So far in this series we have had occasion to develop the Christian underpinnings for prudence. “Be wise [phronemoi, prudent] as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt 10:16), Jesus tells his disciples, utilizing the same word for prudence that Aristotle had named among his five intellectual virtues hundreds of years before. And while the New Testament does not consistently endorse this linguistic distinction between practical and philosophic wisdom (phronesis vs sophia), still the emphasis of the Bible lands squarely on the practical ability to discern the difference between good and evil, to see through the deceitfulness of sin and value goods rightly. Augustine’s ordo amoris, or the proper ordering of loves, provides an important theological development of the Greek philosophical vision of the prudent man. 

Practical wisdom is thus necessarily contrasted with philosophic wisdom (sophia), which for Aristotle involved perception (nous) of first principles and scientific knowledge (episteme) about invariable things, things that never change. We might call these invariable things eternal truths and think more readily of mathematics and metaphysics, than history and literature. What is best for human beings differs with different particulars. Christians might likewise contrast abstract or theoretical knowledge about the divine being, that He is eternal, immortal, impassible, etc., with knowing God himself in a saving relationship. As James writes in his letter, “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe–and shudder!” (James 2:19 ESV). In the same way, prudence has the heart of action in a way that other intellectual virtues do not. 

Adopting a prudential perspective thus has the potential to transform our classical Christian educational paradigm by pumping the lifeblood of practicality back into it. To do that we must now begin to answer in earnest the question of how. What are the proper methods of instructing the conscience and instilling moral wisdom? We must begin with the preliminary stages of instilling prudence in the young, before delineating a pedagogy of prudence for our older students. The full dawning of prudence requires the later stages of reflection and rationality that await higher intellectual development in high school and college years. 

Can We Even Teach Prudence? 

At first, in consulting Aristotle we might be tempted to despair of a pedagogy for prudence. After all, the main requirement for developing prudence in Aristotle seems to be experience, a notion that is illustrated by the fact that scientific knowledge (episteme), while technically of a higher rank among the intellectual virtues, is attainable much earlier than prudence (phronesis):

What has been said is confirmed by the fact that while young men become geometricians and mathematicians and wise in matters like these, it is thought that a young man of practical wisdom cannot be found. The cause is that such wisdom is concerned not only with universals but with particulars, which become familiar from experience, but a young man has no experience, for it is length of time that gives experience; indeed one might ask this question too, why a boy may become a mathematician, but not a wise man or a natural scientist. Is it because the objects of mathematics exist by abstraction, while the first principles of these other subjects come from experience, and because young men have no conviction about the latter but merely use the proper language, while the essence of mathematical objects is plain enough to them? (Nicomachean Ethics VI.8, p. 1803 in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2)

In modern teaching circles we are inclined to believe that it is abstractions and universals that stymie the young mind. Aristotle provides a good counter to our inclinations here, as does the documented Flynn effect: “the increase in correct IQ test answers with each new generation in the twentieth century.” In his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein explains the increasing understanding of abstractions for children in the modern world:

A child today who scores average on similarities would be in the 94th percentile of her grandparents’ generation. When a group of Estonian researchers used national test scores to compare word understandings of schoolkids in the 1930s to those in 2006, they saw that improvement came very specifically on the most abstract words. The more abstract the word, the bigger the improvement. The kids barely bested their grandparents on words for directly observable objects or phenomena (“hen,” “eating,” “illness”), but they improved massively on imperceptible concepts (“law,” “pledge,” “citizen”). (39)

It turns out that abstractions are not as impenetrable to the young as we had thought. The linguistic environment of modern societies, which is rich in such abstractions (if deficient in other ways…), has provided for a steady advance in this sort of thinking. 

It has not, we can assert anecdotally, seemed to afford any meaningful advance in the particulars of prudence. Experience, we are tempted to believe, may not be the best teacher, but perhaps it is the only teacher of practical wisdom. We might forgive Gary Hartenburg, the author of Aristotle: Education for Virtue and Leisure (from the Giants in the History of Education series from Classical Academic Press), for claiming that the development of prudence must wait for after the conclusion of formal education (53-54).

I think that this pessimistic conclusion, however, is incorrect. Even if we must go beyond Aristotle’s admittedly incomplete writings on education (the section of his Politics which concerns education is corrupt and ends abruptly before its actual conclusion), we have reason to hope that we can influence the development of prudence in the young. In addition to a host of classical and Christian resources that answer the question, “Can virtue be taught?”, in the affirmative, as David Hicks memorably put it in Norms and Nobility (Buy through the EdRen Bookstore!), we need look no further than the great Christian educational reformer John Amos Comenius. 

Sowing the Seeds of All the Virtues

You might recall that John Amos Comenius, the brilliant Czech educational celebrity of the late Reformation era, came to our aid earlier in this series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. His reflections helped to establish the ultimate goal of Christian education as the cultivation of all the moral, intellectual and spiritual virtues. In this way we were able to effectively replace Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives in the cognitive domain with a more holistic Christian paradigm focused on the virtues. Prudence uniquely ties together the moral and spiritual virtues at the rational center of human thought. It has therefore rightly been regarded as a hinge virtue, one of the cardinal (from the Latin cardo for hinge) virtues of classical and medieval tradition. 

Comenius, also, provided us a pedagogy of artistry through his method of the arts, laid out first in his Great Didactic, then refined and developed in the Analytical Didactic, which he published much later in life. The first of these developed analogies from nature to detail a thrilling and vibrant (if at times startling) educational vision. The second delighted in the bracing air of analytical logic and method, rather than continuing the playful analogies of his first great educational work. 

In a chapter of The Great Didactic entitled, “The Method of Morals” he begins by stating programmatically, “All the virtues, without exception, should be implanted in the young. For in morality nothing can be admitted without leaving a gap.” We can pause to note the natural metaphor of implanting, sowing the seeds of virtue we might say. (I explored this idea for the benefit of parents on Coram Deo Academy’s website: intro, memory, habits, ideas.) For Comenius, like Aristotle, the virtues do not “exist in separation from each other…, for with the presence of the one quality, practical wisdom, will be given all the excellences” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.13, Rev. Oxford Trans., 1808). 

Comenius goes on, drawing from medieval and classical tradition, to endorse the cardinal virtues explicitly, as the hinges on which the door of virtue is swung open:

Those virtues which are called cardinal should be first instilled; these are prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. In this way we may ensure that the structure shall not be built up without a foundation, and that the various parts shall form a harmonious whole. (211-212)

Comenius’ ordering of these virtues seems deliberate, as he continues through them in the order named, delineating certain “fundamental rules” for “shaping the morals” and “instilling true virtue and piety” in schools (211). It is refreshing to see Comenius’ clear endorsement of the classical tradition’s call to teach virtue and establish a bedrock of piety in our students (on which we might reference Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s chapter on piety in The Liberal Arts Tradition). 

But why does Comenius list prudence first? Most of the time the cardinal virtues are enumerated with prudence last as the crowning achievement after the preliminary moral virtues. Surely our awareness of Aristotle’s categorization of prudence as an intellectual virtue would cause us to place it after the moral virtues of temperance, justice and fortitude. We must read on to see that Comenius’s practical advice on how to instill these virtues requires the seeds of prudence to be sowed alongside every virtue. We cannot really train in virtuous habits, unless we are at the same time laying the foundation of prudence in the hearts and minds of the young. 

The Method of Instruction in Prudence

Charlotte Mason distinguished her method of habit training from mere behaviorism by her insistence on going back further than simply “sowing a habit” to “reap a character”. We must sow the idea that makes the habit valuable and good. In the same way, Comenius regards prudential instruction as the basis for the development of the moral virtues. He begins by stating, “Prudence must be acquired by receiving good instruction, and by learning the real differences that exist between things, and the relative value of those things.” Surprisingly, perhaps to our postmodern ears, Comenius asserts that “good instruction” on values is not only possible, but is grounded in objective reality. 

In our contemporary culture ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ are sharply distinguished, and opinions and value judgments are classed as unimportant because they are contested in the public square. But practical wisdom is precisely concerned with, in Aristotle’s words, “that part [of the soul] which forms opinions” (Nic. Ethics, VI.5, 1801), and “correctness of opinion is truth” (VI.9, 1804). Understanding the “good instruction” of a teacher on the “real differences… between things” and the “relative value of those things” is therefore a preliminary to prudence. As Aristotle explains, 

Now understanding [nous] is neither the having nor the acquiring of practical wisdom; but as learning is called understanding when it means the exercise of the faculty of opinion for the purpose of judging of what some one else says about matters with which practical wisdom is concerned–and of judging soundly. (VI.10, 1805)

The key point for our purposes is that, while understanding a teacher’s “good instruction” is not prudence itself, it does exercise the faculty of opining and judging soundly. It therefore constitutes sowing the proper seeds for prudence, or laying the right foundation, to continue with Comenius’ vivid metaphors. 

Comenius elaborates on this preliminary instruction in prudence quoting from John Ludovic Vives, one of the great educators of the sixteenth century:

A sound judgment on matters of fact is the true foundation of all virtue. Well does Vives say: “True wisdom consists in having a sound judgment, and in thus arriving at the truth. Thus are we prevented from following worthless things as if they were of value, or from rejecting what is of value as if it were worthless; from blaming what should be praised, and from praising what should be blamed. This is the source from which all error arises in the human mind, and there is nothing in the life of man that is more disastrous than the lack of judgment through which a false estimate of facts is made. Sound judgment,” he proceeds, “should be practiced in early youth, and will thus be developed by the time manhood is reached. A boy should seek that which is right and avoid that which is worthless, for thus the practice of judging correctly will become second nature with him.” (212)

We can pause here to note that this sort of instruction cannot be given by a man or woman without sound judgment and some measure of prudence herself. You cannot give what you do not have. In matters of prudence, John Milton Gregory’s Law of the Teacher could not be truer: a teacher must know that which he would teach. We should also fix in our minds clearly that our modern dichotomy between fact and opinion has been entirely done away with (at least in this translation…). The fact is that riches are less valuable than friendship; you can call this an opinion or judgment if you want, but it does not reduce the importance or truth of such a fact. 

Proverbs provide a collected store of such judgments or estimates of the facts of a case, which can provide a preliminary to prudence for the young. Even where the reasoning of moral sayings and aphorisms is not spelled out, they are of immense value to the young in averting prudential error in valuing things rightly. As Aristotle claims, “Therefore we ought to attend to the undemonstrated sayings and opinions of experienced and older people or of people of practical wisdom not less than to demonstrations; for because experience has given them an eye they see aright” (Nic. Ethics VI.11, 1806). 

