleasurable activity:

“Remembering is enjoyable because it entails fulfilling a goal and so brings order to consciousness. We all know the little spark of satisfaction that comes when we remember where we put the car keys, or any other object that has been temporarily misplaced.” (121)

Even the smallest acts of memory sparkle of the possibility of the flow state, since a goal is being reached. You’ll remember his claim that disorder naturally clouds our consciousness as problem-seeking creatures, and so the memory of some stable fact or idea brings a sort of order to our inner world. And if this is true of remembering where we put the car keys, how much more the important events of our life, the histories of our culture, or the important truths that give our lives meaning.

Debunking the Attack on Memory

Interestingly our psychologist takes on the educational establishment’s attack on “rote memory.” He speaks nostalgically of how his

“grandfather at seventy could still recall passages from the three thousand lines of the Iliad he had to learn by heart in Greek to graduate from high school. Whenever he did so, a look of pride settled on his features, as his unfocused eyes ranged over the horizon. With each unfolding cadence, his mind returned to the years of his youth. The words evoked experiences he had had when he first learned them; remembering poetry was for him a form of time travel.” (123)

For his grandfather remembering these lines is both a source of pride and “a form of time travel” providing a re-emergence of his youthful experiences. We can suppose that this sort of experience gave his grandfather a stability and a richness that those of us who haven’t attained such feats of memory might lack.

Our psychologist goes on to debunk the modern attack on memory with characteristic charity and grace:

“But for a person who has nothing to remember, life can become severely impoverished. This possibility was completely overlooked by educational reformers early in this century, who, armed with research results, proved that ‘rote learning’ was not an efficient way to store and acquire information. As a result of their efforts, rote learning was phased out of the schools. The reformers would have had justification, if the point of remembering was simply to solve practical problems. But if control of consciousness is judged to be at least as important as the ability to get things done, then learning complex patterns of information by heart is by no means a waste of effort. A mind with some stable content to it is much richer than one without.” (123)

His argument turns on the pragmatism of modern education, as if the ability to solve practical problems were the only point of education. One can hear John Dewey’s claims in the background, as he argued against traditional methods on the basis of his evolutionary mindset. For him solving practical human problems was the end-all be-all of life. Yet if we view life broadly enough, controlling consciousness should be a valuable enough goal for even the most ardent Deweyan, especially given how many problems are caused by the internal disorder of our minds. Enter the modern epidemics of anxiety and depression, as simple examples of this fact.

But even without this last point, modern learning science has shown just how valuable having a mind full of data is for problem solving. As the authors of Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning explain,

“Repeated retrieval [of something from memory] not only makes memories more durable but produces knowledge that can be retrieved more readily, in more varied settings, and applied to a wider variety of problems.” (43)

Of course, that doesn’t absolve us of the perennial question of what knowledge and therefore what subjects and books are most important or valuable to be learned and remembered at any particular time. But it does debunk the assault on “rote learning” as simply not useful. And the objection that memorized material must be understood by the children (to some degree) in order to be useful is not to the point. Nobody, so far as I am aware, is advocating that children memorize material that they have no understanding of, even if that accidentally still happens sometimes in practice.

Yet these reflections are far afield from our psychologist’s primary point, which is that the cultivation of memory allows a person to enter the flow of thought and thereby attain a joy that is independent of one’s circumstances. As he explains,

“A person who can remember stories, poems, lyrics of songs, baseball statistics, chemical formulas, mathematical operations, historical dates, biblical passages, and wise quotations has many advantages over one who has not cultivated such a skill. The consciousness of such a person is independent of the order that may or may not be provided by the environment…. She can always amuse herself, and find meaning in the contents of her mind. While others need external stimulation—television, reading, conversation, or drugs—to keep their minds from drifting into chaos, the person whose memory is stocked with patterns of information is autonomous and self-contained.” (123-4)

As Christians we might think of the stories of martyrs and those imprisoned for their faith, even in recent times, like Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian Christian minister imprisoned under the Soviet Union. In his book With God in Solitary Confinement Wurmbrand explains how he survived the ordeal with his sanity intact by sleeping during the day and first composing, then preaching a new sermon each night. In so doing he developed (or already had the gift of) an extraordinary memory. He claimed to be able to recall more than 350 of the sermons he composed in this way after the ordeal, some of which he later recorded in his book.

