Yes, I know all the primary pages of my website need to be updated. Yes, I know I need to share a bit about upcoming plans and projects. I know all that, but I’m still making my first post in months a blog post about something completely out-of-the-blue, because education is the science of relations, and sometimes it’s messy and unorganized. But “take time to smell the roses,” right? And take time to share a fascinating painting most of us are unlikely to encounter.

My primary purpose for being in London, of course, was to conduct the “Large Room” seminar, and that was a wonderful day for everyone there, including myself. I had a few more days in London to see things, and of course the National Gallery was a don’t-miss visit. I have been there before, but my family had not, so most of our visit was focused on allowing them to see what they most wanted to see (Da Vinci paintings for my daughter, and all the Impressionists for my husband). I just wandered along behind them with no particular agenda of my own, but one painting arrested my attention and left me thinking about it for a long time afterward.

It’s kind of gruesome, but this was the painting:

It’s called “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” by Joseph Wright of Derby, and it is not the art/style that interested me, but the subject matter. A scientist, who looks for all the world like an archetypical “mad scientist” is performing a demonstration/experiment in which a bird in a globe is being subjected to a vacuum–all the air (or most of it) has been removed from the globe, and the bird is expiring. Science! Look at the attitudes of the people around him–the sensitive girls who are in obvious distress but are urged to look anyway, the youth who is working the bellows, but casts his eyes back to see, because he can’t suppress his fascination. There are the two young men watching intently, one of them holding a stop watch to measure the length of time the process takes. There is the older man with his head in hand, pondering something to himself, and that couple in the background who obviously have eyes only for each other and couldn’t care less about the whole thing. And that mad scientist? His hand is on the apparatus–the bird’s life in entirely in his hands–and he’s looking straight at you, the viewer, as if to ask, “and what do you think about all this?”

“All this” of course is science–new and fascinating, and educational, with so much potential to bring new knowledge and new technology into the world. This was painted in 1768, just on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution. The whole question of whether or not the knowledge to be gained by science is worth the price that has to be paid is asked in this picture. What should our attitude be?

I was captivated by it. I don’t think there is an easy or simple answer, and I don’t think the world has stopped asking this question yet. But I also don’t think it had ever occurred to me that the matter could be expressed by a painting.

So, of all the amazing paintings in the National Gallery, this is the one that caught my eye and gave me the most to think about. Not admire, exactly. The painting as a work of art didn’t even enter into my thoughts. It was the painting as an expression of an idea that made me stop and think and look. I don’t think you can ask much more of an afternoon at an art gallery than that.

Don’t you love it when the books talk to each other?

I’m still immersed in Habits of the Mind: Intellectual Life as a Christian Calling by James Sire. It’s a particular pleasure to read a book on this subject by a modern author who has a profoundly Biblical perspective on the life of the mind.

So when I read that virtue must be expressed in action, I think “That’s just what David Hicks said in Norms and Nobility.” When I read that acts of the conscious will form our character, I think, “That’s what Charlotte Mason said, and what Anne White focuses on in Minds More Awake!” And when Dr. Sire makes a special point of focusing on humility as vital to intellectual development, I even think, “That’s what I said in Consider This!” (Whew–I wasn’t veering wide of the mark after all.)

I particularly like this:

We simply can’t know what we can’t know unless someone who knows we can’t know tells us. God has done that, of course. He has told us that we cannot penetrate his mind to the depths.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the LORD.

…But there is little else he has told us we cannot know.

And I’m a little excited about what’s coming next, because he has promised to begin talking about how to practically go about becoming a thinker. And for that? Oh, that’s where the humility comes in. He gives us a little chart of (some) of the different kinds of intellectual virtues. They fall under four headings:

Acquisition virtues (passion for truth), such as inquisitiveness
Application virtues (passion for holiness), such as love and fortitude
Maintenance virtues (passion for consistency), such as patience
Communication virtues (compassion for others), such as clarity of expression

Each list includes only four or five key virtues, but only one virtue appears on all four lists–humility.

I am fascinated by a discussion about thinking and learning that devotes so much attention to the role of humility. This, I think, is a hard-won virtue, since the mere suspicion of achieving it is fraught with pride, and there we are, back at square one again. And yet, without that humility that makes us teachable, well…how are we going to learn all those things that are possible to know?

(links are affiliate links)

Upon further acquaintance (albeit still far from thorough), my opinion of John Henry Newman is improving. I was terribly disappointed by his thoroughly analytical approach to grammar. However, I’m getting a little better acquainted with him at second hand as I read through Habits of the Mind: Intellectual Life as a Christian Calling by James Sire.

Dr. Sire is a great admirer of Newman, and makes him the focus of his attempts to define Christian intellectualism. I’m not even halfway through the book, but this is one of those that you read slowly and mark up heavily. (I’m pretty sure marginalia counts as a contribution to the Great Conversation.)

