Condition of Receptiveness

Strenuous Effort and Reverence.––We have seen in Ruskin and Wordsworth the strenuous attention––condition of receptiveness––which made each of them a producer after his kind; and whosoever will play the game, whether it be cricket or portrait painting, must learn the rules with all diligence and get skill by his labour. It is true, ‘the labour we delight in physics pain,’ but it is also true that we cannot catch hold of any one of the affinities that are in waiting for us without strenuous effort and without reverence. A bird-lover, one would say, has chosen for himself an easy joy; but no: your true bird-lover is out of doors by four in the morning to assist at the levée of the birds; nay, is he not in Hyde Park by 2.30 a.m. to see––the kingfisher, no less! He lies in wait in secret places to watch the goings on of the feathered peoples, travels far afield to make a new acquaintance in the bird-world; in fact, gives to the study of birds attention, labour, love, and reverence. He gets joy in return, so is perhaps little conscious of effort; but the effort is made all the same.

sound advice

Someone on a Charlotte Mason list linked to this article called Concrete Problems at Parent's Review Archives. It's sort of a panel discussing common upbringing questions and there is all kinds of good sense in it. Here's a bit from the introduction that I think needs to be kept in mind whenever talking about parenting and homeschooling questions:

....none of us speak with the voice of infallibility, we are all learners, and we do not lay down rules of conduct, or a system of education, which each of us can go home and then and there apply to our children. Alas, our task as parents and as child trainers is not so easy. We have to have certain true educational principles which we must master, digest, and quietly work out in all our homes in a reverent and prayerful spirit.

I am afraid that some among our members do what we are always urging that the children should not be allowed to do, viz., swallow raw material without digesting it. Someone will advocate "cold baths," and they will at once, regardless of the child's physical condition, previous habits, etc., etc., go home and then and there start the practice. Someone else will speak in praise of certain gymnastics and at once a fashion and a cult is started for them without due thought and weighty consideration.

Notes on Physical Nourishment

One of Charlotte Mason's principles appears to have been that "grace builds upon nature and does not destroy it" This is a traditional Thomistic formula. It is not enough for a child to be just a "fine animal" as they used to say in the 19th century, that is clear. Yet being in good physical condition is still important in laying the groundwork for natural virtues and for good habits.

Divine Grace works on the Lines of Human Effort.––In looking for a solution of this problem, I do not undervalue the Divine grace––far otherwise; but we do not always make enough of the fact that Divine grace is exerted on the lines of enlightened human effort; that the parent, for instance, who takes the trouble to understand what he is about in educating his child, deserves, and assuredly gets, support from above....

She believed that the mind and body are closely connected. There is of course much contemporary research confirming the connection, which was always intuitionally understood -- that emotional problems can affect physical health, for instance.

She mentions various practices considered healthy for children of her day. Some sound quaint -- children should have cocoa but avoid cheese and fruit preserves with the leathery rinds; they should wear wool instead of cotton; etc. However, the principles seem sound.

1. Principle of rest and nourishment and variety for the brain and body.

Since the brain uses a lot of energy, it is important to replenish it by proper physical food, and by intervals of rest.

the more educable powers of the child––his intelligence, his will, his moral feelings––have their seat in his brain; that is to say, as the eye is the organ of sight, so is the brain, or some part of it, the organ of thought and will, of love and worship. Authorities differ as to how far it is possible to localise the functions of the brain; but this at least seems pretty clear––that none of the functions of mind are performed without real activity in the mass of grey and white nervous matter named 'the brain.'

Strenuous mental activity should not take place right after a solid meal. And a child should be fed after he has studied seriously. Here's a general sketch of a possible schedule based on these ideas:

It follows that the hours for lessons should be carefully chosen, after periods of mental rest––sleep or play, for instance––and when there is no excessive activity in any other part of the system. Thus, the morning, after breakfast (the digestion of which lighter meal is not a severe task), is much the best time for lessons and every sort of mental work; if the whole afternoon cannot be spared for out-of-door recreation, that is the time for mechanical tasks such as needlework, drawing, practising; the children's wits are bright enough in the evening, but the drawback to evening work is, that the brain, once excited, is inclined to carry on its labours beyond bed-time, and dreams, wakefulness, and uneasy sleep attend the poor child who has been at work until the last minute. If the elder children must work in the evening, they should have at least one or two pleasant social hours before they go to bed; but, indeed, we owe it to the children to abolish evening 'preparation.'

The same goes for changes of pace in the school day itself, because the mind does best with a rhythm that emphasize different roles at different times:

this much is certain, and is very important to the educator: the brain, or some portion of the brain, becomes exhausted when any given function has been exercised too long. The child has been doing sums for some time, and is getting unaccountably stupid: take away his slate and let him read history, and you find his wits fresh again. Imagination, which has had no part in the sums, is called into play by the history lesson, and the child brings a lively unexhausted power to his new work. School time-tables are usually drawn up with a view to give the brain of the child variety of work; but the secret of weariness children often show in the home school room is, that no such judicious change of lessons is contrived.

She goes on to talk about the proportion of bodily circulation given over to the brain -- that a child uses a large part of his nourishment to support the function of his growing brain. This is still considered to be true, from what I find.... the adult brain uses up to 20% of the body's resting metabolism. A newborn's brain may use up to 50% of the BMR. The energy comes, as she said, from food (basically glucose) and from oxygen. The brain cannot store energy but it can co-op whatever energy is available from the body -- it takes top priority in energy allocation.

2. Good food to eat and good air to breathe are important nutrition for the body and brain.

Regular, good food plus fresh outdoor air are key features in promoting conditions of healthy brain activity.

the quality of the blood is affected by three or four causes.

In the first place, the blood is elaborated from the food; the more nutritious and easy of digestion the food, the more vital will be the properties of the blood.

The food must be varied, too, a mixed diet, because various ingredients are required to make up for the various waste in the tissues.

But it is not the food which is eaten, but the food which is digested, that nourishes body and brain.

The quality of the blood depends almost as much on the air we breathe as on the food we eat.

3. Mealtimes should be joyful -- the emotional and spiritual aspects of eating are as important as the physical aspects:

If the child dislike his dinner, he swallows it, but the digestion of that distasteful meal is a laborious, much-impeded process: if the meal be eaten in silence, unrelieved by pleasant chat, the child loses much of the 'good' of his dinner. Hence it is not a matter of pampering them at all, but a matter of health, of due nutrition, that the children should enjoy their food, and that their meals should be eaten in gladness; though, by the way, joyful excitement is as mischievous as its opposite in destroying that even, cheerful tenor of mind favourable to the processes of digestion. No pains should be spared to make the hours of meeting round the family table the brightest hours of the day.

... Here is the parents' opportunity to train them in manners and morals, to cement family love, and to accustom the children to habits, such as that of thorough mastication, for instance, as important on the score of health as on that of propriety.

Of course, modern studies have affirmed the importance of these things:

• Make Family Meals a Habit
• The Power of Family Meals
• Developing Habits of Healthy Eating (moderation, balance, variety)
• Joyful Eating (for children, Let Them Eat Cake is interesting in discussing the emotional element in eating -- how important it is not to get locked into eating power struggles, and how rich food has always evoked celebration across almost all cultures)

I didn't do more than mention the "oxygenated air" requirements for the brain because it comes up in more detail later on, in "Habit of Outdoor Life" and "Nursery Habits".

Summing Up So Far

So far this is what I've managed to blog so far from Charlotte Mason's Home Education -- basic overview and preface and first chapter:

• List of Habits from Home Education
• Serenity and Vigilance
• Laying the Basis of Education by the Habit of Reading
• System and Method, or the Limitations of Habits
• Keeping Watch
• Exercise and Effort

To sum up so far, Charlotte Mason seemed to divide habits into three types of categories:

• Moral
• Intellectual
• Preliminary or Nursery habits, which might be said to be environmental and partly physical, partly passive and partly active.
  

She gives more details on these later in the book.

In the category of habits for mothers -- vigilance and serenity are two things to balance. For me that is a hard balance. How to keep alert, and still serene?

Right now I've been trying to cultivate the habit of vigilance, without running to try to fix every little thing, at least not at first. I don't want to get overwhelmed and start "riding off madly in all directions". I want to be present and awake in the moment. Of course, "keeping watch at the place of the letting out of the waters" does involve a certain attitude of caution. When some new behavior crops up, or an old one escalates, just being attentive is helpful in dealing with the issue. This means that I need to mostly stay away from things that distract me from paying attention.

