Ep. 05: How Littles Learn (with Alec Bianco!)
Show Notes
Introduction: Education is a path to participating in Spiritual Life.
The classical tradition is a holistic, humane approach to education.
“It should be defined more in the context of a spiritual reality. And that reality, as we call it, is the spiritual life. It is the Divine. That’s real. And then this world is a beautiful taste of what is to come.”
“There are these moments in time… when the divine comes down to us and we get to meet Christ in that moment.”
In that kind of moment, the Greek word for time is
Kairos: eternal time, the time that God is in; the Alpha and the Omega
The time we normally live in is
Chronos: chronological minutes, hours, days
“What’s the beautiful thing about classical education is that when you focus on poetic learning, mimetic learning, on dialectic or socratic learning, and contemplative you begin to see a movement from chronos into kairos. A movement from this earthly time into the divine time, the eternal time. And that is all we can hope for for our children: to meet Christ face-to-face. Like the little children that he says, ‘Come to me.’ That’s what we want for our little kids.”
“The goal of a classical education is the salvation of our students, and it’s by the grace of Christ that that is accomplished. And we can aid in that, (we can) make… their souls more fertile ground, to receive His message by giving them opportunities to think in the Divine, in the divine time, outside of this earthly time.”
“Kids naturally understand the infinite. And then they grow up and they start understanding the finite. And then the goal is to eventually go back around to the infinite.”
“I don’t want to create a false dichotomy between work and play, between sacred and secular. Those things exist in harmony… We are to live in the world, but be not of it. That’s what Christ says. And I think that is the key: how do you create that harmonic living? One of the greatest joys of being a classical education parent is that you get to participate in that journey with your children.”
“Children can understand these bigger concepts, but they're going to understand them in the way they can, which is through their own life experiences or through stories they’ve read or watched.”
“It’s beautiful to see the minds of children thinking in every little thing. As an exhortation: children are capable, far more capable, than we understand or are willing to admit. Again, why I said that children naturally understand the infinite. They don’t express ideas in the way we might want or expect, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have some kind of understanding. And that is why poetic knowledge is so critical, as an understanding, which is completely absent from modern education.
There is no concept of poetic knowledge or poetic learning or poetic teaching, it’s completely absent. Because it doesn’t exist for them. Because they don’t admit of it. It’s all mechanical. It’s all part of the ‘industry’ and ‘the machine’ learning. The fact that we, the human brain, invented computers and then we turned around and said that the brain is just a computer shows both our simplicity and dullness as humans. And also, the fact that we are arrogant. God gave us something that far transcends a computer. Such that we were able to create the things we are using to record this podcast. And then we turn around and think that we are not even as smart as it? It’s just crazy. And we do that with our children on a constant basis. We do not take them seriously, we do not respect them. And that is a shame. We need to have more respect for our children as little Image-Bearers and as humans, fully human. This is the point that Charlotte Mason makes abundantly clear from the beginning of some of her works. These are humans. They are people, persons, who are capable of understanding and learning. And in many ways, if we were truly willing to humble ourselves, (they) are far wiser than us in many ways.”
“(A child’s) sense of the infinite can drive us mad… friction can occur where we are trying to maintain commitments and responsibilities and they’re just trying to bathe in the infinite pool of cosmic life. They live in Reality. We don’t live in Reality, we live in this symbolic world. There is this famous philosopher and thinker, Jacob Kline. He was the dean of St. John’s College in the 30’s and 40’s, and he helped establish the Great Books program there. One of the things he talks about is this idea that modern man has an algebraic mind. And what he is referring to Descarte, Descarte’s distinction between mind and body, between matter and thought. He… traces the history of mathematics to today, to see that we have actually unconsciously taken that idea to an extreme, such that our minds actually think algebraically. And what he means is symbolically, in the sense that we are completely disattached from the real world. Everything to us is a symbol of something else. And this is very contrary to the concept of poetic knowledge. Not that there is no such thing as abstractions or no such thing as symbols. Rather that that is not our first encounter. Children, their first encounter is with the real world. They struggle with abstractions, with symbols… An example of that is counting. They think in counting on fingers or counting apples or counting a number of objects. But even that is difficult. If they aren’t all the same thing, they find it difficult to count them. You know, it needs to be six cups. It can’t be a cup and a pencil and an eraser and leftover sandwich for breakfast. It becomes difficult for them because that’s the next level of abstraction.”
Recommend: Poetic Knowledge by James Taylor. It was a doctoral thesis, so it’s not super “readable” in an easy, understandable way. So take time with it, read one page at a time, and ideally read it with friends.
Poetic Knowledge: learning through a sensory emotional experience with the physical world.
“The idea is that poetic knowledge is the concept of learning through experience and learning through the world that we live in.”
“I want to be careful as we go into this to not suggest that children learn in stages. This is sort of a pervasive myth within classical education. I think it’s a misunderstanding of Dorothy Sayers’ essay. I don’t think she’s actually suggesting that children are that robotic. So just to clarify, these are not stages. Although they do sort of interestingly track with age.”
