The goals and aims of our educational renewal movement center not on the quality of our curriculum or the quality of our teacher. Instead, the quality of learning is the true test of whether we are providing something of lasting value and worth. To that end, I have taken a look at the learner and applied Aristotle’s four causes to understand this pivotal aspect of quality education. In so doing, I have turned to Charlotte Mason’s Toward a Philosophy of Education to elucidate the fine points of the learner.
The Four-fold Manner of Knowing an Object
Among the most important concepts we teach our students in logic class or perhaps in rhetoric class is Aristotle’s four causes. Aristotle writes about the four causes in Physics 2.3, and examining an object or principle from the perspective of the four causes can provide a tremendous amount of knowledge, as Aristotle states, “Knowledge is the object of our inquiry, and men do not think they know a thing till they have grasped the ‘why.’”
The listing of the four causes as laid out by Aristotle can be examined in any order, although we’ll begin here by laying them out as he has written them. First, the material cause has to do with literal materials: a statue is made of bronze, an animal of bones and fur, etc. The second cause is what Aristotle calls the form or archetype (τὸ εἶδος καὶ τὸ παράδειγμα). This cause gets at the essence of the object under consideration. Philosophers have called this the “formal cause.” Taking the examples above, a statue is a work of art and an animal can be a predator or a pet. We can see that there is a growing complexity as we apply these thought exercises to any given object, which was the goal of Aristotle’s exercise.
The third and fourth causes take into account spans of time. The “efficient cause” is described by Aristotle as the source of change (literally “the beginning of change,” ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς μεταβολῆς). A sculptor created the statue whereas an animal was birthed from its parents. One can perceive a chain of efficient causes, for the sculptor was likewise birthed from his parents. This chain goes all the way back to what has been called “the unmoved mover” or what Aristotle calls “the maker of what is made and the changer what is changed” (τὸ ποιοῦν τοῦ ποιουμένου καὶ τὸ μεταβάλλον τοῦ μεταβαλλομένου).
If the third cause looks backward temporally, then the fourth cause looks forward to the end or telos of the object. There are many possible ends or goals for which an object tends. For instance, a statue might have as its ultimate goal to commemorate an individual or to bring delight to the viewer. The example Aristotle uses is walking. Why do we walk? For the goal of being healthy. The Westminster Divines who produces the Shorter Catechism begin with the “final cause:”
Q: What is the chief end of man?
A: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
These four topics or tools of investigation can be applied generally to every object. Once learned, these can be a handy structure to guide discussion in a classroom. If you are a teacher of logic or rhetoric, you can use these four causes as a brief exercise at the beginning of class as a warm up.
Applying the Four Causes to Educational Method
One of the projects I put my mind to was thinking through what is a student or learner. This idea forced me to examine more closely my educational philosophy and here I will attempt to bring into conversation Aristotle by way of the four causes and Charlotte Mason from her sixth volume Toward a Philosophy of Education.
A central tenet of Mason’s philosophy is that “children are born persons.” For Mason, this means that children are not blank slates, but are born with all the attributes and capabilities of an individual created in the image of God. Prominent in her thinking is that the mind is a powerful force from birth. The infant shows “that he always has all the mind he requires for his occasions; that is, that his mind is the instrument of his education and that his education does not produce his mind” (Vol. 6, 36). If this is the case for the infant, how much more ought we to appreciate the capacity of the learner at all stages of their educational journey. So, to that end, let us explore what a learner is according to Aristotle’s four causes.
What is a Learner?: The Mind
When we think about the material cause of a learner, our focus turns to the physical traits of the student. As bears of the image of God, we believe that all people are embodied souls. In the Shema of Deuteronomy 6, we are commanded to “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5). In other words, our material includes the immaterial. When Jesus quotes this commandment, notice that he includes an additional part of our humanity: the mind. “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Jesus includes our mental faculty alongside our spiritual, moral and physical traits. The reasoning faculty expressed by Jesus was already inherent in the immaterial heart and soul. However, the explicit expression of the mind subsumes even the reasoning part of us under the dominion of the Lord our God.
The mind itself, the central component of our learning, has its material aspect. Charlotte Mason explores the connection between the mind and the brain:
“A child comes into their hands with a mind of amazing potentialities: he has a brain too, no doubt, the organ and instrument of that same mind, as a piano is not music but the instrument of music. Probably we need not concern ourselves about the brain which is subject to the same conditions as the rest of the material body, is fed with the body’s food, rests, as the body rests, requires fresh air and wholesome exercise to keep it in health, but depends upon the mind for its proper activities.”
Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 38.
In this passage, Mason leaves unresolved the mind/brain debate, which to her credit is an unproductive conundrum. Instead, where Mason takes us is to the analogy that the mind is nourished just like the body is. While our brain is composed of “nerved and blood” and therefore must be nourished by food, our mind is nourished by ideas.