Setting himself such a task was without doubt a divinely inspired mission and we have no reason to suspect anything other than that he was uplifted by the Holy Spirit in a remarkable way. But it’s interesting to notice how his chosen activity mimics our psychologist’s secular recommendations for attaining a flow of thought independent of one’s environment. Wurmbrand found a divinely-ordained task—he was called as a preacher after all—that he could practice with focused effort utilizing the whole range of his mental abilities. Practicing this task kept him occupied in joyful flow, improving his preaching skills and developing his prodigious memory. And he did this while in the otherwise torturous state of solitary confinement, with not a sound, not a person, not a thing to amuse him or relieve the pain of boredom.

In light of such an example of the joy of memory it’s frankly pitiful that our culture considers rote memorization to constitute painful boredom for kids, who need to be relieved by frequent entertaining pop-culture references, videos or their own smart phones.

Aside: Download the Free eBook “5 Tips for Fostering Flow in the Classical Classroom”

Wondering how to practically apply the idea of flow in your classroom? These 5 actionable steps will help you keep the insights of flow from being a pie-in-the-sky idea. Embody flow in your classroom and witness the increased joy and skill development that result!

You can download “5 Tips for Fostering Flow in the Classical Classroom” on the flow page. Share the page with a friend or colleague, so they can benefit as well.

Memory the Mother of an Inspirational Education

As a matter of fact, the classical tradition has long recognized memory as the foundation of all the virtues of the mind. As Csikszentmihalyi recollects:

“The Greeks personified memory as lady Mnemosyne. Mother of the nine Muses, she was believed to have given birth to all the arts and sciences…. Before written notation systems were developed, all learned information had to be transmitted from the memory of one person to that of another…. All forms of mental flow depend on memory, either directly or indirectly.” (120-1)

In the opening of his Theogony Hesiod names the nine Muses and describes their gift to him of song and the knowledge of the past: they “breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime” he says (trans. Evelyn-White, lines 31-32). By later Roman times each Muse presided over one particular art: Calliopē, epic poetry; Clīo, history; Euterpē, flute-playing (and lyric poetry to the flute); Melpomenē, tragedy; Terpsichorē, choral dancing and singing; Eratō, the lyre and lyric poetry; Polyhymnia, hymns to the gods; Urania, astronomy; and Thalia, comedy.

The common factor that many of these were recited to accompanying music gave rise to our term ‘music’ today, though all the genres of poetry, as well as history and astronomy were included as ‘musical’ subjects. The ‘museum’ too was originally a place where all these arts—and learning generally—were cultivated; the most famous museum was founded by Ptolemy I Soter in Alexandria and was distinct from the well-known library, instead housing scholars and artists who lectured and wrote and discussed the great works.

The point of the myth is that memory is the basis of all these cultural achievements, just as the joy of flow was a contributing factor in the experience of the inspired poets and artists, scientists and history writers. In actual fact the men and women who created these great works began by storing up in their memory the beautiful and inspiring compositions of others. They imitated them and forged their own path out of the raw materials of memory. In this way, memory is the basis for many of the cultural products that we most enjoy in life.

But not only does memory give birth to all the songs and art that we love, the act of recalling such things is itself enjoyable. You don’t have to teach your child to take joy in remembering their favorite songs from the radio. This comes naturally. Simply the act of remembering creates an internal feeling of control and satisfaction that, as our psychologist would say, orders our consciousness. The assumption that students will be dismayed and bothered by the work of “rote memory” may be one of the more pernicious ideas of modern education.

While memorizing itself has the flavor of work about it, the joy of recalling easily overcomes the initial pain of effort. This is especially so when students are set up to be successful. When a class memorizes a poem together, with the teacher’s guidance and patience line by line, the students build confidence the natural way: through completing a challenging task and experiencing the natural reward of the sense of mastery that knowledge entails. But more than that, they regularly come to love the poem itself. The act of recalling it again and again makes the poem theirs in a way that is hard to describe. It is as if the memory has wedded the poem to their consciousness in such a way that it has become a part of them. And of course, there is no one who does not love his own self; in a mystical fashion, memorizing unites knowledge with the soul.

But memorizing word for word is not the only use of memory that will inspire our students. In fact, any act of retrieving from memory something that has previously been learned has the possibility of enacting the flow state. Remembering is challenging work; in a way, it is the work of learning itself, because it is during what learning scientists call “retrieval practice” that the wiring of neural networks is signaled to take place. But just because it is work, if it is engaged in willingly, as a challenge commensurate with our current level of skill, it can be immensely pleasurable. This is, after all, what is often called the joy of learning or the love of learning as a lifelong skill.

