Charlotte Mason Principle #1
Do you know that the Charlotte Mason method is not really a how-to-do-this or you-must-do-this-and-this kind of thing? Instead, Miss Mason herself invites us to “consider this,” and then she lays out her findings about children and learning.
So over the next few weeks, we hope to share posts that talk about some of her principles. Let’s start with the first one:
Children are born persons
This first principle is one of the foundations of a Charlotte Mason education is that “Children are born persons.”
This is one of the things I love about this philosophy. We view children as individuals, with unique gifts, strengths, and weaknesses, and it is our role as parents to discover—and cherish these individual traits.
I once listened to a TedTalk by the late Sir Ken Robison, Changing Education Paradigms. In it, he explained how our current educational system was a result of the Industrial Revolution, where factories needed to be efficient in producing the items they were called to manufacture, and schools, therefore, also needed to be efficient in producing the workers needed to run these factories. He likened the school system of lumping students altogether by age group as putting them through an assembly line, and stamping each one with a quality control stamp upon graduation.
But, if we believe that children are born persons, it means that our children are not outputs in a factory assembly line, nor are they computer programs where we can input a certain series of things and expect a certain result. Instead, we are given the awesome privilege of raising up a God-created being with special gifts that we get to discover, unfold, and release into the world. Isn’t that wonderful?
If you love philosophy, you probably read of different views of humans, as being either naturally good, or naturally bad. Because Charlotte Mason was a practicing Christian, she based many of her principles on the Bible. Based on this, she believes that children are born with the propensity of doing either good or evil. This means that our role as parents is really important, because we get to train our children to choose the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Respecting the Personality of Children
Do you remember how you behaved in school when you were young?
In my case, I was an achiever from a very young age. But I do remember that I tended to perform well in school subjects where I liked the teacher, and also slack off when I didn’t like the teacher.
Because of the high value she places on children as persons, Charlotte Mason discourages the use of any outside force in encouraging children to learn. This includes the use of rewards and punishment, which are very common tactics for traditional school. For example, who among you here either had experience yourself or your children running for the honor roll or being preoccupied with getting good grades? While there’s nothing inherently wrong with being driven by competition and a desire to do good, when our main focus is on external factors like those, we may miss out on the joy of learning.
Instead, the Charlotte Mason philosophy emphasizes the child’s natural love for learning and works on cultivating, supporting, and encouraging more and more learning, simply for the joy and reward of knowing something. We believe this is a more powerful and sustainable model for encouraging children to learn.
Teaching the Child as a Person
With this, we have the responsibility and privilege to teach our child as an individual and as a fully-formed person even at a young age. Isn’t that more rewarding than simply filling an empty bucket? 😀
