The Learner is one who attends with interest to the lesson

My title is from John Milton Gregory’s “Laws” for teaching.  Attention in education falls into many categories, all of which are quite basic to the formation of an excellent student.  Without the ability to be attentive, the student is not able to learn.  I continue to think about attention and want to list a few connected but perhaps somewhat unordered thoughts I have had about this issue of attention, especially as it applies to this law.

I have taught this lesson along with its other six laws to teachers for a decade or more now.  It amazes me how often people view this law more from what it implies about teachers than what it says about its stated subject: the Learner.  Often teachers will take this law to imply that they have to keep the student’s attention no matter what.  This burden can make them clowns if they are not careful.  But the law here is applied to learners, not the teacher.  Certainly the teacher must be both wise and virtuous, which would include considering how best to focus and keep the attention of the student, but that is not the focus of this particular law.

The learner must attend.  Gregory qualifies that attention with the phrase, “with interest” so as to make it clear what the proper motivation for correct attention should be.  It is not that the lesson is simply titillating or “entertaining” or novel, but rather that the student should have interest in what is being studied.  With that in mind, I would offer the following thoughts to students.

1. It is your responsibility to attend to a lesson if you wish to be educated.  While the teacher can certainly aid you in this task by being more or less “in tune” with you, it remains up to you to be attentive.
2. The main aid to fulfilling this duty lies in your interest.  I certainly understand that in youth you may not desire to study all that others “make” you study, but both you and they must deal with this fact by seeking the point of interest inherent in learning, not by any other false motivation.  Real learning can only occur when there is attention of interest present.
3. Real learning comes from interested attention and offers its own reward.  Another way of saying this would be that only the truly curious can learn, and it is satisfied curiosity that is the proper reward of this kind of study.
4. All this means that you as a student must cultivate interest in learning in order to be attentive.  A lack of such interest will most likely result in your being distracted, bored, or “somewhere else” during a lesson.
5. Interest in anything is directly related to understanding how it is desirable or important to me.  Thus part of being a student is cultivating in oneself a studied understanding of why my studies are of import to me.  This is very hard for someone who has no faith in God, but if a student does have that faith, then the interest in that God’s world, work, and purpose is almost assumed, but still necessarily cultivated or neglected.

Cultivating interest in a lesson is directly related to cultivating an interest in life lived before the Face of God. The Learner is one who attends with interest to the lesson because he is seeking to satisfy his curiosity or “wonder” about the One Who has made him and has a purpose for his life.

And When We Pray, Be Attentive

Prayer is a fundamental means by which we develop “attention” in the Christian life.  Prayer has often seemed rather perfunctory in most Christian schools.  There are two ditches here.  The first is the ditch I feel most are in: wherein prayer is tacked on to the normal activities as a spiritual thing that ought to be done.  We pray at the right moments and even then in rather quick and routine ways.  The other ditch that some administrators seem to use as justification for being in Ditch A is the danger that some will pray all the time and thus defeat the educational purpose of school.  I have never seen this in action, though I have seen some folks with one wheel off the road in this direction.  When fully in the ditch, the praying would be the bulk of the activity in the school.

Obviously I believe there is a middle road somewhere in there.  Prayer is fundamental to the Christian life.  If the purpose of a Christian school is to train up students who walk in wisdom and virtue, then it must traffic often in prayer.  My purpose here is not to build a theology of prayer, or even a tract on the discipline of prayer.  Others have done so way better than I could.  But when you read such things, it does strike me often that one of our sincerest problems in modern education (attention “deficit”) is something clearly addressed in a proper practice of prayer.  This is not an egregious ploy to use prayer as an educational technique.  It is the strong belief that if we do what we ought to do, some of our current educational issues will no longer be as pronounced.

Much of modern educational pedagogy belittles and moves far away from any exercise that would improve a child’s attention.  This is in part because we don’t believe attention to be a skill but rather a “talent” that some have and others can’t build in themselves.  This is pure educational hog wattle.  Attention is a discipline, a forming of a frame of mind.  It is attainable by anyone who sets their mind to it in a proper way.  This is where prayer comes in for the Christian.

True Christian prayer is an attuning of the heart to its Maker.  It is a prolonged attentive meditation upon oneself and one’s God.  It can be as short as a single sentence, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.”  But the implications and intentions of such a prayer, when properly attended to, would take us much longer than the few seconds necessary to simply say it.  The attention to such things, when habituated in the disciple, becomes a discipline that grows and expands and deepens.  Many moderns have decried the “vain repetition” of such things as “the Jesus Prayer.”  Saying the same sentence over and over, or the Lord’s Prayer, or other such meditational prayers, is seen as “vain, i.e. Useless.”  But a repetition need not be vain if it is accompanied with some benefits that remove it from vanity.  A careful attentive repetition or formulaic prayer can actually be part of entering into a deeper understanding of the truths contained in these short prayers.  Imagine if each of our students actually believed each phrase of the Jesus Prayer!

