Michael Hobbiss, a researcher from the UK on attention, distraction and cognitive control in adolescents, remarked in an interview on the Learning Scientists website, that there’s been too much focus among educators on how to grab students’ attention, and not enough on how the attentional systems actually work.

Of course, we’ve all heard of the rising diagnoses of ADD/ADHD (66% increase from 2000 to 2010!). Perhaps that fact is simply a function growing popular awareness of the problem, and therefore more doctor visits for a diagnosis. But Daniel Goleman, the bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence and Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, hypothesizes that we’re recognizing it more because it’s becoming more of a problem, even for us adults.

In his book Focus Goleman memorably tells the story of a conversation with a doctor, who recounted how professionals are beginning to self-medicate for attentional issues and narcolepsy. One lawyer was even complaining that he couldn’t write contracts without such drugs, many of which would have required a prescription just a few short years ago (8-9).

A possible cause for our crisis of attention in the modern world is our addiction to the new media and screen time. Those glowing orbs in our hands and on our desks are powerful brain manipulators. I’ve heard the attention-grabbing industry estimated at $6 trillion; that’s a lot of money, time and effort from experts focused at diverting our attention. And perhaps by the law of habit the industry’s power—and our giving into it—is turning us and our students into less focused people.

The upshot to these dire pronouncements is that there is a rich tradition of reflection on the human faculty or habit of attention. Those familiar with Charlotte Mason’s work will recognize it as a theme that she keeps coming back to. Yet Charlotte Mason wasn’t the first educational theorist to spend some focused thought on the attention, and she wasn’t the last.

So in this article, we’re going to explore the practical recommendations for training the attention that Charlotte Mason had in common with one of her predecessors, the famous British Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, followed by a slightly younger contemporary, the American educator John Milton Gregory, known in classical education circles for his book The Seven Laws of Teaching.

Then we will link up with modern cognitive psychology and neuroscience for how they support and confirm this tradition. This research will provide some greater clarity as to what’s going on in our brains and why Locke, Mason and Gregory’s sage advice still stands today. That will take us through the science of attention then and now.

The Science of Attention Then

John Locke on Attention

More than a century before Charlotte Mason, John Locke anticipated her in many of his ideas about education, including his reflections on the nature of young children and the importance of gentle training in habit. The habit of attention, proper accommodations for children, and the need for training in focus are some of those areas of substantial agreement.

In his treatise on education John Locke begins his reflections by considering the nature of children:

The natural temper of children disposes their minds to wander. Novelty alone takes them…. They quickly grow weary of the same thing, and so have almost their whole delight in change and variety. It is a contradiction to the natural state of childhood for them to fix their fleeting thoughts. (Some Thoughts Concerning Education 124)

Unlike many thinkers of his day and earlier, Locke’s reflections on children’s inattentiveness do not lead him to despise children, but instead to accost parents and tutors for their unrealistic expectations. It is absurd to expect a child to have the developed faculty of attention of a grown scholar, and taxing a student far beyond their capacity is, to him, simply an exercise in frustration.

He briefly wonders why children might naturally have a short attention span, as a 17^th century medical practitioner might be expected to do, before concluding that whatever the cause it is surely the case:

Whether this be owing to the temper of their brains or the quickness and instability of their animal spirits, over which the mind has not yet got a full command, this is visible, that it is a pain to children to keep their thoughts steady to anything. (124)

Next he moves on to propose the same type of gracious treatment and training that Charlotte Mason enthusiasts have come to appreciate from her:

A lasting continued attention is one of the hardest tasks [that] can be imposed on them; and therefore he that requires their application should endeavor to make what he proposes as grateful and agreeable as possible; at least, he ought to take care not to join any displeasing or frightful idea with it. (124)

John Locke thus recommends a tactic of accommodation and understanding toward students’ challenges with wandering attention. This is in great contrast to the usual methods of his day, which employed frequent “rebukes and corrections, if they find them ever so little wandering” (124). Locke finds these methods ineffective and more likely to stifle attention than develop it.

