Principled Education: Ideas

I've been taking a look at Teaching in the Branches again, where Miss Mason lays out a couple of foundational principles of education. It's obvious that she must have spent a great deal of time, not only teaching, but also thinking about teaching: these three principles really are foundational, but like all profound truths, it's pretty easy to go along for a long time without ever really being aware that they're there. The fact that she not only recognizes that education stands on these things, but can also put it into words so clearly, I suspect is the reflection of a great deal of work and thought and time on her part. Which fits with what we know of her, and is why there's a whole educational movement that takes its name from her. But as I'm thinking about it this morning, it makes me think what a truly remarkable teacher she was.

She talks about Authority, which I blogged about last time, and she threatens to talk about Habits, but doesn't actually get to it in the time allotted, and she also talks about Ideas.

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In the matter of the Ideas that inspire the virtuous life, we miss much by our laissez-aller way of taking things for granted.
-Charlotte Mason, Teaching in the Branches

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The leading brethren of the Church have, many times, spoken to this same goal of education as a means for leading the student to the virtuous life.

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The Church stands for education. The very purpose of its organization is to promulgate truth among men. Members of the Church are admonished to acquire learning by study, and also by faith and prayer, to seek after everything that is virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy. In this seeking after, they are not confined to narrow limits of dogma or creed, but are free to launch into the realm of the infinite.
But gaining knowledge is one thing, and applying it, quite another. Wisdom is the right application of knowledge, and true education—the education for which the Church stands—is the application of knowledge to the development of a noble and God-like character. 
-President David O. McKay,  Moral and Spiritual Values in Education, April 1968

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So again, as I outlined this section of the lecture, I found that Miss Mason had offered several specific techniques for coming at the principle that she's getting at:

Principled Education: Authority

It's interesting: this is the third time that I've read Miss Mason's Teaching in the Branches, which is an essay Charlotte Mason read at one of their meetings about the principles that their schools run on. The second time through, I felt like I'd entirely missed the point the first time. And this time, while I do think it would be going a bit far to say I'd missed the point the second time, I do think that I was still unclear on it --in spite of having pulled out 14 points in an "outline" of sorts of the essay. But she says right out, near the beginning, what the three main principles she thinks they ought to be attending to are:

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(1) The recognition of authority as a fundamental principle, as universal and as inevitable in the moral world as is that of gravitation in the physical; 
(2) The recognition of the physical basis of habits and of the important part which the formation of habits plays in education; 
(3) The recognition of the vital character and inspiring power of ideas. 
-Charlotte Mason, Teaching in the Branches

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The idea, at the time, was that the local groups running the schools affiliated with Miss Mason would get together and have lectures or other presentations on various aspects of these ideas. Now, for me, the idea is to consider the principles that our homeschool runs upon, and to put some thought into working out how that looks in practice in my home. Turns out, it's a topic well worth revisiting, repeatedly.

Nature Journal: Bogs

Honestly, I was pretty skeptical about the whole Nature Journal Thing when I started. I mean, Nature Study, yes, that makes a lot of sense, and I was excited. We started to do it pretty early, after a fashion: we'd go outside and look for Interesting Things. It wasn't until much later that we started to carry sketchbooks with us, and even then, there was a while where dragging them around was pretty much all we did. But I'm halfway through my second volume now: the first one filled up. And it's gradually become something that I absolutely love doing. There are so many Interesting Things, and drawing them is both fun and educational: it helps me remember what I've learned. (Bonus points for getting some watercolor on the page!)

So this past week, I went to Cub Scout daycamp with Dragon, and we had a good time. We had to drive a little way to get there, and the environment was just a little bit different from what we see closer to home. Amazing how a relatively short distance can change things! It was a little different, except for one area: they have a bog.

The bog was very different.

And so very fascinating: I could have gone in there with my nature book every day for a long time and not been done looking at All The Things.

This isn't exactly the same as the place that we visited, but it was similar: our bog was a "quaking bog": when the guide told the boys to jump, the trees and everything around us shook. It was pretty amazing.



So I took some pictures, and I've been putting the stuff that I saw in my book in the past week since I got home. I started with a page about Monarch butterflies. Didn't see those in the bog, but I did get a picture, and I'm glad I did: it was fun to paint, and very interesting to learn about their migration patterns.

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But once I'd finished learning about Monarchs, then I wanted to know more about bogs. Because that place was amazing. Turns out, I've had to work a bit to find out much about them.

National Geographic has a nice overview.

And this crazy bit of news about a "wandering bog" came up in one of my searches. I would never have guessed that was possible!




I've got some cool photos of carniverous plants to include as well: it's likely that this project of recording what I saw in our 30 minutes or so in the bog will take more than one page to get into my book, because it's just so different from "regular" ecosystems. I'm excited to see what I can learn about it all.

