Maritain on Work

This is from the section in Education at the Crossroads called Four Fundamental Dispositions to be Fostered:

"The fourth fundamental disposition concerns the sense of a job well done, for next to the attitude toward existence there is nothing more basic in man's psychic life than the attitude toward work. I do not mean by this the habit of being hard working. I am aware that laziness, as well as pride, is natural to us. Moreover laziness in children is often not real laziness but only an absorption of the mind with the workings of vegetative growth or psychophysical hardships.

I am speaking of something deeper and more human, a respect for the job to be done, a failing of faithfulness and responsibility regarding it. A lazy man, a poet if you will, may display, when he happens to work, the most passionate attachment to the inner requirements of his work. I am convinced that when this fundamental disposition, which is the first natural move towards self-discipline, this probity in regard to work is marred, an essential basis of human morality is lacking. "

Leonie at Living without School was describing why she is an unschooler and certainly the above is one reason why I consider unschooling, to use Julie's terminology, to be "the holy grail of home education methodologies".

This probity of attitude towards the "inner requirements" of work is one of the most important things to be nurtured in the homeschool. I have seen people say that children can not learn to value work unless they are forced to do it, but I think it's almost the opposite.

I think that unless the children learn to work hard by their own decision, because of their interior relationship to the requirements of the work itself, they will never have the probity of attitude Maritain describes.

Training in habits and "requirements" can sometimes be of aid in this, but can't stand in as a replacement.

List -- Classical & Unschooling Comparison

The discussion at barefoot meandering has been closed by KathyJo now (after 93 comments, no wonder!), but during the course of it, an interesting sub-thread developed about the possibly different worldviews and goals of classical homeschooling and unschooling (particularly radical unschooling).

In the combox, I wrote a list of ideas which seemed to me to overlap between the two, and I am reposting it here since this blog actually started with the thesis that Catholic classical thinking on learning coincided more than one would think with some of the ideals of unschooling.

So here goes:

1. –”All men by nature desire to know”. Aristotle. It’s a strong desire that’s inherent in people.
2. –Education (however defined) is more than equipment for the intellect — it ought to involve the whole person.
3. –The learner is the primary agent in learning, NOT the teacher, who is secondary.
4. – Education is not a matter of degrees pasted on the wall, but rather something that forms the individual, something that he or she acquires internally.
5. –Informal methods are more effective than formal — discovery leads to a higher quality of knowledge than instruction.
6. – Knowledge is interconnected and one of the highest goals of knowledge is to see the connections between different areas.
7. – Traditional education (meaning educational practices since pragmatic, utilitarian turn to standard public education in the early 1900’s) is often misguided in its aims (to create good servants of the economy) and correspondingly in its methods.
8. –Education (learning) is a lifelong process. You don’t stop — it becomes a habit of mind, a way of life.
9. – Wisdom begins in wonder, as Socrates said. Learning ought to be valued for its sheer intrinsic worth, not for where it gets you.

Also:

• Classical education encourages looking at the principles behind the rules, and so does radical unschooling.
  
• And one final one that came up which overlaps with the one just above -- classical types and unschoolers both tend to think of authority as something to be complied with only when it is right. In other words, neither values obedience (say to the State) as more important than virtue. Obedience, properly understood, is focused towards compliance with the good.

Now, surely there are many points of divergence too but that is for a different post.

Notes on the list:

One commenter said she would change education in #4 to "learning" since education unfortunately has become a loaded word, meaning something like "standard-based outcomes". That does seem to be true. I like the word but I probably would not if I had only heard it from the mouths of politicians and the NEA.

Drew Campbell thought that #1 and #5 were true only partly and in some circumstances, not true at all times absolutely. I am paraphrasing his comment below but you can find it in entirety in Kathy Jo's combox.

With #1, he agreed that we are "neurologically wired" to learn and make sense of our world but did not think it followed that we will all learn what is best to learn. People's reason can be misled by their appetite or spirit (to use Aristotle's terminology in Nichomachean Ethics) . Aquinas says that studiousness, the desire to learn and know, can be pulled off course by curiosity (interest in what is dangerous, trivial, or unsuitable in some other way) or by sloth (indifference, laziness, disinclination to put out the work necessary). Article here. There is also probably a difficulty with ignorance (I think Drew pointed this out somewhere else). You need to find out what is valuable to learn before you can learn what is valuable.

