Children Need Tour Guides

When a new family moves into the area, the hospitable neighbor will drop in with a casserole and be prepared to tell the newcomer all about the local businesses and services in the town, the location of the best park, the cheapest movie rental place, and and she might mention her favorite restaurant, or which store is most likely to carry tofu and which has the freshest meat, or where the speed traps are most likely to be, and the best time of year to plant the vegetable garden. The new family does not object to this information. The newcomers do not rise up in righteous indignation and say, "Why are you telling me the best restaurant? I have the right to make up my own mind. You are trying to do our thinking for us!" Nor do the other neighbors object on the newcomer's behalf. It's considered gracious for the oldtimers to show the newcomers the ropes.

That's what happens in friendly towns. In other places the new folks are left alone to make all their own mistakes and stumble clumsily through the rough spots they could have avoided if only somebody had been willing to reach out to the newbies.

Children are newcomers. They are new to this world and they have many years of exploration and discovery ahead of them. It is a kindness for older and more experienced adults to pass on what they have learned. If we are parents it is more than a kindness, it is our duty. I expect that most parents who send their kids to school are also expecting the teachers to help with the tour guide duties, too.

Some teachers don't see it that way.

IN Volume Six of Charlotte Mason's Six volume series on education, Towards a Philosophy of Education, we may read the following:

"...the requirements of the mind are very much like those of the body... Both ...activity, variety, rest and, above all, food," says Charlotte Mason. She deplores the tendency to substitute activity for food when tending to the mind, or doing the work called education. Workbooks, word games, puzzles, fill in the blanks, multiple choice, logic puzzles, 'critical thinking,' these all have their place- but that place is output, the exercise of a well-fed mind! These activities are no replacement for the stuff that brains feed on- and that brain-stuff is ideas.

Miss Mason continues, "Now, potency, not property, is the characteristic of mind." That might seem a little confusing, so let's break it down. Potency is merely power or strength, and Miss Mason believed that all healthy minds already came naturally enabled to think about things. What children don't have is a wide range of experiences and perspective- intellectual property. The world is a huge place and they are but small, young, and inexperienced travelers. They are new to this place, and we are their tour guides by virtue of our longer experience. Books are also wonderful tour guides in this wide world of ideas. Through reading the great books they can meet with the minds of great thinkers from other times and places. We are priviliged to serve as matchmakers between the minds of our children and the great ideas found in the great books.

"A child is able to deal with much knowledge," observed Miss Mason, with this important caveat- "...he possesses none worth speaking of." She is not being insulting. She is merely pointing out the difference between what he is able to do (a great deal) and what he comes into the world knowing (not so much).

Travel broadens the mind, said G.K. Chesterton, but you have to have the mind. Miss Mason is explaining that children have the mind, but they haven't the experience to make sense of all they see- the experience that travel brings. Reading, of course, is a grand way to travel as Emily Dickinson says in the poem that beings "there is no frigate like a book...."

But instead of respecting the innate power of the average human mind and working on adding to the possessions of that young mind (ideas and information), Miss Mason pointed out that "we [teachers] set to work to give him that potency which he already possesses rather than the knowledge which he lacks..."

We misunderstand the purpose of education altogether. "Perhaps the first thing for us to do is to get a just perception of what I may call the relativity of knowledge and the mind. The mind receives knowledge, not in order that it may know, but in order that it may grow, in breadth and depth, in sound judgment and magnanimity; but in order to grow, it must know."

The adults in the child's life have the "power of appeal and inspiration," and the responsibility to act "the part of guide, philosopher and friend" to these young people with wonderful minds but no knowledge to speak of.

Or... we can just abandon them to their uninformed judgment about what's important and what isn't, leave them to their own devices, and allow them to believe that their own judgment about what is and is not important to know is just as well informed and solid an opinion as Mortimer Adler's, Thomas Jefferson's, Peter's, Paul's, or.... yours. Leaving children to pick up what scraps of knowledge they think to ask about, willy nilly, is not doing them any favors. It isn't respectful of their situatoin as newcomers to the world or to the adults they will grow up to be. And if we don't do our job as the adults in their lives when they are small, the adults they grow up to be will have a malnourished background upon which to build.

"Much of what we have learned and experienced in childhood, and later, we cannot reproduce, and yet it has formed the groundwork of after-knowledge; later notions and opinions have grown out of what we once learned and knew." This ‘sunk capital’ of early learning earns interest throughout our lives. (Page 154-5 of Home Education, by Charlotte Mason) The books and experiences we bring to our children provide an intellectual capital upon which they can draw throughout all their lives. It doesn't matter very much that they remember their first trip to the zoo, or all 100 times we read Mother Goose to them before they were six months old- this is groundwork for after-knowledge. As parents, we do not do right by our offspring when we leave them to lay all the groundwork for themselves.

Bonnet Tip Mama Squirrel at Dewey's Treehouse)

Update: I'd like to reassure any unschoolers reading that I really wasn't taking a swipe at you in this post. I'd also like to encourage readers to read this lovely response and peek at one homeschooler's approach.