When Children Love to Learn: A Practical Application of Charlotte Mason's Philosophy for Today

by Eve Anderson

[W]hen they had arrived they had no doubt. They recognized the truth when they found it. When we meet the truth, we notice I think, three things. First, that like a jigsaw, the pieces fit into place unexpectedly. Lesser truths dawn, and are seen to be connected; it all ties up. Then, we shrink in size as we see ourselves and our problems from a different and strange angle and like those algebraical numbers with recurring indices, more and more dawns on us. This might be a depressing process but it is not so because truth is always bigger than man and independent of self. Yet—and this is what strikes me most—although alien in this sense, strange and surprising, truth is always a friend; the stranger is recognized, the surprise is joyful. An old acquaintance!”4

Complicating the educational picture are several problems. The decrease of family stability (another fruit of that societal tree), disappearing communities with strong neighborhood relationships, and fears about safety hinder children’s healthy development. Then families who aren’t secure tend to either overregulate children or to lack clear boundaries at all. This situation has brought confusion and pressure to bear on schools and teachers. They used to be able to begin with a few hours of teaching the three R’s. Cultural extras were thrown like lettuce and tomato into this sandwich. This method worked because the family and community actually directed and nurtured its children. The situation has now changed right across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Children arrive at school without breakfast, sometimes pulled out of bed before they are awake. It is not unusual for parents to go to work before the school bus comes. Rarely do children enjoy the comfortable ease of a short walk to school in their own neighborhood. Children arrive at school lacking more than a good breakfast and a warm send-off hug. They may never have been consistently taught how to live according to a “root-trunk” system of morality. As we now say, “values” differ. A teacher of five-year-olds is typically confronted with children who have not learned to listen or concentrate. No one has treated them with much respect, and they don’t respect each other. It is typical to find them at war with any authority at all, with no idea of cooperation or obedience. They may be glassy-eyed because they’ve emerged from hours and hours parked in front of a TV set. And there are other difficulties. As marital stability declines, in the average group of children a high proportion suffer emotional turmoil, pain, and confusion. This state of mind obviously affects the quality of their lives and hinders their education. We don’t have the space here to consider all the problems teachers face. More and more children come to school whose parents did not read to them regularly. Many are no longer part of a family that even has a routine of eating daily meals together. When both parents work, stressful schedules may exclude the leisurely conversations so dear to a little child...

People like Charlotte Mason are rare and vital. They contribute both stability and continuity as they maintain the clear infrastructure of truth in their work; yet life bubbles up in them with freshness. Their response to actual life and persons creates a relevance and newness to their work without sacrificing the roots.

Sometimes I’m asked what I think Christian education is. I think it is education that has due regard for the individual child. Children’s differences in makeup are tenderly taken into account. No children should be kept in, sitting on a chair, anywhere in God’s world because someone has decreed that they, even though not developmentally ready, have reached “the age” when they should learn how to read. However good a curriculum is, however much it has the “roots” and “trunk” of life, however worthy and living are the books, however rich the spread of subjects, children are abused if their developmental stages and abilities are not taken into consideration. The child is, after all, a whole person.

If these teachers are careful to choose books that catch the children’s interest and imagination, they and the class are well into accomplishing their goals. Slavishly following a set curriculum if it doesn’t fit a class, situation, or child is legalistic folly. Get “shining eyes” first, and the coveted question, “Can’t you read more?” will come. This question shows that what you are doing is succeeding. As children become interested, chapter by chapter, they will form new habits. It won’t seem like work at all! They like listening, imagining, thinking. These activities are satisfying.

As vital thought touches our minds, our ideas are vitalized, and out of our ideas comes our conduct of life. These must be books that children enjoy. The ideas they hold must make that sudden, delightful impact upon children’s minds, must cause that intellectual stir that marks the beginning of an idea. These books induce in children thoughts about the world, nature, people, music, art, and the God who created it all.

Together teacher and child are under a higher authority. The child should not be asked to be good to please a parent or teacher. Children and the adults both must choose to obey God. Both are learning how to be better people, and both children and adults are interested and learning from books, nature, art, music. Ideas are discussed. Thought is important. Children have amazing ideas! They grow in proper self-esteem as they are listened to and allowed to be themselves.