Habit is of real but limited value, Charlotte Mason says. "System" is codified habit. It is great for certain things that only require training, like secretarial skills. But it is insufficient for education, which involves more than routine. Education involves the will, and the intelligence, which need to be free to exercise; habits are supposed to support the freedom of a human, not detract from it.

Therefore, Charlotte Mason advised that children should always be allowed to exert themselves, to exercise mentally and morally. This, among other things, ensures that habit does not become like an exoskeleton, closing you in like a hard shell.

I want to focus there on the "allow" part -- she used the phrase "LET the children brace themselves to understand; let them compel themselves to do and to bear; and let them do right at the sacrifice of ease and pleasure:". Is this semantics? a euphemism for "MAKE them do these things?" I don't think so. The etymological meaning of "let" is "to allow, let go, bequeath, leave."

The fact is that children like to work, they crave some effort as outlet for their energetical developmental process. Very often, I am aware, I can hinder my children from meaningful intellectual and moral efforts. It's not always said, but it can be an implicit message. "Don't work so hard -- be a less energetic worker so you can be easier to manage."

I think also that when CM says "let" she could be meaning "make the conditions right for...." Sometimes my children hesitate to do something difficult because they are afraid they will initially fail, or find it unpleasant. I am the same way. So sometimes, positively encouraging an effort can have good results.

Bequeathing, as part of the etymology of the word "let", seems to evoke a heritage or gift which we pass on to our children by letting them partake of responsibility and effort. Doing good things intellectually and morally involves effort, but it's a wholesome kind of effort.

The next section, still in Preliminary Considerations, is about Conditions of Healthy Brain Activity, is about the ties between physical and mental health, and about some of the preconditions for habits proper.

Exercise and Effort

Most of us have met with a few eccentric and a good many silly persons, concerning whom the question forces itself, Were these people born with less brain power than others? Probably not; but if they were allowed to grow up without the daily habit of appropriate moral and mental work, if they were allowed to dawdle through youth without regular and sustained efforts of thought or will, the result would be the same, and the brain which should have been invigorated by daily exercise has become flabby and feeble as a healthy arm would be after carried for years in a sling....

The outcome of which is––Do not let the children pass a day without distinct efforts, intellectual, moral, volitional; let them brace themselves to understand; let them compel themselves to do and to bear; and let them do right at the sacrifice of ease and pleasure: and this for many higher reasons, but, in the first and lowest place, that the mere physical organ of mind and will may grow vigorous with work.

From "Exercise" in Preliminary Considerations in Home Education.

Etymology of exercise.

"condition of being in active operation,"

This is the next mention of "habit" in the preliminary considerations. This whole chapter is about the groundwork of moral and intellectual formation, and about the link of body to mind. Here I think she is analogizing the mind and will to muscles. A person confined to his bed for a long time will become atrophied in muscle, and similarly, a person who never really has to exert himself mentally or morally will tend to have trouble doing so when the time comes. Since as she said the large active brain is not contented with entire idleness (and I think this goes for the will, too) it will tend to strike out fitfully in various odd directions. Thus you get the eccentric, not really bad but not able to direct energies to positive good, either. l

Now, the way I am approaching this habit study is to figure out first how it applies to me, an adult. Since children are persons, the application will be somewhat the same for them, or this is my hypothesis. For children, whose brains are more plastic, the *effects* of atrophy or exercise will be more formative... that is, they will engrain themselves in the growing organism in a way that is not so much true of middle-aged adults, who are already formed. Or so I understand it.

For adults, too, though, continual mental and volitional effort is important. You see a lot of middle aged and elderly people who are basically coasting on their childhood formation. But since the natural tendency is to actually lose muscle density (and this seems to be true of mental function, too) -- coasting will actually lead to loss. The surface may continue to look all right, but it becomes a brittle shell of habit and the status quo. In order to avoid this, I think it's important to follow the example of Socrates and keep striving, examining, questioning, enduring, .... not in a sterile rigid way, but because it's truly important as a person ages to become prepared to undertake a good decline and death. Studies show that elderly people who continue to physically and mentally exercise retain function longer and there is no reason why this shouldn't apply to volitional, moral function as well (it's just that this area isn't customarily researched so far as I've seen, though I have seen studies that show that people who continue to be altruistic and socially minded into old age are healthier and happier).

I've been trying to be more conscious myself of daily striving in some area. I realize that if I am not careful, I can let several days slip by without effort. It may LOOK good, even BE good in a way in that I'm doing all the "right things" but it has become reflexive. That is not enough. I know the difference inside myself, even if it isn't apparent on the surface (though a family is a good conscience-check because children and spouses tend to sense emptiness inside even before one is fully aware of it oneself).

See, the point here isn't what you started with.... your natural temperament or upbringing. That is water under the bridge. CS Lewis says that the moral effort required for one person to be a hero might be the same as for another person to smile and be civil first thing in the morning. It's difficult to tell from the outside, but God can see what is going on. Jesus criticized the successful Pharisees but brought the Thief on the cross to Paradise with him. One statement of faith gloriously overbalanced a whole bad life, while lives that were superficially correct could not mask, for Him, an essential sterility and foulness.

Each of us has the same duty to, as St Maximilian Kolbe says,

not permit that evil remain without reparation and destruction;
or that good be without fruit or increase.

So this advice of Charlotte Mason has been a good reminder to me that if I am not making efforts daily, I am doing something equivalent to the man in the parable who buried his coin in the ground. That is, I'm keeping what I have but in the process losing out on real value.

I thought I wouldn't have enough to say about this topic but instead I wrote a lot and still have more to say : ).

Let Me Hear Your Voice

Let Me Hear Your Voice -- a thoroughly interesting account of "A Family's Triumph over Autism".

This book had a 70's feeling to me and reminded me of some of the early unschooling books like Better Than School and And the Children Played. Not that it had an unschooly feeling at all, but because it was passionately and articulately written and very personal. It also reminded me a bit of Cushla and her Books, and Karen. These are all stories of strong, creative, dedicated parents who are willing to go to great but humane lengths to help their children become what they are capable of being.

Writing in the early 90's, when autism was still largely a mystery and often treated with psychoanalysis, or thought of as a mental illness precipitated by poor mothering, the book recounts the family's successful experience with Ivan Lovaas's Applied Behavorial Analysis . It also recounts negatively the family's experience with Holding Therapy 's philosophy (though she did use some of the actual practice of "holding" and found them beneficial in combination with the behaviorial approach).

The author, a devout Catholic with a PhD, who had chosen to stay at home to be a fulltime mother of her three small children, started with reservations about the behavorial approach because it seemed mechanistic and harsh. Unlike some of the ABA proponents, she refused to use any negative aversives such as slaps and electrical shocks. In spite of her initial concerns, she found that the method brought results, helping her child to come out of her interior world and engage with her family and environment.

Her daughter's therapy involved two hours a day of behaviorial work with a therapist, one hour a day of "holding" with mother, and 3 hours a week with a speech and language therapist as well as countless hours of research and consultation with other parents and various doctors. By school age she was able to be mainstreamed into a normal school environment. I haven't gotten yet to the part where her younger son is diagnosed with autism. ... that is in part II of the book.

I particularly am finding the book interesting because I think that the Early Intervention center Aidan went to used some behavioral techniques. However, it was thoroughly inadequate for him. For one thing, he isn't autistic though he shares some behavorial traits and I often read books about autism for insights on how to approach his development. For another thing, it was for 1 hour once a week which is apparently not nearly enough time. And thirdly, since I was not on the same page as they were, and they did not really explain the approach or seem to thoroughly understand it themselves, it was sterile because I did not partake of their goals or methods and so it didn't carry over at all. So the therapy actually did him harm.

I have deep philosophical concerns about strict or mechanical behaviorism but from what I read in the book this form seems a bit more like what I'd call "deep intervention". The therapists and parents work full time to keep the child engaged and interacting. This reminded me just a bit of Charlotte Mason's emphasis on "habits" as "laying down the rails" and also stopping bad habits just as seriously as you would treat a physical disorder like measles. This is basically the approach the book's author took -- she saw autism as a disease, a progressive one that was taking her child away from her, so everything she did was trying to bring her child back from the grip of the disease.

I don't know enough about autism or about ABA to know whether it is the best way or not, but I certainly am finding the book gripping to read from the perspective of a homeschooling mother and the mother of a special needs child. Aidan flourishes so well without behavoristic training that I don't think I'd want to take that approach. However, I do see better after reading this why the therapists at his EI were doing what they did and I also see how some very targeted training can be helpful in generalizing a real and personally integrated style of behavior -- something that Charlotte Mason seeems to refer to often (as well as Montessori) and which I previously had trouble making sense of.

