The Arduous Task of Thinking: thoughts on Essex Cholomondeley's essay "Recipe vs Thought"

 Recipes for Education – Thoughts on Essex Cholmondeley’s article, ‘Recipe vs Thought’

My parents were good parents. To the best of their ability they nurtured me and prepared me for life on my own. A lot of what they modeled and instructed has stuck with me: always make eye contact and smile and say hello to strangers on the street, always tell the truth, work hard and do work you can be proud of, respect yourself or no one else will. They taught me how to check my tire pressure and oil levels, how to fillet a fish, how to balance a checkbook, how to braid hair, how to load and shoot a rifle, how to boil water and bake cookies, how to laugh at myself. But one thing they didn’t teach me was how to make bread. I had to learn that on my own, and I did, from the first cookbook I ever bought for myself as a newly-independent young adult – “The Apartment Vegetarian” by Lindsay Miller.

 

The first recipe I tried was Whole Wheat Honey Bread and it was a total failure. I had no idea what I was doing or how to do it. I had to figure out how to proof the yeast - turns out you can kill yeast - and how to knead the dough and how the bread was supposed to look and feel when it had been kneaded enough. Turns out you can knead it too much, or not enough. All of this was totally new to me. I was learning just how much I didn’t know. And since I didn’t have an experienced baker standing next to me to show me the best way, to guide my movements, to correct my mistakes, to point out subtle differences in the dough as my hands pushed and pulled it up and down, I had to learn it on my own through trial and error and repetition. Lots of repetition. I ate a lot of Whole Wheat Honey Bricks.

But I can still remember the afternoon when I finally pulled out my first successful loaf, my first Actual Loaf of Whole Wheat Honey Bread. I sliced into it and spread copious amounts of margarine on it (don’t judge 19-year-old me; we never had butter in the house growing up, just margarine. My discovery of butter was a year in the future.) and took an enormous bite worthy of the golden loaf, celebrating the success of all my efforts by eating slice after warm, margarine-slathered slice. Being 19, I could eat just about the entire loaf in one sitting and still fit into my pants the next day. Metabolism is wasted (waisted – ha!) on the young.

My success was due in large part to a well-written recipe. The best way to learn, at least for me, is to watch someone who knows do the thing and then doing the thing while they watch and correct me. I struggle with learning how to do things from written instructions only. I need to see it done, to watch the action in real time in order to get a mental vision of the whole, of what the finished product should look like. But when an experienced person is not available and I’m left to figure it out on my own, the recipe is invaluable.

Recipes in themselves are excellent stand-in teachers if the new cook doesn’t have an experienced cook to learn from. Though it is lacking in the personal touch and might require some investigation of techniques on the part of the reader, the recipe is reliable and fool-proof. It has been tested and tweaked by its author until the he knows that if it is followed exactly, the results will be successful every time. If the recipe is followed long enough, the home cook might even begin to understand the principles worked out in the recipe and maybe see ways she could change it to make it better, or alter it to make something new.

This brings me to the essay, ‘Recipe vs Thought,’ by Essex Cholmondeley. I love this essay. I’ve read it several times and I think every homeschooling mother should read it, too. She makes several points that are worth considering and commonplacing and mulling over. But there was something in the piece that wasn’t mentioned that I think worth mentioning, so I’m mentioning it here in the hopes that it will help a recipe-dependent homeschooling parent move from recipe-seeking and recipe-reliance to  principle-understanding and -applying. For me and my loaf of bread, the recipe was the way I saw the principles in action. The first and repeated success from the recipe gave me the courage to look beneath the steps to the principles underneath that made the recipe work. But it was a means to a greater end and not an end in itself.

Obviously, we don’t parent or homeschool our children only with recipes, but our minds can be oriented toward recipes more than principles, which is understandable. A recipe is sourced in what Cholmondeley calls “crystallised experience.” We know the recipe works because it worked for its author, and worked more than once. We all want to live successful lives. I don’t know anyone who undertakes a task, hoping to fail. A recipe is a way to succeed in an area of ignorance or continued frustration. It makes sense that we see recipes for success in just about every area of life from health to employment to spiritual well-being to the best from-scratch mac-and-cheese (it's this one). This isn’t new to the 21st century either. Cholmondeley writes,

“A great part of everyday life is lived according to recipes – helpful or hindering formulas obtained at second hand from successful people and carried out according to the intelligence, capacity or material resources available. It cannot well be otherwise in such a perplexing world of unstable opinion and fluctuating occupation. ‘What must I do? How shall I do it? what shall I make? How shall I make it?’ we cry and then how gratefully we clutch at the floating driftwood ere we drown in a sea of disastrous ignorance and how often we find a straw in our hands.
“Some recipes are not straws, they are veritable logs; the difficulty lied in our power of discernment.” (emphasis mine)

Here she touches on what she dives into more fully later in the piece – thought vs mindless repetition. 