It is in the realm of prudence, then, that we must question Charlotte Mason’s outlaw of opining before children:

One of our presumptuous sins in this connection is that we venture to offer opinions to children (and to older persons) instead of ideas. We believe that an opinion expresses thought and therefore embodies an idea. Even if it did so once the very act of crystallization into opinion destroys any vitality it may have had…. (Toward a Philosophy of Education, vol. 6; Wilder, 2008; 87)

If by “opinions” we are talking primarily about personal views on contemporary issues or debatable matters of history or literary criticism where solid evidence is lacking, Mason’s point is well-taken. The precious class time should not be concerned with such trivialities and the accidence of their teacher’s preferred opinions. 

But if instead we are talking about matters related to living a good life and the general human condition, with what is truly valuable in life and what dead ends and roadblocks have prevented many people for making virtuous choices, then Charlotte Mason’s opinion about opinions must be soundly discarded. If a teacher’s hard-won opinions about such matters are not worth passing on to the young, the teacher should not be employed to give care to the young. In fact, we might go so far as to state that the most important quality of a teacher or tutor of the young is that he or she be a man or woman of prudence, with the ability to give instruction in the form of good opinions about life in the midst of all the studies. As John Locke openly declares in Some Thoughts Concerning Education:

The great work of a governor is to fashion the carriage and form the mind, to settle in his pupil good habits and the principles of virtue and wisdom, to give him by little and little a view of mankind, and work him into a love and imitation of what is excellent and praiseworthy, and in the prosecution of it to give him vigor, activity, and industry. The studies which he sets him upon are but as it were the exercises of his faculties and employment of his time to keep him from sauntering and idleness, to teach him application, and accustom him to take pains, and to give him some little taste of what his own industry must perfect. (70)

The studies themselves pale in comparison to the training in “good habits” and the teacher’s instruction in “the principles of virtue and wisdom.” 

So, our conclusion, for the moment, is that the teacher of the young should not muzzle herself when it comes to opining on matters of wisdom and virtue. She should proactively and deliberately seek to share all the accumulated wisdom on living a good life that she has available to her, from proverbs and sayings, passages of scripture, lessons of life from history, literature, and modern examples. It is the job of a teacher of the young to thus opine. In the next article we’ll continue to explore the methods of instilling prudence in the young through not only “good instruction” but the use of examples, rules and discipline.

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Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) lived during a time of great upheaval in British society. Hardly a decade prior to his birth, the restoration of Charles II (1658) concluded a period of internal strife in England with the Civil War (1642-1646) followed by the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653-1658). The reign of Charles came to an end at the Glorious Revolution which established William, Prince of Orange on the English throne in 1688, the consequence of which was the constant threat of a Jacobite rebellion throughout Swift’s adult life.

Born in Dublin of English parents (who had fled the Civil War), Swift would have been greatly influenced throughout his life by two powerful political forces. One was the divide between Tories and Whigs, the former generally supporting the Jacobite cause and the latter a more progressive policy. The lines that divided these parties were hardly clear and never consistent, but they led to many intrigues and infighting. A second force was the subjugation of the Irish originally by Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Swift moved back and forth between England and Ireland which indicates a struggle to consolidate his identity with one nation or the other. Ultimately late in his life he became a stanch Irish patriot writing works such as A Proposal for Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), Drapier’s Letters (1724), and A Modest Proposal (1729). It was in this patriotic phase during which Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels.

The great majority of scholars analyzing Gulliver’s Travels pick up on these political influences. It is noteworthy that Swift in many ways was writing his travelog against the backdrop of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Robinson was an emblem of English society, and the plot of the book highlights a view of English colonial power as superior to the natives located in distant lands. Gulliver, on the other hand, is similarly English, but becomes much more skeptical about his English society. He travels to many different lands that have well-formed cultures. He is presented less as a conquering force and more as a learner, pitting each new culture against his own native England.

In my analysis of Gulliver’s Travels, I recognize the importance of these political forces, but would like to set them aside – to the extent that is even possible – in order to draw out the educational themes presented by Swift. Now, even as I set this limitation, it should go without saying that there is an inextricable link between education and politics in the classical sense that a well-ordered polis depends upon the quality of education provided to the populace. In that sense, Swift’s pursuit of an educational ideal actually contributes to his critique of British politics.

Lilliput: Education Based on Class Rank

Lemuel Gulliver’s first destination is the island nation of Lilliput, inhabited by a civilization of tiny people measuring only six inches tall. At first Gulliver is mistrusted by Lilliputians, but soon ingratiates himself, which enables him to learn more about their society. He learns that they are educated based on class rank. It seems that Swift is perhaps providing a critique of the boarding school system in England. He writes:

“Parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the Education of their own Children: And therefore they have in every Town publick Nurseries, where all Parents, except Cottagers and Labourers, are obliged to send their Infants of both Sexes to be reared and education when they come to the Age of twenty Moons; at which Time they are supposed to have some Rudiments of Docility.”

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Dover, 1996), 35.

Here we have compulsory education of the ruling class who are separated from their family at a very young age. Swift is given to exaggeration, so we should not read into this a description of the actual historical situation he is criticizing. It is possible he has in mind models of education proposed by Richard Mulcaster or Roger Ascham. Both men had a progressive bent, perhaps incited by Queen Elizabeth being herself a well-educated lady. It was desired that all children be educated, and they promoted the education of young ladies as well. They recognized that not all could afford an education but insisted that at the very least the local vicar should be charged to at minimum teach the youths to read their Bibles. The work of Mulcaster and Ascham likely atrophied in the 17^th century into something of a pro-forma educational regimen the left Swift disillusioned with what we might call the Etonian model of education (a boarding school for the elites with almost guaranteed admittance to either Oxford or Cambridge).

The education of the children of the nobility contained training in “Principles of Honour, Justice, Courage, Modesty, Clemency, Religion, and Love of their Country” (35). In short, the ruling classes were trained in the array of virtues necessary to lead the nation. Today we would be wise to espouse these ideals, but Swift goes on to identify how the ruling classes in Lilliput were mired in the idiosyncrasies of political life and the imperial court. For instance, these well-educated leaders of society were of two parties or factions, those who supported the wearing of high heels on their shoes and those who insisted on low heels (25). So, despite the lofty values of the education received by the nobility, it serves little to no purpose in public life.

The distinction between the classes is made evident when Gulliver observes the education of the lower classes:

“The Cottagers and Labourers keep their Children at home, their Business being only to till and cultivate the Earth; and therefore their Education is of little Consequence to the Publick.”

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Dover, 1996), 37.

Despite the progressive outlook of Mulcaster and Ascham, it seems that by Swift’s time the prominent educationalists of the era had not effected any lasting change. This is genuinely the tragedy of what we might consider old world classical education – the English model coming out of the Middle Ages, refined through the Renaissance, and vivified by the Reformation. Its inability to reform over time left it susceptible to more radical forms of progressivism especially after the turn of the twentieth century. Swift views the educational system of England as brittle and stultified, espousing high ideals that never truly get embodied by the leadership of the nation.

Brobdingnag: A Rudimentary Education

Gulliver – having escaped from Lilliput, returned to England, and crashed once again – lands on the island of Brobdingnag. Here the people are enormous, standing about 70 feet tall. It is an agrarian society that is both simple and peaceable. He is first taken into the home of a farmer and becomes the favorite pet of the farmer’s daughter. As was the case on Lilliput, he is presented to the King, which once again provides him a perspective on the whole of the Brobdingnagian society. As regards education, Swift describes it as “very defective,” indicating his disdain for such a system:

“The Learning of this People is very defective, consisting only in Morality, History, Poetry, and Mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel. But the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in Life, to the Improvement of Agriculture, and all mechanical Arts; so that among us, it would be little esteemed. And as to Ideas, Entities, Abstractions, and Transcendentals, I could never drive the least Conception into their Heads.”

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Dover, 1996), 96.

Here we have a system of solid, bread-and-butter education. The subjects described would feed a populace well. But Swift notes how the scope of their education is only valuable insofar as it relates to life, and in particular their agrarian society. He depicts them as a very simple people who are not used to flourishes of intellect. Swift goes on to describe their legal system, an outgrowth of their educational system:

“No Law of that Country must exceed in Words the Number of Letters in their Alphabet, which consists only of two and twenty. But indeed few of them extend even to that Length. They are expressed in the most plain and simple Terms, wherein those People are not Mercurial enough to discover above one Interpretation. And, to write a Comment upon any Law, is a capital Crime.”

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Dover, 1996), 96.

Their education is simple, and their laws are simple. Swift seems to be indicating that such a society founded on a rudimentary educational system cannot have an elaborate legal system, but also doesn’t need one, as the populace is not all that creative in their criminal activity. They are simple people of the earth who are not prone to crime anyway.

Now, we might question Swift on this point, as the gentleman farmer is one of the ideals of a democratic society. Obviously Swift is making a point that the alternative to the class-based system of education in Lilliput is not a return to the simpler times when the populace only needed a rudimentary education. The discovery of the New World and the emerging Industrial Revolution pointed toward new horizons which the Brobdingnagians were poorly equipped to handle. As much as we might pine for simpler times, we must march forward and incorporate new ways of educating our young to meet the new challenges ahead.

Laputa: An Education Based on Scientism

The next destination Gulliver discovers – or actually is discovered by – is Laputa, a floating island that rules over Balnibarbi. The island itself is a marvel of engineering, as it can be steered in any direction over Balnibarbi by magnetic levitation. The King of Laputa uses the floating island to dominate the inhabitants of Balnibarbi by maneuvering the island over any rebellious cities to block any sun or rain from over the city, and to hurl rocks down on the inhabitants below. In extreme cases, the island can be made to slam down on a city. Lindalino is an example of a city that rebelled against Laputa. The rebellion of Lindalino is an allegorical representation of Ireland’s relationship with Great Britain.

As regards education, the Laputans were fond of mathematics, astronomy and technology. They founded an academy to research science and technology that would contribute to the advancement of their society. So enamored are they by their scientific thinking that “the Minds of these People are so taken up with intense Speculations, that they neither can speak or attend to the Discourses of others” (114). Their scientism, in other words, while aiming as the betterment of society in actuality has made them less capable of living meaningful lives through distraction.

Their scientific endeavors are governed by professors who “contrive new Rules and Methods of Agriculture and Building, and new Instruments, and Tools for all Trades and Manufactures” (130). Swift points out that “none of these Projects are yet brought to Perfection; and in the mean time, the whole Country lies miserably waste, the Houses in Ruins, and the People without Food or Clothes” (130). The point Swift is making is that scientific speculation is of no use if it does not actually solve problems that people face in real life. Among the many ridiculous projects undertaken by the Academy of Lagado is a new approach to architecture:

“There was a most ingenious architect, who had contrived a new method for building houses, by beginning at the roof, and working downward to the foundation; which he justified to me, by the like practice of those two prudent insects, the bee and the spider.”

