Newman -- Intellect and Religion

One more resource on Newman's idea of the relation between intellect and devotion. Intellect as the Instrument of Religious Training. He uses the opportunity of the Feast of St Monica to discuss this.

THIS day we celebrate one of the most remarkable feasts in the calendar. We commemorate a Saint who gained the heavenly crown by prayers indeed and tears, by sleepless nights and weary wanderings,..... as a mother, seeking and gaining by her penances the conversion of her son.

From there he goes on to make the point that religion and intellect are meant to be united, integrated though not muddled into each other, and that the ideal university is one where they are indeed.

Here, then, I conceive, is the object of the Holy See and the Catholic Church in setting up Universities; it is to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God, and have been put asunder by man. Some persons will say that I am thinking of confining, distorting, and stunting the growth of the intellect by ecclesiastical supervision. I have no such thought. Nor have I any thought of a compromise, as if religion must give up something, and science something. I wish the intellect to range with the utmost freedom, and religion to enjoy an equal freedom; but what I am stipulating for is, that they should be found in one and the same place, and exemplified in the same persons. I want to destroy that diversity of centres, which puts everything into confusion by creating a contrariety of influences. I wish the same spots and the same individuals to be at once oracles of philosophy and shrines of devotion.

It will not satisfy me, what satisfies so many, to have two independent systems, intellectual and religious, going at once side by side, by a sort of division of labour, and only accidentally brought together. It will not satisfy me, if religion is here, and science there, and young men converse with science all day, and lodge with religion in the evening. It is not touching the evil, to which these remarks have been directed, if young men eat and drink and sleep in one place, and think in another: I want the same roof to contain both the intellectual and moral discipline. Devotion is not a sort of finish given to the sciences; nor is science a sort of feather in the cap, if I may so express myself, an ornament and set-off to devotion. I want the intellectual layman to be religious, and the devout ecclesiastic to be intellectual.

.... Let both influences act freely, and then, as a general rule, no system of mere religious guardianship which neglects the Reason, will in matter of fact succeed against the School. Youths need a masculine religion, if it is to carry captive their restless imaginations, and their wild intellects, as well as to touch their susceptible hearts.

This reminds me a bit of Benedict XVI's planned speech at La Sapienza, which was called off because of protests by students and faculty who apparently weren't able to make these distinctions.

Today the danger of the Western world -- to speak only of this context -- is that man, precisely in the consideration of the grandeur of his knowledge and power, might give up before the question of truth. And that means at the same time that reason, in the end, bows to the pressure of interests and the charm of utility, constrained to recognize it as the ultimate criterion. To put this in terms of the point of view of the structure of the university: The danger exists that philosophy, no longer feeling itself capable of its true task, might degenerate into positivism; that theology, with its message addressed to reason, might become confined to the private sphere of a group more or less sizable. If, however, reason -- solicitous of its presumed purity -- becomes deaf to the great message that comes from the Christian faith and its wisdom, it will wither like a tree whose roots no longer reach the waters that give it life. It will lose courage for the truth and thus it will not become greater but less. Applied to our European culture this means: If it wants only to construct itself on the basis of the circle of its own arguments and that which convinces it at the moment -- worried about its secularity -- it will cut itself off from the roots by which it lives; then it will not become more reasonable and more pure, but it will break apart and disintegrate.

Newman's Ideas of Paideia

This article from the files, called Athens in the Mid-19th Century, is part of a book available online, Between Athens and Berlin: The Theological Education Debate, written by one David Kelsey who is apparently a professor at Yale Divinity School. The theological education debate is not of too much interest to me at present, but I think I printed out the chapter because it dealt with John Cardinal Newman and his book Idea of a University. The chapter summary is as follows:

This chapter present a case study of a mid-nineteenth-century version of the "Athens" type of theological education that was highly honored, at least verbally, in some mid-twentieth-century discussions of higher education generally, in order to draw attention to ways in which the material modifications it introduced have proved to be problematic.

Briefly, Kelsey summarizes the context and subject matter of Newman's important series of discourses. He does this quite well, it seems to me, so that part of it was interesting reading. From there he tries to make the point that Newman's idea of "paideia", or the university education as "formative", while valuable to us as a sort of commentary on past times, is "theologically problematic" and at the same time a break from classical notions of paideia AND outdated. This part seemed ultimately unconvincing to me, though it raises some interesting issues, and I'll try to explain where I see the problem. Just the thing for a Sunday afternoon while I share leftover Christmas-stocking Skittles with whoever happens to pass by the laptop.

