PRINCIPLE 8: NOTEBOOK EDITION
In saying that ‘education is a life,’ the need of intellectual and moral as well as physical sustenance is implied. The minds feeds on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum.
Food and health are at the forefront of society’s thought; we readily recognize that robust bodily health requires a regular supply of good food, and we willingly argue about what food most readily produces this health.
Perhaps we do not so readily recognize that our minds, no less than our bodies, are not self-supporting organisms, but also require regular nourishment. The food of the mind’s life, Mason believed, was ideas.
Ideas are distinct from mere information—from facts, opinions or generalizations.
Just as we can quiet our physical hunger with junk food, but still suffer malnutrition, idea-substitutes like celebrity tabloids, magazine blurbs and buzz-lines ease the hunger of our minds, but do not prmote the robust health shown in joyful, easy action.
Ideas are spiritual entities, conveyed from one mind to another through various mediums, as speech or writing or art.
According to Samuel Coleridge, an idea can exist as a definite form, ‘like a circle’ in the mind of a geometrician {shades of the Platonic forms, here}; or as a vague appetency, ‘like the impulse that fills a young poet’s eyes with tears.’
Hopkins’ poem ‘The Windhover’—
...shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
—may inspire my moral spirit with the idea that humble trials can produce great beauty, or it may enliven in me the appetency—the desire, the affinity—for beautiful and dynamic language. It may convey to me one or the other or both or something else entirely, as my own mind is ready to receive and interact with the mind of Hopkins in his poem.
These are conveyed to me as living ideas that my mind readily assimilates; I would not be similarly touched by the bald statement that ‘Humble trials can produce great beauty’ or that ‘There is beauty and dynamism in language.’ Read them; they slide off the surface of your mind.
‘All roads lead to Rome, and all I have said is meant to enforce the fact that much and varied humane reading, as well as human thought expressed in the forms of art, is, not a luxury, a tit-bit, to be given to children now and then, but their very bread of life, which they must have in abundant portions and at regular periods.’ [p 111]
This principle is directed more to the material with which children deal before they turn to their notebooks, but we can see once more how suited notebooks are to this course of education. We are dealing not with factoids and vocabulary we can plug into multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank; the child’s mind is working with living ideas and whole truths, that strike a unique mind in a unique way and call for a unique and living response.
October 14, 2014