The Awakening of the Intellect: Ages 4 to 9

The Law of Mnemosyne

Hesiod sings that Mnemosyne, Memory, joined in love with Zeus, bore Him the 9 Muses in Pieria, the Goddesses of song, story, history, dance and the knowledge of the heavens.¹ The author of On the Education of Children draws the lesson for parents: the mythologists made Memory the mother of the Muses to show that nothing in the world is like memory for creating and fostering learning.² The stage that begins at 4 belongs to Mnemosyne. The child's memory is now the widest door into the soul.

The law of this stage is: the intellect begins. The inner emotional foundation laid in the first years now carries the first building. Into a secure child pour the stories of the Gods and heroes, the letters, the numbers, the songs, the measures of music and the skills of the body; and practice, every day, the virtues as habits. Quintilian, the greatest teacher Rome produced, opens his work with a promise to every parent.³

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 1.1.1-2

Nam contra plures reperias et faciles in excogitando et ad discendum promptos. Quippe id est homini naturale, ac sicut aves ad volatum, equi ad cursum, ad saevitiam ferae gignuntur, ita nobis propria est mentis agitatio atque sollertia: unde origo animi caelestis creditur. Hebetes vero et indociles non magis secundum naturam hominis eduntur quam prodigiosa corpora et monstris insignia.

"On the contrary you will find that most are quick to reason and ready to learn. Reasoning comes as naturally to man as flying to birds, speed to horses and ferocity to beasts of prey: our minds are endowed by nature with such activity and sagacity that the soul is believed to proceed from heaven. Those who are dull and unteachable are as abnormal as prodigious births and monstrosities." (tr. H. E. Butler)

The soul believed to proceed from heaven: Zevism holds the same. The divine spark is present in every child (Paideia); the work of these years is to wake it. When promise dies away as a child grows, Quintilian adds, this is due "not to the failure of natural gifts, but to lack of the requisite care".³

What the Ancients Taught

The Stories Come First

Plato begins education with stories, because the beginning of every work is the most important part, above all with anything young and tender.⁴

Plato, Republic II, 377a-c

οὐκοῦν οἶσθ’ ὅτι ἀρχὴ παντὸς ἔργου μέγιστον, ἄλλως τε δὴ καὶ νέῳ καὶ ἁπαλῷ ὁτῳοῦν; μάλιστα γὰρ δὴ τότε πλάττεται, καὶ ἐνδύεται τύπος ὃν ἄν τις βούληται ἐνσημήνασθαι ἑκάστῳ. … καὶ πλάττειν τὰς ψυχὰς αὐτῶν τοῖς μύθοις πολὺ μᾶλλον ἢ τὰ σώματα ταῖς χερσίν.

"Do you not know, then, that the beginning in every task is the chief thing, especially for any creature that is young and tender? For it is then that it is best molded and takes the impression that one wishes to stamp upon it. … And so shape their souls by these stories far rather than their bodies by their hands." (tr. Paul Shorey)

He asked that the stories told to children show the Gods as good and as the cause of good.⁵ Zevism tells the myths as the Temple teaches them: Zeus as Sovereign of the Cosmos and Father of Gods and men, never a victim; the Gods as parents who raise humanity toward their likeness (Theoteknia); the hard episodes of the myths, when the child asks about them, explained as images of cosmic forces. Socrates himself, in his last days in prison, put Aesop's fables into verse.⁶

Music and Gymnastics

The Greek education of the young stood on 2 pillars: μουσική, everything the Muses rule (song, poetry, story, the lyre), for the soul; and γυμναστική for the body. Plato explains why music comes first: rhythm and harmony sink deepest into the soul, and the child rightly reared in them will love the beautiful and hate the ugly while still young, before being able to grasp the reason, and will welcome reason when it comes as a friend recognized by kinship.⁷

Plato, Republic III, 401d-402a

κυριωτάτη ἐν μουσικῇ τροφή, ὅτι μάλιστα καταδύεται εἰς τὸ ἐντὸς τῆς ψυχῆς ὅ τε ῥυθμὸς καὶ ἁρμονία, καὶ ἐρρωμενέστατα ἅπτεται αὐτῆς φέροντα τὴν εὐσχημοσύνην … ἔτι νέος ὤν, πρὶν λόγον δυνατὸς εἶναι λαβεῖν, ἐλθόντος δὲ τοῦ λόγου ἀσπάζοιτ’ ἂν αὐτὸν γνωρίζων δι’ οἰκειότητα μάλιστα ὁ οὕτω τραφείς.