These ideas might make Locke seem like a softy, but he has a place for rigor and aims definitely at a student’s growing excellence in learning. He has just shifted the method of ensuring students’ attention from negative to positive tactics. As he concludes later,

The great skill of a teacher is to get and keep the attention of his scholar; whilst he has that, he is sure to advance as fast as the learner’s abilities will carry him; and without that, all his bustle and pother will be to little or no purpose. (125)

Locke recognizes the necessity of a focused attention for learning and recommends a “certain tenderness” in the teacher to “make the child sensible that he loves him and designs nothing but his good” as the surest way to inspire the child to “hearken to his lessons and relish what he teachers him” (125). This no doubt develops out of his Christian view of children as made in the image of God, a trust to be nurtured and cherished, and not harshly accosted for weaknesses they can’t help.

Charlotte Mason on Attention

Similar to Locke, Charlotte Mason focuses on attention as a habit, and a chief educational virtue at that. A student’s learning and abilities depend upon it, because it makes them possible. As she explains in Home Education,

First, we put the habit of Attention, because the highest intellectual gifts depend for their value upon the measure in which their owner has cultivated the habit of attention. (97)

Developing on Locke’s reflections about the natural state of childhood, Charlotte Mason recommended short lessons for younger children and variety in books and subjects; she famously quipped that “a change is as good as a rest.” In this, like Locke, she accommodates the attention of young students, while at the same time recommending a positive program designed to improve and develop students’ attention over time.

Her reflections on the nature of the attention are a little more up-to-date than Locke’s “animal spirits,” as she grapples with the faculty theory of her day and attempts to articulate an integrated and interconnected view of the mind:

Attention is hardly even an operation of the mind, but is simply the act by which the whole mental force is applied to the subject in hand. This act, of bringing the whole mind to bear, may be trained into a habit at the will of the parent or teacher, who attracts and holds the child’s attention by means of a sufficient motive. (102)

Here too she focuses on the parent or teacher providing the proper motive for attention in a way that attracts the child. Of course, the highest intellectual motive is that of curiosity, which should be aroused and cultivated in any way possible. (John Locke had said much the same thing, and came back to the theme of curiosity again and again in his treatise, which is another reason I suspect him as a source for Charlotte Mason’s reflections.) But other motives (like a sense of duty or achievement) are acceptable and sometimes necessary, as long as students are not nourished too intensely on one natural desire such that it ventures into the arena manipulation or unhealthy influence.

But perhaps the most important tactic for Charlotte Mason in the cultivation of the habit of attention is that students be expected to know and tell after only one reading or exposure. The practice of narration is the supreme way of inducing in the child that habit of attention which will make a scholar of him. The expectation that one will have to tell gives the mind the necessary energy to attend fully and completely to the content at hand. This practice, when regularly followed, is of supreme value for moving students along the path of learning just as quickly as their natural abilities will allow them.

John Milton Gregory on Attention

It is a wonder to see so many theorists speaking with one voice on the science of attention. John Milton Gregory’s second law of teaching says just what we could expect from Locke or Mason:

“The learner must attend with interest to the fact or truth to be learned.” (The Seven Laws of Teaching, Canon Press, 37)

Gregory admits the commonsensical nature of this assertion, but bemoans how often teachers break its principles in practice.

“However much teacher may neglect it in practice, they readily admit in theory that without attention the pupil can learn nothing. One may as well talk to the deaf or the dead as to teach a child who is wholly inattentive.” (40)

Like Mason, he prefers to describe the attention as more than an isolated faculty of the mind, latching onto the word “attitude” as a helpful word-picture:

“Avoiding as much as possible all metaphysical discussion, we may describe the attention as a mental attitude—the attitude in which the thought-power is actively bent toward, or fastened upon, some object of thought or perception. It is an attitude, not of ease and repose, but of effort and exertion.” (38)

The same activity of the student that we would expect from Charlotte Mason’s philosophy is here recommended by Gregory. The student must engage in the effort and exertion and the teacher’s job is to entice her to do so.

