Most of you know that there is a group of individuals working on developing a Mason curriculum.  I work with that group and find that our group discussions constantly make me grow and learn, pushing me into a richer and more thoughtful understanding of Mason’s educational principles and practices.  A recent discussion about avoiding behaviourism creeping in the door of Mason’s work challenged and changed my thinking about one aspect of Mason’s curriculum, Nature Study.  Avoiding behaviourism is difficult because we are all saturated with it. Behaviorism is rooted in matterialism (as distinguished from materialism which means a person who likes many possessions) which is a philosophy of life embedded in much Western thought.  It is the view that all of life is only matter and there is nothing truly spiritual. I once read in an encyclopedia (can’t remember which one, I think it was Compton) that Dewey switched his belief from children as spiritual beings to children as behaviourial beings.  In my opinion he essentially extinguished their spiritual natures by making this switch in …