Parents and children

by Charlotte M. Mason

This is doubtless true of Psychology alone, but of Psychology illuminated by Physiology we have another tale to tell. It is the study of that border-land betwixt mind and matter, the brain, which yields the richest results to the educator. For the brain is the seat of habit: the culture of habit is, to a certain extent, physical culture: the discipline of habit is at least a third part of the great whole which we call education, and here we feel that the physical science of to-day has placed us far in advance of the great philosopher of fifty years ago. We hold with him entirely as to the importance of great formative ideas in the education of children, but, we add to our ideas, habits, and we labour to form habits upon a physical basis. Character is the result not merely of the great ideas which are given to us, but of the habits which we labour to form upon those ideas. We recognise both principles and the result is a wide range of possibilities in education, practical methods, and a definite aim. We labour to produce a human being at his best physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually, with the enthusiasms of religion, the good life, of nature, of knowledge, of art and of manual work; and we do not labour in the dark.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Sonnenschein & Co., 3s.

CHAPTER XXII

THE TEACHING OF THE “PARENTS’ NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL UNION”

Part I

One of Mr. Matthew Arnold’s discriminating utterances may help us in the effort to define anew the scope and the methods of education. In “A French Eton” (page 61) he says:—“The education of each class in society has, or ought to have, its ideal, determined by the wants of that class, and by its destination. Society may be imagined so uniform that one education shall be suitable for all its members; we have not a society of that kind, nor has any European country.... Looking at English society at this moment, one may say that the ideal for the education of each of its classes to follow, the aim which the education of each should particularly endeavour to reach, is different.”

This remark helps us to define our position. We lay no claim to original ideas or methods. We cannot choose but profit by the work of the great educators. Such men as Locke and Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel, have left us an inheritance of educational thought which we must needs enter upon.

Our work is selective, but not merely so. We are progressive. We take what former thinkers have left us, and go on from there.

For example, in this matter of class differentiation, we believe we have scientific grounds for a line of our own. The Fathers (why should we not have Fathers in education as well as in theology?) worked out, for the most part, their educational thought with an immediate view to the children of the poor. Because the children that he had to deal with had a limited vocabulary, and untrained observing powers, Pestalozzi taught them to see and then to say: “I see a hole in the carpet. I see a small hole in the carpet. I see a small round hole in the carpet. I see a small round hole with a black edge in the carpet,” and so on; and it is very easy to see how good such training would be for such children. But what is the case with the children we have to deal with? We believe to-day on scientific grounds in the doctrine of heredity, and certainly in this matter experience supports our faith.