Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!
This quote comes from the classroom of Professor Gradgrind, the notorious school board superintendent in Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel Hard Times. But you could just as easily find the same idea echoed in the halls of conventional schools today. We are told an education that is efficient, productive, and full of facts is most valuable and will make our children successful. And schools are not the only places you’ll see this mantra – it can also be found in the pages of modern children’s books. Open a majority of recently-published children’s books about any topic; what do you see? Bullet points, bites of information, unrelated facts on a page, coupled with chintzy computer-generated images. To the untrained eye, this bare-bones approach to children’s education and literature may seem harmless — maybe even beneficial — but behind the uninspiring vocabulary lists and definitions, there is an underlying message that to know something is simply to know about it. While this may at first seem like a trivial distinction, it is in fact the root of where modern education and a large part of children’s literature has gone askew.
So what does it mean to know something as opposed to just knowing about it and how should this affect the way we educate our children? According to the wisdom of the ages, to truly know something meant you had a relationship with it, not just reciting memorized factoids about it. It was St. Augustine who said that in order to know a thing we must come to love it first. Take baseball, for instance. If you want your child to love baseball, how should you approach it? You might get out the rule book, draw out the various players’ positions on the field, and explain the lineup. All of these details are an important part of the game, of course. But if we truly want to pass on a love of the sport, we will first take our children to a game, run the bases with them, or cheer as someone slides into home. Memorizing stats and players and scores comes after the initial spark of enthusiasm and interest has occurred. You will never fall in love with baseball by studying the rule book, and you will never come to truly know the game until you have a relationship with it.
The late 19th century educator and author, Charlotte Mason, understood this distinction when she observed:
The child who learns his science from a textbook has no chance of forming relations with things as they are because his kindly obtrusive teacher makes him believe that to know about things is the same thing as knowing them personally.
Modern education and children’s literature have supplanted this traditional approach to learning with a more streamline model that gives us interactions like the one found later in Dickens’s novel, when Professor Gradgrind questions Sissy, a pupil he refers to as “Girl Number Twenty,” on the definition of a horse. Sissy, having been brought up around horses her entire life, is swiftly declared ignorant on the subject by the professor. And a fellow student, Bitzer, who possesses no first-hand equine knowledge, quickly responds to Gradgrind’s demand for a definition:
“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.”
“Now, girl number twenty,” said Mr. Gradgrind, ” You know what a horse is.”
This is what an education built on nothing but facts gets us; a mechanical model of cram, pass, dump (cram for the test, pass the test, dump the information, repeat). But hopefully we are beginning to see how deeply flawed this educational approach is. We cannot stuff our children’s minds with unrelated facts and trivia bits, as if entering data into a file, treating them like computers, only to have them spit out data to achieve a desired score. This is not real learning. Our children are not machines; they are human. They possess a God-given heart, mind, and soul connection that is capable of loving what is good, true, and beautiful in the world. Our Lord uses this heart-mind-soul connection to teach us about His plan for the world, its creation, and His love for humanity when He speaks to us in parables, not lists. If the Creator of all things chooses story as a primary way He communicates with His people, why is it no longer good enough to have in the books we read to our children?
So how do we give our children an education that honors the loving and intricate design of the Creator and rejects the current mainstream educational mindset which promotes only utilitarianism? We begin by instilling a love within them for God’s good creation. We allow them to create meaningful relationships with the world by engaging with it and reading the very best literature. Didactic textbooks are incapable of producing a genuine love for the created world and an abiding life-long curiosity to discover it in all of its order and beauty. But before textbooks were ever invented, having a great education meant reading the best books available at the time. These books will not contain pages filled with disparate bits of information, but will be filled with beautifully-written story. The best books read less like a dictionary and more like a novel, often accompanied by artistic illustrations.
As humans, we thrive on story. This is especially true when teaching virtue and morality. In Tending the Heart of Virtue, Vigen Guorian recalls:
The late Jewish philosopher Martin Buber tells the story of how he fell into the fatal mistake of giving instruction in ethics by presenting ethics as formal rules and principles. Very little of this kind of education gets transformed into character-building substance. “The Education of Character”:
“I try to explain to my pupils that envy is despicable, and at once I feel the secret resistance of those who are poorer than their comrades. I try to explain that it is wicked to bully the weak, and at once I see a suppressed smile on the lips of the strong. I try to explain that lying destroys life, and something frightful happens: the worst habitual liar of the class produces a brilliant essay on the destructive power of lying.”
Mere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture the virtues. It can even backfire. A good moral education addresses both the cognitive and affective dimensions of human nature. Stories are an irreplaceable medium for this kind of moral education – that is, the education of character.
Our children need to feast on stories. And not just any stories. The best stories. When they do, these stories will go deep into the heart and lodge themselves there, where they begin a slow growth and do the character-shaping work that is needed to bring about the whole person and TRUE knowledge. A whole person has real knowledge about the world and also knows how to use that knowledge to the glory of God. But we have traded in story for mere information, and what we have gotten is a generation of children who are neither formed nor informed.