With #5, he thought that it would be correct to say broadly that students should "own" their knowledge, but he did not agree that to a classical educator informal methods are always better than formal, or that discovery necessarily leads to a higher quality of knowledge. This article that he wrote gives more detail. To quote:

So freedom, yes, but within limits. We may legitimately use methods of discovery, both empirical and Socratic, to educate our children where those methods are proper to the field of endeavor. We must use didactic methods in disciplines where they are appropriate. But we must never substitute the child's nature, his free will, for a wise teacher. We cannot abandon our responsibility to bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, including the natural orders of knowledge and authority that God has ordained.

I suppose the terms I used, "discovery", "formal", "informal" were not really carefully defined in my listed item. I got the "informal/formal" terminology from Kolbe Academy's Implementation of Ignatian Education in the Home and you can find it stated in this pdf "Synopsis of Ignatian Education". The exact words are:

The informal agencies are more effective than the formal.

But if you asked me, I find I would have to make up my own definition of the meaning of this. It could be that it would differ from what Kolbe means by the sentence. I took it to mean that most of the formal agencies have to rest on the foundation of the informal. So yeah, it would definitely not be the same thing as saying "therefore only informal agencies should be used".

The discovery/instruction terminology is from Aquinas's De Magistro. I quoted the relevant part before on the blog. I'll just pull out a small part:

Now if someone proposes to another certain ideas that are not self-evident or if he does not manifest how they follow from self-evident principles, then he does not cause knowledge in that person, but rather opinion or belief. For those ideas that follow necessarily from the first self evident principles have to be true, and those that are contrary to them have to be false. But to all other ideas he can give his assent or not.

It is by no means a bad thing to have belief in something you are told on others' authority, particularly if you have reason to trust that authority, but it is not the same thing as knowledge.

There is more here on the distinction between knowledge and belief according to Aquinas. A couple of quotes:

Knowledge begins in sense and is completed in the intellect...

There are two different types of knowledge: sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge. Sense experience is the beginning for all of man's natural knowledge. It begins in the senses, and is completed in the intellect (Bourke, 1960, p. 12). There is a dual operation to the intellect. One operation is the understanding of indivisibility, where the intellect grasps the reality of each item in itself; the other operation relates to combining and distinguishing (Bourke, 1960, p. 14).

The second type of knowledge, intellectual knowledge, is abstract and general....The general ability to understand covers simple apprehension, judgment, and reasoning. Simple apprehension is when the mind accepts an object without affirming or denying it. The issue of judgment is the reality that two objects are in agreement or disagreement. Reasoning is the production of new judgment by means of two others.

From reading Drew's article I am thinking that he is saying that formal agencies are useful in teaching the second type of knowledge (depending upon how the word "formal" is understood). Aquinas says of how to guide in matters of reason:

Now in those things that come about by nature and art, art works in the same way and uses the same sorts of tools as nature.... in the acquisition of knowledge, the teacher leads the student to the knowledge of things the student previously did not know in the same way that someone leads himself to discover what he previously did not know.

The process of discovery begins with applying common self-evident principles to particular subject matters, and then proceeding to some particular conclusions, and then from these moving on to other conclusions. In light of this, one is said to teach another, when he makes clear through certain signs the path (discursum) of reasoning he himself took. Thus the teacher's presentations are like tools that the natural reason of the student uses to come to an understanding of things previously unknown to him.

If you define this process of instruction by the teacher as "formal" then probably yes, formal agencies are valuable and effective in guiding a student to knowledge. I just read something about that recently; I can't remember where it was but if I find it I'll add it to the blog.

If you are a classical educator or unschooler who has a problem with any of the things I put on the list, or can think of another to add, I would really really like to know.

parenting as a structure

There is a very interesting discussion in the combox of barefoot meandering. The discussion started with an essay by an unschooled boy on limitation of video games, but in the comments brings up all sorts of interesting unschooling/classical education issues, which of course are my primary focus on this blog. It does get a bit controversial in parts and the equivocations in terminology are frustrating.

