PRINCIPLE 15: NOTEBOOK EDITION
A single reading is insisted on, because children have naturally great power of attention; but this force is dissipated by the re-reading of passages, and also, by questioning, summarizing, and the like.
Acting upon these and some other points in the behaviour of mind, we find that the educability of children is enormously greater than has hitherto been supposed, and is but little dependent on such circumstances as heredity and environment.
Nor is the accuracy of this statement limited to clever children or to children of the educated classes; thousands of children in Elementary Schools respond freely to this method, which is based on the behaviour of the mind.
In Mason’s day, a lot of weight was given to heredity and class. It was assumed that only the children of the privileged or upper classes had the proper ‘breeding’ to appreciate the best in art and literature and music, and to benefit from the kind of education Mason advocated.
We think we’ve gotten away from that kind of thinking; but then an article is written or a documentary is filmed, revealing that intercity children like reciting poetry or attending philharmonic concerts, and aren’t we just a little surprised? A little more hopeful, maybe, because we weren’t quite sure it was in those children to appreciate ‘culture’?
Or maybe we think a CM education is all good and well for the gifted or average child, but one with autism needs a behaviorist education.
Mason, who was actually inspired to teach because of the poor and underprivileged, emphasized the idea of a ‘liberal [generous] education for all.’ She was able to write of children from a poor mining community, for example, who studied Millet’s Angelus with real appreciation and awe, and learned advanced concepts of physics by studying steam engines.
Mason had two beautiful images for the results she experienced with such children, children with little prior education, limited vocabularies, and unhelpful family lives. One Mason took from a beautiful old fairytale, ‘Undine,’ in which a water-sprite ‘gains a soul at the touch of love.’ The other was that of Aaron’s blossoming staff: a lifeless rod suddenly blooming with beauty and fruitfulness.
Mason believed that the consistent and widespread success she saw in over fifty years of teaching were due to the fact that her theory was based on universal principles of human nature, applicable to all people regardless of wether they were upper-class or lower-class, gifted or challenged.
Mason read extensively on the neuroscience of her day, and it is incredible to me that, so many years later, the applications she made to her educational practice still hold true. {A great book for this is Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain. Mason believed that all parents and teachers should make an effort to gain understanding in this area.}
Note-booking is just one of Mason’s brain-based educational practices; that is, it meshes, it works with the natural processes of a brain that is encountering and synthesizing new knowledge. It also takes into account something that gets lot of attention these days, something that is emphasized in the teacher development classes I have taken: the theory of multiple intelligences. Whereas what we might consider ‘traditional’ schoolwork {like worksheets and tests} is geared to a single intelligence, note-booking is something that works well with multiple modalities: it is appealing for wordy children, visual and artistic children, tactile children... The blank page invites so many uses and applications.
• narration for The Faerie Queene •
December 12, 2014