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Dover, 1996), 133.

In Jason Barney’s twin articles on technicism and scientism, he addresses the same issues we encounter today in a culture where undue focus is placed on STEM without proper attention being paid to how education ought to be cultivating wisdom amongst our students. Without growing in wisdom, the moral framework of care for people’s actual problems is absent from our educational system. This is why STEM wedded to a liberal arts tradition is so powerful.

Now, to be fair, the scientific thinking in Swift’s age directly led to the Industrial Revolution, which in total benefited society in many different ways. But Swift recognized that there is a cost in human terms that perhaps could have been averted had the scientists of earlier generations been more conscientious about the tragic impact on human lives. The same goes for today. Very little ethical planning goes into creation and launch of new technologies. True, our smartphones have become everyday carry for the entire population. Yet, we are seeing the cost in lack of attention (see Nicholas Carr, The Shallows and Maggie Jackson, Distracted) and mental health issues (see this review article in Psychology Today).

The Land of the Houyhnhnm: An Education in Pure Reason

The final destination on Gulliver’s journey takes him to a location that is inhabited by Houyhnhnms and Yahoos. The Houyhnhnms (pronounced “hoo-IN-um” or “HWIN-um”) are talking horses whose intelligence exceeds that of humans. They tend to flocks of Yahoos, who are irrational humans (or human-like creatures). Swift creates a contrast between the Yahoos who represent the worst of humanity and the Houyhnhnms who are noble, rational and peaceable. Gulliver comes to learn the language of the Houyhnhnms and undertakes instruction from them. He is rather looked upon as a brute in most ways similar to the Yahoos, which offends Gulliver.

Gulliver learns that the Houyhnhnms are both noble and virtuous as a result of their education in pure reason. “As these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by Nature with a general Disposition to all Virtues, and have no Conceptions or Ideas of what is evil in a rational Creature, so their grand Maxim is, to cultivate Reason, and to be wholly governed by it” (202). The purity of their reason is arrived at without disputation or debate. They neither take into consideration “both sides of a question” nor do they put any stock in opinions or disputes. Now, we might consider this a liability as we train our students in dialectic or logic to pit ideas against one another to arrive at the truth. However, a truth once known need not be debated or disputed, it is only necessary to use the tools of dialectic in the search for truth. So it seems the contention Swift makes here is that this equine civilization has used their rationality to ascertain what is ultimately true and have thereby dispensed with dialectic.

The guiding virtues of the Houyhnhnms are laudable. Swift writes:

“Friendship and Benevolence are the two principal Virtues among the Houyhnhnms; and these not confined to particular Objects, but universal to the whole Race. For a Stranger from the remotest Part, is equally treated with the nearest Neighbour, and where-ever he goes, looks upon himself as at home. They preserve Decency and Civility in the highest Degrees, but are altogether ignorant of Ceremony. They have no Fondness for their Colts or Foals; but the Care they take in educating them proceeds entirely from the Dictates of Reason.”

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Dover, 1996), 202.

Swift looks upon the education of the Houyhnhnms fondly:

“In educating the Youth of both Sexes, their Method is admirable, and highly deserves our Imitation. . . . Temperance, Industry, Exercise, and Cleanliness, are the Lessons equally enjoined to the young ones of both Sexes: And my Master thought it monstrous in us, to give the Females a different Kind of Education from the Males.”

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Dover, 1996), 203-204.

In these quotes we see Swift holding up a moral standard against the prevailing educational model of his time and finding it wanting. The educational vision is simultaneously traditional in its use of reason to acquire virtue – the Houyhnhnms upon learning about Socrates “agreed entirely with his sentiments” (202) – and yet progressive in that it is equitably dispensed to all. This is not to say that the Houyhnhnms did not have their faults. They are so rational as to lack compassion or any scruples about what we would consider propriety. For instance, they had no qualms about trading their children at the annual meeting so that each household had an equal number of boys and girls. One might be reminded of Spock from Star Trek, although his humanity at times wins out over the rational Vulcan half of his ancestry.

The most telling aspect of Gulliver’s relationship with the Houyhnhnms occurs after he returns to England. Gulliver struggles to relate with other humans, even his own family. “I must freely confess, the Sight of them filled me only with Hatred, Disgust and Contempt” (220). From the time of his departure from the Land of the Houyhnhnms, he refers to humans as Yahoos and his experience as “my unfortunate exile.” To compensate for this, he purchase “two young Stone-Horses, which I keep in a good Stable.” He writes:

“My Horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four Hours every Day. They are Strangers to Bridle or Saddle; they live in great Amity with me, and Friendship to each other.”

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Dover, 1996), 221.

This is a bookend to the introductory letter in which Gulliver refers to his to horses as “two degenerate Houyhnhnms” (meaning they lack the speech of the actual Houyhnhnms) who influence him such that “I still improve in some Virtues, without any Mixture of Vice” (xi).

I think this indicates how the Houyhnhnm episode presents the author with an educational ideal absent in the prevailing educational model then current in the British Isles.

Renewing Our Educational Ideals

Swift’s book provides a really thoughtful engagement with what we might consider the ultimate goals of education. As such, we can productively engage with this reading to ask ourselves how we might understand and critique our own educational moment. Here are a few thoughts.

First, Gulliver reveals the vital importance of moral virtue. The simple morality of the agrarian Brobdingnag is cast in a positive light, even though it is not well informed by any high standard of intellectual engagement. Better is the Houyhnhnm set of virtues as it is connected to truth ascertained by reason. When we extract these ideas from the satirical setting of Swift’s world, there is much that we would want to establish as our own educational ideal. We ought to have as our chief aim to train our students thoroughly in virtuous living. They ought to be able to live with nobility and grace as a result of their educational upbringing.

Second, science and technology clearly have a place in education, yet it sits uncomfortably in an educational system. The humanities provide our students with a moral intuition that takes a long time to form. Moral reasoning is slow, while technological advancement is rapid. By the time the next technology burst on the scene, we are already decades late in our ability to think through the moral implications. IPads are already in the hands of toddlers, and we have not even considered whether this is a good thing. The educational system has approached STEM not as a way of thinking (scientific experimentation) nor as a means to solve meaningful problems. STEM needs to be taught such that it is properly situated within a liberal arts framework. The floating island of Laputa is a cautionary tale that still speaks today.

Finally, one of the elements drastically missing from Swift’s tale is any sense of spirituality. It is a fairly secular book that seeks utopia but cannot deliver apart from any recognition of God. The noble vision Swift provides actually falls flat (at least for me) in the absence of any notion of redemption. We truly ought to take seriously the moral vision of virtuous living. But we need the moral exemplar of Christ; to follow in his footsteps, as it were (1 Peter 2:12). My hunch is that a great deal of the ills that befell the prevailing model of education in the British Isles was a tired and impotent form of Christianity that had become overly politicized in the aftermath of so many years of political turmoil. Both England and Ireland would have felt these effects. Swift’s search for an answer looked everywhere without addressing what I would consider the root cause, the British Isles had so contested different forms of Christianity, that it had missed the Christ who could redeem them all. That is likely an overgeneralization, but perhaps one that Swift fell prey to. In our day, with social media rants befalling us from the right and the left, are we likewise susceptible to lose sight of Christ? Any educational ideal apart from Christ is likely to go off the rails. Our educational renewal movement must keep this at heart.

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In The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education (Version 2.0, Revised Edition), Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain argue for a recovery of the tradition of moral philosophy against the reductionism of the modern social sciences. Their account of the intellectual history that led to the replacement of this classical and Christian paradigm for wisdom in ethics and the humanities, broadly considered, faithfully unpacks the faulty assumptions of this shaky modern and postmodern problem. In this series on replacing Bloom’s taxonomy with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues, we have already had occasion to bring the razor edge of their intellectual knife to bear upon Bloom’s taxonomy itself. After all, Bloom’s taxonomy majors on a false analogy from the natural sciences (i.e. a taxonomy for ordering biological species) for the emerging social science of modern education, now obsessed with measurement, clear objectives, and abstract knowledge. 

But as stunning as Clark and Jain’s tour de force is from a broad, intellectual perspective, it leaves us with something missing that only a full recovery of Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of prudence can help us grasp. In order to understand this missing link, we will need to explain more completely Aristotle’s distinctions between prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) and not only philosophic wisdom (sophia), but also their forerunners, scientific knowledge (episteme) and intuition (nous), as well as the moral virtues, with which prudence is inextricably linked. This set of distinctions will help us recognize more clearly the nature of this lost goal of education, the student’s prudence to decide and act reasonably with regard to human goods. 

(Read the first article in this series: The Counsels of the Wise, Part 1: Foundations of Christian Prudence.)

The key to Aristotle’s distinctions can be found in kernel form in a passage of C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man, which we have already cited. In defending the moral law against modernist skepticism, he claimed, “I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers” (24). Lewis’s point is that the character of a person is influenced by his upbringing and habits, more than his skill or intellectual attainments in philosophical speculation. Such a consideration raises the question of whether we are merely aiming at creating clever devils, or if we intend to educate students for genuine moral virtue and wisdom. In fact, in claiming that there is a type of wisdom, a moral philosophy even, which does not require the moral virtue of the philosopher, Lewis is underlining a crucial set of distinctions found in Aristotle.

Different Intellectual Virtues Have Different Ends

Aristotle began his Nicomachean Ethics by noting that different arts and sciences have different sorts of goals: “Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth” (Book I, 1; Revised Oxford Trans., p. 1729; 1094a1ff.). The intellectual virtues contribute in different ways to the ultimate goal of happiness, Aristotle’s eudaimonia or human flourishing. These goals are not ancillary to the nature of the intellectual virtues themselves, but are part and parcel of their nature. It is because of this that we not only can but must distinguish between moral philosophy or science and practical wisdom or prudence, even though these seem to have the same subject matter. 

Perhaps Aristotle’s most helpful example of this set of distinctions occurs when he is discussing the difference between artistry and science. Using an example where the subject matter seems to overlap, he contrasts the perspective of the carpenter and the geometer:

For a carpenter and a geometer look for right angles in different ways; the former does so in so far as the right angle is useful for his work, while the latter inquires what it is or what sort of thing it is; for he is a spectator of the truth. We must act in the same way, then, in all other matters as well, that our main task may not be subordinated to minor questions. Nor must we demand the cause in all matters alike; it is enough in some cases that the fact be well established, as in the case of the first principles; the fact is a primary thing or first principle. Now of the first principles we see some by induction, some by perception, some by a certain habituation, and others too in other ways. But each set of principles we must try to investigate in the natural way, and we must take pains to determine them correctly, since they have a great influence on what follows. For the beginning is thought to be more than half of the whole, and many of the questions we ask are cleared up by it.

