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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Eve Anderson
Started reading
January 6, 2025
It would benefit the child’s growth and development if the parents’ and teacher’s first communication would be along the lines of the formation of habits in the life of the child.
We then begin by seeing children as persons of unmeasured intellectual and moral power with a propensity toward growth, and we use the full scope of education to make this possible. Then the child is able to live, to give either of these answers (yes or no) to the solicitations that assail him.
These challenges do not come on great occasions, but in the guise of the little matters of everyday life. The duty of this exercise belongs to each of us. Therefore, it is the business of education and the function of the educator to train each child we have been entrusted with in the formation of habits that will allow the child to truly live.
The business of teaching was for the sole purpose of furnishing the child with ideas, and any teaching that did not leave the child with a new mental image missed the mark.
thought-out end in mind and a step-by-step plan to assist the child’s progress both in knowledge and in character and conduct.
The child is furnished with the desire for knowledge, i.e. curiosity; with the power to apprehend Knowledge, that is, attention; with powers of mind to deal with Knowledge without aid from without—such as imagination, reflection, judgment; with innate interest in all Knowledge that he needs as a human being; with power to retain and communicate such Knowledge; and to assimilate all that is necessary to him.56
Children deal with ideas in an easy and familiar manner when given proper support; so Miss Mason lays great emphasis on the responsibility we have to teach ideas carefully:
that the chief responsibility which rests on them as persons is the acceptance or rejection of ideas.”
The mind must dwell upon its findings, to accept or to reject them. Only then can knowledge come, knowledge of the truth of the thoughts, beauties, and facts it is an individual’s concern to know and to show forth and to use in daily life.59
The brain works optimally when: • Retelling or talking about learning. • Using the vocabulary of the subject. • Listening, reading, viewing, and acting. • Drawing relationships through the use of metaphor and simile. • Experiencing rigorous content and intellectual challenge joyfully. • Eliminating rewards and punishments. • Focusing heavily on teacher not technology as the main facilitator in learning. • Processing part and whole learning simultaneously. • Delaying gratification to achieve success. • Searching for meaning is innate. • Involving focused attention.61
This work of reformation is not a single act in investigative thought, but an ongoing inquiry into the beliefs expressed in the classroom through various choices regarding books, activities, methodology, and resources.
An obstacle persists when children are viewed as products of education and environment, not as persons. And we lose the way into the mind when “we have embraced the belief that ‘knowledge is sensation,’ that a child knows what he sees and handles rather than what he conceives in his mind and figures in his thoughts.”66
The work of the educator is to put the child in the way of knowing by providing a living way through worthy thought and worthy work.
Using these guides, we look at lessons in view of what the learner should do instead of what the learner should know.
described here can only be the result of careful,
prepared lessons needing to be brought before the students. Unprepared lessons wander aimlessly and are directed by the clock, tangents, and unrelated questions.
Prepared lessons have objectives in mind (content and/or performance), questions to be asked, ideas to be discussed, skills to be introduced or reinforced, and sympathies to be gained. Yet in all this preparation the educator is careful not to do the mind work for the students, but thoughtfully moves toward an aim so as not to get in between the living books and things and the child.
In spending time and effort in preparing lessons, the educator moves into the realm of in...
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As education is an applied philosophy, it is important that the work of the classroom truly reflects the values and beliefs of knowledge in the principle that “education is a life.”
What we are about is not some misty future preparation for our children. Education is not a life later; it is life now.
We must beware the Herbartian error—that of so arranging the curriculum for the students that the connections are merely handed to them.
for it depends, not upon how much is learned, but upon how things are learned.80
The teacher has another dynamic—that of a balance between being the purveyor of wisdom and knowledge and remaining a learner herself, who is willing to at times stand aside or to be a part of the process of learning. Either way, there is risk—and fulfillment.
[Miss Mason’s] books remind readers of their children’s needs and powers, of the laws of authority and obedience, of the helpful stability of good habits, of the joyous living that comes with minds well supplied and occupied. All this, established half a century ago, stands firm in truth applicable to the swiftly changing circumstances of new generations.83
Therefore, the goal of any learner must be attention. Attentiveness is a vital part of understanding and remembering, for one does not know what one has not attended to.
Narration moves the learner from rote or taxon memory to locale memory.
Narration maximizes the process of comprehension and meaning. Studies show that children who narrate comprehend far better than those who do not, regardless of the age factor.
In point, the student who readily narrates after a single reading will have command of the knowledge read.
If the mind is to be active, it must do the work of attending, reflective thinking, and expression through the work of narration. One cannot omit that part of the lesson where the child puts his mind to the task of retelling through reflective thinking, where he performs the “act of knowing” through verbal or written expression.
W]e must never forget that without narration the mind will starve; whatever disciplinary exercises we use, they should be in addition to and never instead of narration.”
persons did nothing more than bind them, for people often exceed
The role of the teacher is that of one who gives direction and elucidation in lessons, one who shares sympathies in studies, speaks a vivifying word here and there, provides a full reservoir of right thought, lays down lines of habit, exercises several powers of the mind, and sows opportunities for learning.
The educator does not manipulate, taking on the responsibility for the child’s knowing, but provides a fitting environment wherein the mind is sustained upon ideas, thus continuing the act of education, self-education. And this education is produced from living thought found in living books.
It cannot be too often said that information is not education.”
Why is it that we can observe how wonder, truth, and beauty attract the interest of the younger child and yet let this interest be swept away by boring details in oversized textbooks when he or she enters a school? We must have the courage to teach for the sake of the children rather than for the system. When taught properly, science can be our students’ favorite subject.