"Education in music is most sovereign, because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them grace … while still young, before he is able to apprehend reason; and when reason comes, the man thus nurtured would be the first to give her welcome, for by this affinity he would know her." (tr. Paul Shorey)

He also warns against either pillar alone: gymnastics without music makes a soul harsh and savage, music without gymnastics makes it soft; the right education tunes both together like the strings of a lyre.⁸ Aristotle names the 4 customary subjects of a Greek education: letters, gymnastics, music and, for some, drawing.⁹

Aristotle, Politics VIII.3, 1337b23-27

ἔστι δὲ τέτταρα σχεδὸν ἃ παιδεύειν εἰώθασι, γράμματα καὶ γυμναστικὴν καὶ μουσικὴν καὶ τέταρτον ἔνιοι γραφικήν.

"There are roughly four subjects that they customarily teach: letters, gymnastics, music, and fourth, some add drawing." (lit.)

The Greeks mocked the ignorant man as one who "knows neither letters nor swimming".¹⁰ Letters for the mind and swimming for the body were the 2 things no child should lack.

Learning Through Play, Never Through Force

Plato forbids compulsion in the first studies. A free soul ought not to learn anything slavishly; bodily labor forced on the body does it no harm, but nothing learned by force stays in the soul.¹¹

Plato, Republic VII, 536e-537a

οὐδὲν μάθημα μετὰ δουλείας τὸν ἐλεύθερον χρὴ μανθάνειν. … μὴ τοίνυν βίᾳ, εἶπον, ὦ ἄριστε, τοὺς παῖδας ἐν τοῖς μαθήμασιν ἀλλὰ παίζοντας τρέφε, ἵνα καὶ μᾶλλον οἷός τ’ ᾖς καθορᾶν ἐφ’ ὃ ἕκαστος πέφυκεν.

"A free soul ought not to pursue any study slavishly. … Do not, then, my friend, keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play. That will also better enable you to discern the natural capacities of each." (tr. Paul Shorey)

Quintilian agrees and gives the method. Some, he notes, would have no letters before the age of 7; he answers that the years before 7 must not be wasted, because the first elements of learning rest on memory, "which not only exists even in small children, but is specially retentive at that age". The child should be given ivory letters to play with, and learning should be a game.^{12, 13}

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 1.1.20

Nam id in primis cavere oportebit, ne studia qui amare nondum potest oderit et amaritudinem semel perceptam etiam ultra rudes annos reformidet. Lusus hic sit, et rogetur et laudetur et numquam non fecisse se gaudeat.

"Above all things we must take care that the child, who is not yet old enough to love his studies, does not come to hate them and dread the bitterness which he has once tasted, even when the years of infancy are left behind. His studies must be made an amusement: he must be questioned and praised and taught to rejoice when he has done well." (tr. H. E. Butler)

Aristotle places the years from 5 to 7 as a time of watching: the children should now be spectators of the lessons they will have to learn.¹⁴

Aristotle, Politics VII.17, 1336b35-37

διελθόντων δὲ τῶν πέντε ἐτῶν τὰ δύο μέχρι τῶν ἑπτὰ δεῖ θεωροὺς ἤδη γίγνεσθαι τῶν μαθήσεων ἃς δεήσει μανθάνειν αὐτούς.

"When five years are past, for the two years up to seven they must already be spectators of the lessons they will have to learn." (lit.)