Some semantic-related questions:

• Is setting limits the same thing as "coercion"?
• Does freedom from explicit limits imply permissiveness or neglect?
• What is "addiction" and what is its origin? Is it better addressed by looking at the big picture of the addictive behavior, or just disallowing the object of addiction?
  

Where I see agreement between the "opposing sides":

• Everyone agrees that their parental goal is to raise children who as adults will make good decisions freely for themselves (though they may disagree on what constitutes a responsible adult) .
• Everyone agrees that parents have authority (with distinctions as to definition and implication) and that children are owed respect (with similar distinctions)

The disagreement seems to be basically prudential, then, prudence being defined as "the exercise of sound judgment in practical affairs." So then:

• Does allowing choices take parental guidance out of the picture? Can a child learn to make wise choices without limits being set?
  
• Does setting limits inhibit the ability of a child to make good choices in freedom?
  

Another question -- given the reality of human fallen nature in children and parents both, what is the best way to deal with that?

How does understanding of original sin play into one's parental policies? Can an understanding of fallen nature go hand-in-hand with some form of non-coercive parenting (here again the semantics are tricky and I feel like just writing my own definitions out so I can make some progress in actually thinking this through for myself).

And one more -- if limits are necessary in cases where the child's preservation is at stake, and are necessary *because* of the inexperience of a child, are there some important areas not directly concerned with preservation where the child's well-being is at stake?

What is more important in those cases -- letting the child learn to practice making good decisions and thus gain prudence, or imparting prudence by means of parental controls or limits? Obviously to a Thomist, discovery from real life is more valuable than second-hand instruction, but that doesn't mean instruction is never useful or required.

One of the quasi-integral parts of prudence is "docility" or teachableness and this is a virtue. This is a habit or disposition of learning from others and not having to constantly bump your own head against the consequences of your misjudgements. In its mature form it is a considered attitude, but children seem to have a natural tendency to look up to their elders.

I have read advice on teaching and training children that say that the more rebellious a child is, the more the wind should be tempered to the shorn lamb, so to speak. The child obviously lacks docility and in that state, by definition, he is not very teachable. There is often an implicit relationship problem and great care and concern is required not to "exasperate" the child. This does not mean fudging values, but is a description of method and approach. You want to work on docility, since this is the prerequisite of learning according to Adler.

Of course, I suppose that a non-Christian might disagree that docility is a virtue. It is often seen as synonymous with subservience though subservience is a defect of docility. In Adler's words (this is what I was looking for when I found the quote in the last post):

The two virtues of the student are studiousness (studiositas) and docility (docilitas).....Docility is much harder. Curiously enough, the word itself throws us off, though it is a virtue and, I think, the prime virtue of the student. The extremes between which it mediates are subservience and indocility or recalcitrance. Unfortunately most people use the word 'docility' in the sense of the extreme; they speak of a person as docile when they mean that he is submissive, lamb-like, subservient. But the extreme is a vice, not the virtue, just as recalcitrance or intransigence is a vice.

Docility, that middle ground between the two, involves a critical use on the part of the student of the teacher as an instrument of learning. I am saying that the docile student uses the teacher. It is perfectly right for him to use the teacher because the teacher is an instrument. To use the teacher critically means that the student is neither submissive to his authority without active inquiry (since nothing is to be accepted on the authority of the teacher, nothing is to be memorized and parroted) nor resistant to the art or skill of the teacher showing him the way to learn.

His attitude is one of respect; he listens. What the teacher says just by virtue of his office is worth asking about to see whether it is true. What the teacher says is listened to respectfully as a challenge. Where the student is initially inclined to disagree, he should watch himself from becoming indocile and recalcitrant; where he is initially inclined to agree, he should guard against becoming submissive.

Of course, the teacher/student relationship is not the same as the parent/child one, though there are definitely overlaps particularly when you are homeschooling.