I, 7; R. Oxford, p. 1736; 1098a29 – 1098b8

The first part of this paragraph is clear enough; a carpenter doesn’t bother with the speculative complexities of angles and their essence like a geometer does. All he needs is a good-enough right angle to be getting on with. In fact, if he paused and contemplated the angle’s essence and relationships too long, he would cease acting as a carpenter. 

What is perhaps harder to see is how Aristotle’s train of thought applies this idea to his own treatise on ethics. We might expect him to side with the geometer, but instead he is claiming to avoid the “minor questions”of moral philosophy or speculative science that might distract him from the “main task.” What is his main task, we might ask? To instruct human beings in making decisions regarding what is good for them (i.e. to teach prudence), we must conclude. He needs a good-enough right angle, which any practiced carpenter can perceive just fine; right angles are one of those “facts” or “first principles,” with which a carpenter must work all the time in his craft. When we get these straight, the battle is more than half-won. 

In artistry or craftsmanship, these principles are perceived, reasoned at by induction, or habituated. The same is true of philosophic wisdom, where intuition (the Greek nous) must perceive first principles correctly, while scientific knowledge (episteme) demonstrates universal truths. Prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) likewise has its forerunners; in fact, when Aristotle mentions “habituation” he most likely has in mind the habit-forming process as the necessary background for the intellectual virtue that deliberates well with regard to human goods. The moral virtues must link arms with the intellectual virtue of prudence for either to be complete.

As he explains, the prerequisite for understanding the subject matter of prudence is a proper moral upbringing:

Hence any one who is to listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just and, generally, about the subjects of political science must have been brought up in good habits. For the facts are the starting-point, and if they are sufficiently plain to him, he will not need the reason as well; and the man who has been well brought up has or can easily get starting-points. And as for him who neither has nor can get them, let him hear the words of Hesiod:

Far best is he who knows all things himself;

Good, he that hearkens when men counsel right;

But he who neither knows, nor lays to heart

Another’s wisdom, is a useless wight.

I, 4; R. Oxford, p. 1731; 1095b4ff.; quotation is from Works and Days 293-7.

A person cannot even “listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just” without some measure of moral excellence or “good habits,” according to Aristotle. It’s not that the situation for such a person is hopeless, but he must listen to and store up in his heart the counsels of the wise if he is to remedy the faults of his uninstructed conscience.

So far so good, as we have already mentioned the link between the moral virtues and prudence. But the presence of Lewis’s imaginary “moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers” seems to put the lie to Aristotle’s claim that good habits are a prerequisite… unless we consider the possibility that our modern moral philosopher is not a prudent man at all, but simply a scientist. He may reason accurately from accepted starting points or first principles in the tradition of inquiry for his discipline, but these do not originate from his personal convictions or familiarity with human goods through personal habituation. He is a professional, an academic, a peddler of abstract knowledge.

This then is the danger of missing Aristotle’s distinctions in intellectual virtues, because they are distinctions in the goals or ends of education. The carpenter’s goal is to create something with the material he uses; right angles are part of the necessary means to his product. The geometer aims to demonstrate abstract truths about angles and their relationship. What then is the moral philosopher’s goal? Is it demonstration of abstract truth about human nature? Then he is a scientist and he may or may not be very wise in his own life. But the prudent person requires a different sort of intellectual precision, because he must deliberate and make practical choices about how to live his life, in the midst of all the particularities that he inhabits. Too precise a moral science may not, in fact, be very useful to him. 

As Aristotle explains,

Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, exhibit much variety and fluctuation, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention and not by nature. And goods also exhibit a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each of our statements be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.

Book I, 3; Revised Oxford, p. 1730; 1094a13ff.

In a way, Aristotle is going further than our claim to say that moral science may be a flawed endeavor in and of itself. This coheres with Clark and Jain’s critique of the modern move toward the social sciences rather than accepting the tradition of moral philosophy. For Aristotle’ prudence is the goal of moral philosophy: his is a practical philosophy for life.

Filling the Gap in PGMAPT

The gap in Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition comes from the fact that they trace an intellectual history of the shift in assumptions or first principles for the academic disciplines of the social sciences or moral philosophy. While important in its own right, this move neglects the goal of prudence as an intellectual virtue: the person’s actual well lived life. But one way of developing the Aristotelian distinctions would argue that even moral philosophy is a form of sophia, philosophic wisdom. And while Aristotle ultimately regards sophia as a higher intellectual virtue than phronesis, he does not thereby exclude phronesis as necessary for a happy life (book VI, ch. 13). 

For this reason, we propose an addition to Clark and Jain’s PGMAPT (Piety, Gymnastic, Music, liberal Arts, Philosophy and Theology) paradigm of the liberal arts tradition. Piety, Music and Gymnastic may help form the habituated moral sensibilities necessary for prudence, but none of them seem to constitute the intellectual virtue of prudence itself. The liberal arts (as well as the fine and common arts) are traditional paths of artistry, as we contended in our series on Apprenticeship in the Arts. Philosophy has been traditionally divided into wisdom about the natural world, human goods and affairs (or moral philosophy) and divine philosophy or metaphysics, but the traditional terms for intellectual virtue in these areas are either science or scientific knowledge (episteme), or its more finished attainment of wisdom (sophia), which assumes an accurate perception and understanding of first principles (intuition or nous). 

Aristotle’s terminology and distinctions bring to light the need for another category alongside the acquisition of the liberal arts at the heart of this paradigm: the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom or prudence (phronesis). Otherwise, we leave out the reasoned outcome of moral formation: the educated person’s intellectual capacity to deliberate about what is good for himself and for other human beings. Andrew Kern of the CiRCE Institute has discussed rhetoric as the master art to rule them all, defining it as the art of decision-making in community. This helpfully draws out part of the connection between the liberal arts and prudence; they are in fact interdependent. On the other hand, Kern’s move unhelpfully collapses Aristotle’s distinction between the intellectual virtues of prudence and artistry. One can be skilled in the liberal arts and imprudent; likewise, a person could be prudent but a poor communicator.

In actual fact, the proper goals of education must include prudence separately from the liberal arts, otherwise we will end up neglecting the beating heart of education, just like the modern educators that C.S. Lewis bemoaned. In our zeal for the traditions of the liberal arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric, or arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, we will neglect teaching students to reason effectively with regard to their own choices as individuals. At the school where I work we have a Latin saying that we often repeat at assembly, non scholae, sed vitae, not for school, but for life. The liberal arts, as I have argued elsewhere, are in fact also practical tools for the workaday world, in spite of our Aristotelian love of leisure and the contemplative life. But viewed in and of themselves and without the guiding heart of prudence, without practical reasoning in line with the traditional moral virtues, the liberal arts are hollow. They must have blood of real moral decision-making pumping through them, if the body of our education is to be more than a hollowed-out corpse. 

Another way of putting this might be to call for a third strand through the trunk of the tree of Clark and Jain’s PGMAPT paradigm. Instead of piety simply remaining in the grounding or roots of the tree, “governed by theology” up top, it should intertwine with the liberal arts in the form of prudential wisdom, as distinct from moral philosophy (nota bene: the trivium might more naturally find its culmination in metaphysics then). To be clear, I am not claiming that Clark and Jain have forgotten about or been unconcerned with matters concerning the development of prudence, only that without naming practical wisdom distinctly as an intellectual virtue, it does in fact tend to be neglected by teachers in a modern educational environment. 

Moral virtue has been and will continue to be a major concern of the classical education movement. The point of this series, however, is to see what light Aristotle’s specific and unique paradigm of five intellectual virtues sheds on the goals of education. Aristotle’s distinction between the moral virtues and the intellectual virtues, specifically the intellectual virtue of phronesis or practical wisdom calls for a recognition of prudence as a proper goal of education:

Excellence too is distinguished into kinds in accordance with this difference; for we say that some excellences are intellectual and others moral, philosophic wisdom and understanding and practical wisdom being intellectual, liberality and temperance moral. For in speaking about a man’s character we do not say that he is wise or has understanding but that he is good-tempered or temperate; yet we praise the wise man also with respect to his state; and of states we call those which merit praise excellences.

I, 13, p. 1742; 1103a4-10

Influenced as we are by Bloom’s taxonomy of objectives in the cognitive domain we tend to separate moral matters from so called academic ones; of course, simply by adopting a Christian frame of reference, we may go some way toward the practices that attempt to habituate piety and good morals in the young. Our teachers may also be less reticent in teaching various subjects to bring up aspects of goodness within a committed moral frame of reference. But this does not mean that students are actively instructed in moral reasoning in any substantive way through a standard course of study.

The liberal arts can be used in service of prudence or practical wisdom, but they can also be used in the service of episteme, scientific knowledge, or nous, intuition or understanding. They are formidable tools in this sense. But between Is and Ought, the reasoning of Fact and of Value, Truth and Goodness, there is a wall of separation. Just because something is so does not make it right. Modern skepticism about value judgments posits that “they are entirely subjective and relative to the individual who makes them,” Mortimer Adler points out in Six Great Ideas (68). Therefore, the modern academic bred on Bloom’s has been inclined to collapse all prescriptive statements into merely descriptive ones. Teachers trained in modern colleges and graduate schools have been trained in this sort of descriptive precision, and will therefore be unlikely to venture out into the prescriptive arena of moral reasoning in their teaching of literature, history, science and mathematics, unless practical wisdom is made a specific course goal of their instruction. 

How would we in fact instruct the consciences of our students for prudence throughout the K-12 sequence? This will be the subject of future articles. But before we close we can note a one promising idea for teaching prudence already present in the classical education movement. That is David Hicks’s conception of the Ideal Type in Norms and Nobility:

An Ideal Type tyrranized classical education. The ancient schoolmaster in his intense struggle to achieve a living synthesis of thought and action exemplified this Ideal and passed it on to his pupils by inviting them to share in his struggle for self-knowledge and self-mastery, the immature mind participating in the mature. Against this Ideal were the master’s achievements and his pupil’s judged. All fell short, of course, but some – and here’s the rub – far less short than others.

David Hicks, Norms and Nobility, 43.

Hicks’s educational vision is described by Gene Veith and Andrew Kern as “moral classicism” for good reason (Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America, revised and updated, Capital Research Center: 2001; see pp. 37ff). In his restoration of “norms” Hicks seems to fuse the ideals of artistry, practical wisdom and philosophic, in the persons of master and pupil, as aspiring individuals. In this way his fusion represents dramatically the type of inquiry of the Great Books and humanities that would cultivate practical wisdom; even science “must be pulled down from its non-normative pedestal,” and be turned toward practical wisdom. Scientific “analysis must be framed within the normative inquiry [of human values] if science is to serve life, not destroy it” (Norms and Nobility, 145).

