I promised in the postscript to my last letter that I’d say more on virtue and natural law and the role of the teacher. I will get to that. But I think before I do I need to make a note on perception. Because the “art of seeing” (not just looking) is essential for Mason’s portrait of a student, her ideals for a teacher, and the focus she puts on both nature and art as training grounds in perception.
In “The Truth of Painting,” the Victorian wunderkind John Ruskin performs a simple experiment and asks his readers to try it as well. On a piece of paper, draw a circle and square and then fill them in. Stand where you can see both as distinct shapes. Keep moving back until they look like one shape together. Then move in until you can only see one. The “truth” of perception, Ruskin wants to show, is almost always a matter of where we are standing. But more than this, it reveals something to us of how the world itself comes to be known:
“Nature is never distinct and never vacant, she is always mysterious, but always abundant; you always see something, but you never see all.”
Charlotte Mason loved Ruskin. She read him closely and well. (And I’m sure as this project continues this won’t be the last we hear from and about Ruskin.)
What Ruskin was meditating on, in his short essay on modern painting, is the peculiar gift we have as creatures who know by sight, yet must always “see in a mirror dimly.” There’s a potency in the human that must be admired, if fearfully. Yet there’s also a deep and limiting contingency to our vision that must be acknowledged, accepted, submitted to. We see. We never see all. We are images of God. Not God.
And this tells us something not just of ourselves, but of the world in which we find ourself. This world—what I will call Prime Reality—is a place of almost unimagineable abundance. It unfolds with exponential complexity the further in or further out we look, unassisted or by the aid of our tools. It’s true of cells and nebulae, toadstools, turnips, chickens, chairs, and even… children.
A theory, or method, of education that does not consider what a child is, is dangerous. And followers of Mason will already know that one of her distinctives is that the child is a person with or without education. Education, for Mason, does not humanize an animal. What a relief that should be to the educator!
But what is the educator to do to the “self-acting, self developing” (Home Education, 9) child? As an irreducibly complex part of the created world, a child cannot be shoe-horned into any industrial, mechanical system. Educators who succumb to this logic are relieving themselves of a different burden: the friction-filled reality of unctrollability. “If a human being were a machine,” Mason argues, all the educator needs is “to adopt a good working system” (8). But a child is not a Model-T.
It strikes me that our obsession with control has only amplified in the centuries since Mason was writing. Her steam and coal powered industries have now been replaced by silicon and computers, but the desire for total, frictionless control touches almost every aspect of our lives. It (mis)shapes our posture to our bodies so mysteriously prone to decay; to the earth so mysteriously elusive of our grasp; to each other so mysteriously knowable yet in possession of an inner life we can never enter. Even to God, a Being so mysteriously and profoundly Other that he has no name or image that might contain him.
If education is not a system, or machine, what is it like? For Mason its a method that is paradoxically simple because it works “with the grain” of a child, yet also almost unfathomably difficult because it requires “constant watchfulness” (10). In this sense it is much like gardening, something I (and generations of my family) love to do. In one sense gardening is easy, but the work is 90 percent perception. What needs pruning? When? How should I best top-dress the soil? What can I do to prepare for winter? How do these plants interact with each other?
To a much more significant degree, Mason’s image of a teacher is that of the constant gardener. One who is bound to a local community not just of generalized “persons,” but of real, living boys and girls, with names, histories, contexts, appetites, abilities… The teacher is one who knows her garden, and just when—and more importantly, when not—to intervene with a lesson. A teacher is one who has mastered the “masterly inactivity"1 that defines the best gardeners, bee keepers, botanists, and naturalists.
Only a teacher who has mastered the art of seeing can undertake the proper craft of an education that is ALL ABOUT SEEING. Home Education is simply dripping with references to sight, perception, watchfulness, attentiveness…
What this means for moral formation will be the focus of my next installment. I hope.
“Masterly Inactivity” is actually a foreign policy term that Mason borrows from Sir John Lawrence (1811 – 1879), a British imperial statesman and Viceroy to India. During the first Afghan War (1839 – 1842), Lawrence articulated policy of “masterly inactivity” in order to avoid unnecessary entanglements and complications and to counter earlier policies of intervention. This should not be a mere footnote, I understand, but a more problematic “reality” of Mason’s context was how much education—particulraly English education—was tied to the colonial projects of the Victorian age, and the colonial assumptions that equate civilization, culture, human-ness with English culture and traditions. Indeed, the “gardening” langauge can be very troubling in how it gets used to “cultivate the wilds” of Africa and India.