Restful Learning
Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.
The start of the school year seems an appropriate time to write about restful learning because we all know how frenetic September can be. And it’s not just schools that have a problem. Home educators can also find themselves becoming fraught under the weight of educational, domestic and economic demands. So, I thought we might turn to Sarah Mackenzie, author of Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler’s Guide to Unshakable Peace, for some words of wisdom.
Sarah Mackenzie is a great guide became, as she cheerfully admits, she is the last person you might expect to be engaging in restful learning. When she wrote the book, she was the mother of six, three of whom were under the age of two.
It seems almost paradoxical that right now – when I am more sleep deprived than I’ve ever been in my life – I’m writing about rest.
However, as she explains, teaching from rest is not a matter of having lots of sleep, a totally ordered household, perfectly behaved children, and the patience of a saint. It’s about the way we respond to the stresses and strains of real life. Early in her book, for example, she quotes this passage from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity:
The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in and out of the wind.
There is great wisdom here. We often go wrong because we start the day trying to wrest control from God. We grapple with circumstances and, like a flyweight pitched against a heavyweight, hope we’ll somehow come out on top. But, of course, life cannot be controlled so easily. How often do we get irritated when students or children prevent us from carrying out our beautifully organised plans? Here’s C. S. Lewis again:
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s “real life” is a phantom of one’s own imagination.
But there’s more to the problem than our own attitude to the frustrations of everyday life. There’s also what I have called elsewhere the problem of industrial education. What we often see in schools - and sometimes in home schools - is an absolute focus on output. It’s the results - narrowly measured as GCSE or A Level grades - that matter. And to gain those results, schools insist on uniformity, measurability and bells. But children are not cars and schools should not be production lines. Taking this simple truth seriously is perhaps the first step towards restful learning.
If we allow it, home educating can transform our attitude towards time. We don’t need a nine to five (or eight-thirty to three-thirty) day. We don’t need a three-term year. We can allow the tides of mind to flow more naturally (and, therefore, more restfully). Tidal homeschooling is an option, as one of the mums in this book reminds us.
Maybe this wider context helps us to see what factory learning can be replaced by. There’s no need to doze on the laptop like the Dominican cat pictured above because, as Sarah Mackenzie points out:
Teaching from rest is meaningful learning and growth - but without the anxiety and frenzy so common in our day. Contrary to what you might think at first when you hear “teaching from rest,” teaching from rest will take diligence, attention, and a lot of hard work.
Diligence, attention, and a lot of hard work: not frenzy, stress, and a lot of strong coffee.
So, let’s be specific. In fact, let’s look at Music and Maths. It is well known that Mozart worked incredibly quickly. One of my favourite stories about him takes us to the time when he was on his way to Milan for the premiere of his new opera. He was sixteen years old at the time and, like a few sixteen year olds I know, he hadn’t finished his homework. That is to say, he hadn’t finished writing his opera. So what did he do while he was sitting in the coach? He composed a new string quartet! I sometimes procrastinate myself, but Mozart took procrastination to another level.
Anyway, back to the point. Here’s what Mozart wrote about his working practice in one of his letters:
When I am, so to speak, completely myself, completely alone and in a good humour, say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I can’t sleep, it is on these occasions that my ideas really flow. I don’t know where they come from or how they arrive and I can’t force them.
French Mathematician, Jacques Hadamard, may help us understand what was happening here. He explained that there are three stages of mathematical creation: preparation, incubation and illumination. This is a very helpful way of thinking about all aspects of work, not just Maths and Music. For Hadamard, all three stages matter: preparation (which may well be uneventful and unexciting); incubation (which requires time); and illumination, which is when the ideas really flow.
And “flow” is the right word. What matters at this third stage of work is total absorption in a task, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This is when learning becomes a real joy. But we shouldn’t forget that it is the third stage. We cannot bypass preparation and incubation. We cannot run past them to meet illumination on the first day of work. We cannot grab illumination and demand it come with us. Flow takes time. Flow is the culmination of restful learning.
Which brings us back to Sarah Mackenzie, who argued that
Rest … is not the absence of work or a failure to consider and carry out a plan. It is work and leisure, properly ordered.
She also wrote that:
The true aim of education is to order a child’s affections - to teach him to love what he ought and hate what he ought.
If that is true, then we don’t need to slog through lesson plans, come hell or high water. We don’t need to stick to artificial deadlines. If education is about ordering a child’s affections then we need to reorder our priorities. We need both work and leisure and sometimes that means stepping back from the busyness of the day.
The home education community to which I belong has a break week every four weeks, for the younger children in particular. This is a very good idea. The school at which I teach began the year with a staff retreat run by Wintershall. That was also a very good idea. If leisure is the basis of culture, as Josef Pieper argued, it is also the basis of education, and that’s good news for us all.
P.S. Teaching from Rest is also available as an audiobook. I heartily recommend it.