We have turned into fools when it comes to appreciating what is really worthwhile in life—proud fools with no understanding of what God treasures. We live in a worldly generation that encourages a blind pride. What would happen if everybody planned for their children to be business executives, lawyers, scientists, or academics? Where would we be without the honored homemakers, craftsmen, artists, and musicians? Where are those who are good at pastoral care? Who will care for community needs— tend the sick, plow the fields, and, yes, collect the garbage? (Garbage collection, water purification, home construction, and similar activities are arguably more valuable to our human community than the work of many of our CEOs and star entertainers. Salary and educational attainments mean nothing in themselves.) Charlotte Mason’s educational ideal was not to remove us from the ordinary but to enrich us, each one, with the best possible relationships—relationships with God, with people in our family and community, with others through their books, art, or music, and with God’s creation.

For some reason or other, Americans bear the dubious reputation of overkill if they are aiming too narrowly at an excellent education. First of all, the educational vision is too frequently factual information alone, rather than ideas or a big general picture. Look at tests from third grade to postgraduate education. Facts. Facts. Facts. And so teachers and children cram, cram, cram (and forget, forget, forget). Too often children discover that they learn merely to pass a test, get a grade, and then no one cares.

If we want our children to stay hungry for knowledge, remain interested and questioning, enjoy the wonder of discovery, then we must leave them some clutter-free hours for friendship, the great out-of-doors, the rich world of imagination, and the satisfaction of the skilled use of art supplies, music, dance, wood, and clay.

Charlotte Mason observed how adults got between the child and the Author, the source— whether it was God, His handiwork (nature), or writers from Plato to Shakespeare to contemporary works. She called the refusal to get between the child and the source “masterly inactivity,” allowing the child direct contact with and individual response to original works.

Another powerful way Christian life and truth are communicated is by being with people who live by faith. Francis Schaeffer, my father, used to say, “Faith can be caught, not taught.” Children sense the genuine and discard the phony. Prayer is powerful. Children who grow up seeing actual answers to prayer in little and big details of life as people pray, genuinely trusting God, will never forget this. There is no guarantee that a child will choose to believe or want to live a Christian life later on. And we must not brainwash them in any way. It will be their choice. They need to know why and how the Christian faith is believed to be true—to hear clear answers that demonstrate that Christianity fits into reality like a key into a lock. They need to be introduced to the living person of Jesus, who is a shepherd seeking them, loving them. He is there; this must be no school lesson. It is terrible to turn this amazing person into a lesson. Children must catch the scent, the scene, the wonder of who He is. If they are used to being interested and moved by other stories, the person or persons in this story will reach them more easily. His Word is the best way to learn about God and His way of working in real history. Love is a great attraction for people, and if children are able to understand this “old, old story of Jesus and His love,” their hearts often open to the Savior who is the source of love, goodness, beauty, and abundant life. Children love in return. They appreciate...

Or to place the motto in a child-friendly format of more recent years: I am a child of God, I ought to do His will. I can do what He tells me, And by His grace, I will.

Moralism, a seemingly harmless practice, is actually a noxious gas to a child’s understanding of God and truth. A favorite example is the misuse of John 6:1- 15, the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000. In a storybook that I read to our teachers in training, the authors focus on the precious little boy who willingly “shares” his lunch of five loaves and two fish with Jesus, who in turn feeds everyone. The book ends with the admonition, “Jesus loves us to share with others.” So is there a problem in this teaching? Isn’t sharing taught here? The answers are a resounding yes and an emphatic no! Yes, there is great harm when the truth of a text is manipulated to force a lesson on the minds of children. The practice lacks integrity. No, sharing is not taught in this passage. But a greater harm than forcing a moral on a text can occur. Children are directed by the author to focus on human actions rather than on the power of Christ. In the long run, a diet of this type of “bread” produces a student who defines himself by what he does rather than who he is. Thus this millstone hinders a true understanding of the gospel. Even those stories that rightfully point out the goodness of a biblical or other literary character should be balanced by acknowledging that character’s frailty and need for God.

The absence of four toxic practices—competition, prizes and marks, stress, and comparison—purified the air for learning.

The obsession with testing in the United States especially is becoming epidemic, primarily due to the collapse of quality education and the desire to hold schools accountable. Standardized test scores of students are seen as the primary way to judge the quality of a teacher and ultimately of a school. This trend is leading to calls for a standardized national curriculum so that all assessments can be equalized, a practice already adopted in the U.K. and other Western nations. Surely the tail is wagging the dog when tests and examinations are dictating what the curriculum of schools should contain. In the midst of all this is the unfortunate teacher whose passion for learning and motivation for teaching is brought captive to tests and exams that control the destiny of her students and herself as well! As Alfie Kohn has stated, “Every hour that teachers feel compelled to try to raise test scores is an hour not spent helping kids become critical, creative, curious thinkers.”

