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. 

No one knows how children learn.

Don't be alarmed. These pictures were taken in the Fall. It is still winter here too.

No one knows how children learn.

I have always found it beautiful that the first thing a child learns, the first thing that he sees, hears, touches, knows outside himself is his mother. He sees her, and he recognizes--- what? his own body, his home, his source, and—surely!—unmediated, unadulterated, unconditional love.

That first learning is a deep mystery. And subsequent learning is an extension of the first. The child looks, reaches out with curiosity and wonder, and finds something outside himself, other than himself, but also something gloriously native: something he recognizes, a world that speaks of beauty and of—could it be?—love?

This is all mysterious and beyond our control and comprehension.

Let me repeat: beyond our control.

Because no one knows how children learn.

This is a truth that all teachers and all parents know, or soon find out. And as parent who also hopes to home school my kids, I think it is essential that I learn the lesson early and well.

It is tempting to think, as one carefully prepares ones’ curriculum, that by controlling the texts, the methods, the timing, etc. of your child’s education, you are actually controlling their education. You might be tempted to think, in fact, that *you* are educating them. But the best books, the best plan, the best theory, won’t ensure that your child will learn anything. Because learning is mysterious. No one knows how children learn.

Again and again I hear stories from home-school moms. They always go something like this: “It was the middle of winter and I had just had (baby number 3, 5, 10) and half of the household had the stomach flu. I hadn’t done any lessons for a month. The kids had been wearing the same pjs for days.  It was an epically horrible week. A week of home-school (and life in general) FAIL. And you know what, that was the week my daughter learned to read.”

It’s not that all the phonics, the letter games, the reading out loud, all that stuff—it’s not as if it didn’t matter. It did. These were the material and the tools of learning. These are the things we can offer to our children. But the learning—the learning itself—we cannot force that, require that, manufacture that.

This must be the most humbling and the most liberating fact for educators to grasp. Humbling (humiliating even) because we must learn that all our efforts, all our plans and intentions, all our theory, count for very little in the end. Because no one knows how children learn. Liberating because the child (our child!) does learn—often in spite our teaching.

All this means that the teacher must learn to let go, relinquish our control (which is in truth no real control) over the learning process.

Now for my confession. This is a very difficult principle for me to accept. Naturally I am a perfectionist and a control freak. I hold myself (and everyone else) to impossibly high standards. When I let this tendency reign, my life is, for obvious reasons, a misery. Because this is my natural inclination, and because I recognize it as a fault, I am constantly trying to avail myself of the wisdom which comes from parenting styles/philosophies that are in direct opposition to these tendencies. Thus I believe firmly in hours of unsupervised play, in dirty children playing unattended outside, etc. etc. (This does not mean, by the way, that I don’t believe in discipline, but that’s a topic for another post…)

And when it comes to homeschooling, I am most attracted to methods and curricula that give the greatest responsibility back to the child, and require the instructor to step back and away.

This is why I am attracted to the methods and writings of Charlotte Mason.

Mason’s first principle of education is that “children are born persons.” What does this mean? It means that a child is not a blank slate (to be written upon by careful teachers), or an empty bottle (to be filled by conscientious educators). Children are *persons,* with a will, an intellect, a personality, and a choice.

Persons are mysterious. Persons must be respected.

If we accept this fact then we must act (and teach) accordingly. We must not manipulate a person (even a child). We must not “encroach” upon their free will.

According to Mason the learning process must never “be encroached upon through use of fear or love, suggestion or influence, or upon undue play upon natural desire.”

Now if your education was anything like mine, these “tools” were used every day. In fact, it seems to me, that rarely were any other tools used. Desire for praise, fear of chastisement, desire for good grades, fear of bad grades.  Love of a teacher, love of peers, fear of teacher, fear of peers.

Could this be why I don’t remember much of what I “learned” in school? Because, so often, I was not—free?

So if we cannot use these tools, what can we use to help our children learn? Is the teacher useless? Is education divorced from the work of the educator? Is the only option some kind of radical “unschooling?”

Of course not. Surely this is not true.

The old adage tells us: you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

In the same way we can’t make our children “drink”—or learn. But we can, in fact we must, bring them to the water.

So how do we do this?