Thoughts About Thinking
The Habit of Imagining and The Habit of Remembering in Home Education. Chapter 3 of Beauty in the Word. Week of July 12, 2026
In this week’s readings, both Charlotte Mason and Stratford Caldecott are exploring what it means to think, and how to encourage true thinking in our children, students, and ourselves.
THE PURPOSE OF THOUGHT
For both Stratford and Mason, thinking in its truest sense is not the passive “fancies” that pass through our minds (in Charlotte Mason’s words)1, or the images and phrases that “flit without effort through the brain” (in Caldecott’s)2. True thinking is an active “real conscious effort of mind3,” and this “pondering4” is the act of bringing things together in order to discover what is true.5
“The search for truth,” writes Caldecott, “in the sense of an ordered, coherent view of the world and its meaning, is fundamental to our humanity.”6 This is what education strives to do: give people the ability to “think coherently and independently—to take responsibility for their own thoughts.”7
We only have two choices: to think things out for ourselves, or to be influenced by someone else’s thinking (whether we are aware of it or not). If we want to be responsible and free, then we must know how to think.8
THE PURPOSE OF TEACHERS
This doesn’t mean children should be left alone in their thinking, and that teachers are not necessary. Quite the contrary! Children need teachers to protect, encourage, and teach good thinking. The world will surely try to destroy it.9
Charlotte Mason (unsurprisingly) believed true thinking is a habit that requires practice:
“The child who never has thought, never does think, and probably never will think […]”10
She believed, like Stratford Caldecott, that thinking required both attention and memory. Children cannot think about what they do not remember, and they cannot remember what they have not given their attention to. And for a child to give their full attention to something, they need the time to do so. Teachers are able to help their students secure the time, attention, and habits required for deep thinking and learning.11
Good teachers “secure the appropriate environment,” “guide pupils to towards subjects and topics most worth learning,” and present “ideas in an order that makes it easy for the learner to grasp for himself both this subject and its relation with others.”12 A teacher helps a child see how knowledge fits together.13
THE PURPOSE OF KNOWLEDGE
Charlotte Mason’s discussion of how to build long-term memory, and ultimately equip children to truly think and learn, is quite relevant to today’s debates about skill-based versus knowledge-based curriculum. While Charlotte Mason certainly doesn’t diminish the necessity of learning real skills, she cautions against calling a person “educated” when they have merely passed a test that they crammed for and then forgot the information:
“They cram to pass, and not to know; they do pass, and they don’t know.”14
Real learning requires building (and remembering) real knowledge that a child can use to engage in real thinking. In words reminiscent of modern day educators advocating for knowledge-based curriculum in American public schools, Charlotte Mason describes how this knowledge and memory is built: by providing lessons that are interwoven with, and building upon, each other.15
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation, says it this way:
“A broad, rich store of background knowledge is not merely nice to have. Knowledge is the essential raw material of thinking.”16
Children must keep using the knowledge and powers they have acquired if they want to keep them. And they must keep building upon them if they want to keep learning. This type of thought and learning is what helps a child see the world and knowledge as a coherent whole.17
THE DANGER OF ISOLATION
We lose our ability to think coherently when we divorce our logic and thinking from other types of knowledge. Caldecott warns of the the dangers of separating Logic (thinking) from Grammar and Rhetoric (language and memory).18 The development of thinking includes the the development of imagination, feeling, empathy, and courtesy. It requires friendship, dialogue, debate, and conversation.19
Thinking shouldn’t be separated from truth and goodness, either. According to Caldecott, when the “will to power” takes the place of “the will to truth and goodness,” an educational crisis is the result.20
This is why a generous curriculum is necessary. When we cut ourselves off from other subjects, other disciplines, other types of knowledge, other ways of knowing, and other people, our thinking is in grave danger.
“Part of the process of thinking is to learn how to set all these types or approaches to truth in the right order, to see how they combine to give a more complete image of reality as a whole—to make it perfectly plain that we need poetry as well as science, imagination as well as reason, empathy as well as mathematics.”21
This warning about the danger of isolating reason is one we have heard before. We heard it from Chesterton when we read Orthodoxy22, and from Charlotte Mason when she discussed the limits of reason in her 20 principles.23 We would be wise to heed their warnings.
Our thinking should never be isolated.
RESOURCES & DOWNLOADS
Church Year Cookbook (paid subscribers): 12 visual recipes for the liturgical year! Complimentary for paid subscribers during the month of July.
Church Year Cookbook
·
Paid subscribers can download The Church Year Cookbook below, a collection of 12 visual recipes for the liturgical year, including Advent, Christmas, St. Nicholas Day, Epiphany, Candlemas, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Shrove Tuesday, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, Michaelmas,
Home Education Audio: You can listen to the audio version of Home Education for free on LibriVox. This week we are reading sections 38 and 39.
Home Education, page 150
Beauty in the Word, page 64
Home Education, page 150
Beauty in the Word, page 64
“[…]Thinking, or the mental process by which we separate truth from falsehood.” Beauty in the Word, page 60
Beauty in the Word, page 64
Beauty in the Word, page 64
Beauty in the Word, page 67
Beauty in the Word, page 65
Home Education, page 153
Home Education, page 158
Margaret Atkins in “The Good Teacher,” quoted in Beauty in the Word, page 65
Margaret Atkins in “The Good Teacher,” quoted in Beauty in the Word page 66
John Ruskin, quoted in Home Education, page 155
Home Education, page 158
E.D. Hirsch, Jr. in What Your First Grader Needs to Know (part of the Core Knowledge series)
Home Education, pages 157-158
Beauty in the Word, page 61
Beauty in the Word, page 81
Beauty in the Word, page 74
Beauty in the Word, page 70
“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy. Also quoted in Beauty in the Word on page 71.
“The way of reason: We teach children, too, not to “lean (too confidently) to their own understanding”; because the function of reason is to give logical demonstration (a) of mathematical truth, (b) of an initial idea, accepted by the will. In the former case, reason is, practically, an infallible guide, but in the latter, it is not always a safe one; for, whether that idea be right or wrong, reason will confirm it by irrefragable proofs.” -Charlotte Mason’s 20 Principles