Part 1: Persons or Products?

How do we see the child? As a product whose outcome we determine by putting them through certain processes? As a demigod who already possesses all they need? On the contrary, the child is a person with great capacity, but also with great need for relationships with mature adults to love and support them, inform them, instruct them, and model for them. Through mind-to-mind relationships the child is to be cherished and cultivated to facilitate healthy growth to maturity as a person.

Part 2: How is the Student Growing?

Rather than focusing on short-term outcomes, Ambleside teachers are concerned about how students grow. They want to know the student is becoming more mature, more curious, more diligent, and more peacefully on task, and that they are developing relationships to ideas in history and math and to people who have lived throughout the ages. These are much larger concerns than a grade on a test. Three instruments are available to the teacher committed to help students grow without using manipulation.

Part 3:  What are we drawing the students to?

What we draw children with is what we draw them to. If we motivate children to perform using candy or our approval or grades, we increase their desire for those things while undermining their natural desire for knowledge itself, their joy in work well done, their satisfaction in ideas and beauty. If we take seriously the sacredness of the personality of a child, then we must not manipulate them by playing on their natural desires in unhealthy ways that distort their hearts.