Episode 204: Short Synopsis Points 9-12

Charlotte Mason distilled her philosophy into some succinctly stated principles, and the homeschool or classroom teacher does well to underpin their efforts by considering the philosophy that drives the teaching. Today’s episode addresses principles 9-12, the specifics of what we believe about the mind, how it learns, and what the teacher must not do to impose on the natural development of a child in acquiring knowledge.

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[9] We hold that the child’s mind is no mere sac to hold ideas; but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a spiritual organism, with an appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet, with which it is prepared to deal ; and which it can digest and assimilate as the body does foodstuffs.

[10] Such a doctrine as e.g. the Herbartian, that the mind is a receptacle, lays the stress of Education (the preparation of knowledge in enticing morsels duly ordered) upon the teacher. Children taught on this principle are in danger of receiving much teaching with little knowledge; and the teacher’s axiom is ” what a child learns matters less than how he learns it.”

[11] But we, believing that the normal child has powers of mind which fit him to deal with all knowledge proper to him, give him a full and generous curriculum ; taking care only that all knowledge offered him is vital, that is, that facts are not presented without their informing ideas. Out of this conception comes our principle that,-

[12] “Education is the Science of Relations”; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books, for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of–
“Those first-born affinities
That fit our new existence to existing things.”

“Herbart’s psychology is extraordinarily gratifying and attractive to teachers who are, like other people, eager to magnify their office; and here is a scheme which shows how every child is a new creation as he comes forth from the hands of his teacher. The teacher learns how to do it; he has but to draw together a mass of those ideas which themselves will combine in the mind into which they effect an entrance, and, behold, the thing is done: the teacher has done it; he has selected. the ideas, shewn the correlation of each with the other and the work is complete! The ideas establish themselves, the most potent rule and gather force, and if these be good, the man is made.” (6/114)

“…as we have seen, the world is being educated, that it is found wanting. Herbart begins to account for man minus what I have called the person. (Person is used in the common-sense, everyday acceptance of the word.) He allows a soul, but he says, “The soul has no capacity nor faculty whatever either to receive or to produce anything. It has originally neither ideas nor feelings nor desires. It knows nothing of itself and nothing of other things…” (3/58-60)

“Kaspar Hauser’s story and our common experience go to prove that the labour we spend on developing the ‘faculties,’ or in cultivating the senses, is largely thrown away. Nature has no need of our endeavours in these directions. Under the most adverse conceivable conditions she can work wonders if let alone.” (3/74)

“…we have not to develop the person; he is there already, with, possibly, every power that will serve him in his passage through life.” (3/75)

“We no longer ask ourselves whether it is better to learn a few subjects ‘thoroughly,’ so we say, or to get a ‘smattering’ of many. These questions are beside the mark.” (3/75)

“…there seems good reason to believe that the limit to human intelligence arises largely from the limit to human interests, that is, from the failure to establish personal relations on a wide scale with the persons who make up humanity,––relations of love, duty, responsibility, and, above all, of interest, living interest, with the near and the far-off, in time and in place. … [she continued] I think we should have a great educational revolution once we ceased to regard ourselves as assortments of so-called faculties and realised ourselves as persons whose great business it is to get in touch with other persons of all sorts and conditions, of all countries and climes, of all times, past and present.” (3/82-83)

“Therefore we do not feel it is lawful in the early days of a child’s life to select certain subjects for his education to the exclusion of others; … but we endeavour that he shall have relations of pleasure and intimacy established with as many as possible of the interests proper to him; not learning a slight or incomplete smattering about this or that subject, but plunging into vital knowledge, with a great field before him which in all his life he will not be able to explore. In this conception we get that ‘touch of emotion’ which vivifies knowledge, for it is probable that we feel only as we are brought into our proper vital relations.” (3/223)

“…they can only be elevated by ideas which act upon the imagination and act upon the character and influence the soul, and it is the function of all good teachers to bring those ideas before them.” (Charlotte Mason quoting Mr. Fisher, 6/126)

“As I have said elsewhere, the ideas required for the sustenance of children are to be found mainly in books of literary quality; given these the mind does for itself the sorting, arranging, selecting, rejecting, classifying, which Herbart leaves to the struggle of the promiscuous ideas which manage to cross the threshold.” (6/117)

“… we want to ensure that the children are gaining knowledge, not merely acquiring information, for the difference between the two is fundamental. Information might be described as the record of facts, whether in books or the mind of the individual, and it may be received rather passively and without much effort; whereas knowledge implies the result of the voluntary action of the mind to the material presented to it. It is something vital and personal, and presupposes an increase of intellectual aptitude in new directions and, as knowledge is never stationary, a new point of departure.” (Downton, PR 47, p. 334)

“Method implies two things-a way to an end, and step-by-step progress in that way…” (1/8)

“…asked itself what end it had in view…What is education after all? The answer came in the phrase–Education is the Science of Relations.” (Education as the Science of Relations, PR 13, p. 485)

“What we are concerned with is the fact that we personally have relations with all that there is in the present, all that there has been in the past and all that there will be in the future–with all above us and all about us–and that fulness of living, expansion, expressions and serviceableness for each of us, depend upon how far we apprehend these relationships and how many of them we lay hold of.” (PR 13, p. 485)

“It is our chief business to give him a chance to make the largest possible number of these attachments valid.” (PR 13, p. 486)

“The five relations which it is necessary for children to establish are:–[1]Their relations with God, of prayer, praise, love and duty; [2] their moral relations with their fellow-creatures, including history, literature, duties of a citizen, etc.; [3] their relations with Nature and the world around them; [4] their relations with the earth, including all sorts of bodily exercises; [5] their relations with materials, in handicrafts, etc.” (PR 16, pp. 61-64)

“A small English boy of nine living in Japan, [who] remarked, — ‘Isn’t it fun, Mother, learning all these things? Everything seems to fit into something else.’” But, she points out, “The boy had not found out the whole secret; everything fitted into something within himself.” (6/156-157)

“Everyone comes into the world capable of forming relations; some have greater affinities in one direction than others, and while one child will receive one class of ideas, and assimilate it quickly, another will choose another class altogether.” (Owen, PR 16, p. 61)

“Our deadly error is to suppose that we are his showman to the universe; and, not only so, but that there is no community at all between child and universe unless such as we choose to set up.” (3/188)

“…we, for our part,” Miss Mason tells us, “have two chief concerns–first, to put him in the way of forming these relations by presenting the right idea at the right time, and by forming the right habit upon the right idea; and, secondly, by not getting in the way and so preventing the establishment of the very relations we see to form.” (3/66)

“It is her duty to open the doors in many different directions through which the children may walk in the pursuit of knowledge whilst she is there to guide and direct as occasion requires.” (O’Farrell, PR 33, p. 782)

“Establishing proper relations is necessary for ‘fullness of life and joy in living.’” (3/75)

“We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. ‘Thou hast set my feet in a large room,’ should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time…that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. We cannot give the children these interests…The question is not,-how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education-but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?” (3/170-171)

“…the one positive precept [given to parents by Christ]… is ‘feed’ (which should be rendered ‘ pasture ‘) my lambs,’ place them in the midst of abundant food.” (6/81)

“It is a wide programme founded on the educational right of man; wide, but we may not say it is impossible nor may we pick and choose and educate him in this direction but not in that. We may not even make choice between science and the ‘humanities.’ Our part it seems to me is to give a child a vital hold upon as many as possible of those wide relationships proper to him.” (6/157)