Truth, Justice and Gratitude Are Taught Like Letters

Herodotus reports that the Persians, from the age of 5 to 20, taught their sons only 3 things: to ride, to shoot the bow and to speak the truth.¹⁵

Herodotus, Histories 1.136.2

παιδεύουσι δὲ τοὺς παῖδας ἀπὸ πενταέτεος ἀρξάμενοι μέχρι εἰκοσαέτεος τρία μοῦνα, ἱππεύειν καὶ τοξεύειν καὶ ἀληθίζεσθαι.

"They educate their boys from the age of five to twenty in three things only: riding, archery and speaking the truth." (lit.)

Xenophon, in his portrait of the education of Cyrus, says that Persian boys went to school to learn justice as Greek boys went to learn their letters, that they judged among themselves the charge men most hate and least bring to court, ingratitude, and that they learned self-control above all by seeing their elders live with self-control every day.¹⁶

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 1.2.8

διδάσκουσι δὲ τοὺς παῖδας καὶ σωφροσύνην· μέγα δὲ συμβάλλεται εἰς τὸ μανθάνειν σωφρονεῖν αὐτοὺς ὅτι καὶ τοὺς πρεσβυτέρους ὁρῶσιν ἀνὰ πᾶσαν ἡμέραν σωφρόνως διάγοντας.

"They teach the boys self-control as well; and it contributes greatly to their learning self-control that they see their elders, every day, living with self-control." (lit.)

Satya, the Truth, is the first pillar the Temple names around the throne of Zeus (Satya, Ma'at and Arete). A child who learns to speak the truth at 5 is a child built on that pillar.

The First Schools of the Ancient World

In Athens, Plato's Protagoras describes the sequence: nurse, mother, tutor and father all strive from the first years to make the child as good as possible, teaching what is just and unjust, noble and shameful, holy and unholy; later the child goes to the teachers of letters, of the lyre and of gymnastics, who are told to care for the child's conduct even more than for reading and music.¹⁷ Aristotle sets the first period of formal education from 7 to puberty.¹⁴ In Egypt, the scribe's apprentice began with the Kemit, a book of model letters and formulas, copied again and again on flakes of limestone.¹⁸ In India, the Laws of Manu place the boy's initiation into Vedic study, the upanayana, between the 8th and 12th years counted from conception.¹⁹ Across the ancient world, the age of the first letters is the age of this stage.

What the Science Shows

From Intuition to Logic

Jean Piaget described the years from about 2 to 7 as the preoperational stage, in which the child thinks in images and stories and judges by appearances, and the years from about 7 to 11 as the stage of concrete operations, in which logical thought begins to work on real, present things: the child grasps that a quantity of water is the same in a tall glass and a wide one.²⁰ The ages are approximate; the order is fixed. The myths and stories of the early years and the letters, numbers and measures of the later ones follow that order exactly.

The Zone of the Next Step

Lev Vygotsky defined the "zone of proximal development" as the distance between what a child can do alone and what the child can do "under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers".²¹ David Wood, Jerome Bruner and Gail Ross named the adult's part "scaffolding": support given at the edge of the child's ability and withdrawn as the ability grows.²² The good parent-teacher works always 1 step ahead of the child, never 10.

Industry and Competence

Erikson placed initiative against guilt in the years from about 3 to 5 and industry against inferiority in the school years: the child now wants to make things, to finish them and to be recognized for doing them well. The virtues of these stages are purpose and competence.²³

Praise the Method, Not the Gift

In a series of studies, Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck found that children praised for being intelligent were more likely than children praised for effort to avoid challenges and to lose heart after failure.²⁴ Later research found that brief "growth mindset" programs have small average effects, larger for struggling students, so the lesson is a modest one: praise the work, the strategy and the persistence, and never make the child's worth hang on a fixed gift.^{25, 26}

Conversation and Reading

Children's exposure to back-and-forth conversation, more than the number of words they merely hear, is linked to the activity of the language areas of the brain in children of 4 to 6.²⁷ The American Academy of Pediatrics counts reading aloud among the most important things a parent does.²⁸

