Let Us Attend: The Power of a Gaze
Patterns for Life Audiobook, chapter 14
Critical thinking is universally touted as one of the most important outcomes of a good education, and for good reason. The ability to take in information and then to understand what it means how it can be used is without doubt an important skill. There is a continual push to teach critical thinking skills to children, and countless new methods and gimmicks dangle in front of us, promising to deliver that ever-elusive skill to our students. When we are used to seeing all the bells and whistles attached, it can be hard to believe that critical thinking is actually easy to teach, and even harder to believe that it is really not the point in the first place.
Patterns for Life, chapter 14
The content below was originally paywalled.
In this chapter we explore Charlotte Mason’s principle about narration, or telling back, but before we can even start with narration, we have to understand what it means to pay attention. [We did not address this in chapter 14, but, living as we do in an age of distraction, many of us have seen our attention spans decrease over time because of the nature of the things we do and often because of the devices we use. None of us like to face this, but it’s important that we do, so that we can also be deliberate about trying to undo the damage, both in ourselves and our children].
The first thing to keep in mind is that narration depends on the reader’s ability to pay attention to what they have read. This is vital to understand because we can push, and push, and push to get through a predetermined amount of material, but without attention all that effort ends up being mostly a waste of time and effort.
Keeping lessons short is helpful in cultivating attention, as is limiting ourselves to a single reading before narrating. (Important note: this idea of a single reading should not be misunderstood to mean that we never re-read anything. It simply means that we try to narrate after one reading, before going back over the material again.)
The rest of the chapter draws out the relational aspects of paying attention — the way we relate to ideas historically, through repetition, and through the embodiment of ideas. By learning to pay attention we can step outside of our own experiences and enlarge our understanding of people in other places and times. By committing words to heart we increase our capacity to relate to the knowledge we encounter, and by learning to embody abstractions we deepen our ability to make connections and observations. Once again, we see Charlotte Mason’s 12th principle at work: “Education is the science of relations”, showing the interconnectedness of all our endeavors.
Some things to think about:
How has narration played out in your home? Have you ever had trouble with it?
If you have younger children and haven’t started yet, how do you expect it to play out?
Why is it important to emphasize memory? Why does it matter what we memorize, and how? How does memory help us to relate?
Where does embodiment fit into the way we relate to knowledge? How is that idea worked out in an area like math? How about in other areas?