Reviving moral philosophy in the later years of K-12 education is not enough. Instead, we must fully recover the intellectual virtue of prudence as a major goal of education in our classical Christian schools and allow a vision of the Ideal Type to shape our curriculum and teaching methods in all subjects and grades.

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In this series, I have been exploring Charlotte Mason’s notion that education should be approached through a trifold lens of atmosphere, discipline, and life. Stemming from her view of children as persons, Mason argues that we are limited to three and only three tools to educate. All others encroach in some way or another upon the inherent dignity of the child.

She writes,

Having cut out the direct use of fear or love, suggestion or influence, undue play upon any one natural desire, emulation, for example, we are no longer free to use all means in the education of children. There are but three left for our use and to each of these we must give careful study or we shall not realise how great a scope is left to us.

Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 95

In the first installment of this series, I took a closer look at what Mason calls the instrument of atmosphere. I explained that for the British educator the goal is to cultivate an environment of learning for persons: one oriented toward relationship, order, and natural beauty. From a classical perspective, we can say that cultivating an atmosphere in this vein is a foundational step for passing on a Christian paideia. 

In the second installment, I explored the instrument of discipline. Here I underscored the importance of training students in good habits as opposed to promoting mere behavioral compliance. While behaviorism focuses on reproducing particular external behaviors through systems of reward and punishment, habit training aims at the heart. Through the repeated practice of good moral habits, children develop virtuous character and the strength, with God’s help, to choose good over evil.

In this third and final installment, I will examine Mason’s notion that “education is a life.” For those unfamiliar with Charlotte Mason, the term “life” could conjure up a few different meanings. Does she mean one’s practical, or everyday life, in the sense that learning should become part of a child’s daily experience? Could she mean “life” in the sense that formal education cannot be contained within the perimeters of a physical classroom or schedule of lessons? Or does she mean “life” in the sense that real education is oriented toward the holistic flourishing of the child, during the school years and beyond?

In this article, I will aim to demonstrate that all three aspects described above are present in Charlotte Mason’s broader notion that our educational efforts ought to be oriented toward feeding the life of the child’s mind. The mind is not a blank slate to be inscribed with the thoughts of others nor is it a receptacle to be filled with atomized pieces of information. Rather, the mind is a living, even spiritual, entity that requires sustenance through ideas encountered in books, art, music, and nature. When the mind is fed probably, the whole child receives the intellectual, spiritual, and moral nourishment to lead a life of flourishing.

The Mind of a Person

Like the first two articles in this series, I will begin this discussion with Charlotte Mason’s notion that children are persons. This is the foundational premise upon which the entirety of her philosophy hangs. Children begin their formal education with a pre-existing intellectual appetite as well as thoughts about how the world works. They are eager to engage, explore, discover, and learn, long before they are led to do so in the classroom or homeschool.

While a conventionally modern analogue for the human mind is a blank slate, Mason compares the mind to an organism– an active and living thing that requires sustenance to continue living. She writes,

The mind is a spiritual octopus, reaching out limbs in every direction to draw in enormous rations of that which under the action of the mind itself becomes knowledge. Nothing can stale its infinite variety; the heavens and the earth, the past, the present, and the future, things great and things minute, nations and men, the universe, all are within the scope of the human intelligence.

Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 330

Here we see the sheer breadth of the human’s ability to explore, discover, and understand. The mind longs to truly know and insofar as it can continue to find knowledge, it lives on.

The Transformative Power of Knowledge

For Mason, it is important to note that knowledge takes on a transformative role as it becomes part of a child. Now, in contemporary society, we have become all too accustomed to the idea that truth is subjective and, therefore, relative to the individual. This generates mass confusion and the ultimate breakdown of rational dialogue as people speak of “my truth” or “your truth,” as if facts change based on who believes them.

However, as Christians, our foundation for truth is Christ himself . Our epistemological framework for knowledge is God’s transcendent nature, which is immutable. As a result, we can believe with confidence that ultimate truths about reality do not change; they are objective, or outside of us. True knowledge, then, is when people believe believe what is actually true (and have some warrant or justification in this belief).

When Mason emphasizes that knowledge must become part of a child for true learning to occur, she does not mean in the subjective sense that prevails in our culture. Rather, she is emphasizing the transformative power of knowledge. Karen Glass offers a helpful analogy to explain this phenomenon:

If you go to the cupboard looking for sugar and sugar is there, the cupboard is functioning as it should. If you ask a question and a child can produce the correct answer, you might assume that education was successful. The child “learned” the correct answer to the question. But what if that is entirely the wrong picture, and education is not about producing correct answers to drear questions? What if the mind is a hungry, living entity and not a receptacle at all? The cupboard is unaffected and unchanged by the presence of the sugar and other items within. It produces them upon request, but it remains exactly as it was before. So it is with children who dutifully produce the right answers but are unmoved by what they know.

In Vital Harmony, p. 67

Glass, in her exposition of Mason’s thought, makes the point well here that real learning ought to change a person. Mere information recall does not constitute true knowledge in whole-person education. While a cupboard is ambivalent to whether it holds sugar or not, a mind is transformed by the ideas it digests. You can gauge the nourishment of a child’s mind, not be how much they know, but by general indicators of life in general: eagerness, diligence, passion, and a zeal for growth.

Facts vs. Ideas

To truly feed a child’s mind, we must move beyond presenting them with mere facts or information. The instrument of “life” that Mason is referencing is the life of the mind fed on living ideas. To be sure, facts are important, and we want children to form true beliefs about God, creation, and humankind. The key is to present these facts within inspiring ideas that will feed a child’s soul, not merely fill a mental repository.

What is an idea? Charlotte Mason writes,

A live thing of the mind, seems to be the conclusion of our greatest thinkers from Plato to Bacon, from Bacon to Coleridge. We all know how an idea ‘strikes,’ ‘seizes,’ ‘catches hold of,’ ‘impresses’ us and at last, if it be big enough, ‘possesses’ us; in a word, behaves like an entity. If we enquire into any person’s habits of life, mental preoccupation, devotion to a cause or pursuit, he will usually tell us that such and such an idea struck him. This potency of an idea is matter of common recognition. No phrase is more common and more promising than, ‘I have an idea’; we rise to such an opening as trout to a well-chosen fly. There is but one sphere in which the word idea never occurs, in which the conception of an idea is curiously absent, and that sphere is education! Look at any publisher’s list of school books and you shall find that the books recommended are carefully dessicated, drained of the least suspicion of an idea, reduced to the driest statements of fact.

Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 105

In short, an idea is an aspect of knowledge that comes in contact with the mind, like two objects colliding in motion. Not all facts are ideas, but they become ideas when the mind assimilates and grasps knowledge for itself. This is why the teaching tool of narration is so powerful (you can read about its history in the classical tradition here). When we give children meaningful books to read and narrate, ideas are unlocked through the telling-back process. No two narrations are the same because no two minds are the same. Each mind will be drawn uniquely to distinct ideas even as they ideas remain grounded in objective truth.

Shedding light on how facts become ideas when they are integrated into a child’s broader base of knowledge, Maryellyn St. Cyr, of Ambleside Schools International, writes,

Facts are clothed in ideas. Facts are taught in relation to a vast number of things and integrated into a body of knowledge (part to whole). The learner assimilates this knowledge when it is reproduced or carries a meaningful connection. Learners can act upon information seen or heard through verbal and written narration, individual or cooperative relationships, or visual demonstrations of art and movement .

When Children Love to Learn, p. 103

Conclusion: Towards a Liberal Arts Curriculum in Ideas

For children to love learning and cultivate a vibrant intellectual life, they need more than an inspiring classroom atmosphere. They need to be taught a curriculum that is ideas-rich and be given opportunities to assimilate these ideas for themselves. Rather than pre-digesting knowledge as adults and transplanting it into bite-sized pieces for children to swallow like a pill, Charlotte Mason advises that we have children read living books with rich narrative content.

A classical liberal arts curriculum, complete with stories, poetry, music, art, and nature, is the key to nourishing a child’s mind in this way. The goal is not for students to recall every bit of information from their studies with scientific exactitude, but to provide avenues for their minds to latch on to a few select ideas that will change them forever. Coupled with the teaching tool of narration, educators will find that through ideas-rich education that children will learn more and retain more as their minds are awakened and inspired to truly know in the fullest sense possible.

How to begin? I will leave the closing word for Charlotte Mason herself:

All roads lead to Rome, and all I have said is meant to enforce the fact that much and varied humane reading, as well as human thought expressed in the forms of art, is, not a luxury, a tit-bit, to be given to children now and then, but their very bread of life, which they must have in abundant portions and at regular periods. This and more is implied in the phrase, “The mind feeds on ideas and therefore children should have a generous curriculum.”

Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 111

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The Four-fold Manner of Knowing an Object

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

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

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

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

Q: What is the chief end of man?

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

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

Applying the Four Causes to Educational Method

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

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

What is a Learner?: The Mind

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

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

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

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 38.

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

What is a Learner?: The Capacity to Understand

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

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

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 41

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

What is a Learner?: Nourished by Ideas

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

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

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 39.

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

What is a Learner?: Fitted for the Good Life

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

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

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

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

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

Mason the Classical Educationist

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

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

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If you’ve been following Educational Renaissance for some time, you might remember my history of narration series from last year. During the third article of the series I had a short section on narration in John Amos Comenius’ work, relying primarily on Karen Glass’s brief quotations in Know and Tell. At the time I was only beginning to read Comenius’ The Great Didactic in full, and I had not yet procured his Analytical Didactic. Now I have read and digested both, coming away with more narration gems to add to the history. Even then I wrote that “more remains to be said on Comenius and narration,” and now I am excited to expand that section on Comenius into an article or two of its own.

Returning to this topic is timely for me because the week before last I trained both my own faculty at Coram Deo Academy, and the faculty of The Covenant School of Dallas (what a privilege!) using this stunning passage on narration from Comenius’ The Great Didactic. So the practical application of it in our modern classical schools is fresh on my mind.

The great Czech educational reformer, philosopher, pastor and theologian, John Amos Comenius, sometimes called the father of modern education, represents the next stage after Erasmus in the history of narration’s rebirth during the Renaissance and Reformation era. The opening statement of his stunning work on teaching methods, Didactica Magna or The Great Didactic, promises much in terms that are familiar to advocates of narration:

“Let the main object of this, our Didactic, be as follows : To seek and to find a method of instruction, by which teachers may teach less, but learners may learn more; by which schools may be the scene of less noise, aversion, and useless labour, but of more leisure, enjoyment, and solid progress; and through which the Christian community may have less darkness, perplexity, and dissension, but on the other hand more light, orderliness, peace, and rest.”