Commonplace: June 2019

A commonplace is a traditional self-education tool: as you read, grab a notebook. Write down things that embody Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Write down notable quotes, with or without your own thoughts about them. Write down the questions you have as a result of the text you are reading. You will find the book becomes a record of your own growth, and it becomes a touchstone for memory of things you have studied in the past. This is what Mother Culture is all about: self-directed, conscious self-education. 


"You can live your life worrying about what you don't know, or you can accept your limitations and make the best of it."
-The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara: Ilse Witch, by Terry Brooks, p179


"Many wear the Robe, but few keep the Way."
-Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, p73


Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is a prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have to KNOW everything about something in order to UNDERSTAND it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.
-How to Read A Book by Adler & Van Doren, p4

#GraphTheWeather

Early this month, I saw a post on Facebook from a lady that was doing something to track wildfires in her nature journal; I wasn't real clear on what it is that she was doing: wildfires are not a thing in our neck of the woods. But she had it in a circle, and it was colored different shades of red, and it was really quite striking.

I thought, what if I did that with the daily temperatures?

So I built a chart.
In a circle, because I loved how that looked.

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And, because it was already the fourth, and because I don't actually have an outdoor thermometer to look at, I grabbed some data from the Weather Underground. Which is pretty cool, actually, because that means that I've got the actual high and low for the day, rather than just whatever it is whenever I remember to look at the thermometer. This also meant that I have a range of colors to represent each day, which turns out to be quite striking, even after only a couple of days of data. I got the kids into the project; it totally counts as math!

Claim Their Anointing

Scripture study is a funny thing. In the middle of following this question, I'll realize that it's related to that thing over there, and next thing you know I'm lost in the "rabbit hole" --but typically happy as a clam about it.

That's kind of how it went this time. I got to the adult session of Stake Conference early, and was thumbing through my Scripture Journal, and decided to fill in some of the things that I've found about lineage in the last little while as I waited for the meeting to start. There's this unexpected connection between lineage and priesthood that I've been noticing, though I haven't really explored it all very well. But I searched "lineage" in the scriptures, and one of the verses that came up was this one:

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...by virtue of the decree concerning their right of the priesthood descending from father to son, they may claim their anointing if at any time they can prove their lineage, or do ascertain it by revelation from the Lord...
-Doctrine and Covenants 68:21

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And I though, hold on here, bishops are anointed? It's not just a regular ordination?

So when the meeting was done, I went up front to see if I could ask the Stake President real quick (he's a friend of mine, and I couldn't see any of the bishops), and I ended up getting the attention of the visiting Seventy instead. Since I thought he might know, I went ahead and asked, not about regular Bishops, since I was 95% certain they just get regular ordinations, but about the Presiding Bishops. He said no. So I asked if he knew what the verse was talking about, and he didn't. Which was neither surprising nor distressing; it's not one that gets a lot of attention, and I was as much making sure that I hadn't missed something obvious as anything: I didn't really expect that either he or our good Stake President would know much about it; it just doesn't get discussed. But you don't know, really, until you ask.

So here I am, trying to learn more about anointings. Way back when, Elder Bednar shared a technique for scripture study that I think of as "Brother Bednar's Cut and Sort" technique: he looked up all the forms of his word, and then put them in a document, then cut them up, and sorted them into piles. I tried this with the word humility once. It completely transformed my understanding of the topic, and I never even really finished. It seems like a likely technique for learning more about this.

There's only 367 instances. ...  How hard can it be? ... right?

Making it Safe to Not Know

I no longer remember precisely what it was that got me thinking about it, but:

It's really important that we create an environment where it is safe to not know something.

Not in a neglectful kind of way, where we're complacently not trying, but in a the sort of way where it's ok not to know yet, and it's so ok to ask questions, to try out incomplete ideas, to say the sentence half in your native language, half in the one you're studying, to take a stab at it, and try -even knowing that your effort is going to be half-baked and incomplete.

Because there is so much learning in the trying.

Commonplace: May 2019

A commonplace is a traditional self-education tool: as you read, grab a notebook. Write down things that embody Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Write down notable quotes, with or without your own thoughts about them. Write down the questions you have as a result of the text you are reading. You will find the book becomes a record of your own growth, and it becomes a touchstone for memory of things you have studied in the past. This is what Mother Culture is all about: self-directed, conscious self-education. 



True education is a form of repentance. It is a humble admission that we've not read all that we need to read, we don't know all that we need to know, and we're not yet all that we need to become. Education is that unique form of discipleship that brings us to the place of admitting our inadequacies.
-George Grant, "Repentance"


But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.
-The Horse and His Boy, p137