What is a Learner?: The Capacity to Understand
The formal cause is the essence of the learner. There is a power within every child, within every human, to understand. It is in the nature of a child to be curious, and this curiosity is the effort to understand. According to Mason, learning is the capacity to “experience all the things they hear and read of” (Vol 6, 40). No matter what subject or lesson is being taught, the child in its essence will feed on ideas. Mason criticizes the teacher, who when presenting a lesson finds that the child is bored:
“If they do not [experience the lesson], it is not for lack of earnestness and intention on the part of the teacher; his error is rather want of confidence in children. He has not formed a just measure of a child’s mind and bores his scholars with much talk about matters which they are able to understand for themselves much better than he does.”
Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 41
In this case, the teacher has not properly taken the measure of the learner. When we lecture and prattle on as teachers, we run the risk of diminishing the essence of the learner. But if we draw upon the curiosity and the will to understand inherent in the child, no lesson can be boring for the living ideas will be a feast for the mind.
What is a Learner?: Nourished by Ideas
The efficient cause of learning centers on the mind. An efficient cause, as Aristotle considers it, pertains to the principle or agent of change for the object under consideration. For Mason, “Mind must come into contact with mind through the medium of ideas” (Vol. 6, 39). A learner grows as a consequence of the mind growing. When the mind comes into contact with another mind, it is able to absorb knowledge just as nutrients are absorbed into our bodies through ingesting food.
“We must begin with the notion that the business of the body is to grow; and it grows upon food, which food is composed of living cells, each a perfect life in itself. In like manner, though all analogies are misleading and inadequate, the only fit sustenance for the mind is ideas, and an idea too, like the single cell of cellular tissue, appears to go through the stages and functions of a life. We receive it with appetite and some stir of interest. It appears to feed in a curious way.”
Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 39.
The analogy can be spelled out more when we consider that the nutrients our body needs come from living things: plants and animals. Ideas are also living things. They grow, building off of one another and generating new ideas. So our minds grow not in physical size, but in greater intellectual capacity, through the ingestion of living ideas.
What is a Learner?: Fitted for the Good Life
The final cause is the aim or goal of the object. In our modern era, this has be a point of confusion. Is the end or goal of learning a good grade, an entry into a good college, or landing a good job? When these aims are teased out, we find that they fall short of the true glory of learning. It may be surprising what Mason sees as the goal for learning:
“Enough, that the children have minds, and every man’s mind is his means of living; but it is a great deal more. Working men will have leisure in the future and how this leisure is to be employed is a question much discussed. Now, no one can employ leisure fitly whose mind is not brought into active play every day; the small affairs of a man’s own life supply no intellectual food and but small and monotonous intellectual exercise. Science, history, philosophy, literature, must no longer be the luxuries of the ‘educated’ classes; all classes must be educated and sit down to these things of the mind as they do to their daily bread. History must afford its pageants, science its wonders, literature its intimacies, philosophy its speculations, religion its assurances to every man, and his education must have prepared him for wanderings in these realms of gold.”
Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 42-43
In this, Mason anticipates the masterful work of Josef Pieper. In his Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Pieper argues that we have mixed up the aim of life. We have succumbed to a philosophy of “total labor,” adhering to the maxim “one does not work to live; one lives to work” attributed to Max Weber (Leisure 20). Pieper proposes an alternative view drawing upon Aristotle such that we work to have leisure. Now the problem is that we have not been sufficiently trained as learners to know what to do with our leisure time.
Mason envisions the monotony of world of work for work’s sake. Instead, if we truly understand that we are being fitted for living the good life, our educational aims take on new scope. Science, history, philosophy and literature are not aimed at getting a good job. Instead, they are aimed at making us the kinds of people that take joy in these areas of knowledge. We grow up to be people who retain the curiosity of childhood and seek understanding where it may be found.
Mason the Classical Educationist
I cannot be certain that Mason had in mind Aristotle’s four causes as she wrote about the learner. But what strikes me as I read through Mason is how compatible she is with the contours of the classical Christian education movement. Mason strikes me as someone as much steeped in the classical educational model as were Dorothy Sayers and C. S. Lewis. It was the prevailing model until the progressivist model of education set in with the onset of 20th century industrialism.
I am often surprised when I hear speak of how Mason and classical education are incompatible. It is true that Mason is not spelling out the liberal arts trivium and quadrivium as our classical school tend to parse them out. But I think this has more to do with an undue focus on the structure of classical curriculum. Reading Mason as frequently as I do, it is in the cadences and tenor of her writings that one gets the sense of her indebtedness to the Greek and Latin philosophical tradition, to a Western cultural heritage that is accessed through great books, and to the centrality of Christianity to nourish our souls as much to feed our minds. Perhaps this unique take on reading Mason in light of Aristotle’s four causes will inspire you to further investigate Charlotte Mason as a classical educationist.