John Amos Comenius, preface to The Great Didactic

As I have noted before, activities like narration that turn students into active learners are more likely to produce flow, thereby attaining for the student both “enjoyment” and “solid progress”.

Charlotte Mason found in narration an ideal “method” for realizing Comenius’ golden key of education: teachers teaching less and learners learning more. Whether consciously or unconsciously, she likely drew some of the details of the practice itself from him (in addition to other sources like John Locke).

As well, Comenius’ profoundly irenic Christian vision of how Christian education might contribute to healing the immediate wounds of Christendom’s strife and divisions (like the Thirty Years War) accords well with Mason’s educational leadership and the classical Christian education movement’s high hopes for renewal in the church. Education is not just for the training of individual Christians, but for the benefits experienced in families, churches and communities.

Rivulets Flowing Out

Comenius’ use of narration has a number of unique features and a flexibility and philosophical completeness that is hard to find in other educational thinkers. Therefore, it is likely to him that we owe the fundamental shift from narration as a progymnasmata or preliminary training exercise for rhetoric to a central learning method or strategy. He states the principle in global terms, while at the same time practically endorsing modern techniques like partner-narration:

Whatever has been learned should be communicated by one pupil to the other, that no knowledge may remain unused. For in this sense only can we understand the saying, ‘Thy knowledge is of no avail if none other know that thou knowest.’ No source of knowledge, therefore, should be opened, unless rivulets flow from it.”

John Amos Comenius, The Great Didactic, “Thoroughness in Teaching and Learning”, 155

This entire section on thoroughness in teaching and learning is essentially a tribute to narration, or more particularly the classical principal identified by Chris Perrin of Classical Academic Press through the Latin phrase docendo discimus (“By teaching we learn”) in his course Introduction to Classical Education. (I wonder where Perrin himself derived this Latin phrase from…. Was it from Comenius or an earlier thinker in the tradition? Or is it a phrase he himself quipped to represent a traditional conception?) Similarly, I have often referred to the classical principle of self-education (see my SCL presentation from 2020), citing Charlotte Mason’s quip that there is no education but self-education and Dorothy Sayers’s remarks about students learning how to learn in “The Lost Tools of Learning”.

The imagery of a fount of knowledge, a spring, being opened up and rivulets naturally flowing out to surrounding streams is evocative. Comenius is claiming that knowledge must be shared; it is a communal inheritance passing from one mind to another. For him it is as if there were a sacred commandment inscribed into the nature of the cosmos that knowledge is no mere personal possession, but a social trust.

On its own this claim holds the teacher to a high standard with regard narration and narration-like activities. Not a single source of knowledge opened (!), Comenius says, without students at least telling one another what they have learned. And yet how much “material” is “covered” by the average teacher without an opportunity for the student to become the teacher, in this splendidly ironic transformation that Comenius envisions as part and parcel of learning.

Collection, Digestion and Distribution

Comenius solidly anticipates the modern research that supports retrieval practice, spaced practice and mixed practice, but he does so through his prevailing method throughout The Great Didactic of drawing analogical wisdom from the created order:

From this it follows that education cannot attain to thoroughness without frequent and suitable repetitions of and exercises on the subjects taught. We may learn the most suitable mode of procedure by observing the natural movements that underlie the processes of nutrition in living bodies, namely those of collection, digestion, and distribution. For in the case of an animal (and in that of a plant as well) each member seeks for digestion food which may both nurture that member (since this retains and assimilates part of the digested food) and be shared with the other members, that the well-being of the whole organism may be preserved (for each member serves the other). In the same way that teacher will greatly increase the value of his instruction who 

(i.) Seeks out and obtains intellectual food for himself.

(ii.) Assimilates and digests what he has found.

(iii.) Distributes what he has digested, and shares it with others. (156)

If we pair Comenius’ call for “frequent and suitable repetitions” of the subject matter with The Great Didactic’s opening principle of teachers teaching less and learners learning more, then it becomes clear that by repetitions he is not envisioning a simply review process where the teacher goes over the facts again before a test. Instead, it is the students who will be repeating the content back, and as becomes clear later in the passage, not just in summary, but in full detail.

At first, the analogy from nature about the collection, digestion and distribution of “intellectual food” may seem to have awkwardly shifted topics. Now we are talking about the teacher grazing for knowledge himself? But in the following paragraphs Comenius will zero in on that third part, distribution, to detail his full method of narration. In the meantime, we can note that Charlotte Mason’s favorite metaphor about the mind feeding on living ideas is not, in fact, of her own coinage. For Comenius too there is a process of assimilation of knowledge that involves narration. But he stresses it as a communal endeavor, with teachers serving as the honeybees gathering sweet pollen for the production of honey and distribution to the younger members. Charlotte Mason, by contrast, is more inclined to minimize the collection and digestion process of the teacher (though she did write a stirring appeal to her ‘bairns’ encouraging them to foster their own intellectual life through avid reading), in keeping with her own focus upon the “living books” curriculum that she herself carefully selected.

But this contrast between Mason and Comenius could be overplayed, given Comenius’ ironic twist of the student becoming the teacher. So while teachers themselves should engage in the collection, digestion and distribution of knowledge, Comenius immediately shifts this application to the student-become-teacher through recourse to a well-known Latin couplet:

44. These three elements are to be found in the well-known Latin couplet:–

To ask many questions, to retain the answers, and to teach what one retains to others;

These three enable the pupil to surpass his master.

Questioning takes place when a pupil interrogates his teachers, his companions, or his books about some subject that he does not understand. Retention follows when the information that has been obtained is committed to memory or is written down for greater security (since few are so fortunate as to possess the power of retaining everything in their minds). Teaching takes place when knowledge that has been acquired is communicated to fellow-pupils or other companions.

With the two first of these principles the schools are quite familiar, with the third but little; its introduction, however, is in the highest degree desirable. The saying, ‘He who teaches others, teaches himself,’ is very true, not only because constant repetition impresses a fact indelibly on the mind, but because the process of teaching in itself gives a deeper insight into the subject taught. Thus it was that the gifted Joachim Fortius used to say that, if he had heard or read anything once, it slipped out of his memory within a month; but that if he taught it to others it became as much a part of himself as his fingers, and that he did not believe that anything short of death could deprive him of it…. (157)

Comenius’ main point is the incredible power of teaching others as a learning tool. Where Comenius has recourse to the anecdote of Joachim Fortius for support, modern research can confirm through studies the value of retrieval practice combined with the elaboration necessary for the act of teaching. This effortful combination of research-informed strategies essentially makes for the most durable and flexible learning, such that the new knowledge has become part of oneself.

Repeated Narrations of the Teacher’s Explanations with Corrections

This brings us to Comenius’ specific recommendations for narration, which are unmistakably surprising to those who are only familiar with Charlotte Mason’s advice. Note as we go the focus on the teacher’s lecture or explanation (just as with Erasmus), but also the repetitions and corrections. (We can observe as well that Comenius does not have our modern scruples about politically correct descriptions of students who struggle….)

This would certainly be of use to many and could easily be put into practice if the teacher of each class would introduce this excellent system to his pupils. It might be done in the following way. In each lesson, after the teacher has briefly gone through the work that has been prepared, and has explained the meanings of the words, one of the pupils should be allowed to rise from his place and repeat what has just been said in the same order (just as if he were the teacher of the rest), to give his explanations in the same words, and to employ the same examples, and if he make a mistake he should be corrected. Then another can be called up and made go through the same performance while the rest listen. After him a third, a fourth, and as many as are necessary, until it is evident that all have understood the lesson and are in a position to explain it. In carrying this out great care should be taken to call up the clever boys first, in order that, after their example, stupid ones may find it easier to follow. (158)

The teacher’s explanation here becomes the rich or living text, complete with examples in a particular order. The students are transformed into teachers, endeavoring to reproduce as exactly as they can the full substance of the teacher’s explanation. To make clear that he intends this as a global practice or central learning strategy, Comenius deliberately begins his description of the method with the phrase “in each lesson”. Instead of avoiding corrections during the narration, as Mason recommended, Comenius has the teacher actively correcting and expecting other students to get all the details right in subsequent narrations. While this is clearly not a word-perfect memorization, it edges in that direction and away from Mason’s insistence on a single reading and letting the students take what they do but trusting the process over time.

Interestingly, in commending the “exercises” and “repetitions” of narration, Comenius hits upon a few of the same rationales that Mason would later borrow to commend her practice of narration (e.g., the habit of attention; supporting “dull” students, to use Mason’s term; the love of learning; and self-possession in public speaking):

46. Exercises of this kind will have a fivefold use.

(i.) The teacher is certain to have attentive pupils. For since the scholars may, at any time, be called up and asked to repeat what the teacher has said, each of them will be afraid of breaking down and appearing ridiculous before the others, and will therefore attend carefully and allow nothing to escape them. In addition to this, the habit of brisk attention, which becomes second nature if practised for several years, will fit the scholar to acquit himself well in active life.

(ii.) The teacher will be able to know with certainty if his pupils have thoroughly grasped everything that he has taught them. If he finds that they have not, he will consult his own interest as well as that of his pupils by repeating his explanation and making it clearer.

(iii.) If the same thing be frequently repeated, the dullest intelligences will grasp it at last, and will thus be able to keep pace with the others; while the brighter ones will be pleased at obtaining such a thorough grip of the subject.

(iv.) By means of such constant repetition the scholars will gain a better acquaintance with the subject than they could possibly obtain by private study, even with the greatest intelligence, and will find that, if they just read the lesson over in the morning and then again in the evening, it will remain in their memories easily and pleasantly. When, by this method of repetition, the pupil has, as it were, been admitted to the office of teacher, he will attain a peculiar keenness of disposition and love of learning; he will also acquire the habit of remaining self-possessed while explaining anything before a number of people, and this will be of the greatest use to him throughout life.” (158)

Comenius is happy to use social pressure as a motivator to improve students’ learning, especially since he has abandoned the widely accepted corporal punishment of his day. Students’ natural desire not to appear “ridiculous” before their peers is arguably a more powerful and immediate spur to the effort of learning than an abstract symbol system like a grade. And while not wanting to seem foolish may not be the highest of ideals it does go some way toward creating a culture of learning among human beings as socially embedded and embodied creatures.

It is clarifying to hear Comenius indicate “several years” as the appropriate timeline for training students in this habit of “brisk attention” that will fit them for an “active life”. Likewise, the help afforded the teacher through opportunities to clarify and re-explain accords well with the real challenges of communicating effectively to students. Comenius gives every indication of having practiced what he is preaching, discerning the ins and outs of teaching and learning through philosophical reflection and practical experience.

