Charlotte M. Mason

“ 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 the Supreme, in which our being finds its fullest perfection. We hold, in fact, that noble conception of education held by the mediæval church, as pictured upon the walls of the Spanish chapel in Florence. ”

“ How many of us would say about our childhood, if we told the whole truth, “Oh, I was an odious little thing!” and that, not because we recollect our faults, but because we recollect our childish estimate of ourselves. Many a bright and merry child is odious in his own eyes; and the “peace, peace, where there is no peace,” of fond parents and friends is little comfort. It is well that we “ask for the old paths, where is the good way;” it is not well that, in the name of the old paths, we lead our children into blind alleys, nor that we let them follow the new into bewildering mazes. ”

“ Actions do not speak louder than words to a young heart; he must feel it in your touch, see it in your eye, hear it in your tones, or you will never convince child or boy that you love him, though you labour day and night for his good and his pleasure. Perhaps this is the special lesson of Christmas-tide for parents. The Son came—for what else we need not inquire now—to reinstate men by compelling them to believe that they—the poorest shrinking and ashamèd souls of them—that they live enfolded in infinite personal love, desiring with desire the response of love for love. ”

“ Those of us who have not children catch echoes. We hear the wondrous story read in church, the waits chant the tale, the church-bells echo it, and the years that are no more come back to us, and our hearts are meek and mild, glad and gay, loving and tender, as those of little children; but, alas, only for the little while occupied by the passing thought. Too soon the dreariness of daily living settles down upon us again, and we become a little impatient, do we not, of the Christmas demand of joyousness. ”

“ We wish the children to grow up to find joy and refreshment in the taste, the flavour of a book. We do not mean by a book any printed matter in a binding, but a work possessing certain literary qualities able to bring that sensible delight to the reader which belongs to a literary word fitly spoken. It is a sad fact that we are losing our joy in literary form. We are in such haste to be instructed by facts or titillated by theories, that we have no leisure to linger over the mere putting of a thought. ”

“ We do not quarrel with the principle of emulation, any more than we do with that of respiration. The one is as natural and as necessary as the other, and as little to be brought before a moral tribunal. But it is the part of the educator to recognise that a child does not come into the world a harp with one string; and that the perpetual play upon this one chord through all the years of adolescence is an evil, not because emulation is a vicious principle, but because the balance of character is destroyed by the constant stimulation of this one desire at the expense of the rest. ”

“ We all want to excel, to do better than the rest, whether in a tennis-match or an examination. We all want to know, though some of us are content to know our neighbours’ affairs, while others would fain know about the stars in their courses. We all, from the sergeant in his stripes to the much decorated commanding officer, want people to think well of us. Now these several desires, of power, of wealth, of society, of excelling, of knowledge, of esteem, are primary springs of action in every human being. Touch any one of them, in savage or in savant, and you cannot fail of a response. ”

“ Education is a discipline—that is, the discipline of the good habits in which the child is trained. Education is a life, nourished upon ideas; and education is an atmosphere—that is, the child breathes the atmosphere emanating from his parents ”

“ It is only as we recognise our limitations that our work becomes effective: when we see definitely what we are to do, what we can do, and what we cannot do, we set to work with confidence and courage; we have an end in view, and we make our way intelligently towards that end, and a way to an end is method. It rests with parents not only to give their children birth into the life of intelligence and moral power, but to sustain the higher life which they have borne. Now that life, which we call education, receives only one kind of sustenance; it grows upon ideas. ”

“ Let children grow up aware of the constant, immediate, joy-giving, joy-taking Presence in the midst of them, and you may laugh at all assaults of “infidelity,” which is foolishness to him who knows his God as—only far better than—he knows father or mother, wife or child.
Let them grow up, too, with the shout of a King in their midst. There are, in this poor stuff we call human nature, founts of loyalty, worship, passionate devotion, glad service, which have, alas! to be unsealed in the earth-laden older heart, but only ask place to flow from the child’s. ”

“ Once we recognise that all thoughts that breathe and words that burn are of their nature spiritual, and appeal to the spiritual within us—that, in fact, all intercourse of thought and feeling belongs to the realm of ideas, spiritually conveyed, the great mysteries of our religion cease to be hedged off from our common experiences. If the friend who sits beside us deals with us, spirit with spirit, by means of quick interchange of ideas, is it hard to believe that just so is the intercourse between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man? ”

“ We mourn over our failures and try again, and recognise that here lies the Armageddon for every soul of man. But there is a debateable land. Is it not a fact that the spiritual life is exigeant, demands our sole interest and concentrated energies? Yet the claims of intellect—mind, of the æsthetic sense—taste, press upon us urgently. We must think, we must know, we must rejoice in and create the beautiful. ”

“ Thus it rests with parents to ease the way of their child by giving him the habits of the good life in thought, feeling, and action, and even in spiritual things. We cannot make a child ‘good,’ but, in this way; we can lay paths for the good life and the moral life in the very substance of his brain. We cannot make him hear the voice of God; but, again, we can make paths where the Lord God may walk in the cool of the evening. We cannot make the child clever; but we can see that his brain is nourished with pure blood, his mind with fruitful ideas. ”

“ Our little friend has told us; mother and father are quite fair, there is no fault to be found in them, but “I’m so horrid, nobody cares for me.” There you have the secret of “naughtiness.” There is nothing more pathetic than the sort of dual life of which the young are dimly conscious. On the one hand there are premonitions of full and perfect being, the budding wings of which their thoughts are full, and for which their strong sense of justice demands credit. Mother and father ought to know how great and good and beautiful they are in possibility, in prospective. ”

