Marilla is advised by Mrs. Lynde, the Cuthbert’s opinionated neighbor, to place Anne in the town school. There Anne meets many of the town’s children and comes under the tutelage of Mr. Phillips, a didactic teacher who emphasizes discipline and shows favoritism to his champion students. Mr. Phillips doesn’t last long, departing at the end of Anne’s first year at Avonlea school. Altogether, Mr. Phillips would not be missed. According to Marilla, “Mr. Phillips isn’t any good at all as a teacher” (Montgomery 118). After the farewell party in his honor, Mr. Phillips hardly receives a reference the remainder of the series, such was his lack of inspiration or connection with the students.

Replacing the forgettable Mr. Phillips is Miss Stacy, a figure who will play an important role in Anne’s life. Unable to return to school due to the broken ankle she suffered at the Phillips farewell party, Anne learns of Miss Stacy from her friends, and the reports she receives gives her anticipatory delight. She learns that “every other Friday afternoon she has recitations and everybody has to say a piece or take part in a dialogue.” For one so enamored with literature, poetry and imagination, this excites the spirit of Anne. She also hears that “the Friday afternoons they don’t have recitations Miss Stacy takes them all to the woods for a ‘field’ day and they study ferns and flowers and birds. And they have physical culture exercises every morning and evening” (189). In the 1985 movie created by Kevin Sullivan, we see several scenes of Miss Stacy giving an inspirational speech to her class, traipsing across the pastures of Prince Edward Island, drawing in their nature journals, and exercising outdoors.

Among the many programs Miss Stacy implemented – including a school drama and a story-writing club – the program that would have the most significant impact on the direction of Anne’s life is the after-school class for the older students to prepare them for the entrance exams to Queen’s Academy, a teacher’s college in Charlottetown. This program serves as a passing of the baton, inasmuch as Anne would eventually attend Queen’s and go on to become the teacher at Avonlea school. Miss Stacy’s impact on Anne led to a life that followed in her footsteps due to the inspiration and connection Miss Stacy formed with her students. Miss Shirley in her own right would embody many of the same principles that were exemplified by Miss Stacy.

Miss Shirley would go on to teach at her home school in Avonlea for two years, applying the same kind of principles she learned under Miss Stacy, although we are still able to witness the many mishaps that follow Anne in her new role in town. She departs Avonlea for further training at Redmond College and then takes a post at Summerside High School. Summerside is a town run by the Pringles, the social elites of the community. With a class full of Pringle siblings and cousins, Miss Shirley must use all of her imagination and connection to win the hearts of her students, who are set against her from the beginning for earning the post over another candidate, a Pringle relative.

Just one episode in her teaching career will go to show the influence Miss Stacy had on Anne Shirley and her teaching methods. Miss Shirley organized a drama club during her first year at Summerside, directing the play Mary, Queen of Scots. Through the drama club, Miss Shirley was able to spark the imagination of her students and created a connection with even some of the stubborn Pringle children.

For both Miss Stacy and Miss Shirley, there were a few key principles that guided their effectiveness in teaching. Here we’ll enumerate a few of these. As an aside, I have found it interesting, as I read these stories and watch the movies, how much the episodes surrounding the classroom remind me of Charlotte Mason’s pedagogy. Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of the Anne series, is only a generation younger than Miss Mason. It is difficult to make a connection between the two, with Montgomery residing most of her life in Canada and Mason in England. However, there is a sense that they are or would be kindred spirits, believing in the full personhood of children and expressing sensible ideas of education. So, as I spell out some of these principles, we’ll see how consistent they are with a thoroughgoing philosophy of education as presented in Charlotte Mason’s works.

A Sympathetic Teacher

Creating a connection with students is one of the key principles to effectiveness in teaching. In his book, The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle illustrates repeatedly the essential qualities of highly successful groups. It all boils down to connection. He writes, “Group performance depends on behavior that communicates one powerful overarching idea: We are safe and connected” (Coyle 15). In Montgomerie’s Anne series, her main character is always seeking connection in the form of “kindred spirits,” people who have sympathy. When you break the word “sympathy” down, it means “having mutual (sym-) feelings (pathos).” This mutual feeling can be cultivated in a classroom by a teacher who is seeking opportunities to create an alliance with her students.

