narration of book 1, chapter 3, part a
Every person is born with possibilities for good and evil in body and mind, heart and soul. It is the hope of education to direct those tendencies towards the good while subduing the evil, bringing to each child a well balanced and healthy body, mind, heart, and soul. Education is the “handmaiden of religion”. It supports values and principles, and trains students in the healthy habits that allow them to act on those values.
There are three important aspects of intellectual well-being that are often overlooked: imagination, reason, and beauty. Every child is created with an innate ability to imagine. This skill is one that ought to be encouraged rather than suppressed, as it often is in education. A child’s imagination will be stocked with scenes and images, either from observations of nature or pictures, scenes from literature, or digital media such as games, movies, and music. Imagination is not an optional skill, but rather one that is essential and can lead to great contemplations of beauty and wonder. It is the responsibility of parents and teachers to ensure that the moral imagination of a child is stocked with images of truth, beauty, nobility, and goodness. In dwelling on such images through the lens of imagination, a child absorbs the ideas and develops an affinity towards them.
A balanced approach to reason and sensitivity is likewise essential to the educational process. Every child is born with both reason and sense; they are developed from infancy for good purposes or bad. It is important that children understand that reason and sensitivity are both their helpers in life, not their masters. To be mastered by reason places logic in supreme importance, and can rob a child of the ability to empathize or be deeply compassionate. On the other hand, being mastered by sensitivity can maim a child’s ability to make wise decisions or reason through fallacies that are presented to him. The two must be balanced, with neither mastering the child and both serving as his helpers to make wise, caring decisions in life.
What part does a contemplation of beauty play in education? Plato describes the role of beauty in our lives simply and elegantly in saying “the good is the beautiful.” Beauty is essential in education because it is a reflection of goodness. A child must be directed to see and appreciate beauty properly, to seek it in his life, and to be humbled rather than arrogant when he comes face to face with it. Nourishing this aesthetic appetite of intellect—through encountering and appreciating all that is good in nature, art, humanity, science, mathematics, and history—is essential if children are to develop a proper relationship with beauty.
Cultivating these three aspects of education is a good step towards maintaining the well-being of a child’s mind. However, it is crucially important that in developing these skills, the necessity of varied studies and diverse materials is not overlooked. We are all born with aptitudes for certain subjects and studies; one child will be inclined towards physical activity, another towards mathematics, still another towards language or grammar. These inclinations should be seen as strengths, not specializations. It is vital to nourish both the strengths and the weaknesses through a broad diet of intellectual sustenance. Darwin admits that after years in solely pursing scientific knowledge, he lost the ability to read poetry. What effect might this have had on his morals and ethics? Education is only complete if it results in a person who can enjoy and absorb information from any given subject. While specialized learning is important for career training and employment, it is not the main goal of education. The goal of education is knowledge (i.e a healthy, active mind and ethical principles) not skills. A diverse diet of intellectual stimuli is what helps a child to attain this knowledge and cultivate a vibrant imagination, balance of sensitivity and reason, and appreciation of beauty.
When faced with this challenge of nourishing and guiding a child’s mind, there seem to be three very common mistakes made by teachers. The first is that of an overly appealing personality. Through smiles, engaging teaching methods, or excessive zeal and excitement, teachers can attach their pupils to their own personality rather than to the knowledge they are attempting to share. This is what Socrates was accused of when the greeks claimed he was misleading and “corrupting the youth”. Attracted to his vibrant personality, young philosophers sought his company more than the knowledge he was offering. Vibrant, zealous teachers are often well-liked by their pupils, true. The fault here is that it is their own personality which attracts learners, rather than a true love of the knowledge itself. On top of this, a teacher’s personal zeal for a subject can sometimes overwhelm or quench the student’s own interest in it. It is important to allow moments of quiet during which a child can develop their own excitement for a topic, rather than relying on the teacher’s interest in it.
Secondly, there is a common idea among educators that repetition is essential, that facts or ideas must be drilled into a child until they simply can’t help but to remember them. Materials are read over and over again, lines are copied, and memorization is seen as the key to success. However, children are turned away by this kind of “drilling”, which drains them of energy and interest through its sheer monotony. Their minds need to be given the opportunity to actively digest the ideas they encounter and then progress to new ideas; they cannot continue to receive mental nourishment by repetition any more than they can receive physical nourishment by eating one serving for multiple meals.
Finally, many teachers could be classified as “talky-talks”. They expound and explain, preemptively offering definitions of potentially unknown vocabulary, and summarizing or moralizing sections of literature. Does any adult feel keenly interested in this type of communication? Do excessive explanations not stifle our own interest? Children, too, are bored by this type of talk. They do not always need vocabulary explained in order to understand passages. Simple paraphrases stifle their excitement for understanding the original. They will draw their own morals out of the raw information. And questionnaires— perhaps the most lethal tool of all— only encourage children to turn out the right answer, without perhaps dwelling on the deeper meaning of a text. Education is meant to encourage children to be reflective individuals who can make wise decisions based on their own store of knowledge, not to encourage them to turn out the correct answer without considering why it is correct.
Children are after ideas, knowledge. This is their proper food. They will thrive on it, and nothing else. This is what teachers are faced with: providing materials and removing obstructions so that children can receive the nourishment they need.
key ideas
- Children are born with possibilities for both good and evil tendencies. In placing education under the role of religion, a teacher seeks to direct the child towards what is good.
- A thorough education is one that develops the well being of the body and mind through play and physical activity, as well as development of the imagination, a balance logic and sensitivity, and appreciation of beauty.
- Education ought to be diversified, not specialized. Our minds are kept in best health through a broad diet of ideas in literary form.The goal of education must not be career skills that give a student specialized knowledge in one direction. Rather, education is meant to develop a love of learning, knowledge in many subjects, and reflective, discerning students.
- Teachers ought to always keep in mind that the children are after knowledge and must be fed -on ideas. If this is the center of their teaching style, they will avoid many of the main mistakes such as attracting students to a subject through their own personality or boring a student through monotony of materials or abundant explanations.
quotes
“There are good and evil tendencies in body and mind, heart and soul; and the hope set before us is that we can foster the good so as to attenuate the evil; that is, on condition that we put Education in her true place as the handmaid of Religion.”
“To explain the meaning of words destroys interest in the story and annoys the child…in many instances it is unnecessary.”
“That is the capital charge against most schools. The teachers underrate the tastes and abilities of their pupils.”
“It is necessary that every child should be trained to recognize fallacious reasoning and above all to know that a man’s reason is his servant and not his master; that there is no notion a man chooses to receive which his reason will not justify.”
“It is no small part of education to have seen much beauty, to recognize it when we see it, and to keep ourselves humble in its presence.”