The Science of Relations :: Lessons from my Seven-Year-Old Son

As I read about Perseus finding Andromeda chained to a rock beside the sea a few months ago, Xavier was sitting on his hands, practically jumping out of his seat. As soon as I paused for narration, he yelled, "I know this! I know this!" And he ran to get D'Aulaires' version from the shelf and flipped right to this page.

This happens daily. It is now so much a part of our routine that we laugh over it. I have started taking photos of the books side-by-side every time he brings them to me.

Apparently he spent years looking at storybooks, not yet able to read them, studying these pictures and wondering about the stories behind them. And now, as he's listening, he's meeting old friends, hearing names for the illustrations he keeps in his mind.

My other kids have not been so insistent on sharing their connections with me, or so visual in their memory. He has these images that have become part of him and this pressing need to make those relationships tangible by showing them to me there on the page. He will pull a book he read months ago, knows exactly where it is on the shelf and what page the picture is on.

Sometimes the connection is obvious: the children on the back of the Golden Ram above, for example. Sometimes it's less so: as I'm reading about the "black stones" the Chinese were mining in Marco Polo, he runs to get Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day. "You're remembering something from Richard Scarry?!" I ask him. Sure enough, coal!

Sometimes the images aren't an exact match--just a detail that in his mind connects the two (or three or four!) stories. These are actually the most interesting to me.  When your seven-year-old son starts to form relationships among Greek mythology, Shakespeare, and classic fairy tales all in one breath, you stop and pay attention. You marvel at how a child's mind that is fed on the meat of narrative, poetry, myth--vitality in its many linguistic forms--responds when he has time to lie fallow and space to consider.

These juxtapositions are snapshots of his brain. Or his heart, since they are obviously working together as he validates affinities and grows in knowledge and in care. It's quite an honor to be invited into our kids' souls, isn't it?

Watching this play out day in and out with multiple children at multiple ages, how all these readings intersect and intertwine until this thing we call a curriculum is far bigger than any pile of books or list of assignments, it strikes me that this is the Science of Relations made clear in the daily--in these books set side by side and the young student who placed them there in front of me.

As Mason says herself, this principle is the underpinning of the whole philosophy, the "captain idea," the very definition of education: relationship. It is what leads one to virtue in act and wisdom in thought. How much he cares.

This particular son is not yet an expert narrator. He's in second grade and still building those skills. But I can tell quite clearly in these moments that there are relationships forming that he isn't yet able to express.

While it's true that when Mason used the term "Science of Relations," she was referring primarily to the relationships a student builds with books (and things and people) and not to the connection between books themselves. But I think harping on such a distinction oversimplifies the matter.

Because the process of education doesn't end there, with a child connecting with a book. The book becomes part of the child, and then another book becomes part of the child, and then both books are connected through the child knowing them.

As Mason says, "A small English boy of nine living in Japan, remarked, 'Isn’t it fun, Mother, learning all these things? Everything seems to fit into something else.' The boy had not found out the whole secret; everything fitted into something within himself." (Volume 6, p. 156-157)

The whole secret is that it's a matter of timing, in the end. 

She is warning us that we don't have to present a carefully-constructed curriculum of connected ideas to make sure our children can learn. Their building those connections themselves is their education. That's not our job as teachers; in fact, it would be overstepping our bounds.

But when books change us, we're primed to see "echoes" in the next books to come. And so the books are connected--through the learner and the mind-work he has done. Everything does fit into something else. Everything also fits into him.

 It is a web, not a string, of relationship, with the learner right there in the middle.

When he brings me these pictures, I can't help but feel they represent those lines from Wordsworth that Mason liked so well:

"An intellectual charm; that calm delight

Which, if I err not, surely must belong 

To those first-born affinities that fit

Our new existence to existing things"

This is delightful to watch unfold.