As with Erasmus, it may be that the teacher is here supplementing or acting as the mediator between the students and the curriculum books. We might imagine a generally older set of students than Mason envisions, but he is undeniably more focused on the teacher as the initial distributor of knowledge. The repetitions seem designed to help students understand hard truths or difficult and complex ideas that are not easily grasped on a first hearing. Corrections, then, might be justified as a necessary safeguard to prevent students from confusing one another with incorrect explanations. We might ponder as well whether Mason’s advice not to “tease [young students] with corrections” focused more upon style and grammar, i.e. not attacking the endless string of ‘and’s that children often start out with. Perhaps she would have sympathized with corrections on matters of fact, when other students might become confused by another student’s misleading explanation.

As stated, Comenius’ variant on narration embodies the golden key of his Great Didactic by turning the student into the teacher after a teacher’s “demonstration” or “exposition”. It thus follows Erasmus in focusing on a spoken lecture or explanation by the teacher rather than a text. The new development present in Comenius is to emphasize the ironic transformation of student into teacher. In a future article we will look at material from Comenius’ Analytical Didactic to see how he developed his recommendations for narration later in life.

“Why the History of Narration Matters” series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 2: Classical Roots

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

Part 4: Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration in Historical Perspective

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One of the best aspects of conventions is the opportunity to meet new people and deepen old friendships. The Symposium began with guests arriving and mingling with one another over coffee.

Emma Foss, music teacher at Coram Deo Academy, let a time of worship to kick off the event. She structured the time of worship around Paul’s triad expressed in Colossians 3:16 to “sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.”

The first keynote address entitled “Cultivating the Joy of Learning in the Classical Classroom” was given by Jason Barney. He developed his thinking about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow. He based many of his thoughts on his book The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow through Classical Education, but also extended his thinking to apply flow in practical ways.

Participants could choose topics in the first breakout session, with tracks catering to teachers or school leaders. After a catered lunch, Patrick Egan presented the second keynote address on “Cultivating Virtue through Habit Training.” He connected the dots between Aristotle’s conviction that virtues are cultivated through habits, the biblical mandate to “train up a child in the way he should go” (Prov. 22:6), and Charlotte Mason’s method of habit training.

A second breakout and guided discussion session preceded the final event; a panel discussion with all three Educational Renaissance authors moderated by David Seibel, Head of School at Coram Deo Academy. It was a discussion about discussion-based learning. The group differentiated discussions from other methods of learning and considered some practical applications for different grade levels and subject areas.

We are grateful for all the participants in this inaugural event. The staff at Coram Deo Academy did an excellent job hosting the event. We look forward to next year’s event. Stay tuned for further information about the date and location for the Educational Renaissance Symposium 2022.

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Against this backdrop, alternatives to conventional education were developed in remote locations. Already by 1900, an abundance of thought was emerging that addressed the concerns of how the Industrial Revolution was transforming education in negative ways. In this article, I will trace the work of two rather different ladies whose lives paralleled one another for a brief span of time. We will consider the influence of these two ladies and reflect on what we can draw from their pedagogical teachings. The two ladies I have in mind are Charlotte Mason and Maria Montessori.

Charlotte Mason: Creating an Educational Alternative in England

Mason preceded Montessori both in age and in her work. Charlotte Mason was born in Bangor, Wales in 1842. Mason entered into teaching as a young lady, eventually developing a vision for education summed up in the phrase “a liberal education for all.” She began a series of books on pedagogy starting with Home Education in 1886 and concluding with Toward a Philosophy of Education published in 1923, the year of her death.

It was around the time of publishing Home Education that she founded the Parents’ Educational Union (P.E.U.) in Bradford, a small industrial city in Yorkshire that specialized in woolen textiles. This location gave her an opportunity to apply her educational principles in a working-class environment. Mason soon attracted a number of adherents in the form of teachers and homeschool mothers. Her organization soon expanded, becoming the Parents’ National Educational Union (P.N.E.U.) in 1890.

After eleven years teaching and training in Bradford, Mason moved to Ambleside where she would help develop a teacher training center. Scale How, a building that is now part of the Charlotte Mason College of University of Cumbria, became the hub of a growing educational movement in the UK. The movement grew beyond Mason’s personal involvement as several of the teachers she mentored launched publications, training centers and conferences elsewhere in the UK.

Mason established an enduring legacy by writing about her pedagogical ideas as well as pouring herself into teachers, governesses and mothers who came to her for training. Her work carried on through those she mentored after her death in 1923. Our friend Jack Beckman, professor of education at Covenant College, shares stories about interviewing former P.N.E.U. teachers during his studies in England in the early 2000s. He conveys how devoted these ladies were to Mason’s principles, particularly the importance of narration. We know very little about Mason’s life, and this is in part a reflection of her devotion to her educational principles, which we’ll explore a little further below.

Maria Montessori: Creating an Educational Alternative in Italy

Born in 1870, Maria Montessori grew up in a newly unified Italy. In 1875 her family moved to Rome the designated capital of the Risorgimento. Montessori attended the University of Rome studying medicine with an emphasis in pediatrics and psychology. After university she worked with children with mental disabilities. During this time, she developed her thoughts about special methods of education while reading works on pedagogy. Her work caught the attention of the directors of the Orthographic School, which trained teachers to educate children with mental disabilities. She began developing a method of instruction that helped children with mental disabilities to pass the same public exams as mainstream children.

By 1906, Montessori shifted all her efforts to fully realizing her educational methods in mainstream schools. Her Casa dei Bambini (House for Children) featured classrooms specially equipped to carry out Montessori’s methods. We will explore her philosophy of education and methods shortly. She showed a great devotion to observing children to understand how children developed and what materials had the greatest impact in their development. Much of her thoughts at this stage were published in Method of Scientific Pedagogy (1909 in Italian and then translated into English in 1912 under the title The Montessori Method).

Montessori’s methods expanded throughout Italian primary schools. Like Mason, Montessori sought to establish her schools in industrial and impoverished neighborhoods. Her methods attracted international attention, and she was invited to England, the European continent, and the U.S. Unlike Mason who remained in northern England all her life, Montessori traveled and lived abroad. She would eventually settle in Amsterdam, although she lived in India throughout the time of WWII. Initially during the Fascist rise to power under Mussolini in the 1920s, Montessori was able to implement her training courses with government sponsorship. By 1930s, however, ideological tensions brought an end to her role in Italy. She left Italy in 1934 and almost all Montessori-related educational programs were rooted out by 1936.

During her stay in India, Montessori corresponded regularly with Gandhi. With a global war raging, Montessori’s thoughts turned to the role of education in promoting peace. Montessori presented lectures on “Education and Peace” promoting early childhood education as the key to reforming society. Her lectures were published in the book Peace and Education in 1949, and she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize that year as well as in 1950 and 1951. When Maria Montessori died in 1952, she had built an enduring legacy through an international network of schools and training centers under the auspices of the Association Montessori Internationale.

A Comparison of Educational Methods

These two pedagogical thinkers share several common ideas, although we’ll see that they differ in some striking ways. For one, both of these educational philosophers share a commitment to viewing the child holistically. Mason, for instance, writes:

“A child is born a person with a mind as complete and as beautiful as his beautiful little body, we can at least show that he always has all the mind he requires for his occasions; that is, that his mind is the instrument of his education and that his education does not produce his mind.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards A Philosophy of Education, pg. 36

Mason was how the child does not become a person later in life when they achieve some level of education. Instead, a child is full of every capacity to engage with a life of learning. Compare this with Montessori’s perspective:

“It was the discovery of the deeper nature of the child, for when the right conditions were established, the result was the spontaneous appearance of characteristics which revealed not a portion but the whole personality. I must affirm once again that they were not the consequence of a determined or a pre-established plan of education.”

Maria Montessori, Citizen of the World, pg. 12

This affirmation is so important to understand. We as educators are not making children into people, we are providing them with the tools of education that engage every aspect of their personhood already present in the child. There is an innate aspect to the personhood of the child that both educational philosophers found important.

Both Mason and Montessori emphasized the atmosphere or environment of education as one of the tools of learning. Mason considers atmosphere in socio-emotional terms:

“They are held in that thought-environment which surrounds the child as an atmosphere, which he breathes as his breath of life; and this atmosphere in which the child inspires his unconscious ideas of right living emanates from his parents. Every look of gentleness and tone of reverence, every word of kindness and act of help, passes into the thought-environment, the very atmosphere which the child breathes; he does not think of these things, may never think of them, but all his life long they excite that ‘vague appetency towards something’ out of which most of his actions spring.”

Charlotte Mason, Parents and Children, pg. 36

Montessori seems to agree:

“There can be no doubt of the fact that a child absorbs an enormous number of impressions from his environment and that external help given to this natural instinct kindles within him a lively enthusiasm. In this way education can be a real help to the natural development of the mind.”

Maria Montessori, The Discovery of the Child, 261

But here we can also see how the two start to diverge. Mason criticizes the artificial transformation of the child’s playroom or school room:

“We certainly may use atmosphere as an instrument of education, but there are prohibitions, for ourselves rather than for children. Perhaps the chief of these is, that no artificial element be introduced, no sprinkling with rose-water, softening with cushions. Children must face life as it is; if their parents are anxious and perturbed children feel it in the air.”

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, pg. 97

Montessori, however, introduced into the classroom a number of specialized materials that were appropriately sized to children. These she intentionally made out of natural materials so that there was a natural aesthetic about the classroom. In Montessori’s thinking, children learned best by working with materials instead of being directly instructed by a teacher.

The divergence grows as we differentiate Montessori’s “scientific education” from Mason’s “humane education.” I pull these designations from Mason’s review of Montessori published in a letter to The Times Educational Supplement on December 3, 1912. Mason’s critique of Montessori is that:

“’Education by things’ is boldly advocated, regardless of the principle that things lead only to more and more various things and are without effect on the thoughts and therefore on the character and conduct of a man, save as regards the production or the examination of similar things.”

Charlotte Mason, “Miss Mason on the Montessori System,” pg. 52-53

Mason concludes her review with the central tenant of her method:

“Because a child is a person, because his education should make him more of a person, because he increases upon such ideas as are to be found in books, pictures, and the like, because the more of a person he is the better work will he turn out of whatever kind, because there is a general dearth of persons of fine character and sound judgment,—for these and other reasons I should regard the spread of schools conducted on any method which contemns knowledge in favour of appliances and employments as a calamity, no matter how prettily the children may for the present behave. Knowledge is the sole lever by which character is elevated, the sole diet upon which mind is sustained.”

