In which Ralph Vaughan Williams writes to the children of the P.U.S.

(posted by Anne White)

To the children of the Parents' Union School, Ambleside

February, 1951

A small girl was once having a music lesson.  Her teacher gave her a new piece to learn, which she explained was composed by a well-known musician who had lately visited the school.  'But,' said the little girl, in great bewilderment, 'I thought all composers were dead.'

Have we really been taught that all composers are dead? Then indeed our art is dead. Vital art must be creative.

It has been said that we should stand in the present with one eye on the past and one on the future.  Let us by all means build our house on the foundations of the great masters, but let us remember that the composers of our own time and of our own country have something to say to us which even the greatest masters of the past age cannot give us; that is the only way we can build a great future for our music.

We must not let let the dead lion swallow up the living dog.

R. Vaughan Williams.

From the Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1895-1958,  edited by Hugh Cobbe.  Retrieved from Google Books.

CM Philosophy--the Really Short Version

by Anne White

If you were making a Charlotte Mason t-shirt, what would it say?

Right away you have your choice of well-used CM mottoes.  I am, I can, I ought, I will. Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.  Things, Books, Ideas.  Knowledge of God, Knowledge of Man, Knowledge of the Universe. Keep calm and CM on (I just made that one up).

If you had to use your own words, though, what would spell it out best?  I kind of like "Learning all the Time," but John Holt already used it.  Same with "Beyond Ourselves" (Catherine Marshall).

How about "Knowledge is Just One Idea at a Time?"

What's on your shirt?

Making sense of EVERYBODY'S learning

by Anne White

I've just started reading Making Sense of Adult Learning, by Dorothy MacKeracher.  In the first chapter, "Assumptions about Learning," she says:

"My understanding of learning is based on a learning-centred approach to learning-teaching interactions.  The learning-centred approach focuses primarily on the learning process and the characteristics of the learner, and secondarily on teaching and the characteristics of those who help the learner to learn.  Only when I focus my attention on the learning process and the learner do I understand more clearly what competent teaching, facilitating, training, planning, advising, and counselling processes would be like."

In other words, it's not about the teacher, and it's not even (primarily) about the content: it's about the meaning and connections that the student makes with that content.  The science of relations, self-education.

MacKeracher then contrasts the learner-centred approach with possible other views of learning.  She says that the focus could be on:

"the content (knowledge or skills) to be learned and how it is organized and presented...; the cognitive strategies and skills to be used and how these can be strengthened through training [Herbart rules!] ; appropriate learning behaviours and how these can be elicited and modified through selected stimuli and reinforcement; the technologies to be used as an aid to learning and how they limit or enhance learning; or the facilitator and his or her facilitating activities."  "In these approaches, learners would be perceived and assessed in terms of their competency to learn the content, how well they use cognitive strategies..." etc.

See where it goes?  We as teachers judge, assess the students based on our own focus.  If our focus is content-based, we will be satisfied if they can parrot back the content.  If we think it's all about behaviourism, we'll be marking them on what they do when we ring our little bells.  If it's all about the teacher...heaven help us.

Now all this is part of an approach to adult education, in all its possible situations and contexts.  And if you imagine a night school class, what she's saying seems like common sense.  You sign up for a class in computer skills or cooking or counselling, and you (the learner) have certain expectations.  You certainly have the right to hope that, in most cases, such a class will be as much about you, the learner, learning, as it will be about the content; to hope that the instructor, if it's a small enough class, will have at least some interest in who you are and what you bring to the course. (Clarification: I don't mean getting all chummy with the teacher, but more in the sense of how the course is designed.)   Most people will understand this naturally, because even if they never teach a class themselves, they will almost certainly have to, or choose to, sit through training sessions or upgrading courses or even sermons.  And although such courses might have some very specific content to be learned (like welding skills), it still makes a difference who's learning it and what they then go and do with it.

The irony, for those familiar with Charlotte Mason's philosophy, is that this is old stuff for us.  That's what we do too.  That's how we teach children. As Cindy Rollins said in a 2013 Circe talk, it's not what we teach, it's what they learn.

So the question that it raises for me is--if that's how adult education is served up in the big world (and that's a good thing), are the kids still stuck with chicken nuggets and canned pasta?  Is some researcher or professor out there saying the same thing to elementary and high school teachers?

Oh, I hope so.

Why Elsie Kitching might like The Teaching Gap (Book Review)

by Anne White

The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom, by James W. Stigler and James Hiebert. Copyright 1999, Free Press (a division of Simon and Schuster, Inc.); new edition with Afterword, 2009.