We share and exchange recipes all the time and there is nothing wrong with this. In homeschooling, you see this with curriculum recommendations, and there maybe nothing wrong with this either, at least nothing on the surface. The problem here is what I emphasized above – the power of discernment. Is the curriculum being recommended as a help to the parent on the way to accomplishing a goal, or as a sort of goal in itself? Does the curriculum support and encourage the parent’s educational principles already in place, or is the curriculum seen as a kind of principle required to educate? (Does the parent even have educational principles? But that’s a post for another time.) Does the parent think “This could help my child learn cursive or biology or Latin or etc…”, or does the parent think, “This will produce the knowledge in my child.” It is a subtle difference in thought and approach. We may not realize we expect the curriculum to pour learning into our child’s mind. Taking some time to consider what we expect of our curriculums and materials is worthwhile. The direction of our thoughts sets the trajectory of our expectations, including all the little expectations of ourselves, our children, and our homeschooling materials that we don’t realize we are setting. 

As a young homeschooling mother, I drooled over homeschooling resource catalogues and boxed curriculums. I badgered every experienced homeschooling mom I knew with questions and requests for their favorite workbooks or programs. I took home every cast-off curriculum, every partially-used program, every workbook or textbook - anything that could potentially teach my kids what they needed to know. I was desperate not to fail them and very afraid that I would. For the first half of my homeschooling life, I approached the buying of curriculum as though it was the great thing to get right, and that if I could just get the right handwriting workbook or literature study guide or science program, my child will learn it, as though the curriculum was a ready-made meal and my child was the final ingredient. A sort of Hamburger Helper of education; just add pencils, paper (optional), and 1 (one) child, use curriculum for 15 minutes daily, and enjoy instant increased intelligence. My mindset was one of recipes and not of thought.

It wasn’t until I had been homeschooling for about 4 years that I started to hear about Charlotte Mason. At first, I thought her methodology was another sort of Waldorfian, Montesorri-type of child-led experience-based education. I thought, based on all the Charlotte Mason programs and the curriculums bearing her name, that it was soft and gentle and mostly for the younger years. I had no interest in something like that. I wanted a robust education that would challenge my kids and instill in them hard work while training their minds. I wanted a tried-and-true recipe to follow, not some airy-fairy flutter in a meadow approach.

Proof that looks can be deceiving.

When I finally started digging into Charlotte Mason’s educational philosophy, I was blown away. The boxed curriculums made her approach to education seem soft, gentle, pastel. Gentle might stick, but not soft and definitely not pastel. Mason’s principles are vibrant and strong, full bodied and full of expectation. She sees in the child a capable person, complete as he is and mindful of what it means to be ‘a person’:  “I am considering a child as he is, and am not tracing him, either with Wordsworth, to the heights above, or with the evolutionist, to the depths below; because a person is a mystery, that is, we cannot explain him or account for him but must accept him as he is.” (emphasis mine) She approaches the child’s education in an attitude of respect for the child and the child’s time, as well as for the teacher or homeschool mother’s person and time. No busy-work or overly pretty workbooks more fluff than substance. Give the child books of literary quality, she say, “the best books of the best writers.” Ask him to tell what he remembers, and expect him to remember after just one reading. Take the child into nature and give him room to experience it without lectures or lessons, or with only a few remarks encouraging attention and interest. Expect that he is capable of excellence and give him just a few chances to achieve it so that he wants to achieve it and is not worn out by repetition. Model this behavior in your own life.

This was not what I expected. It wasn’t a boxed meal type of curriculum and it wasn’t a recipe type of approach to education. There was no step-by-step routine with a promised outcome at the end. This was handing me solid materials and a few trusty tools with some basic instructions and asking me to just try. As Miss Cholmondeley writes,

“Miss Mason left no recipes behind her. She believed in thinking persons, therefore she bequeathed certain principles based upon truth itself. Every parent and teacher is free to apply these principles in ever fresh practice according as new needs and difficulties arise. If members fail to understand these principles and are content to act only according to avoid – however sound – they will make…thought into a series of recipes which though useful at the moment, will be entirely inapplicable to the material of everyday life in another generation.”

