Allowing the Process of Learning
“I come in with something it took me three years to come to the conclusion about this matter, and I get mad because the kids don’t see it in the classroom in 30 minutes. What I’m doing is depriving them of the process and getting there, and it’s dehumanizing. We throw these things in books in their laps and then we wonder why they’re not overjoyed like we are. How long did it take us to get to the point where we were overjoyed about that? So this calls for great wisdom and discernment.” — James Daniels, “The Nature of Education”, 2009 CIRCE Conference: A Contemplation of Nature
Wow. This concept has so many applications besides even teaching our children. Think of all the topics that you feel passionately about. How much time did it take to move from ignorance to understanding to love and passion? How many questions are rattling around in your brain, connecting with other ideas over time, waiting for their time to bloom? Is it only lack of information that these questions need, or is it time and space and process to come to fruition?
So, when we share our convictions, whether it be about theology or parenting or education or politics, there really isn’t a shortcut we can use to convince anyone else of our positions. It is not a process of downloading information directly into someone else’s mind. It isn’t microwaveable. It’s a seed that has to hit fertile soul, feed on material already there, gather in nutrients from other sources, then slowly germinate and grow, putting out a branch here and a few leaves there to gather in more rays of light until finally it’s ready to produce fruit.
So, in education, then, it’s not all about the teacher. Certainly the teacher must have knowledge and mastery and passion. However, a teacher’s mastery and passion are not sufficient, will not guarantee a passing on of that passion. The teacher doesn’t so much have to convince a student of the rightness of his passion, he has to cultivate the conditions in the student so the student can grow his own passion.
And, here again, we see also the need for leisure in order to learn. True learning happens when it becomes personal, a part of you, not when a fact is memorized. And this is a process that takes time, whether it be student encountering grammar or chemistry or an adult encountering new ideas about salvation or parenting or homeschooling. And it is a process that is individual. It can’t be figured out and made into a cookie cutter process. Each person brings his own background and assumptions that make it easier or harder to accept an idea, that put different nuances and emphases on particulars, that make him apply it differently.
So, a two-minute tangent in a 50-minute talk, which is one of 32 in the conference CD set has given me enough to chew on for a long time.
I love this post! I remember once reading in the Bluedorn’s Teaching the Trivium something along the lines of: Let’s look at this journey of faith (toward whatever the Ideal of the issue is) as if it were a journey across the country, from California to New York. So, we are all driving along at different speeds, and sometimes we take different routes, but New York is the Ideal at which we are all aiming. Well, if I’m in Detroit and you’re in Denver, who am I to condemn you? After all, I was probably in Denver a year ago, and we both started out in California, and we’ve both come a long way, and we’ve neither reached New York.
(I just took a sentence out of a book, and turned it into a paragraph! Ha ha!)
Anyhow, I thought of that when I read this, because there is this tendency to hurry everyone to New York, so to speak. Of course, we could question if one could get to New York, in the metaphorical sense, in a hurry at all, but let’s say we could. Would New York be as full of people of depth as if we allowed God to set the speed in their life?
Godspeed. Interesting. I was thinking about this during my 27th reading of Saint George and the Dragon: It isn’t just hurrying, but there is something of God’s will in the journey, and His protection and provision as well.
Anyhow, I agree with you that we, as teachers, must tend to the conditions of the soil. Now that I am teaching someone else’s child (and this is NOT a criticism of that child), I can see how this can be an impossible job for classroom teachers sometimes.
I went to a Charlotte Mason Conference this fall and it was very nice. It seems to me that her methods line up with this idea too. Our children ( and us too actually)have to take these living, real ideas and make them their own in order to remember them and use them. It was neat to hear from some Charlotte Mason Scholars on how to use narration in every type of subject to help foster this atmosphere of learning for our kids. I had never thought of all the ways you could help your child re-tell and think through what they were hearing and learning. For example, studying and memorizing a piece of artwork for 5 min. and then re-telling what you saw down to every little detail you could remember. I am not an artist and have never studied any classical art pieces and Acacia and I have been really enjoying it with new eyes with these methods. It’s a lot of fun! I am excited to see you next week! Thanks for sharing our ideas! They are nice to read!