In 1928, Elsie Kitching, a friend and associate of Charlotte Mason, wrote:

"It has been said, on the other hand, that the one effort of attention and the one narration implies that the child must never do anything a second time, which is again a very much mistaken interpretation of Miss Mason's teaching. The second time may, as I have said, come in the way of composition later on; it probably comes again in the end of term examination, and certainly, if the child is interested, frequently in after life. There are also in the upper Forms the interesting sidelights which one book or subject throws upon another, sometimes covering the same ground from another point of view.  This is a subject on which we need to think clearly, for we are all of us inclined to attack any point of view from the one point with which we have to deal, but we need to take a bird's-eye view of the whole ground covered by any problem, lest we should not see the wood for the trees."  -- "Concerning "Repeated Narration," by Elsie Kitching, The Parents' Review, Volume 39, no. 1, January 1928, pgs. 58-62; emphasis mine
 
In another PR article, Miss Kitching emphasizes that since the PNEU methods are methods, not systems, it is important that we begin with the philosophical principles behind the methods, rather than the other way around.  She says something that might surprise homeschoolers who have spent many hours trying to figure out "the CM way to do things": that there is no one, absolute, foolproof CM-approved way to teach any particular subject, to do any particular activity--and she refers specifically to the question of how to teach reading. Yes, the PNEU provided booklists and timetables, marked exams, organized meetings, and provided many years of Parents' Review articles to try to answer the many questions that parents asked.  Yes, Charlotte Mason wrote about how to keep a nature notebook and do a picture talk. But in the end, a good teacher, working on the right educational principles, providing a generous curriculum, respecting the minds of the students, will probably do a good job overall without having to have every last instruction spelled out.
 
I found that second article particularly interesting, because I just finished reading a much more recent book that agrees, in many ways, with the "big picture" that Elsie Kitching describes.  In the early 1990's, a project called the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) videotaped eight-grade mathematics classes in the United States, Germany, and Japan.  The book The Teaching Gap is not, as its subtitle might suggest, a collection of hints from teachers around the world, but a description and summary of what the researchers found out during that project.  There were a total of 231 classes chosen randomly and filmed during a "typical" lesson; then the videos were studied by an international team of researchers.  They looked for patterns within the three countries, and for differences between them that might account for generally higher math test scores, for example, in Japan.  Were the Japanese teachers doing something special that the German and American teachers had missed?  Were there things that the American educational system could incorporate into math classes?

To give a short answer, the researchers (at that point) found a number of differences between the three countries.  Not every Japanese or German teacher taught the same way, and not every teacher taught the same way all the time, but there were enough common factors to establish some patterns.  Much of the difference came down to the facts that the best teachers allowed students to engage directly with challenging mathematics problems, and that the best lessons seemed to be presented as a sort of story--not in a literary sense, but as something planned with an opening, a middle, and an end, and periods of seatwork or group activity were part of that story as well.  The researchers, in the original book, spent quite a bit of time discussing one particular, uniquely Japanese aid to teaching: teams of teachers would regularly meet together to plan specific lessons, from beginning to end, down to the last example. Since they had a national curriculum, this meant that a local method for teaching "grade 2 math, chapter 2" or whatever could be passed on to teachers in other areas.  As well as adding to what you might call the "lesson bank," this sort of activity seemed to be particularly important in teacher development and training.  The teachers were working together to improve the students' experiences in every subject, and they themselves were learning to be better teachers by participating in these projects.  Their own experience was valued, because they were the people on the front lines.

The final question of the book was not whether the Americans should just adopt particular Japanese or even German teaching methods, for instance, getting together to plan lessons.  The researchers agreed that it would not be enough for teachers in one country to attempt to superficially imitate, or to be told to imitate, exactly what was done in another place, without changing the whole structure of education first.  In other words, principles, not surface methods, were what mattered, and one needed to be in place before much change could be seen in the other.  They also agreed that the focus needed to shift from "teachers" to "teaching," and that teaching could improve only if there was acknowledgement that a country's cultural notions of schools and teaching--the "script"--needed to change.

But the real revelation is in the Afterword, included in the 2009 edition of the book.  In 1999, the researchers expanded their project, and filmed classes in six other countries.. They found out that those countries were also teaching math very well--but that they all did it differently!  "Teachers in the Czech Republic and Hong Kong spend much of their time teaching the whole class, whether through lecture or recitation.  Teachers in the Netherlands, on the other hand, have students work independently for much of the lesson."  What did the high achievers have in common?  "Their varied approaches all accomplished the engagement of students in active struggle with core mathematics concepts and procedures.  It was this feature of teaching that we found common to the high achievers and missing in the United States." (Stigler and Hiebert, page 186)

What does all this have to do with Elsie Kitching, with Charlotte Mason, and with homeschooling parents? As Elsie said, it's easy to miss the wood for the trees.  We can't do the how-to if we're missing the why-to; but if our why-to is firmly in place, we will often see the how.  It might not be exactly the same as somebody else's how.   We may be teaching in different places; even in different centuries.  We may stalk up and down overcrowded classroom aisles like Marva Collins, or sit on a couch with one child snuggled against us.  We may use this math program, or that one.  We may find that it works to put all the "seatwork" together in a bunch and to do several book lessons back to back; or we may have children who work better with a more varied timetable.

