As Charlotte Mason observed, there is nothing quite like the experience of being struck by an idea. The experience is equivalent to being the recipient of some unexpected treasure. Ideas loosen our grip on holding a thin view of the world. They open our minds, especially through narration, to connections previously gone undetected and stir our imaginations to explore further up and further in. Ideas light the fire beneath us to learn, search, and discover.
I’ll never forget when as a child I encountered the idea of the Roman Empire. In the family room we had an entire bookshelf dedicated to World Book encyclopedias. Categorized alphabetically, these tomes catalogued more knowledge than my youthful mind could possibly take in. And while encyclopedias might not exactly fit Charlotte Mason’s criteria for a living book, I can assure you that a feast of knowledge was underway. I was just about through the third course of the meal when I encountered for perhaps the first time the political climax of the ancient world: Imperium Rōmānum. I was hooked.
Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience. It may not have been while browsing encyclopedias, but there you were, reading some text or perhaps going on a walk outside with a friend, when some previously unknown aspect of the world hit you square between the eyes, sparking a desire within you to learn, discover, and connect what you had learned with your current base of knowledge.
The Life of the Mind
This is the power of ideas. And unfortunately for many modern schools today, this power lies largely dormant. In the present educational landscape, ideas are not sought after largely due to the hubristic assumption that there are hardly any left to find. As a result, students are left scrambling and sorting the intellectual table scraps of others, what is called information. The real adventure of learning, encountering ideas, has been counterfeited and massed produced for the unsuspecting modern classroom. An educational renaissance is desperately needed to discard this counterfeit and replace it with a feast worthy of young growing minds.
This is precisely what the educator Charlotte Mason sought to achieve roughly a century ago. She taught that education is a life, referring to the life of the mind. Just as the human digestive system assimilates food, providing the body with the nutrients and sustenance it needs to survive, so the mind requires its own food in order to enjoy health and vitality.
Charlotte Mason writes,
“Under the phrase, ‘Education is a life,’ I have tried to show how necessary it is to sustain the intellectual life upon ideas, and, as a corollary, that a school-book should be a medium for ideas, and not merely a receptacle for facts. That normal children have a natural desire for, and a right of admission to, all fitting knowledge, appears to me to be suggested by the phrase, ‘Education is the science of relations’” (Preface to the “Home Education” Series).
Here Charlotte Mason alludes to two central themes in her educational philosophy. First, as I’ve been emphasizing, the intellectual life is sustained by ideas, not by mere facts. While information is important, it does not itself propel a mind to inquire. When I was devouring encyclopedic information about the Roman Empire as a child, it was not the information itself that was beckoning me to continue. It was the ideas embedded within the text that were impressing upon my imagination.
Second, children have an innate desire for knowledge, which is understood to be both multifaceted and interrelated. While philosophers may debate whether reality is ultimately simple or complex, there is no doubt that the world, as humans practically experience it, is infinitely complex and full of variety. We live in a world of physics and metaphysics, nature and culture, mathematics and language. Each of these facets contains ideas that are uniquely interesting and enticing to the human mind. Moreover, each of these facets are interrelated through their corresponding ideas. A discussion of astronomy can quickly turn into a discussion about the history of astronomy. A Bible lesson can naturally integrate knowledge of geography, archaeology, or poetry.
Education as the Science of Relations
The interrelatedness of knowledge is what led Charlotte Mason to believe that education is rightly understood as “the science of relations.” Children, as persons, are essentially relational creatures who naturally enjoy “…relations with a vast number of things and thoughts” (Preface to the “Home Education” Series). Therefore, the task of educators is not to create these relations, since they already exist, but to activate or strengthen them. As children encounter the world for themselves, both through vivid texts and experiences in nature, their minds take in a multitude of ideas, assimilating the knowledge and making endless connections.
Once education is understood as the science of relations, it becomes clear why Charlotte Mason was so critical of textbooks. Textbooks all but eliminate the possibility of idea-sharing. They provide an accurate account of the subject matter to be sure, but they do so blandly. Rather than directly connecting students with knowledge itself, textbooks offer a summarized, diluted, or what Charlotte Mason called “predigested,” substitute. As a result, textbooks don’t harness the imagination or stir the emotions. They mechanically convey information rather than nourish a living entity, the mind.
On this point, Charlotte Mason writes,
“I believe that spiritual life, using spiritual in the sense I have indicated, is sustained upon only one manner of diet––the diet of ideas––the living progeny of living minds. Now, if we send to any publisher for his catalogue of school books, we find that it is accepted as the nature of a school-book that it be drained dry of living thought. It may bear the name of a thinker, but then it is the abridgment of an abridgment, and all that is left for the unhappy scholar is the dry bones of his subject denuded of soft flesh and living colour, of the stir of life and power of moving. Nothing is left but what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls the ‘mere brute fact’” (School Education, 169).
Nourishing the Mind with Ideas
Although Charlotte Mason lived in the heyday of modern materialism, she was greatly influenced by the counter-reaction to materialism within modernity: Romanticism. She wasn’t afraid to suggest that there is more to this world than what is rendered by the five senses. As a result, she spoke confidently about the spiritual realm, referring to that ethereal reality that extends beyond the physical. Mind, soul, heart, imagination and spirit, thought the British educator, are aspects of reality that merit a central place in the task of education. Additionally, flowing from her view of children as persons, not mere blank slates or undeveloped humans, she firmly believed that the minds of these children deserved the spiritual food of ideas. Under this conception, hollow summaries or abridgements of real knowledge wouldn’t do.