Like Locke, Gregory believes that the method of rebukes and harsh punishments for inattentiveness is counterproductive. But he explains why by making a distinction between compelled and attracted attention:

“Compelled attention is short-lived and easily exhausted. Its very painfulness wearies the powers of body and mind…. Attracted attention, on the other hand, is full of power and endurance. Its felt interest calls dormant energies into play, and the pleasure given by its efforts seems to refresh rather than weary the mind.” (39)

Clearly we are to prefer attracting attention whenever possible, and compelled attention should only be used when necessary to gather the class back together from some distraction, before attracting their attention again by interesting content or, in Charlotte Mason’s words, “a sufficient motive.”

A few of Gregory’s practical instructions connect so well with the spirit of Locke and Mason that they are worth reproducing in full:

• “Never exhaust wholly the pupil’s power of attention. Stop when signs of weariness appear, and either dismiss the class or change the subject to kindle fresh attention.
• “Fit the length of the exercise to the ages of the class: the younger the pupils the briefer the lesson.
• “Arouse, and when needful rest, the attention by a pleasing variety, but avoid distraction. Keep the real lesson in view.
• “Present those aspects of the lesson, and use such illustrations, as fit the ages, character, and attainments of the class.” (48)

Locke, Mason and Gregory seem to speak with one voice on the subject of attention. They discuss its over-arching importance for learning and attaining excellence. They recommend against negative methods and for the positive and caring influence of the teacher. Their goal is to accommodate a child’s natural state, while also developing the focus ability of a scholar in him. The process should involve the slow, faithful inducement of the child to attend as long as he can, but no longer, followed by change and variety. Over the years, the attention of the child will grow with practice, and the love of learning and curiosity will flourish in him, leading him to a willing and settled intellectual excellence.

Now let’s turn to modern neuroscience and cognitive psychology to see these recommendations confirmed and explained.

Modern Learning Science on Attention

What have we learned about the science of attention since the days of Locke, Mason and Gregory? Research confirms that the ability to focus directly correlates with accomplishment in virtually any domain of learning or life. As bestselling author Daniel Goleman puts it in his book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence,

In very recent years the science of attention has blossomed far beyond vigilance. That science tells us these skills determine how well we perform any task. If they are stunted, we do poorly; if muscular, we can excel. Our very nimbleness in life depends on this subtle faculty. While the link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time, it ripples through almost everything we seek to accomplish. (2-3)

Attention is the overarching mental “faculty” that traditional educational theorists described it as. It’s a “subtle faculty” that hides under our radar and yet is always operating, having far-reaching effects on every activity or task we engage in, especially those involving learning.

But why is attention so important for learning and skill development to take place? First, it’s worth mentioning that modern neuroscience has discovered that there are at least two different modes of attention, what Barbara Oakley in A Mind for Numbers calls the focused mode and the diffuse mode. The focused mode is the experience we normally think of as focusing or attending closely to something. The diffuse mode, on the other hand, is when we are relaxed and letting our mind wander.

Dr. Daniel Levitin, Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill University, nicknames the diffuse mode the “mid-wandering mode” (The Organized Mind 41). He remarks that the discovery of this mode as “a special brain network… was one of the biggest neuroscientific discoveries of the last twenty years” (38). One of its features is that it continuously seeks to monopolize your consciousness: “it eagerly shifts the brain into mind-wandering when you’re not engaged in a task, and it hijacks your consciousness if the task you’re doing gets boring” (38). Here we have a fuller explanation for Locke’s remark that the natural state of children’s minds is to wander. In fact, it’s a natural human brain state.

Dr. Levitin goes on to explain that it is a zero-sum game between these two modes:

 “When one is active the other is not. During demanding tasks, the central executive kicks in. The more the mind-wandering network is suppressed, the greater the accuracy of performance on the task at hand” (39).

Daniel Goleman describes these two attention systems as top-down and bottom-up, drawing from research in cognitive science. The subcortical brain machinery (bottom-up) is much quicker in brain time, more impulsive, emotional and intuitive, and manages our habitual ways of engaging with the world, as we would say, without really thinking about it. The top-down focused mode is slower, more logical, voluntary, and based in the seat of self-control, the pre-frontal cortex (Focus 25-26).