I think I'll leave it there for now! Oh, one more quote given by Drew Campbell in the com box, from Jacques Maritain's "Education at the Crossroads" (hooray, my library has the book)

“The freedom of the child is not the spontaneity of animal nature, moving right from the start along the fixed determinate paths of instinct […]. The freedom of the child is the spontaneity of a human and rational nature, and this largely undetermined spontaneity has its inner principle of final determination only in reason, which is not yet developed in the child.

“The plastic and suggestible freedom of the child is harmed and led astray if it is not helped and guided. An education which consisted in making the child responsible for acquiring information about that of which he does not know he is ignorant, an education which only contemplated a blossoming forth of the child’s instincts, and which rendered the teacher a tractable and useless attendant, is but a bankruptcy of education and of the responsibility of adults toward the youth. The right of the child to be educated requires that the educator shall have moral authority over him, and this authority is nothing else than the duty of the adult to the freedom of the youth.”

This is a great quote; however, I don't really see radical unschoolers disagreeing with this in essence. Their main point has always seemed to me that coercion tends to be at least a mild disruption to the relationship, whereas a mindful, non-reflexive way of parenting that looks clearly at the various choices in a given situation is preferable in terms of moral authority and in helping the child gain wisdom.

Whether Knowledge is Relative

A quote from Aquinas Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima (sorry, it is long, but it bears on something I've been thinking about. I wrote some thoughts at the end so you can skip if you want OR of course, skip altogether : ))

On the relative value of different kinds of knowledge:

While all knowledge is good and even honorable, one science can surpass another in this respect. All knowledge is obviously good because the good of anything is that which belongs to the fullness of being which all thingss seek after and desire; and man as man reaches fullness of being through knowledge.

Now of good things some are just valuable, namely, those which are useful in view of some end -- as we value a good horse because it runs well; whilst other good things are also honorable, namely, those that exist for their own sake; for we give honor to ends, not means.

Of the sciences some are practical, others speculative; the difference being that the former are for the sake of some work to be done, while the latter are for their own sake. The speculative sciences are therefore honorable as well as good, but the practical ones are only valuable. Every speculative science is both good and honorable.

Yet even among the speculative sciences there are degrees of goodness and honorableness. Every science is valued first of all as a kind of activity, and the worth of any activity is reckoned in two ways: from its object and from its mode or quality.

Thus building is a better activity than bed-making because its object is better. But where the activities are the same in kind, and result in the same thing, the quality alone makes a difference; if a building is better built it will be a better building.

Considering then science, or its activity, from the point of view of the object, that science is nobler which is concerned with better and nobler things; but from the point of view of mode or quality, the nobler science is that which is more certain. One science, then, is reckoned nobler than another, either because it concerns better and nobler objects or because it is more certain.

Now, why this comes up:

In Is Knowledge Relative? Melissa wrote:

But I don’t see how it could be moral relativism to say “this bit of knowledge is just as valuable as that bit of knowledge.” Valuable for what purpose? In what context?

That is so precisely why education is an art rather than a science, and indeed LIFE is an art rather than a science (it's called prudence, or phronesis if the word prudence sounds like a spinster looking under her bed to you). Aquinas says above that one type of knowledge is (in abstract) better (in goodness and honor) than another, depending on that knowledge's objective and quality.

BUT: What is the profit if you gain the whole world and lose your soul? To say it another way, "if you speak with the tongues of men and angels, but without love, your voice is like the clanging of cymbals". We all know the adult who got years and years of rigorous piano lessons and now never touches the piano; contrarily, we know the motivated teenager who got interested in? football? violin? snowboarding? at a relatively older age and excelled quickly because internal motivation was present. Pavarotti is an example of the latter sort, and so is an athlete from our area, Andy Finch, who apparently didn't start snowboarding until he was about 12 and is now an Olympian winter sports star.

The subjectively best path is not always the one that "seems" higher objectively. A child reading Star Wars novels, as Melissa points out, may be getting something out of it that he will later, or even in the same day, also be getting out of Church's Stories from the Aeneid or Pyle's Tales of King Arthur. Often there are many paths that lead to good things. An expansive open view of the value of ALL kinds of knowledge and delight might be a better tactic than an exclusionary, purist approach that narrows the world unnecessarily.

