23 May 2013

Jane Healy and Charlotte Mason

For a number of years, I kept hearing that the AmblesideOnline Advisory really liked this book called Endangered Minds. So I put it on my PBS wishlist an forgot about it. Until I got a match, of course, and then the book arrived. I happened to be in a reading slump at the time, and so I picked it up to see if it could cure me.

Needless to say, I can see why they appreciate the book! Chock full of research on the development of the human brain, Healy essentially proves that Charlotte Mason was on the right track. This was especially interesting to me because just today I encountered the comment that "times are changing and surely Charlotte Mason would have changed with them."

Well, yes and no.

Some ideas in her volumes are, I think, truly a product of her place and time. When it come to those things, I'm sure she would change or at least update what she did. We know that she changed over time, which is why there is such a vast difference in what she says about mathematics between her first and final volumes.

But much of what she says is not hers. It belongs to the conversation folks have been having about education for centuries--for millennia. To the extent that what Miss Mason said was touching on the Permanent Things, then no. These things are, by definition, things that do not change with time.

I try to base my approach to education upon things I do not need research to prove to me. I know, for example, that children are persons because, first and foremost, I believe this is self-evident. Beyond that, it isn't that Miss Mason said so, but that Jesus said children were capable of coming to Him, and that of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. Naturally, the Kingdom consists of persons. When Miss Mason wrote in her first principle that "children are born persons" I loved it because it was true; not because it came from her.

She had a knack for truth.

Back in the 1990s, Jane Healy went on a mission to figure out why children are so different, so difficult to teach compared to, say, the 1950s, and possibly all of human history. She doesn't phrase it exactly this way, but she's trying to find out what is wrong with them. What she finds is not only interesting, amazing, and, sadly, not unexpected, but it is also a confirmation of what Miss Mason wrote oh so many years ago.

I thought I'd give you a sampling by juxtaposing some quotes. My only struggle here was choosing which ones, there were so many!

On Brain Ruts

We think, as we are accustomed to think; ideas come and go and carry on a ceaseless traffic in the rut––let us call it––you have made for them in the very nerve substance of the brain.

[snip]

This relation of habit to human life––as the rails on which it runs to a locomotive––is perhaps the most suggestive and helpful to the educator; for just as it is on the whole easier for the locomotive to pursue its way on the rails than to take a disastrous run off them, so it is easier for the child to follow lines of habit carefully laid down than to run off these lines at his peril. It follows that this business of laying down lines towards the unexplored country of the child's future is a very serious and responsible one for the parent. It rests with him to consider well the tracks over which the child should travel with profit and pleasure; and, along these tracks, to lay down lines so invitingly smooth and easy that the little traveller is going upon them at full speed without stopping to consider whether or no he chooses to go that way. {Vol. 1, p. 109-110}

[W]hat children do every day, the ways in which they think and respond to the world, what they learn, and the stimuli to which they decide to pay attention--shapes their brains. Not only does it change the ways in which the brain is used {functional change}, but it also causes physical alterations {structural change} in neural wiring systems. {p. 51}

Old Habits Die Hard

But,––supposing that the doing of a certain action a score or two of times in unbroken sequence forms a habit which it is as easy to follow as not; that, persist still further in the habit without lapses, and it becomes second nature, quite difficult to shake off; continue it further, through a course of years, and the habit has the strength of ten natures, you cannot break through it without doing real violence to yourself... {Vol. 1, p. 110}

It is much more difficult, however, to reorganize a brain than it is to organize it in the first place. "Organization inhibits reorganization," say the scientists. Carving out neuronal tracks for certain types of learning is best accomplished when the synapses for that particular skill are most malleable, before they "firm up" around certain types of responses. {p. 53}

Self-Education

No one knoweth the things of a man but the spirit of a man which is in him; therefore, there is no education but self-education, and as soon as a young child begins his education he does so as a student. {Vol. 6, p. 26}

Over thirty years ago I published a volume about the home education of children and people wrote asking how those counsels of perfection could be carried out with the aid of the private governess as she then existed; it occurred to me that a series of curricula might be devised embodying sound principles and securing that children should be in a position of less dependence on their teacher than they then were; in other words, that their education should be largely self-education. A sort of correspondence school was set up, the motto of which,––"I am, I can, I ought, I will," has had much effect in throwing children upon the possibilities, capabilities, duties and determining power belonging to them as persons. {Vol. 6, p. 28-29}

In urging a method of self-education for children in lieu of the vicarious education which prevails, I should like to dwell on the enormous relief to teachers, a self-sacrificing and greatly overburdened class; the difference is just that between driving a horse that is light and a horse that is heavy in hand; the former covers the ground of his own gay will and the driver goes merrily. The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding. {Vol. 6, p. 32}

Therefore, teaching, talk and tale, however lucid or fascinating, effect nothing until self-activity be set up; that is, self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature. {Vol. 6, p. 240}

There is no education but self-education and only as the young student works with his own mind is anything effected. {vol. 6, p. 289}
I often ask myself when I am struggling to "make" a student learn something, Whose brain is growing today? It always helps to consider: Who is interested? Who is curious? Who is asking the questions? Children need stimulation and intellectual challenges, but they must be actively involved in their learning, not responding passively while another brain--their teacher's or parent's--laboriously develops new synapses in their behalf. {p. 73}

Too much "teacher talk" gets in the way of such higher-level reasoning because it prevents children from doing their own thinking! {p. 96}

I could go on, but I'll stop.

