PRINCIPLE 9: NOTEBOOK EDITION
We hold that the child’s mind is no mere sac to hold ideas; but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a spiritual organism, with an appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet, with which it is prepared to deal; and which it can digest and assimilate as the body does foodstuffs.
Let’s discuss these two illustrations Mason gives us to understand different ways of considering and educating a child: what is the difference between a ‘mere sac’ and a ‘spiritual organism’?
If I put a tasty red apple in a sack, what kind of response might I expect from the sack? Would you say it has a desire to be filled? Does it do anything with what it’s given?—transform it, use it? Is the sack changed by the experience? A sack is rather passive, isn’t it? Things you put in it come out exactly the same way you put it in, and it doesn’t make much difference to the sack.
If you had this view of the student and education, what kind of tools would you use to assess their learning, or take inventory of what’s in the sack?
As Mason expressed it in more delicate Victorian terms, most students today are given undigestible forms of knowledge which they then throw-up on a test.
Now let’s picture the student as a living organism. How will most children respond when you offer them a sweet, juicy, crunchy apple? Does a living organism have an appetite, a desire for food? What happens when it eats? Does the apple just sit there? What happens to the apple?—isn’t it translated through an active and complex process of digestion and assimilation into life and energy?
With this understanding of the student and education, does the worksheet remain a realistic and useful way to assess student learning?
A notebook, with its blank pages, does provide such a way. It is an example of what Mason called ‘forms of vitality’—in other words ‘signs of life,’ or, in another phrase by Charlotte Mason, ‘the evidence of things not seen.’ Notebooks are a physical, or visible, expression of the active and largely internal, work of education.
They’re also the physical or visible expression of the teacher’s recognition of the child’s appetite for knowledge {curiosity}, and his ability to deal directly with it. It’s easy to say ‘Children are born persons’; it’s not always easy to know what to do with that, right?
Contrast the worksheet, with its many directives and prods, and the blank page of a notebook, ready for your sketches or writing. What would the difference say to you as a student? {What do they say about the material? What do they say about knowledge? What does it say about you? Where does the onus of education fall, in one and in the other?}
In her book Bestvater will invite us to think: What are we telling the child about himself and the value of what he is doing when we assign teacher- and school-centered worksheets that get thrown away at the end of the year {by teacher- and school-centered, I mean that it is designed to provided fodder for grades and statistics, and actually has very little to do with the child}. What do we say to the child about himself and the importance of the work he is doing when we give him a notebook in which to record and treasure his unique encounters with knowledge?
October 17, 2014