“An illustration might be to think of additions to a home… You're adding rooms. So it’s the same structure, but you're adding rooms and you’re expanding it. So it doesn’t create this sense of reliance upon the other in order for it to occur. Because even in Taylor’s explanation of things, you’ll see that mimetic teaching and poetic learning seem to coincide to the point that some people in classical education argue that they’re the same thing. But I personally don’t think that is correct. I think that there is a distinction, but I think they’re extremely harmonically related. And that’s why I like the idea of expansion. Because poetic knowledge and mimetic knowledge, and… dialectic knowledge. All three of these are related. And in some ways overlap, and interplay, and intermix, cross-pollinate. They’re all interrelated. But that being said, there is a sense in which poetic knowledge comes before all of them. And I think the way it comes before all of them is in the sense that one, we see it. A baby is born and its first experience is with the mother and her face and her eyes… The eyes are really, really important. Eye contact. Skin contact. All of these things, and these are extremely connatural, biologically imminent, they’re experiences that happen to the child and to the parent. There’s a huge change that occurs when you have your first child. You now look at the world very differently, with a sympathetic perspective of the child…. These things are all connected to this idea of poetic knowledge.”
James Taylor gives this portion from David Copperfield as an example of the difference between poetic and facts-based education in a little girl, who grew up around horses her whole life, and as a result had hands-on experience with them, versus a little boy who has memorized that horses are, “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.”
“Poetic knowledge is this summative experience of the world that exists in… this sympathetic knowledge. I think that that’s a really beautiful way of putting it because it implies a sort of soul-to-soul experience.”
“The senses are important here with poetic knowledge. We are sensory creatures. We were made out of the dust. That’s important to remember. It really, really is. I really want to stress that. Because modern education, again, because of our reliance on technology, we have convinced ourselves that humans are just walking computers, walking robots. We are abstraction machines. Our rationality, our reason, exists purely in the abstract realm. Our material bodies are just a happy accident. And that is the underlying problem because why do you think that there are so many people today who are rejecting scientific notions of what a body is? Or rejecting scientific notions of what a man is or a woman is. It’s because our education has told them that those things don’t matter. Only our reason matters, our intellect and the two are not connected. Again, it’s this idea that a Cartesian split between mind and body… it seems to me evident that these are connected and related. These community and social issues that we are seeing surrounding the body and men and women and what those things are and what they mean, is related to the fact that we have displaced the importance of the material world. And so I don’t have to honor this. I mean, God calls it a temple. But we don’t call it that. It’s just a house for a computer. But that’s no good, because it is a temple. And if we don’t treat it as such, then we don’t have to respect it. And I don’t have to follow rules of what I should do with my body, and with whom should I do it, these things.”
“A quotation I read recently from a monk is, ‘Child care is the most beautiful prayer.’”
“It’s not just the daily grind, it’s prayer. Going back to what I was talking about at the beginning, this idea of sacred time… Recognizing that there is such a thing as sacred time, as eternal time, as divine time. There’s also sacred space and sacred matter…. And poetic knowledge is the encapsulation of all those things. This idea that we need to create sacred spaces if we don’t have them. And we need to see sacred spaces when they are there.”
“I’m a big believer in boundaries, that one of the biggest things for little children, one of the main things they need to learn in life, this is the parents primary responsibility more than anything else, is all your doing is teaching them boundaries. That’s it, and then what they do within those boundaries or if they cross them is something they have to reckon with as individuals. It’s exactly what God did in the garden. He created a whole garden and gave them a boundary. ‘Do not touch this one tree’. And then Adam and Eve exercised their free will, ate of the tree, and then they had to deal with the consequences of it. But all God did was create the one boundary and establish that so that harmony was established. So boundaries, rules, are not bad. And when parents make rules sometimes we think we are being bad guys by making the rules. And sometimes the kids think we are the bad guys for making the rules. But in reality what we are trying to do is just establish the walls in which the garden resides and outside is the wilderness that we are trying to protect them from.”
“Laying that framework and that foundation early on, saying no to the body in the sense of no to these snacks now for a better yes, which is… dinner and then dessert... Which translates to, if they fully understand it and it’s taught incarnationally over time, then eventually that will translate to I am going to say no to this person to save myself for marriage, which is a more beautiful good. So that’s the idea, that you’re creating these boundaries… to say no for a better yes later. And it is a better yes, it really is.”
Mimetic Knowledge: learning through the imitation of ideas or skills.
“Mimetic learning and teaching is that the next step. If through poetic knowledge you’re understanding the concrete nature of children and their learning and the fact that they need sacred time and sacred space, then (this) quickly and inevitable leads to this next sense of learning, which is through imitation. They coincide, they happen simultaneously. But in another sense this sort of happens later. Because mimetic learning, is also in many ways concerned with the abstract, it’s getting more abstract. So you’re reading a story about a hero, like Aeneas, or Lucy or any other story you can think of. The Little Prince. You’re reading these stories of these heroes and then your children want to embody them. And that’s the idea. And I love that word embody, you’re taking this idea and your putting it on, making it your own. That’s something mimetic learning is chiefly concerned with. It can exist with ideas, it can exist on a more practical level with skills.”