“ You have no notion, until you try, how the ‘now-or-never’ feeling about a lesson quickens the attention of even the most volatile child; what you can drone through all day, you will; what must be done, is done. Then, there is a by-the-way gain besides that of quickened attention. I once heard a wise man say that, if he must choose between the two, he would rather his child should learn the meaning of ‘must’ than inherit a fortune. And here you will be able to bring moral force to bear on wayward Kitty. Every lesson must have its own time, and no other time in this world is there for it. ”

“ But how he works! he bangs his spoon to try if it produces sound; he sucks it to try its flavour; he fumbles it all over and no doubt finds out whether it is hard or soft, hot or cold, rough or smooth; he gazes at it with the long gaze of infancy, so that he may learn the look of it; it is an old friend and an object of desire when he sees it again, for he has found out that there is much joy in a spoon. This goes on with great diligence for a couple of years, at the end of which time baby has acquired enough knowledge of the world to conduct himself in a very dignified and rational way. ”

“ The problem of education is more complex than it seems at first sight, and well for us and the world that it is so. “Education is a life;” you may stunt and starve and kill, or you may cherish and sustain; but the beating of the heart, the movement of the lungs, and the development of the faculties (are there any “faculties”?) are only indirectly our care. The poverty of our thought on the subject of education is shown by the fact that we have no word which at all implies the sustaining of a life: education (e, out, and ducere, to lead, to draw) is very inadequate ”

“ We absolutely must disabuse our minds of the theory that the functions of education are, in the main, gymnastic. In the early years of the child’s life it makes, perhaps, little apparent difference whether his parents start with the notion that to educate is to fill a receptacle, inscribe a tablet, mould plastic matter, or nourish a life; but in the end we shall find that only those ideas which have fed his life are taken into the being of the child; all the rest is thrown away, or worse, is like sawdust in the system, an impediment and an injury to the vital processes. ”

“ Women, through the very modesty and dependence of their nature, are greatly moved by the desire for esteem. They must be thought of, made much of, at any price. A man desires esteem, and he has meetings in the marketplace, the chief-room at the feast; the pétroleuse, the city outcast, must have notoriety—the esteem of the bad—at any price, and we have a city in flames, and Whitechapel murders. Each falls back on his experience and considers what will bring him that esteem, a gnawing craving after which is one of his earliest immaterial cognitions. ”

“ You should have been on the watch for the outward signs—the same then as now, some degree of pallor, with general limpness of attitude, and more or less dropping of the lips and eyes. The moment one such sign appeared, you should have been at hand to seize the child out of the cloud she was entering, and to let her bask for an hour or two in love and light, forcing her to meet you eye to eye, to find only love and joy in yours. Every sullen attack averted is so much against setting up the habit; and habit, as you know, is a chief factor in character. ”

“ But many thoughtful earnest persons feel sorely the need of a conception of the divine relation which shall embrace the whole of human life, which shall make art, science, politics, all those cares and thoughts of men which are not rebellious, sacred also, as being all engaged in the great evolution, the evolution of the Kingdom of God.
Our religious thought, as our educational thought, is, far more than we imagine, the outcome of our philosophy. And do not let us imagine that philosophy is not for the general run of men, but only for the few. ”

“ Think of how the better half of English literature has a local colouring; think of the thousand spots round which there lingers an aroma of poetry and of character, which seems to get into your brain somehow, and leave there an image of the man, a feeling of his work, which you cannot arrive at elsewhere. ”

“ We should hail the query as manifesting a cheering degree of interest if we were not quite sure that our interlocutor uses discipline as a euphuism for punishment. That conviction puts one’s mind into the attitude of protest. In the first place, we have no system of education. We hold that great things, such as nature, life, education are “cabined, cribbed, confined” in proportion as they are systematised. We have a method of education, it is true, but method is no more than a way to an end and is free, yielding, adaptive as Nature herself. ”

“ But let us beware of words; let us use our eyes and our imagination in dealing with the young; let us see what they are feeling and help them by the flow of our responsive feeling. But words, even words of praise and tenderness, touch this delicate bloom of nature as with a hot finger, and behold! ”

“ Now it is this sort of “bringing under” that parents are apt to leave to the schoolmaster. They do not give their children the discipline which results in self-compelling power, and by-and-by, when they make over the task to another, the time for training in the art of self-mastery has gone by, and a fine character is spoiled through indolence and wilfulness.
But why will it not do to leave it to the schoolmaster to make a child “sit up”? It is natural for a child to be left free as a bird in matters of no moral significance. ”

“ At the same time the more imaginative the child, the more essential is it that the boundaries of the kingdom of make-believe should be clearly defined, and exact truthfulness insisted upon in all that concerns the narrower world where the grown-ups live. It is simply a matter of careful education; daily lessons in exact statement, without any horror or righteous indignation about misstatements, but warm, loving encouragement to the child who gives a long message quite accurately, who tells you just what Miss Brown said and no more, just what happened at Harry’s party, without any garnish. ”

“ We all know that there are times when we cannot get rid of the thoughts that will think themselves within us, though they drive away sleep and peace and joy. In the face of this law, benign as it eases us of the labour of original thought and decision about the everyday affairs of life, terrible when it gets beyond our power of control and diversion, what hope for those in whose debauched brain vile thoughts, involuntary, automatic, are for ever running with frightful rapidity in the one well-worn track? ”

“ This was a new perception to the girl, and one never again to be lost sight of. Such shocks of recognition probably come to most of us, and when they come to the Greathearts of the world we get our Elizabeth Frys, our Wilberforces, our Florence Nightingales. Deeds of pity have been done through all the Christian ages, and, indeed, wherever the human heart has had free play, but to feel pity for another and to be aware, however dimly, that that other is, part and lot, indissolubly bound up with ourselves—these are two things. ”