This book has been so encouraging to me. Sometimes what we do here on the microhomestead can seem "slow" or "backwards" because so much {and yet so little} is asked of young children today. I try to remind myself that as a culture we are graduating people of less and less quality, so asking more does not equal being more in terms of the caliber of the person at the end of the process.

21 May 2013

The Atlas Inside

I'm extra-busy this week, so I thought I'd rerun an old post, for fun. This originally appeared on 11/16/2010.



It is He who sits above the circle of the earth,
And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers,
Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain
And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.

This morning I had to correct a child who has, quite honestly, had it coming. This child is always trying to be the parent, bossing the other children around, inventing rules that don't actually exist, and so on. I've attempted some verbal correction, but now we're in habit training mode. I spent some time explaining that the Lord has ordained the order of authority in our house, and this child is not to usurp that order, even if perfectly capable of handling the situation.
 
As I walked away, I realized this child is a lot like Atlas, the giant punished by Zeus who, due to his siding with the Titans in the primordial war, must bear up the weight of the arc of heaven, that we all might not be crushed by the sky.

As a Christian, the story is always interesting, because we realize that he is holding something that isn't his to hold.
 
And it's a struggle.
 
What a struggle.
 
Burdened by a God-sized responsibility, he is a slave. He cannot freely wander where he will. He cannot be with his wife and children.
 
There are two traditional endings to the story of Atlas.
 
In some versions, Heracles smashes the Atlas mountains and builds the two Pillars of Hercules, effectively liberating Atlas from his bondage.
 
In other versions, we see an Atlas who can no longer bear up. He begs Perseus, who is on his way to kill the Gorgon Medusa, to return with Medusa's head, and turn him to stone, that he might not feel the weight of the world upon his shoulders any longer.
 
My child, and all of us who feel a responsibility which stretches beyond our own boundary markers, must choose one of those two roads. On the one hand, we find freedom from a responsibility which was not ours--from trying to carry the whole world--which also liberates us to do our duty--to carry the small piece of the world which is our appropriate load to bear.
 
On the other hand, we can keep standing in God's place, and have our spirits killed over time. The sky is not ours to carry, the world is not ours to orchestrate and keep "safe," and the only way to handle such a burden is to stop feeling--to stop caring.

To turn to stone.
 
As a Christian, the most interesting thing is that we can trust that, in releasing the sky, we learn that it does not come crashing down after all.
 
It floats.
 
Who alone stretches out the heavens?

19 May 2013

Stupendous Selections on Sunday

  • So true, so true.
    • I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.
    • Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress?
    • The whole trend began in (wait for it) California.
    • The government never said “no vents.” It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly.
    • t’s as if some bureaucrat were sitting around thinking of ways to make life worse for everyone
    • Just what I wanted to do with my Saturday afternoon, hacking the gas can to make it work exactly as well as it did three years ago, before government wrecked it.
  • This is Not Good.
    • Uwe Romeike, a piano teacher, said that if the courts turned down their asylum completely, “it would mean they would send us back to Germany where we would face the same persecution as when we left.”
    • Although the court acknowledged that the U.S. Constitution recognizes the rights of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children, it refused to concede that the harsh treatment of religiously and philosophically motivated homeschoolers in Germany amounts to persecution within our laws on asylum.
  • Raise your hand if you think there are officially too many government agencies? We are living Hobbes' big dream, it seems.
    • In a shocking affront to the United States Constitution, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education have joined together to mandate that virtually every college and university in the United States establish unconstitutional speech codes that violate the First Amendment and decades of legal precedent. 
    • There is likely no student on any campus anywhere who is not guilty of at least one of these "offenses."
  • I love that they did this.
    • They wanted to know what materials we had discussed at any of our book studies.
    • In 2012, the IRS says that it flagged groups with the words “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names for additional scrutiny.
    • They wanted copies of our blog. They said they had already taken copies of our website.
  • Okay: you tell me what this has to do with immigration. This is another reason to suspect bills longer than five paragraphs.
    • Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf)  is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.
  • This is ironic. When Tea Party members accused the IRS of doing this--of singling out certain groups--they were called paranoid {and worse!}.
    • Washington Republicans on Sunday characterized the IRS targeting Tea Party groups and other conservative political organizations as “chilling” and intimidating acts that heighten Americans' mistrust in government.
    • the IRS acknowledgment Friday that the agency targeted such groups during the 2012 election cycle
    • the draft report seemingly contradicts public statements by Shulman and shows senior IRS officials knew agents were targeting Tea Party groups as early as 2011.

17 May 2013

More Library Additions

As they say, when it rains, it pours! That has definitely happened to our home library lately. Some children were given gift cards for birthdays and special occasions, which they finally put to use {having an inability to decide what titles they wanted with any expediency}. Some mommies found things on PaperBackSwap. And some books were found at the best used bookstore ever.

Our New Favorites

These titles are very big hits!

*

Everything Else

These are good stuff, also.



One of my girls still will not pick up many "real" books on her own, so I find I have need of more easy readers than I used to own. Arnold Lobel is, of course, a good author for that level of reading. The sure test of this is that I would never mind reading his works aloud over and over, if my four-year-old demanded that of me. The Frances books are also big helps. I saw a huge stack of them at the store for about fifty cents each. Now that I know the girls like them, I think I'll take a few dollars down there and buy the whole stack!

Any new books in your library?

*Note: In Comus, the water nymphs are somewhat scantily clad. This does not bother me, but if it bothers you, then consider this note fair warning. Personally, I am thrilled that someone bothered to make a children's version of Milton's famous play. It is excellent.