On Principles 1, 2 & 20

Summer with Charlotte: The Defining Issue

As we kick-off, I will begin by stressing the importance of reading Charlotte Mason’s entire Home Education series. Here is a quick look at her six volumes:

Volume 1: Home Education (1886): Charlotte’s idealistic, yet solid, collection of essays on education for the early years. Great for those with very young children, roughly age 9 and under.

Volume 2: Parents and Children (1897): Through a collection of articles written for the Parents’ Review magazine, Charlotte discusses the important role of a parent in a child’s education.

Volume 3: School Education (1904): Charlotte’s thoughts on - you guessed it - education in the school years. This is for children roughly aged 9-12 and discusses methods and curriculum.

Volume 4: Ourselves (1905): Charlotte wrote this one specifically for children and adolescents. There are two books in this volume; Book I is great for kids after age 12 and Book II is intended for the mid-teen years.

Volume 5: Formation of Character (1906): This volume covers the formation of character in various people through case studies and addresses how young people should spend their days before adulthood.

Volume 6: A Philosophy of Education (1922): This volume was written shortly before her death in 1923. Charlotte looks back over her years of work and writes her magnum opus on education, including her complete list of principles. The material is directed towards parents who have children age 12 and up but functions as a great overview of her educational philosophy.

To skim Charlotte Mason’s volumes would be like trying to make a snack of a porterhouse steak. They require a careful read which takes a long time so this is your disclaimer that my work here is not sufficient but simply a jumping off point to help you get started.

In this series I will be working through the 20 principles via Volume 6. I’ve included the reference of each principle so you can dig deeper into your book if you’d like.

Principle 1: Children are Born Persons

“No sooner doth the truth…. come into the soul’s sight, but the soul knows her to be he, first and old acquaintance.”

“The consequence of truth is great, therefore the judgment of it must not be negligent.”

Reference: Volume 6, Chapter 2

Here Charlotte quotes Benjamin Whichcote, who was the founding father of Cambridge and a puritan divine (an archaic word for theologian). I won’t attempt to unpack his words but I will say that with these quotes she is setting the stage to highlight the importance of truth and its inseparable affiliation with the soul.

To understand Charlotte’s first principle you have to know who she was talking to. The Victorian era may have been coming to a close by the time she published A Philosophy of Education, but she originally said this in her first Home Education volume and was very much talking to Victorian educators and parents.

To say a child was “born a person” carries a distinction that we take for granted today. Of course a child is born a person, we think. What else would he be born as? “But truths get flat and wonders stale upon us,” Charlotte said and isn’t that right? We read our bibles every day and skim the details, “yes, yes…the garden, the flood, the gospel, and so on…” but take the gravity of that truth lightly and while small children wonder at the world around them we stroll carelessly past a robin’s nest. How quickly we breeze past what is too familiar.

So the real question is: what is a person?

The Victorians believed babies were blank slates to be written on or empty vessels to be filled. In other words, when a baby was born, you could basically start from scratch. Charlotte said: “Their notion is that by means of a pull here, a push there, a compression elsewhere a person is at last turned out according to the pattern the educator has in his mind. The other view is that the beautiful infant frame is but the setting of a jewel of such astonishing worth that, put the whole world in one scale and this jewel in the other, and the scale which holds the world flies up outbalanced.”

Those silly Victorians, we may scoff; of course we know better now. Yet look at the empty promise touted by our world today: “you can be anything you want to be!” Can you? Can a child who hates math grow up to be an accountant? Can someone with no love of language just decide to be a translator if he really wants to? No, there is something under the surface.

The idea of a “born person” insists that there is already a person there; we are not inventing the child, we are uncovering him with his existing personality, tendencies, and desires woven in. But the child can learn and grow. All babies have amazing and “astonishingly alert” minds - capabilities they are already born with. This is not the educators doing, but the Creator’s doing.

But all children? Really?

If you’ve been here for a while, you know that autism, ADHD, and dyslexia are all a part of the fabric of my family. Therefore, I’m often asked how the Charlotte Mason method applies to kids with challenges like these and if it can apply at all. I’ll let her answer in her own words:

“…every child has been discovered to be a person of infinite possibilities. I say every child, for so-called ‘backward’ children are no exception.”

No. exception.

Pretty bold words for a Victorian. Pretty radical, really, for someone educating teachers and parents in a time where professionals would look at children like mine - maybe like yours - and declare them, “backwards.” Backward, meaning “in the wrong direction” - children who were thought to be altogether “wrong,” themselves.

When making a plea for her principles to be recognized by the ‘powers that be’ of her day, she also says that “the appeal is not to the clever child only, but to the average and even to the ‘backward’ child.”

I smile at the quotations Charlotte put around the word backward in these quotes, imagining her to be saying it with an eye roll or having a hint of sarcasm in her tone at the very least.

Impoverished children were thought to have the same unfortunate prognosis when it came to education, but again, our champion assures the critics:

“To hear children of the slums ‘telling’ King Lear or Woodstock, by the hour if you will let them, or describing with minutest details Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb or Botticelli’s Spring, is a surprise, a revelation.”

She read Shakespeare to kids in the slums.

She said ‘backward’ children had infinite possibilities.

