Through the Mind to the Heart: Integrating the Patterns of Education
Patterns for Life audio Chapter 2
Chapter 2 of Patterns for Life: An Orthodox Reflection on Charlotte Mason Education
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As persons, we are all born with the possibility of cultivating good or evil. Therefore, we are responsible for helping our children to train their minds (similarly to the way we would train their bodies) toward the good — toward health. The primary way we begin to do this is through the use of story, which trains and cultivates the imagination to recognize and pursue what is beautiful. We surround ourselves with beauty in church, and often at home. We should also fill our minds with beauty.
In order to nourish the mind we have to move away from the idea that test scores and other metrics are the right measure of success or failure. Worldly success is not what we’re after — we’re after the nourishment of a healthy mind.
But who gets to decide what will nourish our minds, or the minds of our children? This brings up the question of authority. We have to think long and carefully about what authority it (and what it isn’t), as well as what it means to wield it and what it means for a person under authority to obey.
Similarly we have to think about how a child learns to choose obedience and we have to teach our children that the choice to obey actually lies within their power, because they each hold authority over their own selves. Most children figure that out pretty quickly, but our part in this is to help them see how good it is to choose to be teachable (docile). For our children to use this self-authority they have to learn how to pay attention to the right things.
We don’t get to control the outcome of their decisions. We train, we guide, we correct, we teach — but they are the ones doing the growing and the learning and we often have to be patient and lower our expectations as we teach them how to live up to the high standards we have set.
Some things to think about:
What does it mean to nourish the mind? How can stories help with this?
Why are standardized metrics an insufficient way to assess mental nourishment?
What does it mean for us to have authority over our children? What does it mean for them to be under our authority? How does the way it is described in the chapter differ from behavior modification or manipulation?
What does it mean to have high standards and low expectations?
Were there other ideas that stood out to you in this chapter?