Because of this we know that too much effort to stay in the focused mode, without the training up of habits of attentive focus, will deplete the brain’s reserves of willpower. At this point the brain will automatically switch into diffuse mode to find the needed rest and recreation. This explains the insight from our traditional educators of the fruitlessness of stern corrections for inattentiveness. If a child has reached her limit of attentive focus, the willpower system needs time to refresh; of course, it’s possible to light up the fear and pain centers of the child’s brain, but those will not induce attentiveness to linguistic or abstract learning.

The growing body of literature on elite performance has also illuminated how integral focus is to the development of complex skills, from liberal arts like deep reading, to world-class sports or musicianship. Attention is a necessary requirement of what has been variously called deliberate practice (Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers) or deep practice (Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code).

For instance, in his book Deep Work Cal Newport mentions two core components of deliberate practice, drawing from the research of Anders Ericsson:

• your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master;
• you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.

Both of these components, the uninterrupted focus on the skill or idea and the feedback, require the focused mode of attention in order to optimize skill development or learning. Like Locke explained, when a student’s attention is focused, that student is sure to progress just as quickly as natural ability will allow. But without this focus the time is almost wasted.

Cal Newport goes on to explain the role of myelination of neural circuits in this process:

By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen. (Deep Work 36-37)

The modern crisis of attention is explained! The problem is that our brains are receiving too much stimulation from our glowing orbs, and so our ability to learn and develop is hampered. Myelination requires focus of mind and avoidance of distractions.

There are few experiences this reminds me more of that the peaceful experience of standing in a classroom with a group of attentive students, who are under the thrall of an engaging book. As I or a student finishes reading, I quietly ask a student called at random to begin telling back for the class, and he narrates what was just read with graphic language, fitting details and a faithful account of the sequence of thought. Other students then add a detail or two and we proceed to discuss the deeper meaning and relevance of the text. This is Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration, and its powerful sequence trains students in the habit of attention.

In my previous role as Academic Dean of Clapham School, I’ve discussed the topic of attention before in a series of articles. I was also interviewed in a webinar for parents. I’ve listed these below in case you’re interested in going further in this topic.

• A Call for Focus in Learning: Part 1, Traditional Views of Attention
• Part 2, The Science of Attention
• Part 3, Practicing Attention
• Webinar: Attention, Please! Tips for Keeping Your Child Focused

If you’re interested in learning more about a method for training in habits generally, check out Patrick’s “A Guide to Implementing Habit Training”.

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To summarize the distinction, Aristotle defined the intellectual virtue of ‘art’ as a “state of capacity to make [something], involving a true course of reasoning” (Nichomachean Ethics VI.4, 1140^a). The painter makes paintings, the musician creates music, the architect designs buildings. And all of them do so with a reasoned awareness of the constraints of the world and the proper steps necessary to bring what they imagine into being.

On the other hand, the intellectual virtue of ‘science’ or, in common parlance, ‘knowledge’ is “a state of capacity to demonstrate” (Nich. Ethics VI.3 1139^b), meaning that in order to know something, someone should be able to prove it or give evidence that it is the case. Experts give evidence in order to prove the truthfulness of certain claims, thereby endeavoring to establish genuine knowledge about their subject.

Perhaps you can see in a glance why this is an incredibly important distinction for educators. Training a child in an art should follow a markedly different process than teaching a child a science! Artistic mastery requires a great deal of coached practice in the art, while knowledge of particular truths in a subject entails research, gathering evidence, careful thought and the weighing of arguments.

Where this comes to a head most of all is in our application of the classical liberal arts in our schools: particularly the trivium arts of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, but also the quadrivium arts of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. While we’ve continued to call them ‘arts’, it is my contention that we’ve been so caught up with modernist privileging of ‘science’ over everything else, that we’ve fallen into error in both our understanding of what these arts are in their essence, but also in our methods of teaching them… or I should say, of training students in them. We’ve treated the liberal arts as if they were sciences, and our students have been the worse for it.