Stephanie at Recollected Life makes this point in Melissa's comment box and also on her blog about Why it Worked and what it couldn't do

Plus, there's another thing... the mode or quality that Aquinas talked about. He would say that discovery (inventio) is better than instruction (disciplina), that self-directed learning is better than imposed. I have talked about that before quite a bit, but here just wanted to point out that Aquinas held that even the more artificial instructional "teaching" should imitate as much as possible the natural mode by which people learn. He compared it to the job of a doctor -- stand back when you're not needed; supportive and minimal care when your offices ARE needed; and as the Hippocratic Oath has it "first do no harm".

As Melissa writes:

Another way to think about it is: who is learning more—the kid who is passionately interested in Boxcar Children, or the one who is patiently enduring Great Expectations?

(That same child might, however, find herself captivated by Great Expectations a few years later—her appreciation of suspense fiction having been honed by dozens of Boxcar Children books.)

Here you have one of my ongoing struggles with the balance between the unschooling ideal (honestly, radical unschooling IS my ideal since I am sure that this was exactly what Cain and Abel's upbringing would have been if the serpent hadn't intervened) and my classical ideal (which would have been exactly identical to the RU one, it seems to me, if not for that original intervention).

In a perfect world, everyone would naturally seek out the objectively higher things.
We don't live in a perfect world. It's possible to get distracted, as Amy points out in Melissa's comment box.

YET, and this is a huge yet, subjective perception is extremely important. The shortest distance isn't always the most easily travelled or the most meaningful route. Think Concorde jet on a business trip to Jerusalem vs pilgrimage on foot to the Holy Land. Here I think about my conversion -- it took several years. Would I have one step otherwise? I regret any sinful backwardness on my part but yet, every step was gilded with God's grace. One of my children studied statistics in his high school book but didn't GET statistics until he starting crunching football percentages for his fantasy football game. Now he gets it. The examples could be multiplied.

The other YET (I keep wanting to write YETI because of the Tintins I am constantly reading to Paddy): this is one that Melissa pointed out in the comments:

I can see that how it gets sticky if it’s translated as “all knowledge is equally valuable,” which would seem to open the door to absurdities like ‘the knowledge of how to pull taffy is just as important as the knowledge of how to cure leukemia’ or ‘the text on a cereal box is as valuable as the Summa Theologica.’ But even in reaching for absurdities I find myself arguing the point: if I have a peanut allergy, the text on the cereal box might be more immediately important to me than the Summa. I come back to the value being relative to circumstance and need. If I had to make a choice, I’d choose the Summa…but do we ever have to make that choice?

This is true, and Aquinas would agree. In particulars, sometimes "highers" are properly subordinated to "lowers". At a taffy-pulling party, the person who can pull taffy will have valuable knowledge proper to the occasion, and the person who proses on about the cure for leukemia might perhaps be better off lightening up a bit and practicing his taffy-pulling skills. If you want to see this in action, read Pride and Prejudice. Mary Bennet's speeches aren't so much foolish as they are foolishly situated, not suitable to the occasion.


I think I intellectualize too much. Surprise!

My spring break is ending; in spite of my resolves, I've been spending lots of time on the computer while life swirls and eddies around me. "Oh, my goodness, my (playdough) brownies are ready! " "Mom, could I have some hot cocoa? Mom, did you forget my cocoa?" "Will you please pick me up Mama?" "Look at what I made!" "Mama, do the beep!" (That is not a swear word, but means that Aidan wants to use the timer function on my camera!)

On the bright side, it's been a bit like a retreat, made more memorable and practical with all the domestic swirls and eddies. Thanks, Melissa and everyone who commented at her site. I think I will now resolve during this bright and shiny Easter season to try to make a few changes one step at a time. First, I think it's time to present my face to my kids, maybe with a smile and a friendly voice and gaze; Aidan has been taking way too many pictures of the back of my head with my hair lit by the glow of the laptop screen).

classical quotes about non-coercive education

They shall have such an education as will enable them to attain the greatest skill in asking and answering questions..
....

the mind more often faints from the severity of study than from the severity of gymnastics: the toil is more entirely the mind's own, and is not shared with the body.

