Parents and children

by Charlotte M. Mason

THE CULTURE OF CHARACTER

Part I

“What get I from my father?

Lusty life and vigorous will;

What from my gentle mother?

Cheerful days and poet’s skill,”[6]

says Goethe; for poets, like the rest of us, are born, not made, and get the most of what they are from their parents. But it did not take poet or modern scientist to discover this; people have known it time out of mind. Like father, like child, they said, and were satisfied; for it was not the way in earlier days to thresh out the great facts of life. Not so now; we talk about it and about it; call it heredity, and take it into count in our notions, at any rate, if not in our practice. Nobody writes a biography now without attempting to produce progenitors and early surroundings that shall account for his man or his woman. This fact of heredity is very much before the public, and by-and-by will have its bearing on the loose notions people hold about education. In this sort of way—“Harold is a bright little boy, but he hasn’t the least power of attention.”

“Oh, I know he hasn’t; but then, poor child, he can’t help it! ‘What’s bred in the bone,’ you know; and we are feather-brained on both sides of the house.”

Now the practical educational question of our day is just this, Can he help it? or, Can his parents help it? or, Must the child sit down for life with whatever twist he has inherited? The fact is, many of us, professional teachers, have been taking aim rather beside the mark; we talk as if the development of certain faculties were the chief object of education; and we point to our results, intellectual, moral, æsthetic, physical, with a—“See there, what culture can effect!” But we forget that the child has inborn cravings after all we have given him. Just as the healthy child must have his dinner and his bed, so too does he crave for knowledge, perfection, beauty, power, society; and all he wants is opportunity. Give him opportunities of loving and learning, and he will love and learn, for “’tis his nature to.” Whoever has taken note of the sweet reasonableness, the quick intelligence, the bright imaginings of a child, will think the fuss we make about the right studies for developing these is like asking, How shall we get a hungry man to eat his dinner?

Many a man got his turn for natural science because, as a boy, he lived in the country, and had a chance to observe living things and their ways. Nobody took pains to develop his faculty; all he had was opportunity. If the boy’s mind is crammed with other matters, he has no opportunity, and you may meet men of culture who have lived most of their lives in the country, and don’t know a thrush from a blackbird. I know of a woman who has developed both a metaphysical and a literary turn, because, as a girl of ten, she was allowed to browse on old volumes of the Spectator, the most telling part of her education, she thinks. Again, I watched quite lately an extraordinary educational result of opportunity. A friend, interested in a Working Boys’ Club, undertook to teach a class to model in clay. There was no selection made; the boys were mill-boys, taken as they came in, with no qualifications, except that, as their teacher said, they had not been spoilt—that is, they had not been taught to draw in the ordinary way. She gave them clay, a model, one or two modelling tools, and also, being an artist, the feeling of the object to be copied. After half-a-dozen lessons, the things they produced cannot be called less than works of art; and delightful it was to see the vigour and spirit they worked with, the artistic instinct which caught the sentiment of the object, as the creases made by a little foot which make a child’s shoe a thing to kiss. This lady maintains that she only let out what was in the boys; but she did more, her own art enthusiasm forced out artistic effort. Even taking into account the enthusiasm of the teacher—I wish we might always count on that factor—this remains a fair case to prove our point, which is, give them opportunity and direction, and children will do the greater part of their own education, intellectual, æsthetic, even moral, by reason of the wonderfully balanced desires, powers, and affections which go to make up human nature.