In unpacking and applying this crucial distinction, let’s start first with John Milton Gregory’s distinction of training vs. teaching.

Training vs. Teaching in J M. Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching

At the school where I work we’re going through John Milton Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching as one piece of our faculty training for this year. In rereading it this last June, I came across a passage of his introduction that caught my eye because of its relationship to the classical distinction between an ‘art’ and a ‘science’.

John Milton Gregory divides the whole art of education into two “branches”:

“The one is the art of training; the other the art of teaching. Training is the systematic development and cultivation of the powers of mind and body. Teaching is the systematic inculcation of knowledge.” (p. 10, 2014 Canon Press reprint)

Here it was again articulated in a different form. Where Aristotle’s expression of it held the trappings of a work on personal ethics, and therefore focused on the subjective virtue of an individual, J. M. Gregory was expressing the distinction from the perspective of an educator. Education involves two core parts, we might say, training in the arts (i.e. any of the “powers of mind and body” that produce something in the world) and teaching of knowledge in any particular ‘science’, or subject in which things can be known.

J. M. Gregory goes on to explain the how and why of training in more detail:

“As the child is immature in all its powers, it is the first business of education, as an art, to cultivate those powers, by giving to each power regular exercise in its own proper sphere, till, through exercise and growth, they come to their full strength and skill.” (10)

This expresses well my previous article’s contention for the importance of lots of coached practice. Training students in an art requires giving them “regular exercise” and a long process for the development of “strength and skill.” I hardly need add that recent research on the importance of deliberate practice over the course of thousands of hours is confirming this traditional insight. Highly focused repeated firing of the relevant neural networks is apparently the key to the formation of myelin sheaths around those neurons, so that their firing can occur with high levels of efficiency and accuracy (see The Talent Code, or Talent Is Overrated, or Outliers or any other of the high performance literature drawing from Anders Erikson’s research).

Incidentally, J. M. Gregory also concedes that training is more primary, or that it is, as he says, “the first business of education,” because without the training of a child’s powers, they cannot even grapple with the stuff of knowledge. The arts are a basic human form of culture-making, without which knowledge is not even possible.

In contrast, J. M. Gregory describes teaching as the communication of knowledge, dropping Aristotle’s emphasis on the ability to demonstrate. Modernism and empiricism had effectively undercut Aristotle’s emphasis on deductive logic’s ability to “prove” from universals, and the promise of presenting the “results of modern science” had already come into its own and subtly influenced J. M. Gregory’s view of what it meant to teach knowledge. At least, that’s my explanation of this curious feature of his account, not to mention his decision to write his whole work focused on the rules of teaching and leave the art of training to the side.

Lastly, it is interesting to note how J. M. Gregory claims that these two aspects of education (training vs. teaching) “though separable in thought, are not separable in practice” (11). The fact that he emphasizes this so strongly–though understandable and no doubt correct—just goes to show how far the tradition has come since Plato and Aristotle. In those days the arts were viewed more concretely, almost as professions or trades, rather than academic attainments.

The Arts as Professions in Plato’s Gorgias

Since the Fall of 2018 I have used Plato’s Gorgias with students in my role as a Senior Thesis advisor. The dialogue is a spritely example of Socrates’ witty repartee with a prominent figure, who claims so much for himself. Gorgias was a famous rhetorician with a flowery style, who travelled around Greece taking payment from students to train them in his art.

In the dialogue Socrates forces Gorgias to adopt the shorter method of discourse (i.e. Socrates’ preferred dialectical method) rather than his normal rhetorical speeches, before systematically picking apart what the art of rhetoric really is, and whether Gorgias can really train men in all he claims to. What is interesting to note for our purposes is further confirmation that even before Aristotle articulated the distinction between skill in an ‘art’ and knowledge or ‘science’, it was alive and well in Greek educational culture.