In a world where social classes defined who you were and the kind of life you would have from the minute you were born, and the medical community did not understand neurodiversity, she believed in a liberal education for all.

And she meant it. Listen to how she defends her position:

“and with some feeling of awe upon us we shall be the better prepared to consider how and upon what children should be educated. I will only add that I make no claims for them which cannot be justified by hundreds, thousands, of instances within our experience.” (“our,” referring here to the teachers at the training college, House of Education, which Charlotte ran in Ambleside, England).

She leveled the playing field, for the children’s sake.

You can see that this first principle is the bedrock for the educational philosophy she laid out, which is why I’ve spent so much time on it. Her other principles depend upon this one and often point back to it so it’s important you really take time to think it over. I’ll wrap up with a summary in her own words:

The fundamental idea is, that children are persons and are therefore moved by the same springs of conduct as their elders. Among these is the Desire of Knowledge, knowledge-hunger being natural to everybody. History, Geography, the thoughts of other people, roughly, the humanities, are proper for us all, and are the objects of the natural desire of knowledge. So too, are Science, for we all live in the world; and Art, for we all require beauty, and are eager to know how to discriminate; social science, Ethics, for we are aware of the need to learn about the conduct of life; and Religion, for, like those men we heard of at the Front, we all ‘want God.’”

Principle 2: The Good and Evil Nature of a Child

Children are not born bad but with possibilities for good and for evil.

Reference: Volume 6, Chapter 3

Let’s get this out of the way up front - Charlotte is not talking about the doctrine of original sin. She was a devout follower of Christ and upstanding Anglican and her love of the gospel spreads through all of her writing as you will see in this series. What she is referring to here is the notion that a child can be born “ruined” and education cannot help him. Again, remember we are dealing with Victorians and it seems a popular educator of the day supported the idea that children were either fully bad or fully good. Charlotte clears this up:

“The fact seems to be that children are like ourselves, not because they have become so, but because they are born so; that is, with tendencies, dispositions, towards good and towards evil, and also with a curious intuitive knowledge as to which is good and which is evil. Here we have the work of education indicated. There are good and evil tendencies in the body and mind, heart and soul; and the hope set before us is that we can foster the good so as to attenuate the evil; that is, on condition that we put Education in her true place as the handmaid of Religion.”

She goes on to discuss Well-Being of Body, Well-Being of Mind, Intellectual Appetite, Misdirected Affections, and the Well-Being of the Soul. In short, each area has the propensity for good and evil. Think of the illustration of the angel on one shoulder and demon on another. She goes a good deal into this discussion for educators and spends most of Volume 4 outlining these fantastic ideas to kids and helping them consider how to guard against evil while pursuing good.

Principle 20: Education is Divine

We allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual and ‘spiritual’ life of children, but teach them that the Divine Spirit has constant access to their spirits, and is their continual Helper in all the interests, duties and joys of life.

Reference: Volume 6

This principle does not have its own explanatory chapter but rather runs throughout the message of Charlotte’s overall teaching. There is a beautiful story of Charlotte Mason’s experience seeing the famous fresco, “The Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas” - what she refers to as “The Great Recognition” - and her realization that God Himself is the “great educator” and that therefore all education comes from Him.

To expand a quote from my previous article, “On Education,” Charlotte in her third volume, School Education, said this:

This idea of all education springing from and resting upon our relation to Almighty God is one which we have ever laboured to enforce. We take a very distinct stand upon this point. We do not merely give a religious education, because that would seem to imply the possibility of some other education, a secular education, for example. But we hold that all education is divine, that every good gift of knowledge and insight comes from above, that the Lord the Holy Spirit is the supreme educator of mankind, and that the culmination of all education (which may, at the same time, be reached by a little child) is that personal knowledge of and intimacy with God in which our being finds its fullest perfection. We hold, in fact, that great conception of education held by the medieval Church, as pictured upon the walls of the Spanish chapel in Florence. Here we have represented the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Twelve, and directly under them, fully under the Illuminating rays, are the noble figures of the seven liberal arts, Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Music, Astronomy, Geometry, Arithmetic, and under these again the men who received and expressed, so far as the artist knew, the initial idea in each of these subjects; such men as Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Euclid, whom we might call pagans, but whom the earlier Church recognised as divinely taught and illuminated.

This means there are no “secular” subjects; all is in God’s domain and under His authority. When education is run through this filter, the whole of knowledge is open wide to us - a walk in nature is observing His creation; a study of history is learning His Story as played out through humanity; the arts become expressions of men and women made in His likeness to create. Mathematics glorifies His desire to bring order to chaos and the work of our hands can become acts of worship.

I have heard of people trying to be “secular” Charlotte Mason homeschoolers but to truly realize Charlotte’s vision for education, I do not see how it’s possible. God is inseparable from wisdom and therefore there is an overlap of all subjects and “religious” teaching. Our duty as educating parents, therefore, is to work humbly but confidently in cooperation with the Holy Spirit.

Join me next time as we cover principles 3, 4 & 5. Be sure to subscribe to my substack so you’ll be notified of new articles.

You may also want to follow along on my podcast, Homeschooling Outside the Box, and my Instagram.

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