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.....Then, my good friend, I said, do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to find out the natural bent.

From Plato's Republic Book VII

Aidan made this Lego structure this morning and took his own picture of it. He wanted me to post it : ).

cognitio fidei praesupponit cognitionem naturalem

"Under otherwise similar conditions, seeing is surer than hearing; but if the one from whom we learn something by hearing is capable of grasping far more than one could obtain by seeing for oneself, then hearing is surer than seeing."

--St Thomas Aquinas, quoted by Josef Pieper in "An Anthology".

It occurs to me that this is also a way to think about the difference between what Aquinas called disciplina (instruction) and inventio (discovery) in De Magistro.

Now in those things that come about by nature and art, art works in the same way and uses the same sorts of tools as nature. For just as nature uses warmth to heal someone suffering from a cold, so also does a doctor. This is why art is said to imitate nature. Similarly, in the acquisition of knowledge, the teacher leads the student to the knowledge of things the student previously did not know in the same way that someone leads himself to discover what he previously did not know.

The process of discovery begins with applying common self-evident principles to particular subject matters, and then proceeding to some particular conclusions, and then from these moving on to other conclusions. In light of this, one is said to teach another, when he makes clear through certain signs the path (discursum) of reasoning he himself took. Thus the teacher's presentations are like tools that the natural reason of the student uses to come to an understanding of things previously unknown to him.

Therefore, just as the doctor is said to cause health in the sick man with nature working, so also one is said to cause knowledge in another by the activity of the power of reasoning in that person, and this is called teaching. In this way one person is said to teach another and to be his teacher. Thus the Philosopher says that a demonstration is a syllogism causing knowledge.

Now if someone proposes to another certain ideas that are not self-evident or if he does not manifest how they follow from self-evident principles, then he does not cause knowledge in that person, but rather opinion or belief. For those ideas that follow necessarily from the first self evident principles have to be true, and those that are contrary to them have to be false. But to all other ideas he can give his assent or not.

I am sure it would sound very strange to many to say that our country's secular public schools tend to inculcate belief rather than knowledge. But it is true in many ways. This is in some ways what "information" poured into the vessels is all about. I remember about a year before we started homeschooling my oldest son -- he was in first grade then. My husband lit a cigar -- something he used to do oh, about once or twice a year maybe, and mostly in regard for his grandpa's memory? My son said with terror in his voice: "Don't smoke that! It will KILL you!" That was a pivot towards our decision to homeschool (and now he is in his junior year at Thomas Aquinas College)

One of the goals of both classical education and unschooling is to set an example and provide a method for a lifelong continual examination of assumptions. Not all at once, of course; but as you go, and getting the big rocks in place first, hopefully.

Belief is not a bad thing, of course. If you go through everything you meet up with in a day and decide if you really "know" it yourself, vs whether you believe it on some kind of justified trust, you might be surprised. We believe many things on the evidence of others. It certainly streamlines things. Often there is no reason to do otherwise. If you have a habit of distrusting everything that you don't know by direct empirical evidence, that might be something you want to examine in yourself too.

But it's useful to think of why we believe what we do, what are our criteria for belief, and how we can teach our children to make the distinction.

Pieper says that one criterion is credibility. That certainly seems to be true. He also says:

"The premises of belief are not a part of what the believer believes. They pertain rather to that which he knows, or at least must be able to know. It is another matter that in the ordinary course of events only a few really know what is in itself knowable. In any case this does not detract from the validity of the proposition:

cognitio fidei preasupponit cognitionem naturalem.

Belief does not presuppose knowledge based upon belief in its turn dependent upon someone else, but rather knowledge out of one's own resources."

I understand that to mean that when you believe something, you don't base it upon a whole string of beliefs none founded upon actual known reality, but somewhere behind your beliefs is knowledge or at least potential knowledge. ... you could discover it for yourself if you had the opportunity, but either you don't have the opportunity or it is more efficient to take it on trust.