Reviews for Teaching Adolescents: Educational Psychology as a Science of Signs

The average rating for Teaching Adolescents: Educational Psychology as a Science of Signs based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-01 00:00:00 Carl Ford Mason offers a feast of ideas, examples, and warnings about character formation. I began reading the volume more than a year ago. For me it required slow reading. I foresee myself coming back to it again and again. So much to consider and apply! A few quotes from Part IV: " It is Written," Some Studies in the Evolution of Character: " The pains of little children are as acute as their pleasures, and, what is more, they are eternal. Experience has not begotten hope, and every grief and disappointment is final" (285). "It is by their self-ordered activities they develop, and they require more scope for these than an orderly house affords. An attic, a garden, a yard, a field, where in to do as they will, is necessary to the free growth of children" (287). "If we would but receive it, we are not capable of examining that which we do not know; and knowledge is the result of a slow, involuntary process, impossible to a mind in the critical attitude. Let us who teach spend time in the endeavor to lay proper and abundant nutriment before the young, rather than in leading them to criticize and examine every morsel of knowledge that comes their way. Who could live if every mouthful of bodily food were held up on a fork for critical examination before it be eaten?" (294-295) "In fact, preoccupation with tawdry and trivial things will be avoided if children are let alone: imagination will furnish them with ample properties, delightful scenes, upon the nearest suggestion of reality" (306). "It might be well to bring a child to face the fact of mystery when first his mind is greatly agitated by some public or private calamity. We do not know; we are not meant to know; we have our limitations. If we understood everything, there would be no room left for faith in God, because we should only believe what we could quite well see and understand. But it is just possible that the sudden loss of all these precious lives may mean that life and death are not the great and final things in the eyes of God that they are in our eyes. We are sure that people go on existing; and how they do so, we must trust to our Father, because he is our father and theirs. Such opportunities for the exercise of a strong faith should be a means of fortifying rather than enfeebling the religious life" (317). "Your genius has an amazing and sufficiently irritating way of evading that which bothers him; and assuredly he will be thankful in after days for any such tincture of scholarship as his masters were able to get into him" (326). "... The meaning of must can only be learned by means of a duty which it would be agreeable to shirk" (338). "... all that the man became the child was, not only potentially but actively" (362). "... any dunghill is high enough to crow from if we have a mind to" (367). "... The decisions of life are not simple, and to taboo knowledge is not to secure innocence. We must remember that ignorance is not innocence, and also that ignorance is the parent of insatiable curiosity" (374). "... The book is more terse, graphic, satisfying to the mind than the talk of any but very rare people" (394). "... it is well we should make children perceive at a very early age that a man's reason is the servant of his own will, and is not necessarily an independent authority within him in the service of truth" (406). See what I mean?!

Review # 2 was written on 2017-02-21 00:00:00 Dave Schouten There are many things to like about Formation of Character. Mason has some solid contributions to educational and character driven thought. However, there are many reasons that I liked this book, but didn't like it a lot, and especially didn't love it. Firstly, I'll say that I am a reformed Christian with presuppositions on the authority, inerrancy, and sufficiency of God's revealed word through the Bible. What I will say below in critique is informed almost completely by that: Mason, given her background and insights into philosophical and sociological education of children has an immense treasury of insight to bring to the table, but when it comes to the formation of a child's character, seeing that Scripture (both the Old and New Testaments) is my go-to guide for how character is formed in the lives of humanity, seems to be throwing darts at a mark. Some darts nail it, while others don't even hit the target at all. I saw a great deal of mingling of modern psychology, behavioral conditioning, and even compromise on topics which I see are clearly laid out in the Bible for how to raise children. While I was hoping she would stick to the Text that she has mostly stuck with in her previous volumes, it seems that here she largely deviates from roots sown in Home Education. What most concerns me about this book was that it subtly shifts the foundational standard from the roots of the Word of God and into what society is now replete with: behaviorism, let kids be kids, and moralistic therapy.