Health and Habit of the Soul

Virtue is not self-repression for the sake of duty, but, as Plato says, "a kind of health, and beauty and good habit of the soul" Catholic Encyclopedia

the place of the letting out of the waters

To put the thing on no higher grounds, what happy days for herself and her children would the mother secure if she would keep watch at the place of the letting out of waters! If the mother settle it in her own mind that the child never does wrong without being aware of his wrong-doing, she will see that is not too young to have his fault corrected or prevented. Deal with a child on his first offence, and a grieved look is enough to convict the little transgressor; but let him go on until a habit of wrong-doing is formed, and the cure is a slow one; then the mother has no chance until she has formed in him a contrary habit of well-doing. To laugh at ugly tempers and let them pass because the child is small, is to sow the wind.

(Childrens' Faults are Serious, from Preliminary Considerations in Home Education by Charlotte Mason)

This passage puzzled me for a long time and I still don't think I quite understand it, but maybe the biblical sources for the metaphors will help a little. Here they are:

The beginning of strife is like letting out water, So abandon the quarrel before it breaks out. Proverbs 17:14

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. Hosea 8:7

From what I read, "watching at the place of the letting out of the waters" is a bit like "a stitch in time saves nine" or "nipping something in the bud" (from The Common Room).

Sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind is a bit like "what goes around comes around" or "you reap what you sow".

Both seem to imply that something that is not dealt with in the beginning can grow and grow and take on a life of its own, especially if it's a charged issue that involves an ugly temper .... the examples CM gives are things like vindictiveness, hostility, greed. Those things disrupt the way a community functions very quickly. The way I am understanding Charlotte Mason's thoughts on habits, you have a choice: deal with something directly before it has made its tracks in the mind and manners, or wait and deal with a fully grown manifestation of the same thing. The first time a small child grabs or hits, it's partly simple inexperience and passion. But the more the child confirms his initial action by repeating it, the harder it may be to deal with it, and the more branches it may put out into other areas of life (to mix metaphors, again!)

This would be true of everyone, not just of children. In fact, it is under the heading of "Despise Not" the children that she puts this passage -- she thinks that ignoring faults because they belong to small-sized persons is to disrespect them.

Maybe this is the way in for me. I always dreaded becoming the mom who was constantly watching like a nervous hawk for every little infraction. Thinking in terms of "sowing the wind" can lead, for some people, to a kind of catastrophizing which is a cognitive distortion (see a very good discussion on "how we think" at Real Learning). If I see a child have a temper tantrum and immediately imagine the adult trashing his cubicle or ranting at his co-workers, I am not likely to deal sensibly with the present angry and often panicky toddler. Instead, I may add the burden of my anger and panic to his own. Talk about sowing the wind, and adding to the strife, then! And where is the serenity and loving vigilance there?

So I think she has to be talking about a parental attitude that is much more temperate and clearsighted. Remembering that Charlotte Mason thought things like observation, and attentiveness, and habit formation were good for children because they were good for adults helps me picture a watchfulness that is calm and loving and positive, not tense and strained.

In the post I linked to above, the Deputy Headmistress talks about the difference between a reaction and a response, and that probably sums up what I'm trying to say. Reaction is a default ("acting back"), while response comes from our true selves (an "answer", which implies intentionality). Sure, I see that, and it's helpful.

I probably still have some difficulties with the way I could imagine this passage being seen and acted upon. I definitely think it probably has to be balanced out by reference to other passages in Charlotte Mason's books. But I like the idea that being respectful of even the smallest children means not just laughing about and dismissing their childish follies. Sure, sometimes it's healthy to start by laughing, and sometimes difficult not to, but not healthy to stop there! From my perspective, it's always valuable to think "why" a child is acting as he is, especially as faults generally make a child unhappy, and how to help him overcome them. The Montessori posts on the sidebar are descriptions of the ways I usually try to approach childhood difficulties. Probably other people with different temperaments would have slightly different modes of approach.

And this habit of keeping a watch on the place of the letting out of the waters -- I suppose it isn't so different from the kind of proactive, purposeful work one does to keep one's own life or household running smoothly. A lot of times, I can keep busy putting out fires -- reacting and stressing myself out -- when a little bit of pre-emptive planning and foresight would have, yes, "nipped the thing in the bud" and let me respond appropriately with all my resources around me. This counts for mothering, too.

In the end, of course, one hopes that the children will be able to seamlessly transition into picking up the reins themselves -- that they will learn to keep a peaceful but steady watch on their own habits. I suppose this is why the Church recommends nightly examens for even younger children and a habit of reflecting on the day and making resolves. I remember finding a little piece of paper that one of my children had written on -- the child in question had put down a consideration of a particular personal fault and a resolution targeted towards doing better. Charlotte Mason warns (as does the Church) that there is a kind of introspective soul-searching that is unhealthy, kind of like scraping at a wound, but a simple process of reflection and resolution is almost indispensable in trying to live a Christian life. In the early childhood days a parent should bear a lot of the burden for directing a child's habits, but later on the child should be able to carry on the process for himself, so he or she doesn't become a sort of automaton, a "bundle of habits" mostly operating in reflex mode.

So what I'm trying to remember, both for my own personal character and the way I handle things in my family and household, is to be aware of "the place of the letting out of the waters" and avoid letting things escalate into whirlwinds or full gushing waters of contention because I wasn't keyed into dealing with them while they were still small. But if something has gotten into a full spate of wind or water, for various reasons, it is healthier not to waste time regretting, but rather, as CM says, work on changing the habit of wrongdoing into a contrary habit of well-doing.

That's where I am now, on this.

System vs Method, and the limitations of habits

From Some Preliminary Considerations: in Charlotte Mason's Home Education.

System––the observing of rules until the habit of doing certain things, of behaving in certain ways, is confirmed, and, therefore, the art is acquired––is so successful in achieving precise results, that it is no wonder there should be endless attempts to straiten the whole field of education to the limits of a system.

She goes on to say that though it is tempting to do this, and would be fine if a human were a machine, humans are not machines and cannot be educated mechanistically. There has to be more to education than just what it would take to train an accountant or secretary, or a "lady of society".

I've read about CM's distinction between "methods" and "system" many times, and never noticed it quite that way before, but this has to do with the limitations of habits. It seems she is saying that mechanical habits, useful as they may be, are not sufficient. This is helpful to me, both in measuring what role habits SHOULD take, and what shouldn't be expected from them.

I just recently read an article in the old Parents' Reviews, from 1902, called Limitations of Theory. It makes somewhat the same point.

I believe strongly in the importance of cultivating right habits, and in the power they exert over us; but sometimes I have felt that there was a danger of putting habit almost in the place of God--of thinking that everything can be accomplished by careful training, and that a child can simply, by care and watchful oversight, be turned out a great and good character. Valuable as habit is, it cannot renew the heart, and the mother who trusts entirely to her training is in danger of sad disappointment. It seems to me that those who place too great importance on habit run the risk of leaving God no room to work.
... To change an old saying, we might say, "Habit is a good servant, but a bad master." What is done merely through habit is more or less mechanical, and there is a danger of want of adaptation to surroundings in those who are too much bound by it.

And I already quoted the Catholic Encyclopedia which reiterates this:

At the same time that habits grow, attention has to be paid to their dangers, and the child must not be allowed to become a mere automaton. Habits of reflection and attention, together with determination and strength of will, will enable the child to control, direct, and govern other habits.

Reflection and attention....similar to vigilance for mothers, perhaps.

In School Education Charlotte Mason remarks repeatedly that while habits form the physical self in many ways, ideas feed the mind. She also says that every habit has its origin in an idea. This is something I want to think over. Also, Dr Carpenter too wrote about the limitations of habits. I'm going to type that out for a separate post.

Laying the Basis of Education by the Habit of Reading

This period of a child's life between his sixth and his ninth year should be used to lay the basis of a liberal education, and of the habit of reading for instruction. During these years the child should enter upon the domain of knowledge, in a good many directions, in a reposeful, consecutive way, which is not to be attained through the somewhat exciting medium of oral lessons. Charlotte Mason, Preface to Home Education

First, it's interesting about the "oral lessons". I could find nothing more about her caution about their use in Home Education, but in School Education you find, under the heading of "means of destroying the desire for knowledge" (p 214 School Education)

(a) Too many oral lessons, which offer knowledge in a diluted form, and do not leave the child free to deal with it.
(b) Lectures, for which the teacher collects, arranges, and illustrates matter from various sources; these often offer knowledge in too condensed and ready prepared a form.

A little later in the book (p 226):

Thus it becomes a large part of the teacher's work to help children to deal with their books; so that the oral lesson and lecture are but small matters in education, and are used chiefly to summarise or to expand or illustrate.