Kelsey writes:

... Newman’s lectures are instructive in a cautionary kind of way. Newman’s modifications of the "Athens" type are theologically problematic. His social assumptions, his view of human rationality, and his vision of the fulfilled human life are so alien to North American culture in the late twentieth century that they may help to distance us from our own assumptions about social values, human rationality, and the fulfilled life. At the same time, his historical and cultural distance from us may help to highlight features of the "Athens" type that are inherently worrisome when the type is adopted by specifically theological education.

The content of Dr Kelsey's criticism seems to have two main threads. One is that Newman broke with the traditional, classic notion of paideia as a fostering of virtue:

Newman explains the overarching goal of teaching by reference to those who are taught, not by reference to what is taught. By this move he embraces paideia as the model of excellence in schooling. However, it is a modified paideia because his view of human rationality is different from the view classically assumed by paideia. The goal of teaching "is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence"....

Newman’s notion of intellectual excellence is analogous to a traditional understanding of moral excellence as "virtue." But it is only analogous, not identical. Here he departs from the classical paideia model for which, as we said, cultivation of the mind’s excellence was identical with coming to an intuitive grasp of the Good. It involved a conversion of the person. Intellectual and moral excellence are one..

This is interesting to me for two reasons.

One is that Kelsey never really explains why, if Newman did break from classical notions in distinguishing intellectual excellence from moral excellence, it is theologically a problem. Surely the common tradition that Christians share tells us that:

For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.... so, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand....I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members (Romans 7)

Surely, even throwing out the Christian tradition, it is apparent just from normal life experience that moral goodness and intellectual excellence are not identical to each other; that cultivating the intellect does not directly lead to cultivation of character, nor is moral excellence always found in the best educated or the most intellectually gifted (in Idea of a University, Newman discusses this topic at length -- I don't have space to write it out in this post, but it is surprising that Kelsey brushes over it without apparent notice).

I know that to the ancients, paideia was meant to foster "arete" in a larger sense -- a word meaning "excellence" which incorporated all human forms of excellence -- virtue, rational capacity and physical health and athleticism. However, from what I understand "paideia" in this sense was a larger topic than "how a university ought to be set up." It incorporated everything that goes into the formation of youth. I'm not even sure Newman uses the word paideia in his discourses; in fact, I'm pretty sure he does not. So to bring up the term in its general meaning and then use that to critique Newman's work as a departure from its general meaning seems roughly analogous to criticizing my homeschool because it does not have a full-fledged agricultural program like our local high school does.

Also, since the two concepts (of moral excellence and intellectual excellence) are capable of distinction-- in other words, they may overlap but are not identical sets -- it follows that making the distinction can be allowed even though the two may contribute in different ways to a bigger whole. (Newman goes into this in more detail and I hope to blog more about it a bit in future, but for right now I'm just writing out the general point).

Kelsey writes:

It was central to paideia that the cultivation of human reason would, contrary to Newman, inherently yield not merely the "gentleman" but the good person. What is questionable in Newman’s proposal is the view of human personhood that underlies the content of his theory of teaching.

This seems to be the other main area of criticism.... that Newman has a parochial idea of what education is meant to accomplish. Newman, Kelsey thinks, conflates the product of university education with a fine English gentleman. In this, Kelsey's view of what the ancients meant by "the good person" seems a trifle over-simplified. Even I know that the Greeks, when talking about the philosopher's calling, were talking about a very specific class -- free, Greek-born male. Their notion of paideia in this respect is quite as limited as Kelsey thinks Newman's is.

Kelsey goes on to discuss the qualities of a gentleman that Newman describes in a famous passage (I put the passage under the body of this post, too, in case you don't want to link-surf) . This is his criticism in part:

It is troubling that these values that mark the excellence of a gentleman turn out also to be the virtues marking intellectual excellence. The identification of the virtues that mark intellectual excellence ought to be warranted, not by the accidents of socio-economic status that privilege a few, but by a picture of human rationality that applies to all persons. That is exactly what Newman claims to do. ..... But why the remarkable coincidence that makes this way of identifying intellectual virtue so troublingly like ideological justification of the values of a cultural elite established by prevailing socioeconomic power arrangements?

