We Do Not Know How Children Learn. (So how do we teach?)

The Tree of Knowledge

A while back I wrote a post on how children learn. Or rather, our ignorance as to how children learn. Because no one really understands how it happens (and it does...happens). One thing we do know: learning cannot be coerced.

As the old saying goes: you can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. In the same way, we can bring a child to the lip of the “Pierian spring” but we cannot make her “drink deep.” We cannot force a child to learn.

Because the child has free will; the child is a person.

This is the first principle of Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education. But another of her principles is equally important. It is that the child is equipped, suited, in fact, created to learn.

For the mind of a child is “a spiritual organism, with an appetite for knowledge.” And knowledge is “its proper diet.”

I think sometimes it would be helpful for us to remember that story by Kipling about the Elephant’s Child, who was full of “ ‘satiable curiosity.” Or we could just recall the four-year-old living in our own home. Elephants’ children, and human children also, are hungry, ravenous, starving for knowledge. They want to know why, where, how, when, what. They want to hear stories. They want to look at pictures. They want to know what is in the dirt. They want to know how to draw a nose. They want to know what sound the vase makes if you drop it down the stairs. You don’t have to “teach” a small child. You merely have to let them play, let look at books, talk to them, read to them, answer their questions. They are hungry and knowledge is their “proper diet.”

According to Charlotte Mason, this hunger is the first tool of a good educator. It means that the educator doesn’t have to resort to those commonly used tools of education which encroach upon the child’s free will, namely “fear, love, suggestion, influence or undue play upon natural desire.” It means you don’t HAVE to threaten or cajole with the promise of reward or penalty, you don’t have to give grades (gasp!). The child will want to know what kind of animals lives in Kenya/what happens at the end of the story/how Monet painted the water-lilies even without the threat/promise of grades.

In fact, grades can distract/dilute this natural hunger. The child begins to think she should learn about poetry/history/etc.  so she can get a grade, rather than because these things are worth knowing. The natural hunger is compromised. Sometimes it is lost altogether.   

This might be as good a time as any for me to say this: Charlotte Mason was not a proponent of “unschooling.” I am not a proponent of unschooling. Charlotte Mason advocated for a broad and rigorous curriculum. She expected excellence from even the youngest pupils. She expected her students to perform tasks with “perfect execution.”

But how can an educator expect these things (and get them!) without the use of the above listed forbidden tools (fear, love, suggestion…play upon natural desires), without grades, bribes, threats, etc?

As I suggest above, the natural hunger for knowledge does much of the work—if left intact.

But there are, according to Mason, three legitimate “instruments of education” available to the educator. These are:

1. Atmosphere or Environment

2. Discipline or Habit

and

3. The Presentation of Living Ideas

    

In the next few weeks I will try to explore each of these "instruments," and try to understand how I might implement them in my own home-life and home-school.