What, Why & How to Teach a Fire

What is the Student?

The nature of the student will inform what we teach, why we teach what we teach, and how we teach what we teach. It is extremely important then that we (as parents and teachers) understand the nature of the student properly. Is he a tabula rasa, a blank slate which you can etch any image onto? Or is he more unpredictable, maybe even unruly?

Plutarch presents a dichotomy between two conceptions of the student with a helpful metaphor. He says, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” And Plutarch is right. The student is made in the image of the almighty God and his potential is not limited like a water bottle or a milk jug.

What We Teach

Even though as Christian educators we understand that we are tasked with caring for immortal souls, we often make curricular choices as if that were not the case, as if the pupils in our care were vessels like excel spreadsheets that need to be filled with certain data points.

We do this when we teach English grammar to 7-year-olds. (Before I make too many enemies, I should make clear that I do think grammar is important, but there is a better way to go about teaching grammar which I will allude to later.) Have you ever noticed that 7-year-olds can’t explain what a direct object is? I have, because I’ve experimented on them when they come into my choir class. I have yet to find a 7-year-old (or 8 or 9-year-old) who can explain what a direct object is in their own words. They can sing a little jingle about direct objects, but they have no real idea what a direct object is, much less does the jingle improve their speaking or writing.

We do something similar when we teach young kids Latin chants and charts without teaching them how to say anything in Latin. Proponents of this kind of curricular choice will say, “Sure, they don’t know what it all means now, but some day they will!” Translate this into Plutarch’s metaphor and you get, “Sure, they’ll be fires someday, but for now they’re just vessels.”

What about math? The math curricula I’ve seen teach divisibility rules. And divisibility rules (like English grammar and Latin chants) are not inherently bad. But what does the curriculum require? That the students simply memorize the facts, not that they contemplate the rules. A student that can figure out how the rules for divisibility by 2, 4, and 8 work (it’s easier than you think. Hint: 2 goes into 10 and 4 goes into…) might try to figure out how the rule for 3 works, and whether or not there’s a rule for 33 (there is, and it’s a doozy). This student sounds like a fire that has been kindled. But, “Don’t worry, Sam, it doesn’t matter why the rule for 3 works; you just need to memorize it. Plus, we have one-hundred-nineteen other lessons to get to, so we don’t have time for that!”

Treating the Student Like a Vessel

What we teach ought to be informed by our understanding of the nature of the student, but it’s not enough just to teach the right things; we also have to teach the right things for the right reasons. Often when we give students bad reasons to justify why they are learning something, it is because we have forgotten that the student is a fire, and we have begun to view them as a vessel. When we justify our curricular choices, the primary way we err is by explaining to the students how practical this or that subject will be for them when they’re adults.

What we teach ought to be informed by our understanding of the nature of the student, but it’s not enough to teach the right things; we also have to teach the right things for the right reasons.

Reuben Jansen

To understand what utility has to do with treating the student as a vessel, consider the nature of a vessel. Vessels come in certain shapes and sizes, and we fill them with certain things so that they will be useful in specific circumstances. We fill a vase with flowers, and we fill a cooler with ice and beverages to bring to the beach. But vessels are not very pliable: each vessel is designed for a certain function and when you try to use a vessel “off-label” you run into problems. Try filling your vase with ice and drinks. First, you’ll only be able to fit a quarter of the drinks you want, and second, your vase doesn’t have wheels or a lid which means most of your ice will be spilled on the sand. You might look pretty hip on the beach with your vase cooler, but you will still be thirsty.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with a vessel. But a vessel is meant to be filled for some predetermined purpose. And here is the point: this is not the nature of a student. A student is not “that which will someday perform a certain function in society.” A student is not a future engineer or a future landscaper. He might be an engineer or a landscaper in the future, but that is not what he is, that is just what he will do. And yet when a student asks, “Why do we have to learn this?” a teacher most often responds with something like, “Well, you’re going to need it if you’re going to be an engineer/doctor/manager” which sounds an awful lot like the task of the teacher is to figure out what career path a student is destined for (what kind of a vessel he is). It is as if the teacher has a handful of little rectangular candies and tries them on all the students just to see if anyone might be a Pez dispenser.

Treating the Student Like a Flame

There is nothing wrong with utility, and if a student didn’t learn anything useful over thirteen years at school, that would be cause for concern. The point is that utility is not a good motivator because it does not take into account what a student is. When a teacher uses “utility” as a rationale for something the student is learning, the teacher implies that the student is a vessel and not a flame. A vessel is static, designed for one job, but a flame is alive and sometimes unruly; there’s no telling where it might end up. A vessel that holds one liter will never hold two, but a flame, when it’s finished licking up these branches, might go looking somewhere else.

If we want our students to be like a flame, if we want them to pursue learning without compulsion, we need to help them find the right motivations. There are three things that motivate the child who is a flame, three things which touch the soul: truth, beauty, and goodness. Utility is great, but it does not deserve a place among those three. When God created ex nihilo it was not utility that prompted Him. When He sent His Son to the cross, He didn’t make a pros and cons list with all the practical implications on the left-hand side. What practical benefit did God derive from His very good creation? What practical benefit did God receive from making His Truth incarnate?

When we pursue truth, beauty, and goodness, we find that the Lord graciously adds unto us everything that we need.