Socrates begins by discussing numerous other arts or professions, in order to illuminate what exactly Gorgias claims to be as a rhetorician. Throughout the dialogue he brings up the art of a weaver, a physician, a trainer, a business owner, an arithmetician, and a geometer, among other professions. Of course, he also mentions the art of dialectic that he himself engages in, and discusses at length the nature of Gorgias’ art of rhetoric. When Gorgias’ defines rhetoric as the art of discourse, Socrates makes the point that other arts deal with discourse as well. For instance, the physician discourses with the sick about the remedies for their condition, and the arithmetician about odd and even numbers.

In a way, Plato’s Gorgias foreshadows the later idea of the liberal arts, which would include arithmetic, geometry, dialectic and rhetoric. They are distinguished from other arts by how they use discourse in words or numbers to create their product. Unlike the products of a weaver or sculptor, a trainer or physician, their product itself is the discourse of words and numbers now present in the world. That product could be the ephemeral spoken address of an orator, or the record of it later written down; it could be the mental calculations of an arithmetician or the recorded transactions in a business ledger.

The dialogue is also interesting for how Socrates’ chief critique of Gorgias’ art of rhetoric turns on Gorgias’ claim to being able to persuade anyone of anything regardless of his lack of knowledge or expertise in that area. For example, Gorgias claims that his brother, a physician, could not get a certain patient to take his medicine, until he came along and pleaded with him. Socrates seems to almost be objecting to the art of rhetoric’s ability to persuade others of beliefs without “inculcating knowledge” or “teaching” them anything. For this reason, Socrates thinks the art of rhetoric is suspect because it can be used to convince people of false ideas just as well as true.

In other words, Socrates thinks training students in the art of rhetoric without teaching them true knowledge in the sciences leaves the world ripe for manipulation. For Socrates rhetoric is a manipulative technique like cookery (which doesn’t make food nutritious) or cosmetics (which doesn’t produce real health and beauty). All this would certainly support J. M. Gregory’s claim that training and teaching cannot (or should not) be divorced in practice, even if it is useful to distinguish between them in principle.

Two Errors in Training vs. Teaching

While I am inclined to think that our chief error today is aiming to teach students abstract knowledge and rules about the liberal arts, rather than affording them enough coached practice to develop proficiency, Plato’s Gorgias provides a unique and powerful check on the other side. Neglecting the teaching of genuine knowledge can be just as deadly an error.

We might conceive of these as classical education’s Scylla and Charybdis. On the one side is the perilous rocks of focusing so much on knowledge acquisition and testing, that students lose all active agency in their learning and come out of their rhetoric classes with a host of memorized figures of speech and rules, but no facility or confidence in speaking or writing. On the other side, is the vortex of Charybdis, where the powerful currents of worldliness draw in students whose training has given them the ability to manipulate others, regardless of truth or goodness.

Perhaps there are some debate programs, or classical schools, that so focus on mastery of rules and practice, without the heart of knowledge, that this is a live option worthy of fear. But again, my hunch is that most of our modern schools are so focused on the task of learning about rhetoric that our students left without much practice in learning how to speak, to stick with one example.

How do you keep the balance of training vs. teaching? Let us know in the comments and share this article with a friend if you found it helpful!

Check out more recent articles related to training in the arts!

Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship

Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued

Apprenticeship in the Arts: Traditions and Divisions

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Truth

Peterson grounds truth in the biblical conception of the Divine Logos as the creative force behind the universe.

“In the Christian tradition, Christ is identified with the Logos. The Logos is the Word of God. That Word transformed chaos into order at the beginning of time. In His human form, Christ sacrificed himself voluntarily to the truth, to the good, to God. In consequence, He died and was reborn. The Word that produces order from Chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity.”

