Wednesdays with Words: Many-layered Thing

I finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix the other night and enjoyed it pretty well. I still need to write my review, but I thought I’d share this quote that – as an educator – I found intriguing dealing with the mind:

I know the image I found is unsupportive of the quote – almost the opposite of what the quote really says, but  I couldn’t resist the image. I suppose my review (if I get it written as I hope to today) is going to talk about ‘the mind’ as a theme from that book in the series.

Anyway, Charlotte Mason tells us that education is a science of relations.  If all our ideas are boxed up or paginated or even in pockets (that’s what R-girl tells us about hers), they don’t get the benefit of being so much flotsam and jetsam floating about and bumping into each other and making surprising friends. It’s the mix of ideas, memories, thoughts that matters. Oh, you can – and should – do some organizing and maybe (maybe) some dusting from time to time. But pulling ideas, memories, and thoughts from one place to another in the mind is where the beauty of the work does its best. Maturity involves knowing how to pull from this place and that and arrange a meeting of ideas.

So, while Professor Snape was trying to teach Harry how to protect his mind and close it off, he sent me off in another direction entirely – thinking about thinking in general. A good quote can do that 🙂

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