The curriculums out there are many, varied, and very well-marketed. They may even occasionally be worth the paper they are printed on. But they should always be approached as helps, not ends in themselves. “It is the underlying principle, brought to mind and carefully held in view…which should give the final word of permission,” writes Cholmondeley. Does the curriculum uphold your educational principles? If it does, perhaps it is worth using. If it doesn’t, don’t compromise. It is better to side with your principles than with an easy approach. If you trust the principles behind your practice, you’ll see them work themselves out in ways you didn’t expect. Eventually, it will be easier to trust the principles. ‘Trust the process,’ is a common idiom, but ‘Trust the principles’ or maybe ‘Practice the principles and trust the child,’ should be the motto of every Charlotte Mason homeschooler.  A process is a recipe in action, a formula at work, a sort of mechanized system that works best when left alone, like the process of digestion. It can be important, but it isn’t something to build on in the same way as principles. For those who don’t homeschool by these truths, I suggest you read Home Education and Towards a Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason. You will see examples of her principles applied, and these will encourage you to look at her principles as not merely ideal but practicable. Perhaps reading them will inspire you to try homeschooling by them. Here are a few of her principles to start with, in her own words:

“That children are born persons is the first article of the educational credo which I am concerned to advance; this implies that they come to us with power of attention, avidity for knowledge, clearness of thought, nice discrimination in books even before they can read, and the power of dealing with many subjects.” (TPE, p245)

“’Education,’ said Lord Haldane, some time ago, ‘is a matter of the spirit,’ – no wiser word has been said on the subject, and yet we persist in applying education from without as a bodily activity or emollient. We begin to see the light. …there is no education but self-education, and as soon as a young child begins his education he does so as a student. Our business is to give him mind-stuff, and both quality and quantity are essential. Naturally, each of us possesses this mind-stuff only in limited measure, but we know where to procure it; for the best thought the world possesses is stored in books; we must open books to children, the best books; our own concern is abundant provision and orderly serving.” Later in the same chapter, she concludes by saying, “In urging a method of self-education for children in lieu of the vicarious education which prevails, I should like to dwell on the enormous relief to teachers [and homeschooling parents!], a self-sacrificing and greatly overburdened class; the difference is just that between driving a horse that is light and a horse that is heavy in hand; the former covers the ground of his own gay will and the driver goes merrily. The teacher [or parent] who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeling.” (TPE, p. 26; emphasis mine)

“If we have not proved that a child is born a person with a mind as complete and as beautiful as his beautiful little body, we can at least show that he always has all the mind he requires for his occasions; that is, that his mind is the instrument of his education and that his education does not produce his mind. …a child comes…with a mind of amazing potentialities...” (TPE p. 36; emphasis Charlotte Mason’s)

These are some of the principles that ought to govern our use of curriculum materials in our homeschools. Considering them could help us to have a shift of perspective and emphasis that will help us approach our children’s education with a sense of freedom and joyful expectation. We set a wide and varied feast, as Charlotte Masoners like to say, but it is the child’s mind that takes what nourishment it needs from the feast and leaves the rest. This is as it should be. As Miss Mason writes regarding another of her principles, “Education is a life. That life is sustained on ideas. Ideas are of spiritual origin, and God has made us so that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another, whether by word of mouth, written page, Scripture word, musical symphony; but we must sustain a child’s inner life with ideas as we sustain his body with food. Probably he will reject nine-tenths of the ideas we offer, as he makes use of only a small proportion of his bodily food, rejecting the rest. …Our business is to supply him with due abundance and variety and his to take what he needs.” (TPE p. 109; emphasis mine)

This is not an easier way of homeschooling. “It is a very much harder task to recollect and apply a principle than to follow a precept, hence all the recipe-activity in the world,” writes Miss Cholmondeley, “but we are all born persons and the power to think is there in each one of us if we will but use it. …If in the study and expression of these principles we use our liberty, our best intelligence, our careful consideration and our honest labor, we shall find a steadily growing power of meeting new difficulties, not by recipes old or new, but by vital truths. It is possible to attain, as a society and as ‘persons’ to that kind of knowledge which sets men and women free from mere theories of life, while enabling them to live wisely and choose well among the many new and distracting doctrines which daily come to light.” (emphasis mine)

Recipes can help the beginner, and the parent who starts out homeschooling with educational recipes shouldn’t feel ashamed or judged for it. But the recipes must be seen as temporary helps, like training wheels or scaffolding; both are good and even necessary, but the goal is to eventually remove them. “Habit…is a good servant and a bad master,” writes Charlotte Mason. Practice without principle is an unthinking activity, unworthy of the person performing it, and when it becomes habitual, it is then a mechanical approach of “crystallized experience,” and treats the student as a mere ingredient and not a mystery. Again, as Miss Cholmondeley says in her essay, “It is possible to attain, as a society and as ‘persons’ to that kind of knowledge which sets men and women free from mere theories of life, while enabling them to live wisely and choose well among the many new and distracting doctrines which daily come to light.” The possibility lies in the principles:
”Certain it is that the true teacher, like the man of true religion, should live by the spirit and not by the letter, by principles, not by rules of practice, however faithfully applied. Beware of listening to the cry for educational recipes; answer it with the clarion of revealed educational truths.”

"A person is not built up from without but from within, that is, he is living, and all external educational appliances and activities which are intended to mould his character are decorative and not vital." (TPE, p. 23)

"...we shall find a steadily growing power of meeting new difficulties, not by recipes old or new, but by vital truths."