Simplicity and the Spirit of Childhood in Education

The essential element in Christian faith, however, is God's descent towards his creatures, particularly towards the humblest, those who are weakest and least gifted according to the values of the “world”. There are spiritual techniques which it is useful to learn, but God is able to by-pass them or do without them. A Christian's “method of getting closer to God is not based on any technique in the strict sense of the word. That would contradict the spirit of childhood called for by the Gospel. The heart of genuine Christian mysticism is not technique: it is always a gift of God; and the one who benefits from it knows himself to be unworthy”

This is from a Catholic document called Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Waters, which I just finished reading today.

To me it paralleled a truth in education that I wanted to get out on this blog. (please note that I am not equating education with God's grace, but trying to bring something out by analogy; I do think that education and spiritual growth under grace have some "principal cause" overlap, but that is for another post at another time).

I have been delving into lots of reading on "method" in education. The Ratio Studiorum, which is a procedural formulation of the Ignatian method I have been blogging about, was an outline of method, geared as it was towards the workings of Renaissance era secondary and tertiary schools. The goals and philosophy were mostly implicit, understood as context but not gone into in depth. For an explication of the goals and philosophy, it is best to read St Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, but even these can be misunderstood without an understanding of his focus on "Everything for the Greater Glory of God" (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam)

Method is a fascinating subject to me, perhaps because I have always struggled with executive function issues in my school years and to some extent throughout life. I always tested high but spent most of my school time "dans la lune" (in the moon) as my French teacher would joke. My daily life tends to be rather the same way if I don't consciously focus on the procedures of remembering and prioritizing. My spiritual life too has been enriched by a variety of strategies and habits which balance out my tendency to drift. It's still something I struggle with, so all this reading about strategies and techniques is deeply fascinating for me.

But of course, at the heart of education, as at the heart of religion, is something besides technique and method. Charlotte Mason often pointed to this truth. She saw that a zeal for teaching, often very admirable, can sometimes lead to forgetting the role of the learner, which ought to be the primary one, and how intricately our hearts and imaginations and wills are bound up with our intelligence in the process of learning:

"We hold that the child's mind is no mere sac to hold ideas but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a 'spiritual organism' with an appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet with which it is prepared to deal and what it is able to digest and assimilate as the body does food-stuffs."

"Such a doctrine as the Herbartian, that the mind is a receptacle, lays the stress of education, the preparation of food in enticing morsels, duly ordered, upon the teacher. Children taught on this principle are in danger of receiving much teaching but little knowledge; the teacher's axiom being 'what a child learns matters less than how he learns it.'"

Another advocate of liberal education, and a convert to Catholicism from Charlotte Mason's Anglicanism, Cardinal Newman, wrote :

How much better, I say, is it for the active and thoughtful intellect, where such is to be found, to eschew the College and the University altogether, than to submit to a drudgery so ignoble, a mockery so contumelious! How much more profitable for the independent mind, after the mere rudiments of education, to range through a library at random, taking down books as they meet him, and pursuing the trains of thought which his mother wit suggests! How much healthier to wander into the fields, and there with the exiled Prince to find "tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks!" How much more genuine an education is that of the poor boy in the Poem —a Poem, whether in conception or in execution, one of the most touching in our language—who, not in the wide world, but ranging day by day around his widowed mother's home, "a dexterous gleaner" in a narrow field, and with only such slender outfit

"as the village school and books a few
Supplied,"

contrived from the beach, and the quay, and the fisher's boat, and the inn's fireside, and the tradesman's shop, and the shepherd's walk, and the smuggler's hut, and the mossy moor, and the screaming gulls, and the restless waves, to fashion for himself a philosophy and a poetry of his own!"

Cardinal Newman was not an advocate of unschooling or auto-didacticism per se, any more than Charlotte Mason was, but both their eyes rested on a truth that the Church also recognizes -- that methods and practices are, at best, aids and tools to devotion and virtue, but they do not substitute for those things, and they must not be allowed to become the goals in themselves. This is true for education as well; Charlotte Mason calls education the "handmaid to religion" and St Ignatius says much the same thing. Of course, the Gospel sums it up.

"Seek ye first the kingdom of God....and all these things will be added unto you."

(By the way, I am doing a lot of quoting on this blog right now, and I would really love to set these quotes aside in real boxes, rather than in bold script, but I can't get Blogger to do it this way for me -- do any experienced Blogger-readers have any ideas for me? ETA: I figured it out! Bravo for auto-didacticism! and thanks to Amy, too, for reminding me of the Moms Who Blog site where non-techy moms can go to get techy help from moms like themselves)