Kelsey does admit that it is unfair (anachronistic is the term he uses) to reach back in time to judge a person's thinking by today's standards. To me, this seems patronizing. Remember that Newman was giving his lectures in Catholic Ireland where the bishops were trying to decide on the scope and ends of a Catholic university which they were proposing to bring into being. Newman was not trying to lecture on a Utopia where women, for instance, would take their place in the halls of academe. He was speaking to an actual situation. But he was laying down principles that would apply to a wider extent in theory than they actually did, at that time, in actuality.

The link on the Gentleman I mentioned above says it this way:

Taken in isolation, Newman's descriptive definition, which appears an exemplary idealization of the British gentleman, appears a standard, unsurprising presentation of a sociopolitical ideal clearly related to specific class interest. In context, however, his statement immediately appears more complex, since he does not address those with political or even economic power. In fact, his intended audience of Irish Catholics were doubly disenfranchised as members of a colonized people and a despised, only recently permitted religion.

In addition, as David J. DeLaura points out, for Newman, "the insuperable defect of humanistic culture," appears in the limitations of the gentleman, who has 'no means for transcending the limits of the natural man (p. 238).'"

The last point was actually the one I noticed very clearly when I read Newman's description of the gentleman in context. I had never read the whole thing before, just the excerpted passage, and I had never realized that to a certain extent the description of a gentleman is the description, almost the critique, of the limits of the cultivation of human intellect in itself.

Such are some of the lineaments of the ethical character, which the cultivated intellect will form, apart from religious principle. They are seen within the pale of the Church and without it, in holy men, and in profligate; they form the beau-ideal of the world; they partly assist and partly distort the development of the Catholic. They may subserve the education of a St. Francis de Sales or a Cardinal Pole; they may be the limits of the contemplation of a Shaftesbury or a Gibbon. Basil and Julian were fellow-students at the schools of Athens; and one became the Saint and Doctor of the Church, the other her scoffing and relentless foe.

Why this view, even granting that it really is a departure from classical notions of the role of human reason, is "theologically problematic" to any Christian, really perplexes me. Surely St Paul, who with all his education and intellectual training and sense of moral responsibility, held the coats for those who stoned St Stephen, would heartily come down on Newman's side of the fence -- that intellectual education does not and cannot stand in for the religious life in a human person?

Oh, and why am I bothering to write this out? Well, because it's fun ;-) and also because reading the article did motivate me to read further through The Idea of a University than I ever have before, and after reading it I am even more of a Cardinal Newman fan than I was after reading Apologia pro Sua Vita. I wish I understood him better than I do, but I did not have the kind of education he recommends, unfortunately (more about his recommended kind of education some other time). Since I wanted to blog about Newman's idea of education and I don't really have enough knowledge to do it in a scholarly way, tackling a Question is an easier way to do it than just skimming superficially over the top with no specific focus.
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(Passage by Newman on the ideal gentlemen is below)

It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them. The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast; — all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets every thing for the best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain, because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blunder. [From The Idea of a University, 1852]

Lifelong Learning

This is interesting: from The Professor or the Dialogue, by Mortimer Adler. I came upon it when I was looking for something quite different:

When you understand this, you understand something that is profoundly important to understand, which I am sorry to say our twentieth century and our generation has forgotten. None of our ancestors misunderstood this. You can take all the theories of education from the Greeks down to the end of the nineteenth century and no one made the mistake we make. Our contemporaries, our teachers, our students, our parents -- all of us think that education is something that happens in school. This is preposterous. It cannot happen there. Schooling is not education. Schooling is preparation for education. That is why I said let's use those words carefully.

Education cannot possibly be accomplished in school. No one in the past ever thought it could. No one thought that a boy graduated from school with a B.A. was an educated man, no one who understood that education consists in slowly, slowly becoming wise, acquiring a little understanding. No young man at the age of twenty could possibly be educated, no matter what kind of school he went to and what he did there. He could not possibly be wise or have much understanding or much insight. How could you talk about schooling as producing an educated man? The purpose of schooling is to prepare young people to go out of school and get an education thereafter.