Peterson, 12 Rules, 223

As a consequence, truth is what orders the universe. To live in harmony with the universe is to encounter truth, brutal as that may be at times, and to abide by truth in speech and conduct. Peterson takes us to the prison camps, both Soviet and Nazi, through the accounts of Solzhenitsynn and Frankl (pg. 215) to see that truth often comes at great personal expense, and that untruth corrupts at all levels of society. For both the individual and society, “lies war the structure of Being.” (pg. 215). Knowing the truth will set us free, according to the words of Jesus in John 8:32, who calls us to abide in his Word. Centering our lives around truth is not easy, but the alternative is a life that lacks freedom, even though lies entice us through the deception that we can attain freedom through them. Peterson’s advice in rule 8 is “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” As educators, this advice orients us to assisting our students in the acquisition of truth, and challenging them to root out deception.

Educators often fall prey to the urgent needs of the moment. Grades are due, the students need to be prepped for the annual performance, or we’ve simply fallen behind in our unit. We figure delivering content efficiently is the best solution. Content delivery, that is the teaching of the facts and figures in our curriculum, is not the same as centering our classroom on truth. Surely, we are telling true things to our students, but the content is more likely to glance off the surface of their minds. To be truly centered on the truth, we must recognize the transformative nature of truth. Truth needs to be reflected upon. Truth needs to be expressed. Truth needs to be committed to. These are necessities that take time and effort in order for truth to take its full effect in the lives of students. I appreciate Peterson’s vulnerable self-reflection, recognizing how to detect truthfulness and deception within himself.

“If you pay attention to what you do and say, you can learn to feel a state of internal division and weakness, when you are misbehaving and misspeaking. It’s an embodied sensation, not a thought. I experience an internal sensation of sinking and division, rather than solidity and strength, when I am incautious with my acts and words. It seems to be centred in my solar plexus, where a large knot of nervous tissue resides. I learned to recognize when I was lying, in fact, by noticing this sinking and division, and then inferring the presence of a lie. It often took me a long time to ferret out the deception. Sometimes I was using words for appearance. Sometimes I was trying to disguise my own true ignorance of the topic at hand. Sometimes I was using the words of others to avoid the responsibility of thinking for myself.”

Peterson, 12 Rules, 224

My mom taught me something similar to what Peterson describes here. She called it the “uh-oh” feeling. I now call it my conscience. Our students need to learn how to feel and respond to their consciences, and to know when they are exhibiting the strength of truthfulness or are succumbing to deception. This takes time, and peace, and quiet. It also requires of us a level of commitment to the student that is challenging. We often want to detach ourselves from our students at the most opportune moments for learning to take place: namely lunch and recess. But these are the moments when we most get to live together with our students in meaningful ways. We’ll explore meaning a bit further below.

In the classroom, though, we can be mindful of two pillars that ground study in truthfulness. First, is the assumption that others have something to teach us. Peterson’s 9th rule states, “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.” Intellectual humility is a virtue our society desperately needs. Intellectual humility is the disposition a thinker has that recognizes the limited nature of the individual’s knowledge. It is learned in the classroom not only when we read new texts. In some ways a student is more willing to listen to the books we read because there is an innate trust they have that the school will put before them something valuable. Beyond this, though, is the interchange between students through discussion and debate. Helping our students to listen effectively to their classmates is so important to developing an awareness that they don’t know everything. I would love for students to even know that they barely know anything at all, but that would be asking too much. Even while I say that, I also recognize my own need to listen effectively to my students, because there are plenty of times that the ethereal knowledge comes through the mouths of babes.

The second pillar of truthfulness is to mark the words you speak very carefully. Peterson’s 10th rule is to “be precise in your speech.” The classical tradition of liberal arts education promotes this ideal. The three forms of the trivium – grammar, logic and rhetoric – trained individuals to become competent language users through the acquisition of the mechanics of language, thought and persuasive speech. Precision in language gives us a means of accurately perceiving the world around us. Peterson describes Adam in the garden naming the animals. In an exposition on Genesis, he makes the point that “We can’t really get a grip on something before we have a name for it.” Precision in language helps us come to terms with the world that already exists around us. But it also affords us the creative potential to make something of the world around us. Language is the means by which we create narratives and poetry. Words can alter our perception of reality, creating order where once there was chaos.