Too much faith is commonly placed in oral lessons and lectures; "to be poured into like a bucket," as says Carlyle, "is not exhilarating to any soul"; neither is it exhilarating to have every difficulty explained to weariness, or to have the explanation teased out of one by questions.

and a bit later (p 227):

Oral lessons have their occasional use, and when they are fitly given it is the children who ask the questions. Perhaps it is not wholesome or quite honest for a teacher to pose as a source of all knowledge and to give 'lovely' lessons. Such lessons are titillating for the moment, but they give children the minimum of mental labour, and the result is much the same as that left on older persons by the reading of a magazine. We find, on the other hand, that in working through a considerable book, which may take two or three years to master, the interest of boys and girls is well sustained to the end; they develop an intelligent curiosity as to causes and consequences, and are in fact educating themselves.

and on p 229

The lecture must be subordinated to the book. The business of the teacher is to put his class in the right attitude towards their book by a word or two of his own interest in the matter contained, of his own delight in the manner of the author. But boys get knowledge only as they dig for it. Labour prepares the way for assimilation, that mental process which converts information into knowledge; and the effort of taking in the sequence of thought of his author is worth to the boy a great deal of oral teaching.

Do teachers always realise the paralysing and stupefying effect that a flood of talk has upon the mind? The inspired talk of an orator no doubt wakens a response and is listened to with tense attention; but few of us claim to be inspired, and we are sometimes aware of the difficulty of holding the attention of a class. We blame ourselves, whereas the blame lies in the instrument we employ––the more or less diluted oral lesson or lecture, in place of the living and arresting book. We cannot do without the oral lesson––to introduce, to illustrate, to amplify, to sum up. My stipulation is that oral lessons should be few and far between, and that the child who has to walk through life,––and has to find his intellectual life in books or go without,––shall not be first taught to go upon crutches.

I know these quotes are hard on the eyes, and I apologize. I think it's interesting that this emphasis on books rather than oral lessons was actually a very traditional concept. My favorite manual on Ignatian education warns against lectures and too much talk in very similar terms, and for very similar reasons. The activity of a student's mind is very important, and oral lessons tend to be received in bits and pieces.

I am not quite sure what CM meant by oral lessons being "exciting". I was looking back over all my school life and realized I can hardly remember a word of most of the classes I sat through, though I suppose I must have retained bits and pieces. But I do remember other things like the tumbleweed rolling across the playground, the way a teacher's glasses caught the fluorescent light, the skinny boy with the buzz cut in first grade who couldn't sit still for the life of him. Those things don't have much to do with the content of the lessons. But listening involves only one sense, the hearing, leaving the other senses more or less idle or in actual competition with the listening.

I wonder if oral lessons disconnect you from your brain processes in a way that reading does not. And what would Charlotte Mason think of educational DVDs and tapes?

Now what about reading aloud or listening to audio-tapes? Most of my children have trouble listening to books on tape. Because of the way they learn, they find the unfamiliar voice and sound effects very distracting. Reading aloud to them has a different effect. It's mom, and there is a relation-bonding aspect to it which associates beautiful language with deep affection and comfort. Now, reading aloud is not quite the same as an oral lesson because part of CM's criticism of the oral lesson was its mediocrity. Most teachers of grade school and secondary school are not great minds in their own right. Their words will not have the force, clarity and grace of a good book. Reading a good book aloud is a sharing of appreciation (though Charlotte Mason thought that doing this should not distract from her primary goal of getting kids directly in touch with books for themselves).

Now this brings us back to the habit of reading for instruction. She has a lot more directly to say about that in other parts of the book, but the primary emphasis in this preface is that nothing else should be allowed to interfere with that habit. The school talk should be centered around the book -- the teacher's comments can introduce or sum up or point out sections of the book, but the reading is the central focus of the lesson.

You find that reading, in many ways, is unavoidably at the core of a liberal education. Our heritage comes to us largely through books, though also through art and music. How else can the dead people of past times speak to us? Nowadays there is cinema, which is a form of drama in my opinion, and I believe it will over time become part of the stream of culture to an even greater extent than it has already. If the Greeks could have filmed their tragedies, would they not have? (sure, there is an element in the audience gathering personally that is lacking in the modern video viewing at home, but to replace that there is a wider possibility of transmission comparable to the wide transmission of books begun by the invention of the printing press).

OK, really rambling now. Just a few thoughts. I didn't even get to "reposeful and consecutive". But that is obviously important to her in dealing with an excellent book -- the fact that it can easily take a year or two years for the children to work through it. This is a plus in her opinion because it's like visiting a wise person over a long course in time. You get familiar with their approach, their thinking, their whole persona. Since education is "by intimacy" not by quick superficial exposure to different concepts, in her view, the careful reading of a challenging book is an apprenticeship in a way of thinking and seeing and expressing.

I just read Frank Smith's quote in James Taylor's Poetic Knowledge to the effect that children learn to read from an author, not from a technique. I handed the book over to my son at college and I can't seem to bring up the exact quote, but here are a couple of parallel ones:

“Learning to read is a complex and delicate task in which almost all the rules, all the cues, and all the feedback can be obtained only through the process of reading itself”

This one is about writing, but in a lot of ways the thought is the same:

If you aspire to be like a particular author, you read what the author has written. You don't study how the author writes, you participate in the author's writing. There is ample evidence that children are sensitive to what they read, even if they -- and their teachers -- are not aware of the fact. It doesn't always work in the learner's interest. Children whose reading primers were mindless three-line stories..... wrote similarly mindless fragments themselves when asked to compose a story. Children who were reading rich, complex, meaningful material produced stories that were creative and interesting. As computer programmers say: Garbage in, garbage out.

Gilbert Highet in The Classical Tradition points out that complex, rich language actually develops a person's structure of thought. He writes in the context of how introduction to the Latin and Greek languages allowed barbarian peoples with simple, concrete languages to actually become capable of thinking and creating at a much higher level than they would have been able to do otherwise. Often the Greek and Latin words entered their own language and made the languages higher. Again, it is "participation" in the writer's thoughts. This is something that cannot happen so effectively when the teacher becomes an intermediary between the child and the book. You lose the participation; the book and the author become "objects" of thought, not "co-thinkers". The difference is subtle, but has wide ramifications (and now that I think of it, it explains something that puzzled my daughter when she encountered it in her high school peers -- that they dislike books like Dickens' and Brontes' and Shakespeare's, because they have been taught to objectify them by much discourse on "literary techniques" and "author's intention" which is fine AFTER a student has learned the "one thing needful" in the literary response, but is devastating and almost permanently injurious if it is done PRIOR to it).

Perhaps another strike against the "oral lesson" is that it tends to talk down to a minimal level of competence. I think a teacher faced with a class of children of various intelligences and background will try to communicate so that even the most disadvantaged children will have a possibility of understanding. This is tactful, and proper in circumstances such as instructing children how to tie shoes or behave at mass, but does not give these children a chance to rise above their current levels of competence in intellectual and emotional response. Beautiful, poetic, narrative DOES give the children something to be attracted to and respond to even when they don't totally understand it yet.

One final note: when she uses the term "medium" of oral lessons she is speaking precisely. A "medium" is something that comes between two things. To CM, the "medium" should be mostly the child's own perceptions and attention.... the child develops a relationship with the book, so the relationship itself is the medium. If a teacher interferes with this (instead of supporting it with well chosen words) then the child may become dependent upon the medium, and then when it is taken away, the child either has to learn for himself to do without that crutch, or else is left helpless and without his own tools.

Serenity and Vigilance

I notice that Charlotte Mason mentions several habits that are uniquely the mother's or father's role (she mostly talks about the mother in Home Education, but in other books she discusses the father's role, too).

According to what she says, the mother:

• Develops the habit of developing habits "one tick at a time" as Charlotte Mason said. Developing the habit of this will make the habit-forming a delight, she assures us.
• Practices masterly inactivity.... avoid the Martha spirit of bustling about, hovering, or being troubled and anxious. "Our endeavours become fussy and restless. We are too much with our children, 'late and soon.'"
• Develops a sort of vigilance -- this is a combination of the two, and also incorporates household management, which Aristotle called "oikos" -- our word "economy" derives from it. In CM's day most middle class parents had servants and so part of the household economy was supervising and directing the course of meals, child-care, and housecleaning. Even though a mother wouldn't be scrubbing floors or shining silver herself, she was responsible for these things being done. An ill-regulated household was one where the mother was careless and slipshod.