I thought this was an interesting and perceptive diagnosis, from St Thomas Aquinas and Education by John Donohue, SJ:

"Philosophy of education, which is an effort to relate a generalized discussion of the aims, curricula, methods and agencies of formal schooling to a philosophy of life and value, flourishes so notably in the United States as almost to seem an American invention like the motel. This may be partly due to the unparalleled size of our educational establishment and to our hopeful faith in what it can accomplish. Our spacious conception of education is, in fact, suggested by the way we use the term. For it is a commonplace among philologists that a people's distinctive use of words points to a distinctive way of seeing the world.

Now Americans have not usually drawn a distinction between "instruction", the chief business of the school, and the wider, if vaguer, concept of "education" thought of primarily as the development of character and personality. This distinction between enseignement and education, between Erziehung and Bildung, is well established elsewhere but has not become an American usage, probably because it has not seemed to Americans that these two aspects should or can be separated.

This view may have its bad effects. Some people think it accounts for the schools' failure, particularly in higher education, to fulfill their specific intellectual function as well as they might because they are confused about their role. However that may be, at least the theorists among us have had their attention directed steadily toward a richer and more stimulating conception of education than that merely of instruction. "

On Questioning, and Helping Students Learn

"The real job for which teachers are trained and paid is to help the young to learn. It should not be necessary also to make them learn. ,"

writes Gilbert Highet in the excellent Art of Teaching. That is a distinction I want to remember. He goes on:

"I am not sure when this second necessity grew up to overshadow the first. I think it must have come with the establishment of universal education in the Western countries. ..."

"There are really two different reasons for asking questions of a class: to find out if each individual has done his work in preparation, and to expose the difficulties they have found collectively in preparing the work. The former is a method of making them learn, the latter helps them to learn. The latter is much more important, but it is sometimes forgotten. ...

It is more important to explain a new field of study to a class than to check their homework on it. It is also more creative, because a class soon learns if you are interested merely in catching them out, proving them wrong, showing them up, making them squirm; and it you are, it thinks of methods to evade and to irritate you.

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On children asking questions of their parents:

Children ask thousands of questions, because their world is all new, all strange and bright. If they ask at the wrong time, when we are fishing out the laundry or trying to get them to sleep, they should --- no, they should not be shut up, they should be told: 'Ask me again, at breakfast-time, will you?" When they ask at the right time, they should always be answered. It is hateful to hear a little boy in a train asking, as he looks out of the window: 'What makes the wires go up and down?" and receiving a reply which would be downright rude from one grow-up to another, and is anyhow stupid and stupefying for a child. "Never mind" and "don't bother me now" and "Sthespeedofthtrain." What good is that?

...Of course, it is difficult to answer all their questions. It is impossible to answer some of them completely. But an answer should be given, if only to keep them interested in learning and friendly to their parents, for that is what all children are naturally, and anything else is a distortion. "

From this article I learn that he wrote poetry too, and I'm not at all surprised, since his prose is admirable. I hope the excerpts above give you some idea. According to this site, he translated the book Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. This does not surprise me either since the Art of Teaching book struck me as being in the tradition of paideia.

The word Paideia (παιδεία) means "education" or "instruction." Paideia was "the process of educating man into his true form, the real and genuine human nature."

Since self-government was important to the Greeks, Paideia combined with ethos (habits) made a man good and made him capable as a citizen or a king.

That's essentially what the book is about -- the role, character and methods of a teacher in educating a student into his true nature and heritage. There is also a section on "great men and their teachers" and "teaching in everyday life".

Oh, and what do you know! Gilbert Highet's wife was Helen MacInnes.

The Way of the Reason

I have always been a bit bothered by the section of Charlotte Mason's 20 Principles where she talks about the "Way of the Reason":

The way of reason: We teach children, too, not to 'lean (too confidently) to their own understanding'; because the function of reason is to give logical demonstration (a) of mathematical truth, (b) of an initial idea, accepted by the will. In the former case, reason is, practically, an infallible guide, but in the latter, it is not always a safe one; for, whether that idea be right or wrong, reason will confirm it by irrefragable proofs.

