Reading through the book Towards a Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason, I learned that learning for the sake of learning alone is enough to educate a child. Parents and educators do not need to provide external motivators so that a child would be enticed to study and learn. I now live by her words:
Therefore, we are limited to three educational instruments--the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the presentation of living ideas. The P.N.E.U. Motto is: "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life."
I have written my take on the atmosphere of environment. Homeschooling does not mean to literally bring the school home. The entire world is the child's school. There is no need to make the school room at home look like a school at all. I also talked about the discipline of habit. There are so many things that we need to note about habit formation, you can check out my other blogs about it.
Today, I read through the "presentation of living ideas." It took me a long time to wrap my head around this idea. My main question was what do presentation of living ideas mean? What are living ideas?
My thoughts about kids before was they are blank slates, a vessel that needs to be filled with all the knowledge, a clay that needs to be molded into the person we wish for them to be. But it turns out, children are definitely not any of those. They are born persons and their brains are a powerful living organism that feeds on ideas. Living ideas.
Ideas ignite inspiration on children. It satisfies children's curiosity. It grows on them, strikes them, it impresses them. Ideas do not only stay in their minds, it also affects their emotions. It makes them care, and love, and hate. And more importantly, it inspires them to formulate their opinions.
When we read a living book about Jose Rizal's life, my daughter remembered how Pepe was struck by a guardia civil when he forgot to bow to them. She then related it to another story we read that was about the Japanese occupation when the protagonist of the story was hit by a kempeitai when the boy forgot to bow to the Japanese soldier. Those stories and ideas in the living books we read are awakening her patriotism, the idea of justice and equality, respect, and so much more in the heart of my little girl.
I remember reading about these things on the textbooks I had when I was in gradeschool. I just memorized the meanings of guardia civil, makapili, and other terms, answered my exams, then moved on to the next topics. Watching my kid become passionate about what Juan Luna did to his wife, it made me feel a bit jealous. Because I was presented with dry, broken-down, tiny bits of facts to memorize while she is right now enjoying a full feast of the banquet of ideas from the living books we are reading.
Living books are basically inspiring and engaging books that is written by an expert passionate about the topic and is usually in literary form. One thing I noticed about living books is that the author tells the whole story, keeping their readers' attention from start to end. And it is important that the book be read from start to finish without skipping a chapter or cherry-picking a topic. The living books we read about Luna, Rizal, Bonifacio, Gabriela Silang humanized these people. Those living books gave the reader a full understanding of the humanity of these heroes. It showed that even the best people in history also make wrong choices, had a crappy childhood, had perfect lives but still managed to get mangled in sticky situations.
We are studying nature not through memorizing terms or parts of the plants but by carefully and mindfully observing nature itself, focusing on the ideas like how the eagle fly higher than the trees and hornbills just perch from tree to tree, not just reading dry facts about how long an eagle's wing span is. A kid's attention span isn't that long. 15-20 minutes is already too much, but with these living books, my kid is always wanting for more on each story that we read.
Now, the last tool that CM mentioned is the presentation of living ideas. I like to focus on the word presentation for a minute. My role as a teacher in our homeschooling journey is to simply present the living ideas - wide variety of ideas, a banquet if you may - and my kid's role is to digest all the she can. Whenever we do study time, my main task is to read the stories aloud to her. She mostly does the narration to show what she learned and understood about it. Then I ask her questions like "What do you think about.... or Which character do you relate to the most? or If you were in that story, would you have done things differently, why or why not?
My focus is to present to her as many ideas from great minds as possible. She is learning things from great minds like Shakespeare, Aesop, Alexander the Great, Jose Rizal, Beethoven, Giotto, and so much more. And all I needed to do is to read their books to her, and she is the one eating up those ideas, helping her develop a healthy mindset towards education.
So far, using these three tools, the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the presentation of living ideas, have made our homeschooling journey a lot more enjoyable than any other methods of learning we tried. Sure, we are reading a lot of books. But isn't that much better than to just read and memorize dry facts that does not satisfy the curiosity and does not feed the soul?