Ideas, and ideas alone, bring life to mind. Charlotte Mason believed so strongly in the power of ideas, she offered this advice:
“Give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information; for the child who grows up with a few dominant ideas has his self-education provided for, his career marked out” (Home Education, 174).
Ideas vs. Information
Now don’t get me wrong, information is important. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to make much sense of the world or even comprehend ideas for that matter. Information is necessary for strengthening one’s foundation of knowledge and growing proficient in any field of study. Hopefully our positive interaction with books like Make it Stick, which highlights superior techniques for information recall, demonstrates precisely this. But even the authors of Make it Stick emphasize the shortcomings of information, even as they praise its necessity.
In a particular section of the book in which the authors are defending information recall against critiques that honing higher-order skills is a more valuable use of class time, they write,
“Pitting the learning of basic knowledge against the development of critical thinking is a false choice. Both need to be cultivated. The stronger one’s knowledge about the subject at hand, the more nuanced one’s creativity can be in addressing a new problem. Just as knowledge amounts to little without the exercise of ingenuity and imagination, creativity absent a sturdy foundation of knowledge builds a shaky house” (30).
It is my contention that this little insight has some direct connections with Charlotte Mason’s emphasis on ideas. More specifically, I want to suggest that ideas, as she understands them, fuse what the authors are referring to as “knowledge” and “creative thinking” together. When an idea strikes a person’s mind, it doesn’t just bounce off. It lands, attaching itself to the host, not parasitically, but generatively. This is because ideas themselves are generative: as ideas make contact with the mind, they interconnect and reproduce. Not before too long, given the proper sustenance, these ideas have created a whole new area to one’s web of knowledge. Within this dynamic web, which is durable yet flexible, one’s knowledge base grows while thinking skills are honed.
Here’s how Charlotte Mason explains the generative nature of ideas:
“An idea is more than an image or picture; it is, so to speak, a spiritual germ endowed with vital force––with power, that is, to grow, and to produce after its kind. It is the very nature of an idea to grow: as the vegetable germ secretes that it lives by, so, fairly implant an idea in the child’s mind, and it will secrete its own food, grow, and bear fruit in the form of a succession of kindred ideas. We know from our own experience that, let our attention be forcibly drawn to some public character, some startling theory, and for days after we are continually hearing or reading matter which bears on this one subject, just as if all the world were thinking about what occupies our thoughts: the fact being, that the new idea we have received is in the act of growth, and is reaching out after its appropriate food” (Home Education, 174).
Ideas in John Milton Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching
Let me make one final point about Charlotte Mason and the power of ideas. In the broader home-school/classical education/Charlotte Mason movement, there is discussion, sometimes debate, over whether Charlotte Mason and classical education are compatible approaches to education. Of the many apparent differences, one common argument for incompatibility is that while Charlotte Mason emphasized the power of ideas, classical educators, at least those following Douglas Wilson’s popularization of the trivium, focused on fact memorization.
I’ll provide a fuller response to this point of view in a future article, but for now, I want to reference what has become a popular teacher training text in the classical school world: The Seven Laws of Teaching by John Milton Gregory. While this text does not serve as a universal authority for classical educators, it has earned a credible voice in the movement. It is curious, therefore, to observe one key section of the book in which this text discusses the power of ideas. Gregory writes,
“Knowledge cannot be passed, like some material substance, from one person to another…Ideas, the products of thought, can only be communicated by inducing in the receiving mind action correspondent to that by which these ideas were first conceived…It is obvious, therefore, that something more is required than a passive presentation of the pupil’s mind to the teacher’s mind as face turns to face. The pupil must think” (41)
Although this passage indicates some noticeable differences, there remains an even more noticeable similarity: the focus and power of ideas. It is not enough for a teacher to merely pass knowledge to his students as he would a football. In order for a student to truly learn, her mind must actively receive and digest ideas. She must think on ideas, the products of thought. When the pupil’s mind is attending to the task at hand, in the flow and focused intently on learning, the germination of ideas is the result.
Now, I am not suggesting that this insight from Gregory solves the Charlotte Mason-Classical divide, but it does show that perhaps the sides needn’t be as polarized, at least on the topic of ideas vs. facts, as they are. As much as Gregory measures learning using the retention of facts as a core metric, here he seems to be acknowledging that the key for any learning to occur in the first place is a meeting of the minds and the sharing of ideas.
Ideas for Life
Let me leave readers of this article on the power of ideas with this word from Charlotte Mason:
“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? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?” (School Education, 171).
In this post, I have tried to make the case for a reinstatement of ideas in education. Ideas are powerful. They are generative. Unlike facts and information, they have the capacity to support life, the life of the mind. Ultimately, education is not about information recall, creative thinking, or knowledge acquisition. It is about cultivating the mind, shaping the heart, and passing on the tradition. Through harnessing the power of ideas, we can help our students see all of creation as a world of connections, and over time, by God’s grace, watch them flourish in it.
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