Body, Outdoors, Sleep and Screens

• Movement. From 5 years the WHO recommends an average of at least 60 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous physical activity, with vigorous activity and muscle and bone strengthening on at least 3 days a week.²⁹
• Outdoors. In a randomized trial in Chinese schools, adding 40 minutes of outdoor activity to the school day reduced new cases of short-sightedness over 3 years (30.4 percent against 39.5 percent).³⁰
• Sleep. 10 to 13 hours for ages 3 to 5; 9 to 12 hours for ages 6 to 12.³¹
• Screens. For ages 2 to 5, at most 1 hour a day of high-quality programming watched with a parent; from 6, consistent limits on time and content, a family media plan, and screens kept from displacing sleep, exercise and the family's time together.^{32, 33}

The Practice

The Stories: The First Theology

• Tell the myths of the Gods and heroes every week. Zeus and the Olympians, the birth of Athena, the labors of Heracles, Perseus and Medusa, Theseus and the Minotaur, Odysseus and the Cyclops; Osiris, Isis and Horus; the tales of the Pantheon (The Pantheon). Tell them as the Temple teaches them.
• Tell the fables. Aesop's fables carry practical wisdom in a form a child remembers for life.
• Let the child retell. A story retold is a story owned. Ask the child to tell it back, to act it, to draw it.
• Memorize. Short hymns and prayers of the Temple, the Names of the Gods, the Delphic maxims γνῶθι σεαυτόν ("know yourself") and μηδὲν ἄγαν ("nothing in excess"), and the opening lines of the Pythagorean Golden Verses: honor first the immortal Gods, then the heroes, then your parents.³⁴ Memory is at its peak; give it treasures.

Letters and Numbers

• Begin letters through play. Letter shapes to hold, as Quintilian's ivory letters; sounds and rhymes; signs read in the street. Reading should arrive as a conquest; a punishment teaches only fear of the page.
• Read aloud every day, beyond the child's own level. The ear runs ahead of the eye; a child who hears rich language learns to read it.
• Make numbers concrete. Counting, measuring, weighing, cooking, money, shapes and patterns. The Pythagoreans revered number as an image of the order of the cosmos.
• Teach the Greek letters as a game. The alphabet of the Ancients, learned early, opens the door to the sacred texts later.
• Write. Letters to grandparents, captions to drawings, the child's own short stories.

Music and Gymnastics

• Sing every day. Hymns, songs and rhymes; music sinks deepest into the soul.
• Begin an instrument when the child shows readiness, often between 5 and 7, with short daily practice.
• Move every day. Running, climbing, ball games, dance, gymnastics, and swimming above all: the Ancient who could neither read nor swim was the image of the ignorant.
• Keep the balance. Plato's warning stands: the body without the Muses grows harsh, the Muses without the body grow soft.

The Virtues as Daily Habits

• Truth. The Persians taught it with riding and the bow. Never punish a confessed fault as harshly as a concealed one; honor the truth told.
• Courage. Small fears faced with the parent near: the dark, the deep end of the pool, a new group of children.
• Self-control. Waiting a turn, finishing a task, saving a sweet for later. Self-control grows like a muscle.
• Justice and fairness. Turns in games, fair shares, keeping promises. Let the child judge small disputes between siblings, as the Persian boys judged among themselves.
• Gratitude. Thanks to parents, teachers and the Gods. The Persians punished ingratitude; the Pythagoreans taught the honor of parents next to the honor of the Gods.
• Work. Real daily duties at home: setting the table, feeding animals, caring for plants, tidying. Duty given early becomes character.

Before the Gods

• Give the child a part in the household's worship. The child lights the candle beside the parent, recites a short prayer, brings flowers to the altar and joins the festivals (Our Rites & Holidays). The first libation poured by the young person's own hand belongs to the Ephebeia at 18; until then the child worships beside the parent.
• Answer every question about the Gods honestly. At the child's level, and with "I do not know; let us find out" when that is the truth. The child of the Gods has the right to ask (Theoteknia).
• Teach quiet. A minute of silence before the evening prayer: sitting still, breathing slowly, listening. The practices of Power Meditation and of Magick and Theurgy belong to the adult who chooses them at the Initiation; the child learns stillness, prayer and reverence.
• Teach the meaning of the household rites. Why the candle, why the water, why the Names. Rites understood become rites loved.

