PRINCIPLES 16, 17 & 18: NOTEBOOK EDITION
There are two guides to moral and intellectual self-management to offer children, which we may call ‘the way of the will’ and ‘the way of reason.’
Here is a worthy goal for parenting and education, and for all dealings with persons: not control, but children, students, persons discipled in the ways of self-control—in both the moral and intellectual.
Is your child going to do good and learn, without your watching and directing him? That’s what we want, right?
The key then is to empower your child with the ability to do these things, and, yes, that does require limiting {or realizing the limitations of} your control over another person—even when that other person is your child.
It’s a process. I remember directing my younger brothers in their chores, and their complaints that I was bossy. ‘I wouldn’t have to tell you what to do, if you were already doing what you know you’re supposed to do,’ was my standard answer. ‘If you don’t want to be bossed, then you need to boss yourself.’
The way of the will: children should be taught a) to distinguish between ‘I want’ and ‘I will.’ b) That the way to the will effectively is to turn our thoughts from that which we desire but do not will. c) That the best way to turn our thoughts is to think of or to do some quite different thing, entertaining or interesting. d) That after a little rest in this way, the will returns to its work with new vigor. {This adjunct of the will is familiar to us as diversion, whose office is to ease us for a time from will effort, that we may ‘will’ again with added power. The use of suggestion as an aid to the will is to be deprecated, as tending to stultify and stereotype character. It would seem that spontaneity is a condition of development, and that human nature needs the discipline of failure as well as of success.}
The way of reason: We teach children, too, not to ‘lean {too confidently} to their own understanding’; because the function of the reason is to give logical demonstration. a) of mathematical truth, b) of an initial idea, accepted by the will.* In the former case, reason is, practically, an infallible guide, but in the latter it is not always a safe one; for, whether that idea be right or wrong, reason will confirm it by irrefragable proofs.
In these two principles, Mason describes in greater detail the use of these two guides for self-management: the way of the will, and the way of reason. They may not seem related to Mason’s use of notebooks, but let me extrapolate.
By allowing children their rightful work in education, notebooks are certainly in harmony with—if not instrumental in—the development of the student as a self-determining force who recognizes and is able to make wise use of his personal responsibility in the moral and intellectual realms.
Such development comes, Mason has already said, from exposure to a wide range of ideas under the guidance of the teacher. Notebooks are especially suited to the wide curriculum necessary, and require children to slow down and truly comprehend the material and make it their own. Notebooks equip students to deal thoughtfully and independently with the ideas they will encounter everywhere.
Freedom from the tyranny of public opinion was one of the liberties Mason believed to be the right of every child.
*These ‘ideas’ Mason mentions as so important are what apologists call ‘presuppositions.’ We might call them ‘faiths,’ these ideas we hold as true but which lie outside the ability of reason, or logic, to explain—the existence of God, for instance, or the non-existence of God, an idea necessary to hold in order to think logically about many important ideas, but which we must accept or reject of itself. Or we have what mathematicians call a postulate, which can’t be explained but which must be accepted in order to explain anything else.
• drawing of an oriole in Coralie’s nature journal •
December 19, 2014