“Miss Mason on the Montessori System,” pg. 53

Charlotte Mason promoted the power of ideas as best conveyed through great books. This and only this can raise the character of children. Now, to be fair to Dr. Montessori, 1912 was an early stage in the development of her ideas, when Miss Mason produced this evaluation of her method. However, as I read Montessori’s educational philosophy, I don’t see a substantial development of her understanding of the key tools of education beyond this. The peaceable kingdom she sought during and after WWII was based on a constructivist philosophy of education that emphasizes independent discovery activated by the learner. Her assumption in the innate goodness of children meant that they would naturally learn self-discipline. In this way, we might say Montessori has perhaps most fully realized Rousseau’s educational vision.

This last point on self-discipline pulls in another key difference in perspective between these two educational philosophers. Mason saw that discipline is one of the tools of education, and to this end she promoted habit training. This is a method whereby the teacher or parent enables the child to acquire a practice (like brushing teeth daily) or a virtue (like sharing with others) through simple instruction and regular support. Montessori proposed that children would attain discipline through physical work with objects, through activities like pouring water or sweeping up. She writes:

“When work has become a habit, the intellectual level rises rapidly, and organised order causes good conduct to become a habit. Children then work with order, perseverance, and discipline, persistently and naturally; the permanent, calm and vivifying work of the physical organism resembles the respiratory rhythm.”

Maria Montessori, The Advanced Montessori Method, Vol. 1, pg. 85

Assessing the Alternatives

The need for an educational alternative came about at a time when educational reform pushed schools away from its mooring in the classical liberal arts. The technicism and scientism of conventional education remains to this day, which is why it is worthwhile exploring the works of early advocates for genuine alternatives. Let’s consider a few of the high-level concepts that can guide us today in our educational renewal movement.

To begin with, both Mason and Montessori highlight the importance of the personhood of children. It is not our place to make children into something, instead we receive into our classrooms people made in the image of God with tremendous intellectual and moral capacity. Our work is to care for the life of the mind and feed our children with nourishing ideas. Caring for the content of great books that will sustain the intellect and moral character of the children is similar to providing nutrient dense meals to help their bodies grow. The Christian and classical tradition provides us with an ample supply of nutrient dense books.

The concept of character is clearly a goal for both Mason and Montessori. Our classrooms should be places where students strive after character. Montessori seems to have placed too much trust in the innate goodness of children. Mason seems to take a more realistic view of the child’s capacity for good or for evil. This strikes me as the more biblical paradigm. Left to herself, the child is prone to miss the target. Obviously teachers trained in the Montessori method care for and guide their children, but I think Mason’s method of habit training provides a more sustained level of support to cultivate virtue in the child. Mason is not far off from the classical tradition as Aristotle teaches that moral virtue is learned through habit and practice. The biblical tradition also points to virtue that is cultivated through diligence (2 Pet. 1:5) as we follow our Lord Jesus Christ, walking “in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:10).

Finally, we need to be clear to distinguish the locus of learning energy or power on the part of the child from what is called child-centered learning. As we have developed the intersection of Charlotte Mason pedagogy and classical Christian education, the concept we’ve brought forward is the shift of the energy in the classroom away from the teacher (i.e. lecturing) to the learning (i.e. narration and discussion). The role of the teacher, then, is to carefully direct the learning energy toward idea-rich texts that capitalize on the child’s natural hunger for knowledge and joy in learning. Child-centered learning, on the other hand, usually focuses on developing the problem-solving skills of the child. Child-centric learning emphasizes the independence of the learner, but it normally results in an education without any clear goals. Mason is clear that education is about feeding a child’s love for knowledge within the proper authority structure of the teacher-student relationship. We can see how this is consistent with the biblical mandate to “train up a child in the way he should go” (Prov. 22:6).

For many years I have been curious to explore Maria Montessori’s work. My sense is that there is likely more overlap between Charlotte Mason and Maria Montessori than I have been able to uncover in this article. The distinction between the two, though, is abundantly clear to me. Mason seems to be fully grounded in the Christian and liberal arts tradition. Montessori seems to break with the tradition in ways that would not be consistent with the classical Christian movement. I think at points the popular understanding of Montessori as a nature-loving, child-centric model of education has influenced people’s understanding of Mason. Hopefully this comparison of the two helps open a greater discussion of the distinctives between the two.

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In order to escape the technological addiction that has mystified the 21st century, it is not enough to take smartphones, laptops, and video streaming services away. They must be replaced with something better. Something deeper. Something more satisfying.

In this blog, I will put forward one compelling alternative to digital saturation. It isn’t the only alternative, nor is it a sufficient one. But it is necessary. Here I have in mind cultivating the intellectual life. By this I mean the world of story and imagination. Thoughts and ideas. Concepts and principles. The life of the mind. 

The Road to Recovery

Sadly, like some prehistoric species, the intellectual life is all but extinct in some minds. I don’t mean this in a condemning sense. It is merely a diagnosis. We have become so acquainted to consuming that the idea of cultivating the intellect sounds incredulous. At best, it sounds boring. Why think when one can switch to auto-pilot?

In theory, people are first taught to cultivate an intellectual life in school. Or are they? For most of us, school was a pragmatic transaction from day one. First-graders may be six, but they are not dull. Their social acumen is developed enough to pick up on what matters in the classroom. The usual suspects include grades, prizes, and teacher-approval. 

Imagine, however, if the first day of school was an orientation to cultivating the life of the mind. No talk of a syllabus, grade criteria, or course objectives. Instead, the teacher begins by comparing one’s mind to a garden. Gardens don’t pop into existence weed-free and fruit-bearing. They must be tended, weeded, watered, and cultivated. As does the mind. The intentional teacher, dedicated to her craft, inspires her students to cultivate an Eden in order to discover that the labor is its own reward.

People coming from schools who implement traditionally modern methods to motivate learning may struggle to cultivate the intellectual life at first. “What will I get out of it?”, “This is boring”, and “I would rather do something else” are all common reactions. But if one can move beyond these initial obstructions, there is hope for recovering interest in intellectual matters. It will take time and effort, but it is possible.

The Importance of Self-Feeding

Once the intellectual life is conceived, it requires self-feeding for sustenance. This is the brilliant insight of educator Charlotte Mason. She insisted that the life of the mind will die if it remains dependent upon the sustenance of others. This is because the mind is like an organism, a living thing that needs to take care of itself. A nascent organism that depends on other organisms will be parasitical at best and fizzle out at worst. It is up to each individual to cultivate the life of the mind through feeding it regularly.

How does one feed the intellect?

This may sound surprising to some but reading, generally speaking, is not the precise answer. There are two reasons for this. First, not all books nourish the mind in the same way. Tech addiction is one major obstruction for cultivating the intellectual life and another is a diet of shallow books. Stories that are morally vacuous, sensationalistic, and stylistically weak fall into this category. These books won’t nourish the intellect any more than a sugar-glazed donut will nourish the physical body (even if it tastes good).

Good books must be chosen for self-feeding and, subsequently, they must be chewed upon. This is the second reason that reading is not, generally speaking, a sufficient path to the self-nourished intellectual life. Our minds need to act upon that which has been read. They need to do something with the knowledge that has been encountered. How often do we read something, probably too quickly, and try to recall it later with no success? We never gave our minds time to assimilate, or digest, that which has been encountered.

For Charlotte Mason, narration is the ideal way for students to assimilate knowledge. Give children the opportunity to narrate the text without looking back, after a single-reading, and the process for self-feeding begins. The mind comes alive as it processes in real-time what it ingested moments ago. The ideas of the text become part of the mind of the student. 

Making Time for Quiet

To cultivate the intellectual life , one must first recover and nourish it. Then one must sustain it intentionally. 17th century polymath Blaise Pascal famously wrote, “All of man’s problems stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Pascal’s observation is more than relevant for us today as we inhabit this present age of distraction. Technology is one contributing factor for incessant distraction, as I have already suggested.

Another factor is that most of us live in suburbs or cities. We are surrounded by people, pets, activities, stores, restaurants, and things to do. It is very difficult to find a place that is quiet and unoccupied. Professionally speaking, our work may not be physically laborious, but it mentally exhausting. And more often than not, our personal lives provide no respite. We are constantly on the go, bumping into people and things like electrons.

The solution to such mental crowdedness in order to sustain the mind is to carve out space for solitude. To be sure, minds can be nourished in social settings. Engaging thought-provoking questions, spirited debate, and penetrating discussion are all worthwhile intellectual activities. But the mind also needs time alone with no immediate distractions. It needs time to slow down, process, and reflect. It needs time to be alone.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Most of us begin feeling antsy after sitting still with no distraction for more than a few minutes. Our minds grow nervous, eager for something new to seize our attention. In reality, however, what the mind needs, even if it doesn’t realize it, is space to think. Perhaps surprisingly, making time for the mind to work brings unexpected rest.

The Benefit of Such a Life

Despite what has been written thus far, some readers may continue to struggle to see the value of the intellectual life. “What benefits will it bring?” they will wonder. “How will this support my personal advancement?” 

Questions like these miss the mark. To be sure, there is productive value in the intellectual life. I have already alluded to some examples. The nourished intellect, on average, will be more resilient than one that has been depleted. It will be more efficient in work settings. It will more effectively grapple with everyday problems. 

But here lies the paradox. The real benefit of the intellectual life is the joy of learning. One in pursuit of a nourished intellect for the sake of external benefits will eventually fizzle out. The work will grow too difficult and the benefits will no longer be perceived as worth it. Joy must accompany the process for the intellectual life to remain viable.

The good news, though, is that there is grace. As humans, we often begin our pursuit of good things for wrong, or imperfect, reasons. But amidst these mixed motivations, God can use these moments to transform us. He graciously conforms us to His image, revealing to us the goodness of Himself and the eternal reward of life with Him. When it comes to cultivating the life of the mind, we pray for God to reveal truth to us through the Holy Spirit and shape our affections to desire it and Him more and more.

Conclusion

As the apostle Paul writes in his closing remarks to the Philippians:

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you (Phil. 4: 8-9 ESV).

Amidst the busyness we all face in the modern world, may we make time for the intellectual life, reflecting on what is true, honorable, lovely, and just. Ultimately, as we engage in such reflection, may our minds turn to Him who is the manifestation of all these, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word who became flesh.

Recommended Reading:

Mind to Mind: An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason and Karen Glass

Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pense’es by Blaise Pascal and Peter Kreeft

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster

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Mentoring as a Program

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

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

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

On Permissiveness and Micro-managing

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

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

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

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

Mentoring and Habit Training

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

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

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

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

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

Philosophy of Education, 102

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

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

Philosophy of Education, 102

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

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

Philosophy of Education, 102-103

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

Train Up a Child

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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