So much has changed in the last hundred
years since Charlotte Mason lived, especially in the area of technology; technologies
have been developed since her day. What is the place of technology in a Charlotte Mason home
school? Let's discuss that today. [Gentle Music] Welcome to the Simply Charlotte Mason Podcast. I'm
Sonya Shafer. Joining me today for this discussion is my friend and co-worker, Doug Smith. Doug,
thanks for joining us again—Good to be here.— We have talked before about techn
ology;—
Yes.— But that was more, is it the big evil, or is it something that can be productive and
useful?— Yeah, we did an episode on screen time, and in that, we talked about more of, what
are the guardrails around our children and the way we use technology? Are we a consumer or
a creator? Those kind of things. We're not going to be talking about that this time and they can
reference the other one.— Yeah, we can leave a link in the description to that other podcast.
That one's more shoul
d you use technology? How should you use it if you choose to? This one, I
want to talk more about what technology, if any, is compatible with a Charlotte Mason approach to
uphold her principles of education, and is there a way to incorporate technology into that wisely,
I guess.— I ran across a really interesting story in Charlotte's book, School Education, and what
I love about it is that what she espoused there aligns with a lot of what I believe in how
we approach technology. And she tel
ls this interesting story about going to visit what was
called the Peace and War Exhibit, or Museum; it was in Lucerne, Switzerland, and it was a
pretty big deal at the time, and she traveled there to see it. And she talks about the model
of a torpedo and that there were these elaborate diagrams in cross sections, and models, and all
of these things; and that as she viewed those, she didn't get it. She didn't understand how it
worked. Later at lunch the people she was sitting with at the ta
ble, one of the people there was
knowledgeable on the subject and he pulled out his glasses case and used that as a very simple
model of a torpedo and explained it very simply and she understood it right away. And she made
the observation that elaborate models don't make a very good foundation for our education. They're
too much all at once. They're like a flood and we need to build our knowledge. Now there's a place
for those things, that more elaborate knowledge, but that's not what we st
art out with, right?
And like so many things in a Charlotte Mason education, guided discovery is the key, right?
We learn more when we have to discover it and we retain more when we have to discover it and so a
lot of what we do with children is we guide them in making those discoveries for themselves.— And
that applies to how we use technology as well.— Yeah.— That, as you said, we don't want it to be
a flood and, you know, give them everything all at once: here you need to learn this whol
e diagram,
but little by little guiding them to discover it. A lot of times with technology, as you said, it's
not a discovery, it is an information dump. Here, I've already done the work, now you just learn
this.— Right, right. And I love the way she said… I have to get the exact quote here…— Yes, yes.
…because it's so good.— I noticed you're using technology for this!— I am using technology for
this! But we could just as well open the book, but I just had to say that!—he said when we
do
that, those elaborate models, she said, “It's stale on the senses and produce a torpor of
thought the moment they are presented.”— Torpor of thought.”—I didn't know the word, “torpor,”
I had to look it up, and it means “lethargic” or “without thought.” —Yeah, it's like the eyes
glaze over; it's like the look on the kid's face when he's watching TV.—Yes, yes. And maybe
torpor is an old word that we need to bring back because it applies so well to technology, you
know, it's like, Johnny, you’
ve got to put the phone away now, you've got yourself in a torpor
again.— Yeah, because that is a poignant word; that is a perfect word for what the look is on his
face, where he’s just spaced out—scrolling; or you might say to your friend, you know, we've been
friends for a long time and I've enjoyed having conversations with you, but since you got that new
phone and you keep getting it out over our meals, our conversations have become “torporous.” —Just
drop that little word in there.—Dro
p it in there. People say, “What’s that?” then you can talk
about it. Yes, good, so that's what we don't want the technology to produce with our kids.
So, what technology do you think… well, okay, here's a question: Did Charlotte Mason use
technology?— She did. And in that passage, she talks about some of the things that she used.
She said the exceptions would be the microscope, the telescope, and the magic lantern. Okay, so we
know that a microscope is something that allows us to see thing
s that are very small, that we
couldn't see otherwise.— Right.— A telescope allows us to see things that are far away that
we couldn't see otherwise. And most of us haven't heard of a Magic Lantern. I ran across one at
an antique shop recently. It's a little device, about this big.— About the size of a sack of
flour, maybe?— Yeah.— A 5-pound sack of flour, okay.— It's a little projector, has a light bulb
in it, and then there's kind of like a a film; the the pictures were about this big, an
d you
could put them in there and it would project it up on the wall. So that allowed, in the classroom,
they could do a picture study. They could show things… — from other countries— other countries;
places that you couldn't visit. —So it's like an original slide projector.—Yes, yes. And then
later on, we know that she used the phonograph or, she called it the gramophone, that's what they
called it.— Oh yes, for music study.— She called it a gramophone. Could you imagine
what that opened
up? Because that came about in her lifetime. We don't think about how readily
music is available to us at an instant. We can stream it from anywhere, listen to anything
we want. But to do music study in her day, before that, you had to go to a performance. And
now this has opened up a whole world. After after her death, in her schools, they continued to
have the phonograph with a lending library that you could check out records and were shared all
over the place. So she did embrace those th
ings. The commonality is that they were purposeful.