Guarding the Mind

• Choose what enters. Stories, programs, games and companions. Plato would have the nurses and mothers tell only stories worth telling.
• Keep screens in their place. Agreed times and agreed content, kept away from meals and from the bedroom at night, and never the child's companion of first resort.
• Choose teachers and schools with care. The author of On the Education of Children asks parents to seek teachers of blameless life and proven skill; a teacher's character teaches as much as the lesson.³⁵
• Protect the child's rest. The soul, the same author writes, grows through tasks adapted to it and is drowned by excessive ones; all of life is divided between relaxation and application.³⁶

Signs the Stage Is Going Well

• The child loves stories, asks for them and retells them. Mnemosyne is at work.
• Reading and counting arrive as pleasures. Learning has stayed a game.
• The child tells the truth about faults. The pillar of Satya stands.
• The child helps without being asked, at least sometimes. Duty is becoming habit.
• The child moves with skill and joy. Gymnastics and music are in balance.

Errors to Avoid

• Forcing early learning into drudgery. The child who learns to hate study before being able to love it, Quintilian warns, carries that bitterness for years.
• Praising cleverness. It teaches the child to fear the task that might prove them ordinary.
• Letting screens replace stories, play and conversation.
• A childhood without duties. A child served in everything becomes an adult who serves nothing.
• Ridiculing questions about the Gods. The question is the seed of understanding.

Books for This Stage

For the Parents

• Jim Trelease, The Read-Aloud Handbook (Penguin, 1982; 8th edition with Cyndi Giorgis, 2019). Why and how to read aloud, with long lists of books by age.
• Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise, The Well-Trained Mind (W. W. Norton, 1999). A classical education at home built on the trivium: the "grammar" years of memory and stories, then logic, then rhetoric.
• Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk (Rawson, Wade, 1980). The classic on cooperation without threats.
• Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, NurtureShock (Twelve, 2009). Research that overturns common assumptions about praise, sleep, lying and siblings.
• Carol S. Dweck, Mindset (Random House, 2006). On praising effort and strategy; read with the modest effect sizes of later research in mind.
• Paul Tough, How Children Succeed (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). Character, curiosity and self-control as the foundations of achievement.
• Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test (Little, Brown, 2014). Self-control and how it can be taught; read with the later replication of the test in mind (The Frameworks).
• Peter Gray, Free to Learn (Basic Books, 2013). Why free play makes children more capable and more resilient.

For the Child

• Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire, D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths (Doubleday, 1962). The best illustrated first book of the Gods for children.
• Charles Kingsley, The Heroes (1856). Perseus, the Argonauts and Theseus, written by a father for his own children.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853). The myths retold as tales for reading aloud.
• Roger Lancelyn Green, Tales of the Greek Heroes (Puffin, 1958) and Tales of Ancient Egypt (Bodley Head, 1967). Clear, faithful retellings of the Greek and Egyptian myths.
• Padraic Colum, The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles (Macmillan, 1921). Jason and the Argonauts, with many other myths woven in.
• Aesop's Fables, tr. Laura Gibbs (Oxford World's Classics, 2002), read aloud a few at a time.
• D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths (first published as Norse Gods and Giants, Doubleday, 1967). The northern Gods for the same age.

From the Ancients

• Plato, Republic II-III, 376e-412b. The education of the young in stories, music and gymnastics.
• Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria I.1-3. The first years of learning, play and memory.
• Plutarch (or his circle), On the Education of Children. Teachers, rest and memory.
• Xenophon, Cyropaedia I.2. The Persian school of justice and self-control.
• Herodotus, Histories 1.136. Riding, the bow and the truth.