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.

During the first week that Consider This was released, it had a brief moment in the sun (figuratively speaking) at Amazon. It was featured, to my amusement, as a “hot new release” in the sub-sub-sub-sub category of “Education Theory.”

So, just for fun, I thought we might make an attempt to put Charlotte Mason into the limelight and give Mind to Mind the same “hot new release” status in its sub-sub-sub (I really don’t know how far down it goes) category. Amazon updates its status hourly, so things move fast. I’ll announce the winners of the free books at noon on Friday, Eastern Time, and if you are planning to buy a copy soon, why not make your purchase on Friday afternoon? If enough people decide to do that, Charlotte Mason will rise to the top of the charts, and maybe a few teachers doing some back-to-school shopping on Amazon will notice and be introduced to her for the first time.

Well, we can hope. Wouldn’t it be a breath of life for children in public schools to have a teacher influenced by Charlotte Mason?

In any case, if we achieve this fleeting status by purchasing enough books to feature Mind to Mind as a “hot new release,” (originally published in 1925!) I’ll give away an additional two books. Why not?

Another lovely bit from Mark Van Doren’s Liberal Education:

The educated person, says Pascal, is one who has substituted learned ignorance for natural ignorance. That is valuable because it keeps ignorance in the picture, which otherwise would be false.