Because of this Charlotte Mason recommended the practice of narration in every subject. Narration is when a student is asked to retrieve from memory as much as they can of what they have just read, heard or seen. In giving students the time and accountability to assimilate the new knowledge they have encountered by telling it back, they are given the opportunity of creating a personal connection with the material, and the joy of memory is the natural result.

Tips for Getting in the Flow of Memory

In closing out his chapter our psychologist describes some practical tips for modern adults to use for getting in the flow of memory during daily life. We can translate some of them into ways of helping our children or students enjoy learning as well.

The first tip is to make the work of memory a daily activity, carried with us wherever we go:

“Some people carry with them the texts of choice poems or quotations written on pieces of paper, to glance over whenever they feel bored or dispirited. It is amazing what a sense of control it gives to know that favorite facts or lyrics are always at hand. Once they are stored in memory, however, this feeling of ownership—or better, of connectedness with the content recalled—becomes even more intense.” (124)

Who does not have an abundance of spare minutes waiting at the checkout counter at a store, or for a meeting to start? Punctuating your day with time cultivating your memory of favorite poems or quotations, facts or figures, gives a sense of meaning to those lost minutes. Rather than getting frustrated while driving in traffic, the recitation of some valuable content can occupy the mind with something productive and overcome habits of irrational anger, worry and fear.

This is part of the reason why memorizing Bible verses or passages has helped so many to overcome temptations and vices of many kinds. While there is the power of the truths of scripture themselves to transform the soul, and although God’s Spirit undoubtedly comes to the aid of those who reach out to him in this way, there is also the simple logical benefit of mental preoccupation. It is the pain of mental boredom and frustration that often causes us to seek relief in some sinful pleasure. This is because of the link between attention and willpower. If instead we focused our consciousness on recalling some beautiful and convicting passage of scripture, our whole frame of mind would be changed, and the boredom relieved in a more productive and life-giving way.

Because of this, we shouldn’t feel guilty as teachers about assigning our students short tasks of memory as regular homework. This sort of minor retrieval practice that can be completed in minutes is often enjoyable to children and develops in them life-long habits that are beneficial both academically and morally. Our reticence in this area is the result of the overwhelming modern pressure against “rote learning” that our secular psychologist has already successfully debunked. Little memory assignments are not to burdensome for our students; we do them a disservice by avoiding them.

But the joy of memory can also be developed through life-long learning in some area of interest or hobby. The sense of autonomy in cultivating a personal passion lends a great deal of strength to the task. Csikszentmihalyi recommends deliberately setting out a plan for what in a subject you will work on committing to memory:

“With a good grasp of the subject will come the knowledge of what is worth remembering and what is not. The important thing to recognize here is that you should not feel that you have to absorb a string of facts, that there is a right list you must memorize. If you decide what you would like to have in memory, the information will be under your control, and the whole process of learning by heart will become a pleasant task, instead of a chore imposed from outside.” (124)

This psychological fact is something important to keep in mind as teachers and parents. Whenever possible, it is helpful to enlist the student’s own will and desire in the process of learning and even the selection of tasks and assignments. Of course, if you work in a school setting, a class must receive some uniform assignments, especially in early years and at the beginning of developing a new skill. But treating children as persons created in the image of God includes according them the dignity of autonomy in ways that fit their age and understanding. In Dan Pink’s Drive autonomy is described as one of the major ways to boost motivation.

This doesn’t mean that students become the arbiters of what to learn, rather than the classical tradition and their teachers’ best judgment. But there are ways to cultivate students’ full engagement with the content at hand through appealing to their autonomy in some of the details of assignments. For instance, when deciding on which passage or poem to memorize, why not let the class decide on one they most connected with. In committing to memory the important facts about an author, engage the class in the determination of what are the most crucial details to remember.

Students jump at this sort of opportunity, and, incidentally, it helps them train their judgement in discerning the relevance of different facts. But more than anything, it creates the habits of life-long autonomous learning in them that we should aim to cultivate in ourselves. After all, it’s not just a chore, it’s one of the joys of life itself. How are you cultivating the joy of memory?

Enjoying this series? Jason Barney revised and expanded it into a full-length book that you can buy through the EdRen Bookstore. Complete with footnotes and in an easy-to-share format for teacher training or to keep in your personal library, the book aims to help you apply the concept of flow in your classical classroom.

Future installments: Part 3: Narration as Flow, Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games, Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom; Part 8, Restoring the School of Philosophers, Part 9, The Lifelong Love of Learning.

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