Connections and alliances can be formed in all sorts of ways. Both Miss Stacy and later Miss Shirley would use drama as a means of creating sympathy. To act in a play draws upon the sympathetic part of our natures, so it is only natural for students to be drawn together in the effort of putting on a play. Coaching a sports team, going on nature walks, or doing a handcraft together are all ways that being with your students cultivates the sense of togetherness, the safety and connection Coyle describes.

The sympathy we offer to our students is a means of empowering them to accomplish the work of learning. To learn anything takes effort, and we as human beings are averse to effortful work, unless we have a compelling vision of the value of the work to be done. This is where the sympathetic teacher provides the sense of togetherness and sets the tone for the work to be done. The teacher cannot do the work of learning, that is the responsibility of the child. But the teacher can make the conditions optimal for learning through her sympathetic presence. Charlotte Mason writes:

“The children, not the teachers, are the responsible persons; they do the work by self-effort. The teachers give sympathy and occasionally elucidate, sum up or enlarge, but the actual work is done by the scholars.”

Charlotte Mason, A Philosophy of Education, p. 6.

Such a teacher is aware of the needs of her students and provides just the right direction to enable them to put in the effort of learning.

The Love of Reading

A constant theme in the Anne series is a love of great literature. There are wonderful episodes where Anne enacts a scene or delivers a rousing recitation from the great poets. Anne’s love of literature becomes a great temptation for her. In one scene, Miss Stacy catches Anne reading Ben Hur when she should have been reading her Canadian history text. She recounts the incident to Marilla:

“I had just got to the chariot race when school went in. I was simply wild to know how it turned out—although I felt sure Ben Hur must win, because it wouldn’t be poetical justice if he didn’t—so I spread the history open on my desk lid and then tucked Ben Hur between the desk and my knee. I just looked as if I were studying Canadian history, you know, while all the while I was reveling in Ben Hur. I was so interested in it that I never noticed Miss Stacy coming down the aisle until all at once I just looked up and there she was looking down at me, so reproachful-like. I can’t tell you how ashamed I felt, Marilla, especially when I heard Josie Pye giggling. Miss Stacy took Ben Hur away, but she never said a word then. She kept me in at recess and talked to me. She said I had done very wrong in two respects. First, I was wasting the time I ought to have put on my studies; and secondly, I was deceiving my teacher in trying to make it appear I was reading a history when it was a storybook instead. I had never realized until that moment, Marilla, that what I was doing was deceitful. I was shocked. I cried bitterly, and asked Miss Stacy to forgive me and I’d never do such a thing again; and I offered to do penance by never so much as looking at Ben Hur for a whole week, not even to see how the chariot race turned out. But Miss Stacy said she wouldn’t require that, and she forgave me freely.”

Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 240-241.

It’s a delightful scene that exposes Anne’s fascination with literature, and Miss Stacy’s approach to discipline. In the midst of confession and forgiveness, we see how Miss Stacy comes alongside Anne to help order her affections. History must be read in its proper time, and literature must be read in its time. Care must be given to all forms of reading. Anne goes on to explain to Marilla the influence Miss Stacy has had on her preferences for reading:

“I never read any book now unless either Miss Stacy or Mrs. Allan thinks it is a proper book for a girl thirteen and three-quarters to read. Miss Stacy made me promise that. She found me reading a book one day called, The Lurid Mystery of the Haunted Hall. It was one Ruby Gillis had lent me, and, oh, Marilla, it was so fascinating and creepy. It just curdled the blood in my veins. But Miss Stacy said it was a very silly, unwholesome book, and she asked me not to read any more of it or any like it. I didn’t mind promising not to read any more like it, but it was agonizing to give back that book without knowing how it turned out. But my love for Miss Stacy stood the test and I did.”

Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 241.

Cultivating a love of reading is not simply about getting a child to simply read books. It’s about helping them to be choosy about the quality of books they read as well as giving them the proper attention and care to expand their minds through a healthy appetite for books. Charlotte Mason describes the role a teacher plays in cultivating this love of reading:

“The child who has been taught to read with care and deliberation until he has mastered the words of a limited vocabulary, usually does the rest for himself. The attention of his teachers should be fixed on two points—that he acquires the habit of reading, and that he does not fall into slipshod habits of reading.”

Charlotte Mason, Home Education, p. 226.

The aim is for the child to gain independence by reading “for himself.” This means they have the autonomy to choose personal readers and has the ability to “read with care and deliberation.” Reading is such an essential skill for awakening the imagination. So many of the richest aspects of life require an active imagination, whether that be the experience of abstract concepts such as love or empathy, the expansion of our intellects through the consideration of alternative perspectives, or the appropriation of a flourishing relationship with God. The cultivation a love of reading, then, is one of the principles to effectiveness in teaching.

Instilling Willing Obedience

A final principle of effectiveness in teaching has to do with preparing a child to be at peace under authority. There is a difference between a child who has been made to obey, and a child who obeys willingly. This requires the teacher or parent to be at peace in their own authority. I have found that the roles that bear authority must be carried out with careful consideration never to erode that authority through being overly familiar or chummy on the one extreme or strict and rules-based on the other extreme. There are a warm and orderly disposition someone in authority must acquire that enables those under authority to willingly obey. At the same time, there is an ability to speak to those under authority that requires, guides and confirms proper obedience.

In the episode shared in length above, we see Miss Stacy correcting Anne by naming two wrongs she had done by reading Ben Hur when she should have been working on history. Miss Stacy identifies how this act was a waste of time as well as deceitful. In the 1985 film, we are shown the episode and hear the words from Miss Stacy. It’s a stunning moment where we see the conviction of what is good and right in the countenance and the words of Miss Stacy. But we also feel the warmth of her connection to Anne. Rather than being made to feel shame or forced to obey, Anne is brought to a place of willing obedience. This properly ordered relationship of authority – being in peace in authority and under authority – actually enhanced the depth of affection Anne had for Miss Stacy. Anne viewed her as a person who had her best interests at heart as well as a person who could guide her towards virtuous living.

Charlotte Mason expresses how important it is to “secure willing obedience” on the part of students. It is the pathway to their own happiness. She writes:

“It is the part of the teacher to secure willing obedience, not so much to himself as to the laws of the school and the claims of the matter in hand. If a boy have a passage to read, he obeys the call of that immediate duty, reads the passage with attention and is happy in doing so.”

Charlotte Mason, A Philosophy of Education, p. 70.

Notice how there is a higher calling the teacher is pointing to. She mentions “the laws of the school,” which in some cases are clearly expressed in, say, a school-side set of rules, or classroom procedures. However, there are many more unwritten rules that are actually an outworking of natural law or divine law. In other words, we are not securing willing obedience to ourselves as individuals, but to a higher order that we are all duty bound to obey. I in my position of authority as a teacher am duty bound to call my students up to that higher calling, and to do so with the view of their abundant sense of duty and ultimate happiness.

There are three tenets to willing obedience that are easily expressed in what I call a mantra. Obedience is right away, all the way, and with a good attitude. Having this framework helps us to coach students of any age to accomplish the effort of learning by assessing these three tenets. For instance, take the child who has been assigned a homework set and given time to complete that in class. Calling that child to work on it right away is essential to cultivating willing obedience. Don’t wait until a later time, strike while the iron is hot! Has the child completed all of the homework set? Here we can point out how obedience is “all the way.” We are only satisfied with a job done all the way. It can happen that when assigning the homework set, we hear grumbling. Here we call for obedience with a good attitude. We are only satisfied with a job done cheerfully.

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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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