And, like the Japanese teachers, we can definitely improve.  We can support each other, we can work with each other to talk about what worked well and what didn't, we can discuss books that we (the teachers) are reading together, we can even write class notes and lessons for each others' benefit.  In some ways, I think online homeschoolers have some of the best of all worlds: we certainly are not working in isolation!
Although The Teaching Gap is specifically about large educational systems, public schools, and classrooms, there is much in the book for home educators to think about.  In addition, we are, like it or not, part of cultures that hold "scripts" about education and schools, and those expectations affect us even if our own children are not in those classrooms.

Overall, a very interesting book, particularly as a bit of inspiration to examine the teaching "scripts" that we find ourselves following--and to rewrite them when needed.

(Charlotte Mason might ask us to note what ideas of education we have inadvertently admitted, and encourage us to give the boot to those that are harmful or non-productive.)

Why, they say, we can't read books anymore

by Anne White

Have you read the Christian Science Monitor article about people being so distracted that they can't pay attention long enough to read anything demanding, even if they want to?  It popped up for me on Yahoo a few days ago, and I actually read it.  I do read things.  But then that's what I do.  And on the other end, there are people who really never did read much in the first place, so superimposing the distraction of technology on them isn't going to make a lot of difference.

I'm trying to put myself in the place of someone who used to read,  used to want to read, and who has actually changed that because of "digital distraction."  Is there really such a person?  Maybe, maybe not.  I'm more concerned about how this applies to children, learning or not learning.  If the office workers cited in the article were interrupted about every three minutes and took twenty-three minutes to get back on task-and these were adults--is it any easier for children who are constantly interrupted and distracted?  It sounds as if we're putting ourselves, or being put, into an ADHD experiment..  The question is, why would we want to do that to ourselves, and more so, to our children?

And check out this observation: "I see people of all ages around me abandoning the moment they're in to search for something better."  The author blames this, again, on the intrusion of technology, claiming that a friend found a miraculous cure by abandoning a fancier phone for a flip phone.  Wow, if that was all it took...the funny thing is, I don't even have a flip phone, and I still get distracted.  Not enough not to read, but just trying to keep all the usual balls in the air.  But this friend, apparently, could not bring himself to read books as long as he felt enslaved to his do-everything, don't-abandon-me piece of technology.  (Doesn't that remind you a bit of those Japanese electronic "virtual pet" toys, popular about fifteen years ago, that demanded to be fed and coddled hour on the hour?  Is it possible that those were just training wheels for "SmartBerries" and the rest?)  Well, anyway, there we seem to have our Exhibit A, somebody who would have read, could have read, but who was too busy to stop and seriously look a book in the eye. Well, good for him, at least.

But again, he's an adult. He knows better and he can make his own choices.  What concerns us are the children, our own and those around us.  Are we allowing them a great deal time free of distractions?  We may have to deliberately create that--I don't mean sabotaging the devices, but at least going places where they're not wanted or not allowed, and that can include "unplugged" places and times within our own homes.  If education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life, we need to be vigilant about guarding all three.

With young children, we can play with them, with our own gadgets turned off of course.  We can do as Charlotte Mason suggests in "Inconstant Kitty," and encourage them to finish the game, play with the same toy a bit longer, go a little slower and more carefully at building something.  We can provide toys with many possibilities.  We can even do as the mama in All-of-a-Kind Family did with chores: she hid buttons (and occasionally pennies) when the little girls were dusting, so that they had to do a very thorough job to find them all.

If we homeschool, we can practice the disciplines, create the habits that do teach them to concentrate, pay attention, observe--and then record observations non-electronically.  If we teach classes or work with groups of children, we can provide books and activities that absorb them, that make them suddenly come up for air and ask for another chapter, more time to keep working or watching something.

Some will say that is not exactly cutting-edge.  But in a world where distraction is the new normal--maybe it is.

Ages and Stages

by Karen Glass

Charlotte Mason's methods are not (thank goodness!) associated with stages.  However, she did in fact talk about two stages of education.  It isn't the focus of her principles, but her methods are worked out to serve the needs of the stage that was most relevant to her pupils.

Charlotte Mason tells us that "education is the science of relations."

The idea that vivifies teaching in the Parents' Union is that Education is the Science of Relations; by which phrase we mean that children come into the world with a natural 'appetency,' to use Coleridge's word, for, and affinity with, all the material of knowledge; for interest in the heroic past and in the age of myths; for a desire to know about everything that moves and lives, about strange places and strange peoples; for a wish to handle material and to make; a desire to run and ride and row and do whatever the law of gravitation permits. Therefore we do not feel it is lawful in the early days of a child's life to select certain subjects for his education to the exclusion of others; to say he shall not learn Latin, for example, or shall not learn Science; but we endeavour that he shall have relations of pleasure and intimacy established with as many as possible of the interests proper to him; not learning a slight or incomplete smattering about this or that subject, but plunging into vital knowledge, with a great field before him which in all his life he will not be able to explore.