You notice that these almost seem to contradict each other. Most people I know tend to fall into one camp or the other..... the masterly or the inactive. Either they are very efficient but tend to over-manage, or they are more relaxed but let things slide. Or sometimes we alternate personalities. That's probably what I do, though I definitely fall on the relaxed side of the spectrum in temperament. Flylady talks perceptively about how the person who has been letting things slide starts making changes for the better and suddenly finds herself being horrible to her "babies". Then, if I am any example, she dislikes the harried self she has become and slips back to more pleasant chaos.

Both are manifestations of acedia, by the way. Over-industry and idleness are both traditionally attributed to sloth. I was shocked when I first read that several years ago because when you grow up in America, you tend to think you can never be too productive, too efficient, too active. But misplaced activity, burning the midnight oil at the office while the wife and kids are left to themselves, is just as misguided as slouching on the sofa with the remote control, and they come from exactly the same spiritual problem -- they are the excess and deficit. I can really see that in myself because I am often very industrious and productive -- concerning something that isn't the highest priority at the moment. What CM says of Prospero makes me wince a bit (and I'll work on that during Lent). Or I do the thing that Flylady and CM both warn against -- I start training habits, but I get wrapped up in my battle against the dust bunnies and childish messiness and forgetfulness, and by extension angry at the situation that makes me have to deal with the wretched things.

So what looks like a contradiction in her recommendations is really a description of the golden mean. That is how I think it must be, anyway.

I think the key to the different "habits" she recommends for the mother is the loving vigilance. She mentions that the one common thing all the traditional paintings of the Madonna share is Serenity. So this is the needful thing. Vigilance implies "keeping a vigil" -- observing and pondering, thinking ahead, not rushing around trying to put out figurative fires or curling up worrying all the time until the smoke of burnout curls around your ears. Serenity implies a peaceful though not slack spirit. Can you have both? I think you can, but I think it requires steering between a kind of sluggish or complacence on one hand, and a kind of worry and almost hostility or disappointment on the other hand.

I think I often settle personally for a sort of gentle blend -- a kind of amused, pleased happiness in the gifts my children are to me just as they are, combined with a wistful consciousness that I am not doing all I could or should be doing to make their childhood days all that they could be (and naturally, sometimes a bit of a feeling that I could use an occasional break from their more trying moments!). And sometimes a sort of plaintive "I'll live with your faults if you are willing to live with mine" attitude that could probably use a bit of tuning up to bring it closer to true love. Those are my things to work on.

I think another reason the description of serenity and mother's habits can sound so discouraging is that it sounds like you need to be someone besides yourself to actually succeed. Say I have a strong and lively, or thoughtful and slow, or laughing and playing young child. I DON'T want my child to think that the way to be "good" is to be like, say Elsie Dinsmore or Dora in the "Anne" series of LM Montgomery. An Augustine, an Aquinas, a Francis of Assissi need to become more deeply themselves to be what they were meant to be, not more like some Victorian pattern model of a child like the one in Jane Eyre who, when asked if he would rather have a gingernut or a tract, went for the tract, and thus was given two ginger nuts for his "infant piety". St Francis didn't need to become a methodical scholar; Augustine didn't need to go commune with the birds and wolves. Each had their own way of reflecting the capacities of the human being.

It is the same for mothers. God delights in, and the world needs, a range of mothers, a range of environments in which children are raised. These habits, I believe, are meant to help us to "become what we are".-- not become Pattern Models or dresser's dummies.

So this is another thing I want to keep in mind. Not only where I am in my journey (last post) but WHAT I am -- not an Edwardian lady with a nanny and governess and cook and housemaid, but a mom of seven up in the Range of Light, the Forest of Giants, raising boys and one girl who have grown up walking in light, among giants. My vocation, and each person has their own, unlike anyone else's in the world. So no, I probably don't want to be "habitized" or get my children into that state, but I do want them to attune their choices to the noble things and not the lesser ones. I don't so much care if they grow up to be football coaches or park rangers or computer game designers or monks or writers or physicians, but whatever they do, I want them to breathe the air of magnaminity. This was what Charlotte Mason wanted, too, so, accidents of time and place aside, we have the essentials in common, I think.

trying to reach higher ground

Photo taken by Clare

When I was making this list of Habits from CM's Home Education, for children under the age of nine, I was thinking that any time we talk about habits for children, we are necessarily talking about something required of the mother as well. So maybe that's part of the reason I tend to get bogged down quickly whenever I read CM's thoughts on habits. I get good things out of them, but at the same time I start feeling discouraged.

More than just getting discouraged, I get skeptical. I wonder if her ideas are "permanent principles" -- are they still relevant today? Some of them? All of them? In what way? Do I want my individual, unique children "habitized?" Do I want myself to be that way?

I will have to try to deal with the last two questions some other time, but right now I'll try to deal with the first couple. I notice that I find it too easy when I'm trying to sort through Charlotte Mason's ideas to either (1) resort to banalities -- that is, basically just repeat and restate her thoughts (2) throw away the whole thing in discouragement (3) get unhappy as I read her books and then compare them with my quite different ways of doing things, and feel a kind of resentment towards my whole life and its seeming shortcomings; a resentment that becomes a near occasion for sins of anger and pride.

So I thought I'd try to think through that difficulty just a bit.

From what I understand, Charlotte Mason WAS speaking for her time -- she did it intentionally. In her time, she was trying to reframe the traditional ideas in such a way that they would be understandable to her educated contemporaries. She often spent a chapter critiquing a contemporary educationist, or comparing her school's ideas with those of a current philosopher or scientist.

She probably would expect us to do the same. She would stand by the principles she was employing, which she thought had eternal verity. But she did think the "Zeitgeist" or current state of thought needed to be taken into account. She thought there needed to be educators who would say things in terms that the people around them would understand, as St Paul spoke to the Greeks on Mars Hill. So this is part of her method -- she didn't expect it to be a static "system" with no flexibility or individuality of application.

There's also something else, that St Francis de Sales often spoke about. This is about the feeling you get when you are looking at a set of standards and see that you don't measure up to some of them. It can feel like a report card with a bunch of poor marks. However, when there is a path laid in front of us, even if we are on the very first stages of a journey and feel like we are taking a step backward for every two forward -- we do well to keep on OUR path. It doesn't really help to put on the mask of some saintly person and then try to become that person. Though well meant, it is not effective and can sometimes make a person stumble -- like David wearing the armor of King Saul. It is a sort of pretense. I know that, both from experience and intuitively.

In contrast, there's nothing at all wrong with trying to aspire to become more like that saint.... that's different. It's like the child wearing a superhero costume or pretending to work like his Daddy. I don't know if you can see the difference. I can usually feel it in myself. Walking around rapt in admiration of a favorite saint or great person is usually ennobling. My father took his early fervent admiration of Albert Schweitzer and alchemized it into some excellent life choices. His life was not that much like Schweitzer's in the details (beyond the fact that they were both physicians who worked with indigenous peoples) but he took some of the best things about Schweitzer's life and principles and incorporated them into his life. This is not mask wearing, but a kind of inheritance.

Now to make my following point, I ask you to visualize the Candyland board : ). You have so many steps to go until the end. It would be cheating to take a shortcut. .... like search through the deck for all the good cards like some of my 4 year olds want to do. HOWEVER, sometimes you find yourself drawing the right card or landing on the right space and getting a real boost in your progress.

Or, the Gospel at mass today was about the crippled man let down through the roof. He was "behind" all the healthy people and blocked from Jesus, seemingly intractably, by the crowd jostling to hear the Teacher. A few minutes later his sins were forgiven and he was taking up his pallet and walking. Where you are at one point doesn't always predict where you will be in a given point in time.

This, I believe, is somewhat true of habits too. Just because you feel you are just barely starting out on the first steps of some endeavor, doesn't mean that you will stay way behind forever. St Francis de Sales was talking about spiritual progress but you can see the analogy with education and lots of other things. Say a 9 year old still doesn't read. That definitely doesn't mean he will always be 4 years behind his peer who learned to read at age 5. Often you see that within four months they will be equal and sometimes the late reader actually pulls ahead quickly. This is very often true with life things too. St Augustine at one point was a sinner and a heretic..... in a way, miles behind my grandmother, probably, as far as virtue and straight thinking and simple devotion went. Within a short space of time he was one of the greatest people and thinkers of his day and the following centuries. That doesn't minimize my grandmother's good qualities, or make it somehow fine for Augustine to keep being sinful and wrongheaded while he was being that way... it just means that the road is not always strictly sequential and step by step.

