From The Parents' Review: Only these days we do it on a phone?

"We see it in the smaller details of life. A man reads a paper while crossing a crowded thoroughfare. His forebrain is in full attention on the newspaper. He takes no heed of the traffic. But his sub-consciousness guides him. That is, his sight centre and ear centre announce the approach of a vehicle, and without telegraphing to the forebrain for directions, wire on to the walking centre on which side to move. This shows that a large amount of information and knowledge is acquired by the brain, and stored up there to be used in a quiet fashion, without always rousing the full intellectual activities. One can see what a saving of brain work there must be if the brain can act automatically, or sub-consciously, without calling on the forebrain for its aid."  --  "The Brain in Relation to Education Part 2," by A. Wilson, Esq., M.D., in The Parents' Review, Volume 14, 1903, pgs. 435-450

From The Parents' Review: Icky Bugs

 "Now, I labour under one great disadvantage in my present subject, namely, the prejudice which exists in the minds of some against beetles, nay, the very mention of the name produces in them a feeling of creepiness and horror. "What! collect beetles, cockroaches, and earwigs! ugh!" and, perhaps, some fair reader wrings her hands with dismay. She considers those ugly black beetles only fit to be trodden upon. Now, if I had time, I would set up a brief on behalf of these greatly maligned insects, which, I am sure, would lead you to respect them very much. However, at present, you must be content to learn that the cockroach and the earwig are not beetles. I admit, candidly, that both of our old friends just mentioned are very like beetles, and therefore, I must try to give you a good reason--only one out of many--why they are not put into the same class with the beetles. Suppose we had opportunities of watching the development of the eggs of the common earwig, and also those of some common beetle, say the cockchafer. Please don't confuse this with the cockroach. One morning we find that our earwig eggs have hatched; and what do we see? A number of little creatures very like the parent earwig from which they were derived. Just a few slight differences, and that is all. It is a very pretty, and not at all an uncommon sight, to see these little broods of baby-earwigs following their mother about, as chickens do a mother-hen. In a short time, also, our cockchafer eggs hatch, and we see resulting, a few little fat grubs, totally unlike their parent, and, indeed, possessing no resemblance to a beetle at all."  -- "Natural Science Recreations: Beetles," by Rev. A. Thornley, M.A., F.E.S., in The Parents' Review, Volume 3, 1892/93, pgs. 834-840

Why read The Water-Babies? (An opinion from the Parents' Review)

"Water Babies" is another favourite. As I wish to be veracious I must confess that our little ones like best the classics of the nursery - they have made few new discoveries in the literary heavens. Kingsley's satire is less natural and cheery than Thackeray's, and I don't think the small folk make much of it. But then they are, like all children, wonderfully patient of longueurs, and they wade through disguised sermons on over pressure, and on insanitary cottages, for the sake of the inimitable charm and grace of the story proper, with an impartiality which they will be happy if they maintain to maturer years. Our young philosopher's logical faculty is developing; and I well remember the chuckling glee with which he detailed to me the plausible but fallacious arguments by which Kingsley establishes the existence of the Water-baby. "What do you think about it yourself?" he added, with judicial gravity. -- "Our Children's Book Friends," by Their Sister, in The Parents' Review, Volume 3, 1892/93, pgs. 331-334

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.

The Ultimate C.M. t-shirt slogan?

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.)