What does that have to do with stages?  Well, we see that Charlotte speaks of "the early days of a child's life."  The first stage, obviously, begins at the beginning, and the work of this stage is to develop relations with every area of knowledge.

Charlotte Mason mentions her stages in volume 5 of her educational series, Formation of Character,  which is not often read because it is less practical, and it is probably for this reason that we have been spared a rigid system forming around these stages. 

There is also a time for sowing the seed of this knowledge, an intellectual as well as a natural springtime; and it would be interesting to examine the question, how far it is possible to prosecute any branch of knowledge, the sowing and germination of which has not taken place in early youth. It follows that the first three lustres belong to what we may call the synthetic stage of education, during which his reading should be wide and varied enough to allow the young scholar to get into living touch with earth-knowledge, history, literature, and much besides. These things are necessary for his intellectual life, and are especially necessary to give him material for the second stage of his education, the analytic, which, indeed, continues with us to the end.

The "first three lustres" is fifteen years, so all the years prior to our high school, and even the first year or two of high school, may be considered part of this "synthetic" stage.  This is a time for gathering first-hand knowledge, developing relationships with every area of learning, and establishing that affection for knowledge that is the foundation for what Charlotte Mason tells us is the vital question about education--not "how much does the youth know?" but "how much does he care?"

After he has learned to care, his maturer mind is ready to analyze what he knows.  For most educators in the 21st century, analysis is the first object, and we expect children to analyze what they learn as soon as they trot off to kindergarten.  Charlotte Mason understood that analysis was the work of a mind "throughly furnished" with much knowledge, and the first stage of education--a long one, allowing plenty of time for relationships to develop--was a time to synthesize knowledge.  Most of us know what analysis looks like, and how to approach knowledge analytically, because this is how we are taught in institutional schools.  The idea of synthesizing knowledge might be confusing, but Charlotte Mason has distilled the idea in her principle that "education is the science of relations."  If we pursue the idea of developing a relationship with every area of knowledge, we are well on the way to making the most of that first stage of education--the synthetic stage--which lays the foundation for the later work of a mature mind.

Narration Through the Ages

by Karen Glass

One of the hallmarks of a Charlotte Mason education is narration. Everyone who inquires into the method bumps into narration almost from the very first, because it is so central. Read and narrate, read and narrate. Because narration is not a widely-used technique today in any other method of education, it is easy to imagine that it is an invention of Charlotte Mason, something particularly her own, but in fact, the practice of narrating goes back for centuries. The preliminary exercises of classical rhetoric, the progymnasmata, include narration as one of the first things young learners would do, beginning with fables or relating simple historical events, and these early rhetorical lessons were sometimes begun even with children. But even narration in the form that Charlotte Mason recommends it--retelling immediately what has been read or heard--is not an invention of her own, but was recommended centuries before by some of the Renaissance educators (and I believe Charlotte gleaned a great deal from them). Consider this advice from Erasmus:

The master must not omit to set as an exercise the reproduction of what he has given to the class. It involves time and trouble to the teacher, I know well but it is essential. A literal reproduction of the matter taught is, of course, not required - but the substance of it presented in the pupil's own way.

Perhaps, reading that advice, or something like it, Charlotte Mason decided to give it a try and found it very effective! Other teachers from the same era, perhaps influenced by what they knew of rhetoric, recommend the same practice. Comenius outlines similar guidelines in his Great Didactic:

Every pupil should acquire the habit of acting as a teacher. This will happen if, after the teacher has fully demonstrated and expounded something, the pupil himself is immediately required to give a satisfactory demonstration and exposition of the same thing in the same manner. Furthermore, pupils should be instructed to relate what they learn in school to their parents or servants at home or to anyone else capable of understanding such matters. This practice will serve various useful purposes: In the first place, pupils will be more attentive to every part of the teacher's exposition if they know that presently they will have to repeat the same matter and if each one fears that perhaps he will be the first to be asked to do so. Second, by restating exactly what has been taught, everyone will imprint it more deeply in his understanding and memory.

So what does it mean? Did Charlotte happen to stumble by chance over an ancient practice or did she discover it in the course of her wide reading on the topic of education? She doesn't tell us, but those of us who make narration an integral part of our educational efforts are not just following the advice of an obscure 19th-century British schoolteacher. We are sharing in a traditional practice of the past, and giving our students a share in the education of Quintilian, Erasmus, and Comenius...as well as Charlotte Mason!