So my point can be summarized rather simply here:  What we do in a school forms what our students love.  If we enter into real habits of prayer, that avoid the “simpleton” ditch A and the “overkill of activity” ditch B mentioned above, but rather pray as our Lord taught us to pray, we will not only build a love of prayer into our student’s lives, but they will also have the blessed skill of attention formed in them as well.

Of course there will be issues of how to do this well, the time necessary, and other such obstacles.  But when has the right thing ever been the easiest or most popular thing?

Prolonged Attention on Attention

I have been putting a lot of my attention on attention lately. Some things I have been reading, including Scripture, and some things I have been doing, including my current home school experience with my fourteen year old son, have brought many things to my mind about how central attention is to education. So below are some questions and areas that I want to develop, each with at least one blog, maybe more. It outlines where I will be thinking and writing on this blog for the next month or two. As always, your input and comments are welcome.

Education and Attention: Questions and Observations

1. Prayer is a fundamental means by which we develop “attention” in the Christian life.

2. Attention in education falls into many categories, all of which are quite basic to the formation of an excellent student.

3. Attention to detail is a key to success in many areas of life, academics not the least.

4. Attention to arguments is crucial to communicating well.

5. Attention is basic to observation, which is basic to learning. Seeing the whole of something well is necessary to understanding anything.

6. Prolonged attention to an object is basic to fully seeing, hearing, or knowing that object.

7. A deficit in attention is a real roadblock to learning. From whence does such come, can it be overcome, and what might we do to change the growing tide of attention issues in education?

8. How does the teacher attend to her student, and what constitutes bona fide attention on the part of the student toward his teacher?

9. How are attention and memory related?

Well, that should not take me more than a few years to work through!

Nanny State vs. Farm Kids

For the last 100 years or so highly insignificant people (usually short in stature and virtue) have been arguing in the teacher’s colleges of our land about how to use the mandatory and governmentally controlled Department of Education to bring about a new Social Order.  If you don’t believe me, simply read Diane Ravitch’s carefully documented history of this endeavor in her book, Left Back (Simon & Schuster, 2000).  Now I read of a new tactic being implemented by the Socialist wannabes, and I quote, “The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.”  You can read the full article here.

Nanny-ists fear the farm and especially the education implicit in farm work.  Kids who grow up on the farm and work there pick up a lot of wisdom that makes them Nanny State resistant.  Even the modern agribusiness factories that are falsely called farms will teach some of these things.  The following are just a few of the things that come immediately to mind:

1. You reap what you sow.  Not, “you reap what others sow,” or “you sow so the government can reap,” or worst, “everything just is; no one sows, no one reaps, it just appears.”
2. Good things take time, and the best things are generational, therefore have the long view always in front of you.  Even the “conservatives” in Washington seem to want us all to forget this lesson of the farm.
3. Consuming what you produce trumps consuming stuff that comes from unknown sources ten ways to each Tuesday.  This kind of thinking leads directly to self-reliance and independence, which is a silver bullet for the vampire-like Nanny State.
4. Working as a family makes light work of it.  The formation of local family oriented communities will kill any collectivist Nanny State – what do we need those perfumed dandies in Washington for?
5. You can live a great life of significance and security without ever going to college.  The Nanny State desperately needs to indoctrinate its corpus (the People) by convincing all of them to go for four years to a school where they will be taught how much they need their government (including the money that government loans them to go to the university, thereby enslaving them in debt for the first ten years or better once they “graduate”).

I could go on, but I bet most of you reading this have thought of ten other lessons even before getting to this last sentence (that is what the comment box is for below).

Breaking Away from the Educational Hobgoblins

Many of you know how much I value, read, and love what Wendell Berry has to say to our day.  In particular, I am convinced that if we sought to approach education the way he is calling us to approach farming we would turn around the dismal state of our current schools within a generation or two.  But the problem is that to do so would require a major overhaul of most of our pet paradigms.  Two recent things I have read by Berry have impressed the enormity of this vision to change how we educate upon me.  So I have a couple of blogs to post here, first this one “the hobgoblins of our schools” and later one designed to give some practical action steps for dealing with these hobgoblins at an individual and personal level.