Therefore, children should be taught, as they become mature enough to understand such teaching, that the chief responsibility which rests on them is the acceptance or rejection of ideas. To help them in this choice we give them principles of conduct, and a wide range of the knowledge fitted to them. These principles should save children from some of the loose thinking and heedless action which cause most of us to live at a lower level than we need.

The part that puzzles me is that initial "acceptance or rejection of ideas".

According to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, human reason, to say it as such, 'breathes,' that is, it moves on a wide-open horizon in which it can experience the best of itself. Nonetheless, when man limits himself to think only of material and experimental objects, he closes himself to the questions of life, about himself and about God, impoverishing himself." --

Benedict XVI, Feast of Thomas Aquinas, January 2007


From the Catholic Encyclopedia on Reason:

Ratio, in opposition to res, denotes the mode or act of thinking; by extension it comes to designate on the one hand the faculty of thinking and on the other the formal element of thought, such as plan, account, ground, etc. This wide use of the word reason to denote the cognitive faculty (especially when dealing with intrinsic evidence, as opposed to authority) is still the commonest.

....In its general sense, therefore, reason may be attributed to God, and an angel may be called rational. But in its narrower meaning reason is man's differentia, at once his necessity and his privilege; that by which he is "a little less than the angels", and that by which he excels the brutes. Reasoning, as St. Thomas says, is a defect of intellect. True, in certain acts our mind functions as intellect; there are immediate truths (ámesa) and first principles (archaí) which we intuit or grasp with our intellect; and in such verities there can be no deception or error. .... Within a certain region our cognitive faculties are absolutely infallible.

Yet the Scholastics also unanimously hold that man's specific mark is ratiocination or discursus. .... in this life our knowledge is a thing of shreds and patches, laboriously woven from the threads of sense..... our actual human experience.... is a gignómenon, a coming to be. Man is rational in the sense that he is a being who arrives at conclusions from premises. Our intellectual life is a process, a voyage of discovery; our knowledge is not a static ready-made whole; it is rather an organism instinct with life and growth. Each new conclusion becomes the basis of further inference.

Hence, too, the word reason is used to signify a premise or ground of knowledge, as distinguished from a cause or real ground. So important is this distinction that one may say herein lies the nucleus of all philosophy. The task of the philosopher is to distinguish the a priori of logic form from the a priori of time; and that this task is a difficult one is testified by the existence of the many systems of psychologism and evolutionism. Reasoning, therefore, must be asserted to be a process sui generis.

This is perhaps the best answer to give to the question, so much discussed by the old logicians, as to what kind of causative influence the premises exert on the conclusion. We can only say, they validate it, they are its warrant. For inference is not a mere succession in time ; it is a nexus thought-of, not merely an association between thoughts. An irrational conclusion or a misleading association is as much a fact and a result as a correct conclusion; the existence of the latter is explained only by its logical parentage. Hence the futility of trying to account completely for the existence of a human thought--the conclusion of a train of reasoning--simply by the accompanying sense-data and psychological associations.

I will leave it there for now. It seems to me that Charlotte Mason is using the word "reason" in the sense of the discursive process, what the CE calls "ratiocination". She holds (or it seems so to me) that the original premises or principles (she uses the term "ideas") are accepted by the will. Consequently, she says that the child's main role in dealing with ideas is to affirm or deny, which is puzzling to me. I will have to pore through Catholic philosophy a bit more to figure out if it has an equivalent notion of the will's role in accepting ideas.

The Catholic Encyclopedia's definition of Will includes this (I think I've quoted it before):

The term will as used in Catholic philosophy, may be briefly defined as the faculty of choice; it is classified among the appetites, and is contrasted with those which belong either to the merely sensitive or to the vegetative order: it is thus commonly designated "the rational appetite"; it stands in an authoritative relation to the complex of lower appetites, over which it exercises a preferential control; its specific act, therefore, when it if in full exercise, consists in selecting, by the light of reason, its object from among the various particular, conflicting aims of all the tendencies and faculties of our nature: its object is the good in general (bonum in communi); its prerogative is freedom in choosing among different forms of good.

This doesn't seem too far from CM's notion, but I shall have to think about it some more. I know from other reading on her notions of Will that she has a similar idea of it as being the commander of all the other parts of the human.

Simplicity and the Spirit of Childhood in Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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