David Isaacs said that often if you get a fair start on one good habit you find some of the others following naturally. This seems to have some truth to it. So in some ways starting just one thing can sometimes provide that Candyland double card or short-cut. Flylady says that sometimes a clean shiny sink can make a difference in how the rest of the housekeeping goes. Reason for hope, there.

Another way to think about it is that whenever you "think upon" what is good and wholesome and true and beautiful and try to plant the seed in your own life, you never know what good things might sprout and what fruits may be produced. There are some things in CM's writings that stuck in my heart and helped me immensely. If other things in her books haven't yet struck me in a way that can allow them to help my life, it doesn't mean it was useless to read them at all.

And finally, one of those links I mentioned on habits mentioned that when you are trying to replace a bad habit with a good one it's helpful to build on what you already have instead of try to pull something new out of yourself that you never had before. For me, it's helpful when I'm reading "challenging" books to glance at where I am already. It's usually not as bad as I think. Try it if you are a melancholic, easily discouraged person like me. Make it a discipline to gather your stock around you and take inventory. THEN decide what the next step ought to be from there. (horrible mixed metaphors -- to unite them let's say you take a look through your knapsack of handy possessions before you start on the next stage of your climb).

Lots of words! But good to have written out. I'm going to list some of the habits that CM thought were helpful for a mother to acquire. But I wanted to write this out first as a qualifier.

More notes on Attention

The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 is often useful to read alongside of Charlotte Mason's books because it was roughly contemporary with her later life and it sums up a lot of the major philosophical and psychological currents of that day in light of Catholic philosophical and psychological principles developed from the earliest days of the Church.

Here is an entry on the Psychology of Interest (basically, about attention). It is a treatment of Herbart's doctrine on apperception; we know that Charlotte Mason, like the Catholic Encyclopedia authors, was critical of some of Herbart's thinking. See the CE Herbart and Herbartianism.

There is also an article about the Will which includes some discussion of attention. I'm bolding the parts that especially seem to relate to this discussion about habits and the role attention plays in them.

an act of will is the usual condition of attention and of all sustained application of the cognitive faculties.

St. Thomas teaches that will acts on the organism only through the medium of feeling, just as in cognition, the rational faculty acts upon the material of experience. .... Just as the most abstract intellectual idea has always its "outer clothing" of sense-imagery so volition, itself a spiritual act, is always embodied in a mass of feeling: on such embodiment depends its motive-value.

Thus if we analyze an act of self-control we shall find that it consists in the "checking" or "policing" of one tendency by another, and in the act of selective attention by which an idea or ideal is made dynamic, becomes an idée-force, and triumphs over its neglected rivals. Hence control of attention is the vital point in the education of the will, for will is simply reason in act,

As we have said, control of attention is the vital point in the education of will. In the beginning, the child is entirely the creature of impulse. It is completely engrossed for the time by each successive impression. It exhibits plenty of spontaneity and random action but the direction of these is determined by the liveliest attraction of the moment.

As experience extends, rival tendencies and conflicting motives come more and more into play, and the reflective power of the rational faculty begins to waken into existence. The recollection of the results of past experience rises up to check present impulses.

As reason develops, the faculty of reflective comparison grows in clearness and strength, and instead of there being a mere struggle between two or more motives or impulses, there gradually emerges a judicial power of valuing or weighing those motives, with the ability of detaining one or other for a longer or shorter period, in the focus of intellectual consciousness. Here we have the beginning of selective attention.

Each exertion of reflection strengthens voluntary, as distinguished from merely spontaneous, attention. The child becomes more and more able to attend to the abstract or intellectual representation, in preference to urgent present feeling which seeks to express itself in immediate action. This is furthered by human intercourse, injunctions from parents and others in regard to conduct, and the like. The power of resistance to impulse grows.

Each passing inclination, inhibited for the sake of a more durable good or more abstract motive, involves an increase in the power of self-control. The child becomes able to withstand temptation in obedience to precepts or in accordance with general principles. The power of steady adhesion to fixed purposes grows and, by repeated voluntary acts, habits are formed which in the aggregate constitute formed character.

Finally, a bit on Habit and its relation to attention.

Daily experience shows that the repetition of actions or reactions produces, if not always an inclination, at least an aptitude to act or react in the same manner. To say that a man is accustomed to a certain diet, climate, or exercise, that he is an habitual smoker or early-riser, that he can dance, fence, or play the piano, that he is used to certain points of view, modes of thinking, feeling, and willing, etc., signifies that owing to past experience he can do now that which formerly was impossible, do easily that which was difficult, or dispense with the effort and attention which were at first necessary.

Psychologically habit signifies the acquired facility of conscious processes. The education of the senses, association of ideas, memory, mental attitudes derived from experience and from studies general or special, the powers of attention, reflection, reasoning, insight, etc., and all these complex factors which formman's frame of mind and character, such as strength of will, weakness or obstinacy, irascibility or calmness, likes and dislikes, prejudices, and so on, are due largely to habits intentionally or unintentionally contracted. ...

Compared to the quality of the sounds to be produced, the special activity of the pianist's fingers or the singer's vocal organs is but a means to an end. Hence the musician becomes less conscious of this activity but more conscious of its result. In any case, since the energy flows naturally in the wonted direction, effort and attention are in inverse ratio to habit.

At the same time that habits grow, attention has to be paid to their dangers, and the child must not be allowed to become a mere automaton. Habits of reflection and attention, together with determination and strength of will, will enable the child to control, direct, and govern other habits

Mental Physiology and Attention.

After this I'm going to leave Dr Carpenter for the time being, but he may come up again as I go on through Charlotte Mason's thoughts on habits. Obviously these parts aren't very directly practical and I want to get to Charlotte Mason's practical thoughts on teaching habits, but her first practice was to "go back to the principles" to figure out how to teach and raise children, so I wanted to get the origins of the principles somewhat more clear in my own mind.

Also, sorry about the flood of posts! I want to get them all out here but if you don't happen to be very interested, feel free to skip these CM-theory oriented posts. This won't last forever but this blog is sort of a thinking place for me as you know.


--------------------
Dr Carpenter, in Principles of Mental Physiology, speaks a bit in his preface about "Attention". In his day, as now, there were some theoretical scientists who believed everything about a human could be explained by biochemical processes. He argued against that. He said he noticed within himself that a person could *decide* how much of an impression something would make upon him. He could "alter the relative potency of different motives or sets of motives by determinately directing his attention to those which would draw him in one direction, and by partially or completely excluding those of an opposite tendency from his mental view."

If an "Automatist" (as he terms those with a mechanist point of view) argues that we decide based on the real strength of motive presented by our character set so far, he would argue in return that he is conscious of the act of will it takes to prefer one consideration over another. The desire alone is not enough; he has to make an effort to fix his will. He thinks that this is the operation of our free will and that it is the automaticism of our "default mode" (he does NOT use that term) that limits his freedom. He goes on to mention that some of the strongest evidence for his case outside his own consciousness of his mental processes is the work done in Education. A large part of education seems to be a process of helping the child to fix his effort in light of what his Reason and Moral Sense tell his Will to do, and to exclude from consideration the primitive considerations which would rule in the other direction.

In chapter III and following, he talks in detail about Attention and how it is mustered. Briefly he seems to consider that the continuum is similar to the one I mentioned in the last post in regard to walking. In some ways attentiveness is a simple automatic reflex. Even a tiny baby once its needs are met will look around and attend. And a very healthy and wonderful response to the world that is. As Charlotte Mason says, no learning can take place without some level of attention. Attention is what fixes our senses upon its environment. But Dr Carpenter points out that the Will uses attention in a regulative way as we get older. We learn to pay attention to a higher priority thing and discard what is less important.

If we are not careful, attention becomes a low-level acquired automatic thing and we only pay attention to what is specifically necessary to maneuver our environment. For example, we can easily drive to work and back consciously enough for safety, but not really noticing anything beyond the bare requirements of road awareness. This is actually a sign of the efficiency of the mind in selecting a sort of outline of what is necessary for survival, freeing the rest of the brain up to think about the problems at work or the enjoyments of the weekend or one's Rosary or whatever, but it pays to reflect on whether this automaticity is working for you or not.

People with attention deficit problems often have difficulty mustering and filtering their attention to what is important though not as pressing. To Dr Carpenter, there is a certain element of conscious choice in the effort or refusal to muster our attention to what needs attention. Obviously a child with an actual handicap like ADD would be in Carpenter's category that I mentioned earlier, comparable to the stammerer who might will not to stammer and fail until he could figure out a strategy for improvement. But that doesn't abridge our will, it just shows how its function is essentially selective -- it has to work with what it has.