It wasn't technology for technology’s sake. It was technology that brought things to us that we
couldn't otherwise experience but that were also useful.— I think that's a key point. The purpose
was to help the child discover; just put before them and let them discover for themselves from
these items or experiences that they would not otherwise have been able to experience.—Yes.—And
I think it's the same thing for us today; what we don't wa
nt to do is use these “appliances,” as
she called them, or technology, to stifle our children's imagination. And there's a fine line
there. She talked at one point about when they read about a place they need to be able to picture
it in their mind's eye. The habit of imagination was important to her. She did not want them to
not be able to read a passage and picture it; but she also is wise enough to know that you
can't picture something if it is so far removed from what you have experience
d that you have no
starting point to even imagine it. And so, I think that's when the appliances, the technology, was
helpful, just to bridge that gap.— Yeah, and when we look at the internet, there's a dumpster load
of garbage there….— Oh, that's very true.— But, the potential for bringing things to us; and
the twaddle rule applies here, right? —Oh yeah, absolutely.— The quality of what we allow children
to consume, or ourselves, and its educational value, varies greatly on the quality of
the
content.— Yes, yes. So we don't want to stifle their imagination. We don't want to stifle their
habit of attention. A lot of technology today; maybe you can talk to this, I don't know, maybe
you've done some research on it; a lot of the technology switches camera angles, boom boom boom
boom boom boom boom, and thus, it wires our brains to only pay attention for that split second and
and be ready for something to change rather than giving it your full undivided attention.
We don't want
to use technology that will stifle imagination, stifle attention span, stifle
curiosity.—Yeah. There's also a temptation because there's so much there in this “fire hose,” to take
on too much and not take the time to, as Charlotte Mason said, to ruminate on what we're learning;
sometimes we have to learn a little “shut off that spigot.”— Yes. —And take some time and let
it settle in for a little while before we go back, rather than just consume, consume, consume. —
We've got to process it,
otherwise we are just a consumer.— Yeah. Recently a friend posted on
social media asking about her child who wanted a cell phone. And she asked for advice. These
things are expensive, the plans are expensive, I'm not sure if I want him to have one, and so
on. And it was interesting that the majority of the responses were about how to get a good-priced
cell phone plan. —Really.— Yeah –Nobody talked about the purpose of it and whether he should have
it? —Just a little bit. Just a little bit.
And my mind immediately, with the question, went to: has
this child proved in social situations that they could use a device and not isolate themselves?
Has this child proven the mastery of of devices, that they're not consuming him? Those kinds of
things that we often don't think about. Does this device enrich his life or drag him down? What are
the purposes, what are the goals for it? Do you have any? Or is it just, I want something shiny
because everybody else has one? —Yes, those are su
ch crucial questions to think through.— Yeah.—
And Charlotte was nothing if not intentional with her choices. It behooves us to do the same.