Actually, as we know, the new commercial education is fun for everybody. All you have to do in order to have or to provide such an education is to pay your money (in advance) and master a few simple truths:

1. Educated people are more valuable than other people because education is a value-adding industry.
2. Educated people are better than other people because education improves people and makes them good.
3. The purpose of education is to make people able to earn more and more money.
4. The place where education is to be used is called “your career.”
5. Anything that cannot be weighed, measured, or counted does not exist.
6. The so-called humanities probably do not exist. But if they do, they are useless. But whether they exist or not or are useful or not, they can sometimes be made to support a career.
7. Literacy does not involve knowing the meanings of words, or learning grammar, or reading books.
8. The sign of exceptionally smart people is that they speak a language that is intelligible only to other people in their “field” or only to themselves. This is very impressive and is known as “professionalism.”
9. The smartest and most educated people are the scientists, or they have already found solutions to all our problems and will soon find solutions to all the problems resulting from their solutions to all the problems we used to have.
10. The mark of a good teacher is that he or she spends most of his or her time doing research and writes many books and articles.
11. The mark of a good researcher is the same as that of a good teacher.
12. A great university has many computers, a lot of government and corporation research contracts, a winning team, and more administrators than teachers.
13. Computers make people even better and smarter than they were made by previous thingamabobs. Or if some people prove incorrigibly wicked or stupid or both, computers will at least speed them up.
14. The main thing is, don’t let children get in the way of being nice to children. Children are our Future. Spend plenty of money on them but don’t stay home with them and get in their way. Don’t give them work to do; they are smart and can think up things to do on their own. Don’t teach them any of that awful, stultifying, repressive, old-fashioned morality. Provide plenty of TV, microwave dinners, day care, computers, computer games, cars. For all this, they will love and respect us and be glad to grow up and pay our debts.
15. A good school is a big school.
16. Disarm the children before you let them in.

From “the Joy of Sales Resistance” (preface to Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, pp. xii – xiv)

A Major Player in the Overthrow of the PC Police

I have had the pleasure of doing some work for a new venture online called FREE THINK U that is now at a point where it is open for the public and thus I am trying to make my crew of friends, former students and colleagues aware of it and perhaps even using it.

The link for it is:  http://freethinku.org/#

Look it over and make use of it, pass it on.  It only takes a spark…

Lenten Education (What Should School Make You Give Up?)

So much of what I learn from Lent I learn through visceral, physical experience.  The meditations and prayers and liturgy are there, and worthy of much consideration, but in the end, every year, it’s the physical aspect that does the most for me.  Simply put, it’s the denial.  This is incredibly un-American or at least not PC these days to talk about purposely denying oneself anything that is desirable and legal.  And yet that is the point; that there is something better that only comes when several “allowable things” are foregone for the pursuit of that one better thing.

And this is where I bring Lent into my blog on education.  The modern educational world is awash with a lot of distraction and delightfully “allowable” ideas and the like.  What could possibly be wrong with more tests, new technology, IB and AP programs, another sport brought on board, etc.?  Only that all these things might dilute or even crowd out the best things in a school, that is all.  “Multum non multa” has become “more, more, and more.”

More than half way through this Lent, I think I already know what I will give up next year: Facebook.  What could be wrong with “social media” such as Facebook?  You catch up with old friends, you get to “like” all kinds of good things, and you can spend an hour flying about the world and at the end feel “really caught up” until you realize that Facebook just stole an hour that could have otherwise really profited you in the here (your locality) and now (your real life).  Something fully deserving to be considered good has just stolen what might have been better or even the best from you.

Before you jump all over me and my Facebook analogy, realize, please, that it is meant to simply exemplify my point.  Lent shows us that otherwise perfectly fine things, once set aside, cause us to reconsider what is truly important, really eternal, actually worth it.  And that is what a good education should do as well.  It should make a student choose between the good, better, and finally choose the best.

Christian Kopff on The Death of Classical Education

http://www.imaginativeconservative.org/2012/03/greek-to-us-death-of-classical.html

Worth your time and consideration.

I never thought of using Princess Bride in this way. I love it!

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/lines-from-the-princess-bride-that-double-as-comments-on-freshman-composition-papers

One Hundred Percent or Ten Percent?

I have had the joy recently of working on various writing projects, which can only be done upon the back of research.  In my research, I have been reading Saul Alinsky’s work, Rules for Radicals.  One of his assertions to would-be-Community-Organizers is the notion that you shoot for the moon with your vision and then rest happy that you got folks to come a little bit more your way than if you had been more centrist with your “shot.”  He literally puts percentages too it, saying shoot for 100% of your vision and then be happy when you get 10%.  Setting aside the raw pragmatism of this stance, I am bothered by his being able to swallow less than a full realization of the vision.  But this is just where it gets slipper for me.

Let’s use the example of a vision I might have for a classical school.  My inner conversation sounds something like the following:

• Can you have a school that is halfway classical?  Is it all or nothing like being pregnant?
• Part of the difficulty that both Alinsky and myself may be working with is clarity of vision.  Just what is a classical school?  There seem to be as many definitions as there are visionaries.
• Even if a group of modern Americans can agree, at least initially, on a single clear vision of a school, will the surrounding culture support it with enough students, money, and other forms of “help” to allow it to come into being, and then once in being, to remain?

Perhaps you begin to see mud slide I am stuck in?  Is it better to be right and lonely, or a little more toward “right” and at least surrounded by partial supporters?  This needs a lot of discussion among the leaders of the CCE movement.  It needs a lot more discussion than technique or curriculum choices, I would suggest.