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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.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Children Need Tour Guides
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8 comments:
I respect your opinion and agree with you on many points. I fear that following your train of thought, though, to the end means that we will lack innovation in the world. If we simply pass along pre-selected "important" ideas to students and don't foster any kind of independent, critical, and intellectual thought than students accept what has come before without question. I believe that is wrong. I believe that our students need to learn how to question others' ideas so that - as a human race - we are always working to improve ourselves - both in terms of how we engage with each other and advancements made in understanding and technology.
If Galileo had accepted the previous Copernican system than we would still think today that everything revolves around the earth. If American revolutionists hadn't challenged the British system of rule, this country would not exist. If abolitionists hadn't challenged the previous system of slavery, than many of my students would currently be enslaved.
Progress requires questioning and critiquing what has come before. Encouraging students to fully accept others' opinions without question prepares them to exist under a tyrannical system.
That is not to say that students are out there all on their own to think and do whatever they want. They need to be guided through the process of looking at the world and questioning it. We should show them what is currently thought as "important" but also teach them to challenge these concepts.
I fear that following your train of thought, though, to the end means that we will lack innovation in the world.
I think you must have switched trains somewhere, because the rest of your reply seems to be addressing ideas that were neither on my train nor any part of my train's destination.=)
I must be mistaken then. Can you be more specific about what I wrote which wasn't part of your argument? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding....
[Tim Frederick wrote:
I fear that following your train of thought, though, to the end means that we will lack innovation in the world. If we simply pass along pre-selected "important" ideas to students and don't foster any kind of independent, critical, and intellectual thought than students accept what has come before without question.]
Mr. Frederick,
I think you're setting up a false dichotomy here. I don't think the headmistress is saying that one should *only* pass along what is believed to be important without the also-necessary teaching of critical thinking, but she is saying that to not pass such information along is doing an injustice to the child.
Will I do my child a favor if I let her opinion of Shakespeare at age 7 or 8 remain her opinion indefinitely? If at age 8 she pronounces Shakespeare "unreadable" or "dull" shall I not steer her in the direction of giving him another chance as she matures? Or should I say, "You're right ... if he's not important to you, he's not important."
The approach you seem to advocate (and please do correct me if I'm misinterpreting) appears to be one of relativism. Are you then saying, for example, that Shakespeare's work is *not* objectively important to the culture?
It's quite true that one's personal taste might land one in the "I don't read Shakespeare for fun" category (and that's fine -- we're all entitled to our personal taste) but that doesn't erase the fact that to *understand* a great deal of other literature in subsequent centuries, one must understand allusions to Shakespeare's work (and for that matter, to understand Shakespeare, one must understand other references, such as the Bible, mythology and the like.)
These sources, the "western canon," as Harold Bloom says, are objectively important in that way. They are references that we live by and with.
How does guiding children to understanding of that fact exclude the teaching of critical thinking?
If anything, many classics will sharpen one's critical thinking skills, in a way that Junie B. Jones never will.
(Disclaimer: I'm not anti-Junie B. ... my little girls read the books. I let my girls eat candy and chew gum, too, but it's not their only diet. Alas, I'm now leaving the train and starting a new metaphor, so I'd better stop.):-)
And, I'm not saying that we shouldn't share with students that society has deemed some works as important.
Where she and I differ is that I believe we MUST have students question that importance and decide for themselves. I don't believe that there are works that are *truly* objectively important. (There is a cultural capital argument to be made - the idea that to succeed in culture one "must" know about these things. I would argue, though, that the majority of people out there are living pretty good lives without ever having read or understood Shakespeare, Dickens, or the like.)
I think these works have been called "important" by the people in power. Power does not equal objectivity. Students need to understand this and question and critique. Otherwise, we will not make progress.
From what I gather, she is not in favor of this kind of questioning or, if she is in favor of it, not focussing instruction on this kind of questioning. I think it is a necessity - we cannot teach literature without it. She can correct me if I'm characterizing our differences incorrectly.
Tim, we've been out of town so I have been unable to read or respond. We've only just got back tonight, and I still haven't the time I'd like to spend on responding. However, I will say that yes, I think you are characterizing our differences incorrectly. They go broader and deeper than this.
As for the role of 'people in power,' I have a goodly amount to say about that. I think you are half right, but before I say much more, I'd like to ask if you've read anything by Richard Mitchell or John Taylor Gatto? Both have works online which you can read free as etexts.
And, 'Ire?' Disappointment, yes. Sadness, yes. I'm disturbed by what appears to pass for education in too many classrooms. I think you've been cheated and not realizing how much you have been defrauded, you are passing on gilt for gold. That's a shame.
Very interesting discourse. While I obviously agree with the Headmistress, I think y'all are trying to reconcile foundational differences. Tim Fredrick's idea of what constitutes a "good life" most likely does not resemble the Headmistress'(or mine) in many ways. I believe Tim's educational philosophy is flawed, but would agree with him that if my child, heaven forbid, were not being homeschooled, I would certainly want him/her to question what the teacher deemed "important". =) Blessings ~ Patricia
I read your Children Need Tour Guides & Tim's comments. Then I read more at Tim's blog. Through all of Tim's asserting that children should be allowed to choose what is important to read and that they don't need us (parents, teachers, adults) as guides, I just kept thinking what about The Declaration of Independence or The Constitution. Why is it wrong to guide someone to read these and say they are important to our freedom and to our remaining a free country. Of course, these thoughts were inspired by my son's Year 9 Ambleside curriculum which has him reading these very documents and a whole lot more of the writings and speeches of the Founding Fathers. I, for one, find it important for everyone to read these original sources of our country's beginnings. They were written by those "American revolutionists" who "challenged the British system of rule" so this country could exist. By encouraging our children to read these and think about them, and discuss them, we help create thinkers of original ideas.
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