Alright, so…—Let's talk about some tech that we have today and how it might align or not align
with some of those things.—Yes please.— One that I thought of is e-books and e-book readers. They
allow us access, ready access, a library on the go; that can be valuable.— Now, for those of our
audience who don't know what an e-book reader is, is that one th
at reads it aloud to you?— No, I'm
talking about, those are available of course, but I'm talking about a device that lets you have
a library that you can read like a book.— Okay, all right, so the device itself that you can
see the the words of the book.— Yeah. —Okay, gotcha.— Of course, so many pieces of our
technology allow us to communicate, and so, if we can be in touch with one another, if we can
develop relationships, foster communication, those are good things.— Yes, right, yes. That
reminds
me of when our kids were growing up,— Yes.— and we lived, you know, a thousand miles apart, but they
were constantly in touch with each other, creating movies together, —writing books— writing scripts,
writing books, —correcting each other's grammar, you know all those kind of things.— Yeah, so
they were using it in a productive way, not just to idle away the time because they had nothing
else to do. And when we when you had mentioned about the Magic Lantern and seeing pictures of
people who live away from you, same thing now, you can communicate with those people. My husband
talks about how he has a group of friends who are from all these other different countries, and it
never ceases to amaze us how, just at the drop of a hat, he can be talking with people in all
these other countries instantly. That's common, I guess, for the kids growing up today, but for
us it still is a wonder.— Yeah.— But the art of communication itself needs to take precedence
over the techn
ology.— Yes, yeah. In the same way, with communication, the internet can give
us access to experts, or skills, or courses, or someone who speaks another language that we
are learning. Those learning opportunities are plentiful. —So again, it comes back to what you
were saying: what we cannot access for ourselves in our own sphere, we have opportunities to
connect with those and form relations with those things more easily now.— Yeah, we can have
access to historical documents, historical me
dia, that we wouldn't have access to otherwise. I
recently ran across; I collect some old records, and I recently ran across this old Edison record
from the 1920s and it was from the time of World War I, and it was a a song about that experience
and that launched me off into a whole study of the time period because of that. And I was able to
go online and find other materials from that time period: music, and documents, and things that
helped me understand the mindset and develop a relation
ship with those ideas and times. —Yes,
so it's a supplement to your thought process, not a replacement for thinking for yourself.—
Yeah. —Nice. —I'll put a question mark on one, which is virtual reality headsets. —Hm, okay.—The
question mark comes because, if I put this on my face, I can't see you, right? —Right, right.— But,
at the same time, I can look at something in a way that looks very real. I could walk through the
Great Pyramids. I could take a tour of a museum in a far away city as
if I'm there and walking
through it and it looks very realistic. But again, I'm isolated when I do that. There's a solution
to that, and it comes from our childhood. Did you have, when you grew up, a View-Master?— Yes,
I did.— Okay, and we put the little reels in, and we could look at things 3D.— Click, click— And
those were very, there was a lot of educational content for those.—Yes. But only one person could
look at it at a time.— Yeah, but you know what our solution was?— What?— Hey! Yo
u look at this!— Oh
yeah, that's true! We did, we did, yeah, pass it back and forth.— But we have to be intentional
about the use of those kinds of things.— True.— And you can pass that back and forth, you can
find ways to use that.— That reminds me of what you said earlier about guided discovery. It's
not just discovery.— Yeah.— It is guided by a wise older person. —There are also some technology
that falls into tools that we can use in our study and our discovery. One I was thinking of wa
s
for nature study: trail cams. —Okay, describe that to me.—I think I need to describe that,
because some people might not be aware of it; they’re a camera with a motion detector, usually
on a stake that you would plop down somewhere; like if you have access to a wooded area or
something, you can put the camera there. And on a trail where you see, you know, an animal trail.
Then you can come back in a week and download the pictures, and you would see what animals are in
the area. Now, here
's where we need to be careful: the purpose isn't just to check off, I've seen
those.— There, I did nature study! —I did nature study! It's to say, oh, now I'm aware that there
are coyotes in this area. Now I want to study those further. In the same way, I saw a project
that someone did taking a little tiny computer board and a microphone and hung it outside
and made it so that it could recognize bird calls and it would give them an alert when there
were new birds in the area. Again, this i
s not, I'm checking off the birds.— Right.— I'm done with
that one, I'm done with that one; —I know this one's in my backyard.—Now I can go out and make an
observation; try to see it, try to learn further from that. But you use that as a tool for further
study. —Further study using your own mental powers to do the further study. It's not a substitute for
putting forth the mental effort yourself.—Right, exactly. —Nice. — And then a couple of final
ones.— Okay.— Tools that develop skills that
could turn into careers. So, learning computer coding
or design; so much of graphic design happens using technology now. Or even 3D printing; developing
models that might turn into a product or learning those skills even just for having exposure to
3D spatial concepts and skills and measurement and things like that. Those can be valuable for
developing career skills.— And you could start, again, laying the foundation first, before you get
there if you're doing paper sloyd, learning how the
3D stuff, and then it will step up so that you
can use the technology as a tool rather than as a replacement for your own effort.— Yeah, and again,
we don't give that elaborate model, that flood, first thing off, we give basics and then you build
those skills. Charlotte related into that passage to what came before where she was talking about
oral lessons, right.— yes— and that the blah blah blah blah blah blah is like starting a child out
on crutches.— Right.— And she said appliances, tec
hnology, for us, is the same way.— Yeah, so
they are very chary of which appliances they use and how they use them. I think there's another
word we could resurface along with terper, no, torpor!— Torpor!— I'm going to have to practice
that before I can resurface that one, yeah, torpor and chary; those are good words to use or
at least the principles behind them are good to guide us in our using technology in a Charlotte
Mason home school. Thanks for all those ideas, Doug. If you enjoyed thi
s podcast be sure to
subscribe. I'll see you next time. [Music]
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