Clear language is the heart of excellent teaching. This idea is similarly expressed by John Milton Gregory in his The Seven Laws of Teaching. His third law — the law of language — is condensed into the statement, “Use words understood by both teacher and pupil in the same sense — language clear and vivid alike to both.” The words we use in our lessons should be precise, and we then look for precise language from our students. This pertains not only to academic stuff, but also to our general speech. I don’t permit loose words in my classroom. Any students who drops a fake swear word will be guided to consider what it truly means and why one would choose to use it. These have become a rarity simply because they know they have to be careful in their speech, or at the very least will have a lengthy conversation about the etymology of their colorful language.

Meaning

Precise speech not only enables us to accurately perceive the world around us, but it also assigns meaning to our reality: “We don’t see valueless entities and then attribute meaning to them. We perceive the meaning directly” (Peterson, 12 Rules, 261). This leads us to a consideration of life as meaningful. We teach not merely so students can learn facts. The words we learn aren’t merely a set of definitions. Our students are acquiring the ability to make sense of their world and to find meaning through their experience of the world. The last rule we will consider in this series is Peterson’s rule 7, “Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).”

There really are two alternatives for each and every one of us. One can do nothing except that which would enable one to keep doing nothing. Or one can do something. Once that choice is made, you are either on a path of nihilism or on a path of meaning. The most frustrating thing to encounter as a teacher is the student who chooses the first path. We want all the best for them, but dance, sing, cajole as we might, they will only be satiated by their own wants and desires. The homework is unfinished yet again, only to find out they spent the better part of the evening playing video games. Or the child falls asleep in the middle of class yet again, only to find they stayed up most of the night binge watching an inane series on Netflix. The child clearly doesn’t care. There may or may not be concerned parents equally mystified by the behavior. Prodding doesn’t work. Rewards don’t cause lasting change. What’s to be done? Probably nothing. Nothing is what they’ve chosen.

Fortunately, this rarely occurs to the greatest extreme. But we see gradations in all of our classrooms. “Life is suffering,” Peterson states right at the outset of the chapter (pg. 161). One way to cope with that reality is to simply live for the moment.

“Follow you impulses. Live for the moment. Do what’s expedient. Lie, cheat, steal, deceive, manipulate – but don’t get caught. In an ultimately meaningless universe, what possible difference could it make?”

Peterson, 12 Rules, 162

The lure of meaninglessness beckons our students more and more. Hours can be spent on meaningless scrolling through memes and YouTube videos. Time has passed and nothing meaningful has been done.

“There is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient. There is no careful observation that actions and presuppositions matter, or that the world is made of what matters.”

Peterson, 12 Rules, 200

The subtle lie behind the choice to live according to expedience is that you get to avoid suffering. That can never be.

We must be careful as educators to not shy away from meaning. Every class and every subject holds great potential for our students to encounter meaning. How sad it would be to come away from reading Homer without the student understanding in a personal way what it means to live a heroic life through personal sacrifice! History shows us over and over that tyranny must be opposed by people who value life and liberty. What just cause will capture our students hearts, propelling them into the world to make it a little bit better as they see it? Unfortunately, our students aren’t evaluated according to virtue or wisdom on their standardized tests. Yet, the quality of their lives most corresponds to their sense of value and worth. My concern with the state of education today, borrowing from the outdated factory model, is that its chief end is employment. But life is so much more than a job.

Education ought to be transformative in the lives of our students. As young people, they already experience suffering. If school is to truly equip them for life, we ourselves as teachers must be in touch with matters of vital interest to our students in acquiring for themselves a life of meaning. This only comes about by caring about something. Charlotte Mason’s educational method is founded on living ideas. We present to our students a vast array of possible interests about which they can develop care.

“We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. ‘Thou hast set my feet in a large room,’ should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking––the strain would be too great––but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. We cannot give the children these interests; we prefer that they should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care?”

Charlotte Mason, School Education, 170-171

Bringing students to a place where they care for a great many things sets them on a course to experience a life of meaning. Will they still suffer in life? Most assuredly. But will they find purpose and meaning through the suffering? Absolutely. And they will be better people for it.

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