Parents and children

by Charlotte M. Mason

Punch has hit off the state of the case: “Come and see the puff-puff, dear.” “Do you mean the locomotive, grandmamma?” As a matter of fact, the child of four and five has a wider, more exact vocabulary in everyday use, than that employed by his elders and betters, and is constantly adding to this vocabulary with surprising quickness; ergo, to give a child of this class a vocabulary is no part of direct education. Again, we know that nothing escapes the keen scrutiny of the little people. It is not their perceptive powers we have to train, but the habit of methodical observation and accurate record.

Generations of physical toil do not tend to foster imagination. How good, then, for the children of the working classes to have games initiated for them, to be carried through little dramatic plays until, perhaps, in the end they will be able to invent such little dramas for themselves!

But the children of the cultured classes—why, surely their danger is rather to live too much in realms of fancy. A single sentence in lesson or talk, the slightest sketch of an historical character, and they will play at it for a week, inventing endless incidents. Like Tennyson, when he was a child, they will carry on the story of the siege and defence of a castle (represented by a mound, with sticks for its garrison) for weeks together, and a child engrossed with these larger interests feels a sensible loss of dignity when he flaps his wings as a pigeon or skips about as a lamb, though, no doubt, he will do these things with pleasure for the teacher he loves. Imagination is ravenous for food, not pining for culture, in the children of educated parents, and education need not concern herself directly, for them, with the development of the conceptive powers. Then with regard to the cultivated child’s reasoning powers, most parents have had experiences of this kind—Tommy is five. His mother had occasion to talk to him about the Atlantic Cable, and said she did not know how it was insulated; Tommy remarked next morning that he had been thinking about it, and perhaps the water itself was an insulator. So far from needing to develop their children’s reasoning powers, most parents say—“Oh, wad the gods the giftie gie us”—to answer the everlasting ‘why’ of the intelligent child.

In a word, to develop the child’s so-called faculties is the main work of education when ignorant or otherwise deficient children are concerned; but the children of educated people are never ignorant in this sense. They awake to the world all agog for knowledge, and with keen-edged faculties; therefore the principle of heredity causes us to recast our idea of the office of education, and to recognise that the child of intelligent parents is born with an inheritance of self-developing faculties.

Thus education naturally divides itself into education for the children of lettered, and education for the children of unlettered parents. In fact, this class question, which we are all anxious to evade in common life, comes practically into force in education. It is absolutely necessary to individualise and say, this part of education is the most important for this child, or this class, but may be relegated into a lower place for another child or another class.

If science limits our range of work as regards the development of so-called faculties, it extends it in equal measure with regard to habit. Here we have no new doctrine to proclaim. “One custom overcometh another,” said Thomas à Kempis, and that is all we have to say; only physiologists have made clear to us the rationale of this law of habit. We know that to form in his child right habits of thinking and behaving is a parent’s chief duty, and that this can be done for every child definitely and within given limits of time. But this question has been already dealt with, and we need do no more than remind parents of what they already know.

To nourish a child daily with loving, right, and noble ideas we believe to be the parent’s next duty. The child having once received the Idea will assimilate it in his own way, and work it into the fabric of his life; and a single sentence from his mother’s lips may give him a bent that will make him, or may tend to make him, painter or poet, statesman or philanthropist. The object of lessons should be in the main twofold: to train a child in certain mental habits, as attention, accuracy, promptness, &c., and to nourish him with ideas which may bear fruit in his life.

There are other educational principles which we bear in mind and work out, but for the moment it is worth while for us to concentrate our thought upon the fact that one of our objects is to accentuate the importance of education under the two heads of the formation of habits and the presentation of ideas, and as a corollary to recognise that the development of faculties is not a supreme object with the cultivated classes, because this is work which has been done for their children in a former generation.

But how does all this work? Is it practical? Is it the question of to-day? It must needs be practical because it gives the fullest recognition to the two principles of human nature, the material, and the spiritual. We are ready to concede all that the most advanced biologist would ask of us. Does he say, “Thought is only a mode of motion?” if so, we are not dismayed. We know that ninety-nine out of a hundred thoughts that pass through our minds are involuntary, the inevitable result of those modifications of the brain tissue which habit has set up. The mean man thinks mean thoughts, the magnanimous man great thoughts, because we all think as we are accustomed to think, and Physiology shows us why. On the other hand, we recognise that greater is the spirit within us than the matter which it governs. Every habit has its beginning. The beginning is the idea which comes with a stir and takes possession of us. The idea is the motive power of life, and it is because we recognise the spiritual potency of the idea that we are able to bow reverently before the fact that God the Holy Spirit is Himself the Supreme Educator, dealing with each of us severally in the things we call sacred and those we call secular. We lay ourselves open to the spiritual impact of ideas whether these be conveyed by the printed page, the human voice, or whether they reach us without visible sign.

But ideas may be evil or may be good; and to choose between the ideas that present themselves is, as we have been taught, the one responsible work of a human being. It is the power of choice that we would give our children. We ask ourselves “Is there any fruitful idea underlying this or that study that the children are engaged in?” We divest ourselves of the notion that to develop the faculties is the chief thing, and a “subject” which does not rise out of some great thought of life we usually reject as not nourishing, not fruitful; while we usually, but not invariably, retain those studies which give exercise in habits of clear and orderly thinking. We have some gymnastics of the mind whose object is to exercise what we call faculties as well as to train in the habit of clear and ordered thinking. Mathematics, grammar, logic, &c., are not purely disciplinary; they do develop, if a bull may be allowed us, intellectual muscle. We by no means reject the familiar staples of education, in the school sense, but we prize them even more for the record of intellectual habits they leave in the brain tissue than for their distinct value in developing certain “faculties.” Thus our first thought with regard to Nature-knowledge is that the child should have a living personal acquaintance with the things he sees. It concerns us more that he should know bistort from persicaria, hawkweed from dandelion, and where to find this and that, and how it looks, living and growing, than that he should talk learnedly about epigynous and hypogynous. All this is well in its place, but should come quite late, after the child has seen and studied the living growing thing in situ, and has copied colour and gesture as best he can.