Because Newman’s prose is typically Victorian, Sire is selective about what he quotes, and he gives us seven suggestive excerpts from Newman’s seminal work, The Idea of a University. Since I’m pretty comfortable with Victorian prose, the language isn’t really a problem.

What was fascinating to me was that every single one of the selected quotes, which are meant to convey the general overview of Newman’s ideas, is basically advocating synthetic thinking. Much more eloquently and thoroughly than that, however. Here are some of the snippets I underlined:

…when we not only learn, but refer what we learn to what we know already.

…a truly great intellect…is one which takes a connected view of old and new, past and present, far and near, and which has insight into the influence of all these, one on another.

It [intellect] possesses the knowledge, not only of things, but also of their mutual and true relations…

…so intimate is it with the eternal order of things…

…he observes how separate truths lie relative to each other…

I suppose Science and Philosophy, in their elementary idea, are nothing else but this habit of viewing, as it may be called, the objects which sense conveys to the mind, of throwing them into system, and uniting and stamping them with one form.

[Raciocination] is the great principle of order in our thinking; it reduces chaos into harmony…

I was really quite enamored, myself, with Newman’s thorough comprehension of synthetic thinking and all that it entails. James Sire says that these excerpts take his breath away, and asserts “They awaken our sleeping minds.”

Which immediately put me in mind of Anne White’s new book, Minds More Awake, which I reviewed here.

Charlotte Mason caught that vision of synthetic thinking which had been the province of intellectuals like John Henry Newman for centuries and devoted her whole life to bringing that vision to the sleeping minds of parents, teachers, and of course, children. James Sire lauds John Henry Newman, and rightly so, for awakening sleeping minds, but I think Charlotte Mason’s influence has been very little less, though her audience was ordinary folks, and not ivory-tower intellectuals. Certainly, I suspect Charlotte Mason continues to be more widely read than Newman in the 21st century. Although I suspect I will have to delve more deeply into Newman, eventually. Maybe after I finish James Sire’s book.

I have read all six volumes of Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series, and I have read them more than once. Even so, I have not read all of them from cover to cover recently. Since I spent most of the last year very engrossed in the sixth volume, A Philosophy of Education, because of Mind to Mind, I decided recently to read through another volume afresh, and so I began the second volume, Parents and Children, which I have read from but not through for a good while.

And there, almost right in the very middle, I found the clearest statement I can remember reading in which Charlotte Mason makes it plain, herself, that her philosophy of education is rooted in the past. If I ever have occasion to update or revise Consider This, I’ll be sure to include quotes from this section, and I’m sorry they are not there already.

(all quotes are from Chapter XII of Parents and Children)

Charlotte Mason laments, “Probably the chief source of weakness in our attempt to formulate a science of education is that we do not perceive that education is the outcome of philosophy. We deal with the issue and ignore the source.” That, of course, is her recognition that why we pursue education along certain lines is more important than how.

She makes reference to the tradition of studying Greek at the major universities and observes the fear which existed then that something was in danger of being lost, as there was a struggle in educational circles at that time between classical studies and scientific studies. But she is unafraid, because:

…we are beginning to recognise that education is the applied science of life, and that we really have existing material in the philosophy of the ages and the science of the day to formulate an educational code whereby we may order the lives of our children and regulate our own.

Looking backward…and looking forward. This quote really belongs somewhere in Consider This. But she goes further, and emphasizes the fact that educational practices are sound only when they rest solidly on a clear and comprehensive philosophy, and there are two main schools of thought which seek to dominate.

Will education be based upon the premise of naturalism, in which only the material considerations of brain will be given attention, or will education be based upon idealism, in which non-material ideas are given precedence? She has quite a lot to say about this, which I will not attempt to summarize, but if you know Charlotte Mason, you know where this is going to conclude.

You cannot have it both ways (which is why an eclectic mish-mash of philosophical ideas is ineffectual).

Either thought is a process of the material brain, one more ‘mode of motion,’ as the materialists contend, or the material brain is the agent of the spiritual thought, which acts upon it, let us say, as the fingers of a player upon the keys of an instrument.

She goes on to explain the the practical implications of this, and I will not repeat all of that here, but the chapter ends with a call for a unified, synthetic approach to knowledge which I can’t resist quoting.

We must introduce into the study of each science the philosophic spirit and method, general views, the search for the most general principles and conclusions. We must then reduce the different sciences to unity by a sound training in philosophy…

Yes, I really wish I had read this chapter before I wrote Consider This. It doesn’t say anything new, but it certainly does confirm everything I wrote there.

Well, tomorrow is the big day! I’m looking forward to finding out who the two winners are, and then seeing if there will be a couple more!

There’s still a little time left to share and post if you want to enter to win one of the free copies.

I did send out a number of review copies, and one of the those early readers posted a review today. Check it out! Her interaction with Mind to Mind is exactly what I hoped readers would find there. She’s giving away a copy, too, so there’s another chance.