You can certainly find lots of modern research about the physiology of attention. I'm just going to list a few for my own future reference and in case anyone else is interested. Many of these simply restate the obvious ("It is biologically impossible to learn and remember information to which the brain has not paid any attention") and some are more technical and theoretical in their focus ("Led by Donald Stuss, Ph.D., of the Rotman Research Institute, the psychologists say that their findings support a proposed cognitive architecture of attention.") but it still is interesting.


Attention and the Brain (pdf)
How the Brain Holds our Attention (pdf)

Study Shows How the Brain Pays Attention
Psychologists Draw an "Architecture of Attention"
Brain Knows When to REALLY Pay Attention

Directing Attention -- The Bane of Multi-Tasking
Smart But Underachieving -- When Knowledge, Creativity and Retrieval Diverge
Strategic Memory and Reason Training for Teens

You Are What You Think and Do

If you google "habit brain" you can come up with any number of hits relating habits to neurobiology. These range from the popular self-help pieces to scholarly articles. Just a few here. More scientific evidence that Charlotte Mason was on target with her thoughts that habits form pathways in the brain. All this is very interesting to me. I had always half-wondered if CM's concepts about the physiology of habits had gone the way of phrenology but it appears not.

From The Thinking Business: Thinking Habits you find:

"You are what you think!"
This quote is scientifically proven to be true! The neural pathways discussed earlier in the tour, create patterns of thought.. Once these pathways are created, the thoughts are likely to be repeated. This is because, the repetition of a thought decreases the biochemical resistance to that thought happening again and the connections between to brain cells on the neural pathway become stronger.

From Break Bad Habits in 14 Days you find:

But how exactly do you turn lifelong bad habits inside out? How do you get over the rationalization and justification that lead to small unhealthy decisions that rack up toward an increasingly unhealthy, unhappy-about-it you?

Dr. Rice says it takes as little as 14 days to "rewire your brain" or create new brain pathways that make habits easier to follow, so the habits become more effective and long-lasting. Will it be hard? Yes. But "the mind is much more powerful that we've ever given it credit for," he says. "Wellness is an integration of mind and body, and allowing yourself to change for the better" is the first step. But you have to be honest with yourself. If you define yourself prematurely, you won't be able to change the behavior.

(this article goes on to list several specific steps to replacing a bad habit with a good one)

On a grimmer note, "Brain researchers explain why old habits die hard"

Habits help us through the day, eliminating the need to strategize about each tiny step involved in making a frothy latte, driving to work and other complex routines. Bad habits, though, can have a vise grip on both mind and behavior. Notoriously hard to break, they are devilishly easy to resume, as many reformed smokers discover.

And in Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?

HABITS are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word “habit” carries a negative connotation.

So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

But don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.

Some Habits of Mind are listed here. A lot of these, I notice, are to do with the executive function mentioned in earlier links, which has to do with the prefrontal cortex. But keep in mind that this frontal lobe does not fully mature until about age 25, according to what I have read. And it increases in richness in later maturity. So I'm taking that to mean that children won't display these traits consistently and richly and that this is normal. We are looking for plantings of habits, not the full fruit of them, at these younger ages, and particularly if our child happens to have a learning disability, patience and tact is important.

the physiology of habit

The particular object of this volume, as a member of the 'Home Education' Series, is to show the bearing of the physiology of habit upon education; why certain physical, intellectual, and moral habits are a valuable asset to a child, and what may be done towards the formation of such habits.

I beg to acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr Carpenter's Mental Physiology for valuable teaching on the subject of habits contained in some two or three chapters of that work. Also, I would renew my grateful thanks to those medical friends who have given careful and able revision to such parts of the work as rest upon a physiological basis. Charlotte Mason, Preface to Home Education Series

Here we find laid out the scope and goal of the book Home Education, which mainly deals with children up to the age of 9. So you can see that "Habits" will be very important in reading that book, and the approach I am taking is to search through the book for all her references to habits and try to ponder it with regard to my two boys who are still in that age group.

If you follow the link you can see a facsimile of Dr Carpenter's book. I thought I would go through it looking for mentions of habit, in order to see if I could get some of the context for Charlotte Mason's views on "habit" and its place in education.

On page 16 and the following pages, Dr Carpenter gives an overview of his positions on habit and the relation of mind to body. He says there are two kinds of habit, automatic and volitional. Automatic habits are physiological ones like breathing and heartbeat and reflexes. Volitional ones he says were originally put into effect by the Will (thus the term volitional) but have become what he calls "secondarily automatic". He uses the example of walking to show degrees of acquired habits. Insofar as a person has learned to walk and doesn't have to think about it at all, he can walk automatically (still an acquired skill, but does not require any real thought). If the person is walking along, his will is guiding and permitting the walking towards some destination -- this he terms "voluntary". Now say the person is very weary and has to consciously force himself along for whatever reason. This is what Dr Carpenter would call "volitional" activity because the will is overmastering the bodily reluctance to continue.

He goes on to say that when we will to act in a certain way, we don't will the minute physical processes (like the act of walking). Rather, we will to "produce a certain preconceived result". What does it matter how we will? He says it is important because (1) it implies that we have to act in order to produce the habit of that kind of action -- for example, as he says, someone with a detailed knowledge of anatomy will be no better than a complete ignoramus in making a certain kind of trained movement, say rowing a boat. You have to form the automatic nature of the habit by repeated action -- what they call now "muscle memory" . As for (2), it is not enough to will when the body is for the time being incapable of the carry-through. For example, a stammerer may have the strongest will in the world and yet be unable to cease stammering unless he is able to learn to master the mechanics of stammer-free speaking. The walker if he keeps walking will come to the point where not even his efforts of will can keep his exhausted muscles working.

The point of all this? He says that the Will is brought to bear upon what the "Ego" (the spirit or interior self) proposes as worthy of its attention. It is by the volitional direction of its attention that the Will "exerts its domination".

"It is thus that each individual can perfect and utilize his natural gifts; by rigorously training them in the first instance, and then by exercising them only in the manner most fitted to expand and elevate, while restraining them from all that would limit or debase.-- In regard to every kind of Mental activity that does not involve origination, the power of the Will, though limited to selection, is almost unbounded."

In other words the Will can't propose ideas for itself -- it has to select ideas from what is presented in the form of some kind of reasoning or experience -- and it can't make the body or mind do what it is simply not capable of, but within those conditions it has any amount of power.

I notice that people in the later 19th century often talked in very "strenuous" terms, and in this Dr Carpenter is similar to Charlotte Mason and William James and probably others I have not read. I am not a very strenuous person myself, and even writing out something like "rigorously training" makes me feel like crawling under the covers and dozing for a few moments. It makes me feel like I am being "Organdized" as Winnie the Pooh felt when Rabbit was scurrying around Looking for Small. My natural reaction aside, this is interesting because I can see definite reflections of Charlotte Mason's ideas here, and I think knowing this context will help me study her thoughts on habits in a slightly clearer light.

Habitual Lines of Thought

Physiologists tell us of the adaptation of brain structure to habitual lines of thought––i.e. to our habits.

from Charlotte Mason's Preface to the Home Education Series.

Neurophysiology has advanced much since the day when she wrote this, but the field still seems to support her thoughts on this matter. I found one example yesterday when I was looking for the information on the prefrontal cortex. From Brain Development and the Development of Executive Function:

Changes in the brain appear to be dependent on experience. For example, stress appears to slow down the creation of new neurons in the hippocampus, whereas using particular parts of the brain appears to make those parts grow. In one study by researchers in London, England, cab drivers (who have to pass a rigorous test demonstrating their knowledge of London streets) were found to have larger posterior hippocampi than other men of the same age. Moreover, the size of their posterior hippocampi corresponded closely to the number of years that they had been driving a cab. This finding suggests that relying heavily on spatial memory (and engaging regularly in navigation) leads to an increase in the size of the relevant brain areas—in this case the posterior hippocampus.

Another study makes the same point. This study, by researchers in Germany, examined the sensorimotor cortices of violin players—specifically the part that is associated with the complex fingering movements involved in playing the violin. Results indicated that this part of the brain was larger in the violin players than it was in people who don’t play stringed instruments.

Evidently, you can grow your own brain by using it! Whether this growth involves the creation of new neurons is unknown, but it almost certainly involves changes that affect the connections among neurons (for instance, thickening of dendrites). ...

Of course, this is mostly concentrated on professional habits, while Charlotte Mason was talking about habits involving "lines of thought". Still, I would imagine the principle would be somewhat the same.

