Ever the provocateur, Charlotte Mason, the late 19th century British educator, raised the question of the role of ideas in education. After mentioning the importance of ideas in both common life (“I have an idea!”) and the history of philosophy, she castigates the educational establishment of her day for neglecting ideas:
“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 84)
Charlotte Mason is critical both of the pedagogy and of the curriculum of her day for the curious lack of a conception so obviously crucial to education. It would be interesting to know whether she would be equally disappointed with the educational world of today, with its focus on technical rather than liberal learning.
Of course, we hear of ‘concepts’ and their ‘attainment’ quite a bit in educational circles these days. Perhaps she would be satisfied with this rough synonym? Or perhaps not, given how much she emphasized the formative influence of ideas upon a person’s life. After all, she deals with the importance of ideas under the heading of Ruskin’s phrase, “education is a life,” and certainly does not go into detail on methods for helping students attain discrete concepts in math, science or the humanities. For her, ideas are living entities of the mind encountered in “much humane reading” (88) and taken or discarded by children as they will (see 86-7). They are not concepts to be attained, but food for the soul to sustain the growing life of the mind.
An article published in 2017 by four members of the Education Faculty at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, presents a unique comparison to Charlotte Mason’s concept of an indiscriminate idea feast. The title of the article is “Using ‘Big Ideas’ to Enhance Teaching and Student Learning,” and the premise is that “the significance of big ideas in classroom practice is underappreciated”(Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 23:5, 596). So far they agree with Charlotte Mason in critiquing the neglect of ideas. They even use the term ‘generative’ to describe the importance of these big ideas, which might parallel nicely with Mason’s conception of ideas as living entities which are productive of trains of thought, even inspiring action.
But as the article goes on it becomes clear that their conception of “big ideas” contrasts sharply with Charlotte Mason’s, looking far more like the standard goal of concept attainment. For instance, “big ideas” must be expressed, according to our researchers, as a single sentence with a subject and a verb, and in a form that helps students avoid common misunderstandings (600-1). The teacher’s role involves composing such a “big idea” from the standard concepts or theories of their discipline, as a generalization that students can easily grasp. Newton’s third law, “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” should be rephrased for students as, “Almost all reaction forces are due to some distortion (bending, squashing, stretching) of an object,” in order to avoid the common confusion about there being only one object that the forces act and react on (600). Such a formulation of an idea is “generative” in that it will suggest to the teacher the structuring of learning experiences in order to help students attain and solidify this central concept.
By contrast, Charlotte Mason doesn’t seem to envision ideas as statements that teachers formulate for their students in order to guide their attainment of key concepts in a discipline. Instead, her primary focus is on a rich, literary curriculum that stimulates the student’s own internal and spiritual development: “we must sustain a child’s inner life with ideas as we sustain his body with food” (Towards a Philosophy 86). In fact, she contrasts this feeding on ideas, in which a child will probably “reject nine-tenths of the ideas we offer,” with “forcible feeding” and “predigested food” (87). She goes on to claim that
“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….” (87)
What perplexes the modern educator at this point is whether or not Mason would have considered a teacher’s formulation of a concept into a sentence as the crystallization of an idea into an opinion. Is the teacher’s distillation of a science textbook’s most important point into a well-crafted statement the serving up of “predigested food” and her own “opinion”? Is it “forcible feeding” to carefully structure a set of lessons in a unit in order to maximize the student’s comprehension of the foundational ideas of physics or any other subject?
But perhaps we are pushing Mason’s words too far. Perhaps she did not mean to exclude the possibility of an expert teacher carefully organizing and selecting curriculum and learning activities in this way. Maybe she was just concerned to ensure that her non-expert governesses and elementary teachers didn’t pontificate their moral and political opinions at every break in the reading of a great book. That’s certainly something we can all agree with. At the very least, it’s clear that Mason’s concern was chiefly with choosing an idea-rich curriculum and giving students the space to catch the inspiring ideas themselves. What’s not so clear is how her criticism of the “desiccated” textbooks of the late 19th century would square with the textbooks of today, complete with questions after every chapter, vivid illustrations and diagrams of important ideas, and carefully structured sequences of concepts.
In all likelihood, the phenomenon described in “Using ‘Big Ideas’” was simply not a part of Mason’s common experience or philosophy of education. For her ideas were not the core concepts to be attained by all students in the course of a given class, but included untestable and indefinite instincts as well. On this she quotes the Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
“The idea may exist in a clear and definite form as that of a circle in that of the mind of a geometrician or it may be a mere instinct, a vague appetency towards something… like the impulse which fills a young poet’s eyes with tears.” (85)
We have to concede with Mason that the poet’s tearful instinct, if it could fill the classroom, is certainly formative and therefore educational, even if untestable and harder to create. But our devotion to these types of experiences should probably not crowd out the legitimate means of helping students attain key concepts. This too is not only informative, but formative in shaping students’ relationships to learning and the subjects they study. Deliberate practice in attaining such concepts can help form a growth mindset. In our educational renaissance let’s not neglect ideas, in either sense of the term.
References:
Charlotte Mason. Towards a Philosophy of Education. Wilder: 2008.
Ian Mitchell, Stephen Keast, Debra Panizzon, and Julie Mitchell. “Using ‘Big Ideas’ to Enhance Teaching and Student Learning,” in Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 2017, 23:5, pp. 596-610.