Recommendation: The Lost Tools of Writing
“(Mimetic learning) is not just in this sort of idyllic realm of ideas and fairy tales, it can also be extremely practical in the classroom. But the principles inform the practical, so we need to think about this idea of what Christ says, which is to be like Him. And to follow Him. So we follow Him by imitating Him. You see that so poorly with parents. You know, we struggle… they’re going to imitate us and sometimes they’re going to do bad things because we do bad things. But they’ll also do good things if we do good things, and try to provide them a feast of good things.”
“We are given these opportunities to learn and to practice these virtues, but the thing is our children, our students, they will be given these opportunities. And if they haven’t been given examples of how to deal with those opportunities, then it’s going to be more difficult for them. And that’s why we give them stories of heroes… early on we need to be laying that foundation.”
“Our little ones can understand ideas very well, we just have to remember to meet them where they are at, which is what Christ did.
Dialectic Knowledge: learning through a conversation aimed at wrestling towards the Truth, turning from false belief and orienting yourself towards the True.
“Dialectic is not just sitting around a classroom table having a seminar-style discussion. It can take that form, but dialectic or socratic teaching and learning is fundamentally about the metanoia, which is this turning back from false belief or opinion and trying to orient yourself toward the True. That comes through discussion because it’s impossible if you’re just lectured at to wrestle with an idea and to critique oneself, and the idea, and wrestle with it to find out what the truth is.
“Truth is the… thing you’re trying to get to. And you have your ideas about it and he has his ideas about it. And you’re wrestling to try to get to the truth. So that’s what dialectic is primarily concerned with, and it takes it’s best form in conversation. Little kids can do that. You can have that, and it’s really so important that you’re asking your kids. Don’t always tell them the answer, don’t always do everything for them. Watch them, let them struggle… we have to let them because if we constantly jump in they don’t have the dialectical experience. They just get it told at them, and then you have no way of knowing if they’re actually wrestling with it. And so that happens in physical processes but it also happens with ideas. And so, if your child says something like, ‘Mommy, why is the sky blue?’ My first reaction would be to say, ‘Well why do you think it is?’ Because I want to hear what they have to say. And I want to hear how their mind thinks through a question like that. More often than not they’re just going to drop it because they’re just talking and they actually don’t care at all what the answer is. And that’s ok, and you can just move on with your day. But if they are, by asking, you’ll actually know if they’re interested. But you wouldn’t have known if you just told them the answer.”
Contemplative Knowledge: learning through participation in a life of prayer.
“Sometimes you’ll hear, ‘Well, what does it mean to say we are created in the image of God?’ ‘Well, it means that we have reason.’ And I don’t think that is a fully accurate answer, although to some degree it is true. We have more reason than a dog. But it has far more to do with the fact that we have a nouetic understanding, which the animals don’t do. That is our ability to, what St. Peter says in his epistles, that we can become like God. And then St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians, the more knowledge we have of the Spirit of God, the more knowledge we are given. Alot of the church fathers and the saints of the church throughout history have talked about this idea illustrated in the stories of the lives of the saints and others, that there is a kind of knowledge that is gifted to those who have dedicated their lives to prayer. Who just completely empty themselves out, kenosis is the Greek for that, empty themselves out and let Christ and His Spirit come. And then that gift is the gift, the knowledge that comes as a gift from that. So I call that contemplative knowledge.”
Recommend: Leisure the Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper
“We need to give space for spiritual work and prayer… you can find that in the little things like soothing your child at night or in the early morning with a cup of coffee. In all kinds of places. It can be while you’re doing the dishes, it can be while you’re pulling weeds, etc. The other sort of main thing, and I think it is very closely connected to poetic knowledge because it’s not quantifiable- contemplative knowledge or spiritual knowledge, whatever you want to call it. It is not quantifiable. Really none of this stuff is, not according to modern educational assessment metrics. It’s quantifiable in the sense that Christ says. A good tree bears good fruit. That’s the assessment we are looking for. The main assessment, fundamentally, if I could exhort any classical educator is, ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ That’s the assessment we are looking for.’”
“Contemplative, spiritual knowledge is a kind of knowledge that is gifted to us, and we see it. We all can think of a person who we’ve thought, ‘wow, that is a spiritual person.’ A woman or a man, might be your pastor, an old lady at church, might be your dad… you met them and you can see it. You know exactly what Christ is talking about a good tree bearing good fruit, you can see it in that person. It just spills out, the Spirit of God in them. It’s something you have to work at, it’s the hardest of all of them, you have to work so hard at it.”
“It’s a worthy pursuit to dedicate your life to prayer, fasting, and setting the world aside, but there are also so many of us who live in the world, and that’s what we are called to do, we are called to tend the garden. The first people on the planet, that’s what they did. Husband and wife, raised their children, called to tend the garden, it’s exactly what we are doing. Lord willing, we can do it well.”
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Find Alec on Twitter: @alecmbianco
“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” (Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac)