CMP Review 2024-09-03

September 3, 2024

In her epochal 1947 paper “The Lost Tools of Learning,” Dorothy Sayers pointed to “three stages of development” which she identified as Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. But it would take decades for educators to build on Sayers’ ideas. In the meantime, teachers found their basis for stages of learning in the writings of a 20th-century giant of educational thought: Jean Piaget.

Piaget aimed to prove that children, quite frankly, don’t think like adults. If true, then the implications for education are profound. If Sayers and Piaget are right, then children need to be taught according to their stage.

In the early 1970s, Joan Molyneux was the steward of the Charlotte Mason heritage. Pressed on all sides by the increasing momentum of Jean Piaget’s ideology, she saw before her the words of Miss Mason: “We recognise steady, regular growth with no transition stage.”

Was it time to revise Mason’s thought? Was it time to recast Mason’s theory into stages of learning? Was it time to capitulate to the consensus of the age?

Not on Molyneux’s watch. In a long-forgotten issue of the PNEU Journal in 1971, Molyneux took her stand against the leading thinkers of her day. “A dominant idea is not necessarily correct,” she declared. While Piaget has “a respect amounting almost to reverence,” “this should not prevent us from disagreeing with him.”

And then Miss Molyneux fearlessly proceeded to defend the teaching that she had received. Children are born persons. “Children need living ideas from the very first.” Children crave story like we do because they think like we do.

In Molyneux’s courageous and inspiring article, she advised parents to do what she herself did: “Something that a teacher needs to guard against is the temptation to be up-to-date against her better judgement.” Molyneux’s spirited defense of the Charlotte Mason method can help educators even today guard against the temptation to change. But don’t take my word for it. Find out for yourself here.

@artmiddlekauff