List of Habits from CM's Home Education

This is a list of the habits mentioned in Charlotte Mason's Home Education, which was directed towards children from infancy up to the age of nine. What I'm hoping to do is go through them in more detail one at a time. If you remember my CM Learning Goals for 2007 -- I took one thing a month (a CM topic like Nature Study) and focused on it in more depth. That was really helpful for me. I want to try something similar with habits, now.

These are some habits she thought particular important for smaller children. More habits are listed in her volumes targeted to older children, and I hope to get there someday.

Nursery Habits (habits which are mostly passively received at first, through the infant's caretaker)

• Cleanliness
• Order
• Neatness
• Regularity
• Punctuality

Early Life Habits (starting in the early years before age six)

• Outdoor Life
• Observation
• Physical Vigor
• Manners
• Enunciation
• Music

Intellectual Habits (which help develop readiness for future learning)

• Attention
• Application
• Quickness
• Thinking
• Imagining
• Remembering
• Perfect Execution

Moral Habits (for young children -- these are primary, and most of the other moral habits develop from these early beginnings)

• Obedience
• Truthfulness
• Temper

Charlotte Mason said that even twenty habits faithfully formed and kept would make a big difference to a child once grown to adulthood. For this reason I don't think she was talking about micro-habits like closing a door after you but about larger dispositions like the ones listed above. Of course, most micro-habits fit into a larger scheme of things, so there is a place for them but maybe thinking of the principles or mental attitudes BEHIND the little habits might be helpful in knowing which are more important to work on and which are less.

I've noticed that everyone has to balance their temperament somewhat. I am an intuitional "global" thinker. That means I spend a lot of time thinking through the "big picture" and it can get silly because I am thinking about Immersing My Children in Great LIterature (say) while the children are playing video games because I am too busy pondering to actually sit down with them.

A sensory type of person might be excellent at arranging the environment and sitting down to do things with or sometimes TO the child, but not feel strong in thinking through the reasoning, so this type of person might make errors in what she emphasizes because she hasn't thought it all through. Simply basing rules on "because it IS that way" tends not to foster real, internal consent to the rules. So a sensory, practical type may need to pay some attention to the whys and principles behind the practical strategies.

Most of the systems of education I like most pay attention to BOTH aspects and help those of us who work from their mode of strength balance out our weaker points. This seems to reflect a deep truth. Our whole selves ideally ought to be integrated -- body and spirit, hands and head. The Bible often uses the "heart" as a word for the uniting of these aspects of ourselves. "Heart" does not mean emotions per se in the New Testament -- the etymology for "heart" relates to "middle" or "core" or "center". The "heart" is our center, and its activity is love, which unites our various capacities and directs them towards the good.

Following the King's High Road

I just finished reading Charles Williams' book Many Dimensions -- he was a Christian writer, a friend of CS LEwis's and a member of the Inklings. Towards the end of the book he quotes John Braxton as saying:

Attribuat igitur Rex legi, quod Lex attribuit ei,videlicet dominationem et imperium. Non est enim Rex ubi dominatur voluntas, et non Lex.

He translates this as

"Therefore let the king attribute to the law that which the law attributes to him, namely, domination and power. For where the will rules and not the law is no king."

From what I understand, the context is British constitutional development -- this was the thought process that gave rise to the Magna Charta in England. It reminded me of Charlotte Mason who wrote much about the role of authority and how it relates to the role of parents.

During the summer I was blogging about Charlotte Mason's ideas on Habits. I planned to continue during the year, but as is typical, I got caught up in the practical details of homeschooling and couldn't keep both balls in the air at the same time. But going through Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Montessori ideas and seeing how they overlapped with some of CM's thoughts on child-raising made me get out my scuffed old copy of Home Education.

Also the Real Learning board has been hosting some discussions of habits in their various aspects: habits for kids, for teens, for the household, and for moms. It seems to me that perhaps the Ordinary Season between Christmas and Lent is a good time to think about these things. So I wanted to pick up the CM thoughts focusing mainly on her Volume 1 which focuses on children under the age of 9. This intersects nicely, it seems to me, with the Dorothy Canfield Fisher focus on children of preschool age.

Charlotte Mason talks about obedience in much more depth, and so it will probably come up again, but in the meantime, it's important to remember that we are talking about obedience in its highest sense, and that there are perils in trying to train mechanical, unreasonable obedience. Humans are not animals, not slaves, and they are not cogs in somebody else's system of order; Immanuel Kant, who got some other things wrong, got it right in saying:

"Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only."

I tend to be a rebel, temperamentally and naturally, as a melancholic (and as half Scottish Celt, as well). My first question when faced by a simple command or statement is always "Why should I?" or "Why should it be so?" This can manifest as both a strength AND a weakness. That's probably why I usually get reflexively stopped in my tracks whenever I see the word "obedience". On the other hand, say the words "loyalty" and "fidelity" and my heart rings. But in some ways, they are the same concepts at their core.

When I first read what Charlotte Mason said about the nobility of obedience, it came together as it never had before. I didn't have to impose servility on myself or on my children. Mothering was not a power struggle -- me asserting my will over that of my small, beautiful children.

Obedience was loyalty to the Good, True and Beautiful -- which can never be anything but expansive and ennobling. My only problem then was convincing my rather balky reason, will and body to fall into step together alongside of that glorious banner. ... and of course, to make clear to my children the high dignity of doing so and the fact that they are fellow soldiers or adventurers or questers after Beauty and Truth; not slaves.

Obedience is a virtue only to the extent that it is free. Perhaps if you think about it in terms of Pride and Dignity and the Chivalrous Temper, it makes this clearer. I think of King David, certainly a great man, whose "delight was in the law of the Lord". He did not think it was undignified or demeaning to follow another.

I mentioned this part once before on the blog. ...When I was reading the Catholic Catechism I found that the etymology of "obey" is from "audire" meaning to hear or hearken to. Here is Proverbs 22:17, in the same vein:

Incline thy ear, and hear the words of the wise: and apply thy heart to my knowledge.

In this respect, it can be the highest of human acts. There is something intrinsic to me, in that connection between listening -- hearkening -- and "logos" -- word, or reason. You have to listen in order to hear words. And the obedience bit is where one's will comes in; will implies voluntariness, as Charlotte Mason says:

let him (the child) know what a noble thing it is to be able to make himself do, in a minute, and brightly, the very thing he would rather not do.

My task as a mother got much easier when I realized that my authority as a mother was not a matter of my superior power of intelligence or physical strength (that seemed like tyranny to me) or even my superior virtue (because I, being older, had sinned more than my children). It was my role, insofar as I represented the Good. I had to represent something bigger than myself "what is right". It is a high responsibility but we are placed in that role by virtue of being parents. We all have to grow into it to some extent, I think.

Charlotte Mason writes in Home Education (Some Moral Habits)

Children must have the Desire to Obey.––It is only in proportion as the will of the child is in the act of obedience, and he obeys because his sense of right makes him desire to obey in spite of temptations to disobedience––not of constraint, but willingly––that the habit has been formed which will, hereafter, enable the child to use the strength of his will against his inclinations when these prompt him to lawless courses.

It is said that the children of parents who are most strict in exacting obedience often turn out ill; and that orphans and other poor waifs brought up under strict discipline only wait their opportunity to break into license. Exactly so; because, in these cases, there is no gradual training of the child in the habit of obedience; no gradual enlisting of his will on the side of sweet service and a free will offering of submission to the highest law: the poor children are simply bullied into submission to the will, that is, the wilfulness, of another; not at all, 'for it is right'; only because it is convenient.

If you notice, this implies that (1) the child's growing abilities to reason and will must be directed towards doing what is right and (2) that the parents and those in authority are entrusted with using their ability to lead in the way that is best for the children themselves. You don't want a child who disobeys whenever there is no one to look.

This is what Dorothy Canfield Fisher is saying, too ( I quoted her on that before). She points out that adults (hopefully) don't refrain from stealing or hurting simply because they are afraid they will go to prison. She points out that we don't want the obedience that would make things easy for a dictator like Hitler. We want free, reasoning consent to what is right.

The parents and the children should both be doing what is right. Their roles are not oppositional; they should be aimed in the same direction. The bigger role in one sense belongs to the parents -- to show the beauty and dignity of obedience to good things and that parents, too, are subject to what is right and ought to resist what is wrong.

Obedience is dignified by its very nature IF freely chosen and directed towards the right. Our obedience is a trust; it does not give us permission to do what is wrong. Similarly, and for the very same reason, authority is a trust. Think about it this way -- as Bob Dylan said, "You gotta serve somebody..." and there is solid truth in that. The person who does everything to please himself is a slave to whatever he is striving to please ... his appetites, his personal temperament. A person who does something only because he fears what will happen if he doesn't is a servant to fear or aversion.