Saturday 15 February 2020

Cotton Mather's hot tips for homeschooling (sort of)


The following excerpts are all from The First American Evangelical: A Short Life of Cotton Mather, by Rick Kennedy.

Speaking of Cotton Mather’s upbringing, Kennedy notes how both sides of Cotton Mather’s ancestors had a “multi-generational reputation for being soft on children.”  I suppose we might qualify that by saying that they were soft for 17th century Puritans.  But the tenor of their home was loving:

Richard Mather, the first Mather in America, wrote on the importance of cherishing one’s children, especially by talking and praying with each child individually.  Cotton grew up in a home where both his parents went out of their way to talk to him and pray with him….  Later in life Cotton Mather carried on family tradition by advising parents that “Our authority should be so tempered with kindness, that our children may fear us with delight, and see that we love them with as much delight.”  What Cotton experienced in his own home growing up he carried over into the pulpit as a minister.  God was a good parent whose power was tempered with kindness, meekness, and tenderness.  Delight should be the character of the bond between creator and creature. 

                                                                                                                               (p. 8)

Kennedy describes the education of a Puritan home.


            Beginning with reading and writing, Puritan education quickly turned to memorizing catechisms.  Catechisms are a type of song, a memorized call and response between a teacher and student.  They introduce children to precise information that society agrees upon….  Catechisms are especially good for affirming traditions of knowledge.  Two people at minimum, but the more the merrier, is the ideal for catechism.  One person calls the question, and others call back the answer.  Nobody is learning to think individualistically or critically.  Nobody is learning to think like a philosopher.  Everybody is learning to think within a tradition of shared knowledge.  Everybody is affirming out loud and in the same rhythm what everybody already knows. 

                                                                                                                            (pp. 9-10)

But teaching children at home was not only about learning shared doctrinal truths about God.  It was also about bringing a child to a right relational orientation toward God, about directing them toward salvation and a personal relationship with God.  


            Along with memorizing catechisms, children were also supposed to learn at home the skills of being “wise unto salvation.”  This began with training infants to be obedient, kind, and patient, to which were added skills of self-examination, spiritual observation, and prayer…. Children were supposed to learn that spiritual warfare wages within them and around them.  Children needed to learn how to weigh both their holiness and their sinfulness…. Children should be encouraged to act “with all possible gravity” and be sensitive to the fact that their souls hung in a balance.  God must choose them for salvation.  In some children this could encourage despair, but it was supposed to encourage hope.  God is good.  “God hath made me, He keepeth me, and He can save me.”  Children were also taught that they were never alone.  This would help them be good and also feel safe.  “Dear children,” Cotton’s grandfather wrote, “Behave yourselves as having the angels of God looking upon you, the angels of God looking after you!”  Prayer was taught from the first day of life.  Young children were not only taught to pray but also to expect answers.  God wanted a two-way relationship with each and every child.

                                                                                                                       (pp. 10-11)
           

Before attending Harvard, Cotton’s grammar school teacher, Ezekiel Cheever, believed that the student’s affections and not only their understanding had to be involved in learning.  Learning is not merely academic, in other words, but also spiritual.


What Cotton did for American evangelical education was to articulate powerfully his own experience in Cheever’s classroom.  It was there that Cotton found a teacher who taught his students “how to make prayers out of what they read.”  It was there that Cotton saw a schoolmaster who was not “so swallowed up with other learning, as to forget religion, and the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures.”  In grammar school Cotton experienced a teacher who wanted to bring children to Christ because through Christ all things become best known.

                                                                                                                         (pp. 13-14)

In a passage that resonates with the famous scene in C.S. Lewis’s, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where Peter and Susan consult Professor Kirk about Lucy’s stories of finding a world in the wardrobe vs. Edmund’s denial of such a place, and the professor (lamenting that they don't teach logic in school anymore) judges their respective testimonies not based on what seems more rational but based on what better accords with logic – whose testimony is more likely to be true based on which of the two siblings is usually most truthful and honest – here is an excerpt about the reliability of testimony and social or traditional knowledge vs. purely individual rationality:

[Through his father’s catechizing] a foundation of social thinking was being established in Cotton Mather’s mind that would always uplift the authority of the Bible, Christian tradition, neighborhood fellowship, and congregational life.  “Inartificial argument” was an old Latin name for what we might describe as information known socially, the kind of information that a single person cannot think up by himself or herself but has to learn from other people in the form of books, maps, or conversation.  In courtrooms, what the jury learns from witnesses is “inartificial.”  History and geography are the school subjects most obviously learned by inartificial means.  In churches people learn from each other about God’s recent activities by inartificial means.  The events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are learned by inartificial means.  Using what was called in Mather’s textbook the “rule of reciprocation,” the credibility of a witness’s testimony depends more upon the trustworthiness of the person testifying than the seeming incredibility of the testimony.  For example, if trustworthy neighbors tell Cotton – as they would later in his life – that they saw a girl levitate to the ceiling of her room, Cotton should not judge the credibility of the story based on whether levitation is impossible or not; rather, the credibility of the story is based on whether the eyewitnesses are conscientious men and women who can be trusted to tell the truth.  Cotton knew of levitation – the ascension – of Jesus in a similar way: by means of trustworthy eyewitness reports written in the Bible.  By the reciprocation rule in logic, the appropriate first question should not be whether the even it impossible; rather, the listener should first question the trustworthiness of the source of the information.  If the eyewitnesses are trustworthy, then the report should at least by entertained as probably true.

                                                                                                         (pp. 21-22)

In a passage that reminds us that “Evangelical” was not always associated with individual interpretation of Scripture, or with technique over tradition, regarding the socialness of learning/knowledge, and talking about Cotton Mather’s learning of Logic, or Dialectic, or the Art of Thinking, Kennedy comments:


The Harvard curriculum placed a high value on teaching “reasonableness.”  This felicitous term described something both bigger and softer than hard and narrow rationality.  Cotton learned at Harvard that knowledge, like politics, was a fellowship.

          Cotton learned in his logic classes that a lone and anti-social boy could be a great mathematician, a rational genius, and even a brilliant thinker, but no such boy could be the wise leader of a state or the pastor of a church.  The most common analogy used for teaching reasonableness was courtroom jurisprudence: witnesses introduce external information into the court, prosecutors and defenders analyze the information, judges set rules of evidence and certainty, and a jury decides by consensus.  Truth rises out of the interaction of many people.  Jurisprudence – like the leading of a state, a church, or a family – was too important to leave up to a lone individual thinking rationally.

          Another analogy for social reasonableness that Cotton learned at Harvard was the classical tradition of bee imagery.  Working together, bees gather pollen (information) from widely diverse sources, organize the pollen in a honeycomb (a book or library), and, mysteriously, honey is produced.  Books that gather together diverse information and libraries that gather together many books are “honey-producing”: they are “inspired” in a mysterious way.  Going to college was bee-like and honey-producing.  Education in all the liberal arts, reading in the library, living with other students and the tutors was inspirational.  Cotton wrote that he loved large encyclopedia-style books because each was like a “hive.”  Such books gathered together the thoughts of many authors from multiple books.  The Bible was the greatest of all hives.  The canon of books in the Bible was a honeycomb of entangled divine and human testimony that was uniquely inspired in such a way as to be “infallible.”  An individual using his intuition, mind, and senses could think with pure human reason and claim to be rational; however, reasonableness was social.  At Harvard Cotton learned mathematics and philosophy and the high arts of individual rationality; however, he also learned that if he aspired to be a pastor or a civic leader, he needed to cultivate the social art of reasonableness. 

          Throughout Cotton’s most important books he would always be careful to follow the rules of social logic.  He became a great gatherer of trustworthy information and a consensus-builder of judgment.  In the pulpit he upheld the Bible as divine testimony.  In a book he titled Reasonable Religion, he declared that Christians are not reasonable “if we don’t receive that book which we call the Bible, or, the Scripture, as a Divine Testimony.”  Note that Christians “receive” the book as a community rather than individually interpret, argue, or prove its truth.

                          (pp. 22-23) 
 About collecting useful information into “commonplace books”: 


            Harvard also taught Cotton the quiet scribal appreciation of making notebooks and copying passages.  Students were not given textbooks but instead were expected to make a personal copy of a textbook by copying one that was being passed around the class.  Often tutors would create an “epitome” of a textbook, a sort-of synopsis like the Catechismus Logicus that Cotton’s father had made for him.  The tutor would pass this epitome to his students who would share it as they copied it into their notebooks.  Students, fingernails dark with ink, not only spent many hours copying textbooks, they were also supposed to create their own set of “commonplace books.”  Such books were where students transcribed useful quotes from whatever book they happened to be reading.  Ideally students were supposed to later transcribe these initial notes into much more organized commonplace books with indexes.  The highest ideal of this classroom tedium was that, in the end, the student would have a collection of commonplace books that would be an encyclopedia-like personal information storage and retrieval system.

Cotton Mather loved all this scribbling and was a master at information storage and retrieval.  He kept at it all his life.  Cotton’s largest and most complex books – his Magnalia Christi Americana, Biblia Americana, and even his more private Diary – are understood best as creatively expanded commonplace books.  Cotton found it relaxing to fold, cut, and sew several large sheets of paper into a clean new notebook, then, in his precise and clear handwriting, spend an evening organizing and copying passage from published books.
                                                                                          (pp. 26-27)

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