Reuben Jansen

The student is made in the image of this God who does not appear to be all that concerned with practical implications. When God makes a covenant with his people, He is not concerned with getting the better end of the deal. In human terms, God gets by far the worse end of the deal. How is that practical? So, when a student, an image-bearer, asks, “why do we need to learn this?” he is not asking why something is practical or how it will boost his future salary by three percent. The student wants to know that what he is learning is true, good, and beautiful, not just for the future, but for the present as well. When we pursue truth, beauty, and goodness, we find that the Lord graciously adds unto us everything that we need. “All these things will be added unto you” is true for education as well. When we seek first the Kingdom of God in educating our children, God gives us the things that we need, the practical stuff, the food, drink, and clothing.

Why We Teach What We Teach

There is not enough space here to consider all the true, good, and beautiful reasons for learning any subject, so a single example will have to suffice. Latin is perhaps the best place to start because it is the most common target of the question, “Why do we have to learn this?” The Latin teacher is quick to list all the practical benefits of learning Latin: it teaches English vocabulary, it teaches English grammar (better than an English grammar textbook can), and Latin teaches students to think analytically at blazing speeds. All these things and more are true, but they are not good reasons for learning the subject, because the child is not a thing that is destined for some job that requires, for instance, blazing fast analytical skills. Instead, these are just some of the useful secondary benefits of learning Latin.

The primary reason for learning Latin is to read Latin texts in their original language. It is difficult to describe how different it is to read the opening lines of the Aeneid in Latin than it is in English. If it were possible to describe what it’s like to read a certain verse in Latin, then an English translation would be a perfect equivalent. “Arms and the man I sing” works pretty well, it even preserves much of the rhythm of the original (which is integral to Latin poetry), but it feels odd to begin an English sentence with a direct object. Not only that, but “the man” is an atypical direct object for the English verb “to sing.” In Latin, however, sentences often begin with direct objects, and it is not uncommon to see objects like virum (man) for the Latin verb canere (to sing).

You may have heard of a foreign word that doesn’t translate into English. Gezellig is a good Dutch example. It’s often translated as “cozy,” but a Dutchman will be quick to explain that “cozy” doesn’t quite capture it. You might be cozy reading a good book in the morning with a cup of coffee, but the scene couldn’t be described as gezellig because gezellig never happens when you’re alone. You might ask the native Dutch speaker what the word really means, and even though he understands the word perfectly, and even though he speaks English fluently, he won’t be completely satisfied with the explanation he gives you. What this means is that the Dutch speaker is able to have a thought that is captured by the word gezellig that you as an English speaker just can’t understand.

The same is true of Latin, and even more so than Dutch, because Latin differs from English a lot more than Dutch does. There are thoughts and there are ways of presenting thoughts in Latin that an English speaker cannot comprehend… yet. And this perhaps gives us a glimpse into the reason why God gave us so many languages. We cannot grasp an infinite God in all his glory with finite language, but many languages get us further than just one.

Another great reason to learn Latin is that Latin is the language of our ancestors. Learning the Language of one’s ancestors is a joy in itself. As I learn Dutch, the language of my grandparents, I can imagine, “My opa used this phrase when he was just a boy.” When I started learning, I wrote (and continue to write) letters to my oma in her mother tongue, something that I never did in English.

Since we are all inheritors of Western Civilization, our grandparents spoke Latin. Vergil, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Newton, Jefferson, Tolkien, Lewis, the list of men who shaped the world we live in (our grandparents), and loved Latin, goes on. I don’t know whom I will see first, my great-grandfather who only spoke Dutch or Augustine who spoke Latin, but when I go to glory, I am excited to speak to both in their native tongues.

Reading glorious texts in their original language (thinking thoughts that can only be thought in another language) and learning the language of one’s ancestors are just two reasons for learning Latin that touch the soul, that motivate the student who is a living, breathing fire to be kindled.

How We Teach What we Teach

Understanding that a student is a fire and not a vessel informs what we teach and why we teach it, but it will also inform how we teach. Latin serves as a good example again.

Perhaps the vessel analogy will make a lot of sense to people who have spent any time doing declension charts in Latin. In many Latin classes, students get empty charts (empty vessels) to fill with different endings, and in many cases the students do not understand what these endings are for. Students who learn this way typically do not hanker for more.

There is nothing wrong with memorizing declension charts. I have used them with my students to help organize what they know, and we’ve also used charts for review. The problem is when the charts become an end in themselves. If Latin quizzes only ever test the declension endings but there is no translation or composition section, then there’s a good chance the students aren’t actually learning Latin and will quickly burn out.

Picta Dicta Latin Primer teaches Latin through examples, much like the way we learned our mother tongue, but with a systematic, incremental approach. Some of Picta Dicta Latin Primer’s illustrations are funny. Every third-grade boy chuckles when he sees the example in Chapter Five digitus in naso est (the finger is in the nose). The curriculum uses jokes because it understands what the student is. It understands that a third-grade boy loves comedy and will go home and tell his parents a joke in Latin. It’s important to get the child speaking Latin, desiring to communicate in Latin, because the child who can say, “The finger is in the nose,” desperately wants to know how to say, “The finger is in the beehive,” and how do you say, “bee sting” and, “The boy ran away crying”?

When Latin is taught this way (or when any subject is taught with a proper understanding of the child) it is easy to see how a student may be compared to a fire. Fires grow of their own accord. They don’t necessarily stay where you set them, and when it comes to students, this is very exciting. More than exciting, it is a major goal in education. We don’t want our students to cease learning in twelfth grade or after they’ve gotten their bachelor’s degree. We want them to learn new languages, learn math, read history, and read the Bible for life. The way we get there is by starting with a proper ontology of the student (knowing who and what they are) and making sure that we are consistent with our ontology in what we teach and how we teach it.