Not At School Today

Charlotte Mason Musings: Vol. 1 pp8-10

Miss Mason describes a METHOD of education, something which has a definite end object in mind. She asks: “What do you propose that education shall effect in and for your child?” Good question. Just off the top of my head…

1. I want my children to grow up to love God with all their minds, their hearts, their souls and their strength.
2. I want my children to grow up to love learning. I want them to be able to know how to find things out for themselves, to have the confidence and the know-how to do anything that they put their minds to.
3. I want my children to love reading, to be really interested in finding out about different people, times and places.
4. I want them to want to be the best that they can be, always striving to live a life that benefits others; to learn how to care for others and the world that we live in.

With an end in view, you can use all the different parts of the child’s everyday life to bring it about. “Does the child eat or drink, does he come, or go, or play––all the time he is being educated, though he is as little aware of it as he is of the act of breathing.”

The objective of a SYSTEM is more definite, calculable results, for instance how to pass exams. A system requires acting, thinking and working in prescribed ways. But children are not little automatons - they are ’self acting, self directing,’ and the person responsible for their education needs to take into account how best to produce good, to dispense with evil, and prepare children to do their best, depending on the powers inherent in them, which might look very different from the next child’s best.

A system can be a useful tool, but a ’system of education’ produces only mechanical action instead of vital growth and movement of a living being. The limited developments achieved by a system do not constitute a complete, all-round education. A definite, quantifiable, scheme and end result is more appealing to sluggish human nature than “the constant watchfulness, the unforeseen action, called for when the whole of a child’s existence is to be used as the means of his education.” But this method is not so labour intensive as it first appears - it is only necessary to learn a few broad, essential principles which cover the whole field and which Miss Mason will put before us in the course of her book.

More of Miss Mason’s thoughts on method vs system, from Vol. 2, pp168-9

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. Method has a few comprehensive laws according to which details shape themselves, as one naturally shapes one’s behaviour to the acknowledged law that fire burns. System, on the contrary, has an infinity of rules and instructions as to what you are to do and how you are to do it. Method in education follows Nature humbly; stands aside and gives her fair play.
A Method is not a System––System leads Nature: assists, supplements, rushes in to undertake those very tasks which Nature has made her own since the world was. Does Nature endow every young thing, child or kitten, with a wonderful capacity for inventive play? Nay, but, says System, I can help here; I will invent games for the child and help his plays, and make more use of this power of his than unaided Nature knows how. So Dame System teaches the child to play, and he enjoys it; but, alas, there is no play in him, no initiative, when he is left to himself; and so on, all along the lines. System is fussy and zealous and produces enormous results––in the teacher!

So far I have been thinking of a system as it applies to the way the majority of schooling takes place in this country (i.e. through the National Curriculum), but I realise I also have to be careful not to let what I do at home become too rigid a system either. There’s a fantastic post from Jen on the AO year 0 List about this - she gives the example of time spent outdoors. If we prescribe a rigid system of 4-6 hours a day outside, or else, then we are bound to fail as life interferes which, in my case, leads to great discouragement and wanting to throw in the towel! We need to cling to the ‘principles and informing ideas’ of what Charlotte Mason teaches, in all aspects of education, and “if we have to adjust the practical working out of those ideas to fit with our modern times and the quirks of our personal family life, so be it. “Method” is flexible enough to allow that. As long as we have our sights set on the end goal and the principles underlying that goal, we will see our way to guide our children to that end.”