You’re asking an awful lot of human beings inside schools if you don’t have tests (or exams). You’re asking for principals (or headmasters) to be willing to sit down with a teacher and talk to him about things that have gotten out of hand. And you have to reduce the teachers’ load so that they can get to know their students better and find out what will really make each student sing as a scholar. (emphasis mine)11

Charlotte Mason was very explicit about how the atmosphere of the school classroom is affected by the teacher making herself the “showman of the universe.” This type of teaching in effect denies that the child is a person who can act upon the knowledge he receives and retrieves, and that he must be directed as to how, what, and when he should think. Though the masterly inactivity of Mason does imply a master, it is the role of the teacher to get out of the way. The teacher is the master by planning the lesson, having available all the necessary resources, and then deftly guiding the flow. As master, she guards against inappropriate materials or diversions, keeping intact the foundational principles that we discussed earlier. There is never a doubt to her authority, but she never lets herself get in the way of the learning. She is inactive in the sense that she lets the natural curiosity and interest of the students take its course within the confines of the discussion. Often ideas come that lead to connections with truths learned in other subjects, for which she is delighted as students make these transitions. Overall she lets the living books and other resources speak for themselves and does not consider herself the students’ only source of information. Does she share her own stories and information that would benefit her students? Absolutely, but not in a continual lecture format day in and day out that produces an unhealthy attachment of the students. Individual pursuit...

The Four Tests to Be Applied to Lessons Charlotte Mason gave these tests to be applied to the subjects in which children are instructed: • Provide material for their mental growth. • Exercise the several powers of their minds. • Furnish them with fruitful ideas (rather than bushels of information).23 • Afford them knowledge, really valuable for its own sake, accurate, and interesting, of the kind that the child may recall as a man with profit and pleasure (emphasis mine).24 If these commonsense principles were applied in schools today, rather than those prescribed by a bureaucracy interested in its own agendas for political and economic purposes, some turnaround might be made in the demise of academics.

The future character and conduct of children depend on the work of enlightened human effort in forming habits along with the work of divine grace more than anything else. The children will have habits, and we as parents and educators are engaged in forming these habits actively or passively every day, every hour. We cannot escape this fact.

Charlotte Mason admonished the parent and teacher to use tact, watchfulness, and persistence in forming habits with a twofold policy: • Never let the child slip from his responsibility in the habit. • Never let the matter be a cause of friction between you and the child (let her suffer the natural consequences).41

As schools, we have taken on the work of laying down lines of thought quite seriously as we make choices regarding the printed page in the lives of the children. Books are chosen from a variety of genres that emphasize the virtuous deeds of characters, promote the knowledge of histories and sciences, develop the sound and sense of language, and generate the interior education of the learner. With this in mind, the children have set before them “the best thought of the best writers.” Our time is limited with the children, and therefore we choose what reflects truth, beauty, and goodness—not necessarily popular culture.

Caine and Caine in their book Making Connections characterize lessons according to how the brain works. The brain works optimally when: • Retelling or talking about learning. • Using the vocabulary of the subject. • Listening, reading, viewing, and acting. • Drawing relationships through the use of metaphor and simile. • Experiencing rigorous content and intellectual challenge joyfully. • Eliminating rewards and punishments. • Focusing heavily on teacher not technology as the main facilitator in learning. • Processing part and whole learning simultaneously. • Delaying gratification to achieve success. • Searching for meaning is innate. • Involving focused attention.61

It is important to think of Charlotte Mason’s practice of education not in an eclectic sense, as a selection of good practices from all systems of philosophy, but rather, as the outgrowth of a particular philosophy. The practice is significant because of its philosophical underpinnings, not because of trend, tradition, or tastefulness. Practices are manifestations of beliefs— beliefs the educator has concerning the nature of the learner, the role of the teacher, and the nature of knowledge.

When one looks at the quality and quantity of work in the PNEU, one’s mind immediately moves to present-day examples of preparatory schools, accelerated programs, and gifted education. Yet the schools that practiced Charlotte Mason’s philosophy did not fall into these categories. All students participated in the feast set before them—some generously, others less so. Grades were used on examinations alone; assessments and ranks were not calculated, comparing one student to another, making prominence over others the main goal. Instead, students reached full potential in many areas, motivated by natural curiosity rather than by self-glorifying desires.

Charlotte Mason urged the educator to apply four tests to the students’ lessons: Does the lesson • Provide material for mental growth? • Exercise several powers of the mind? • Furnish fruitful ideas? • Afford valuable, accurate, and interesting knowledge?62

The work of the educator is to put the child in the way of knowing by providing a living way through worthy thought and worthy work.

Once we engage the learner in a system of achieving results instead of obtaining knowledge to understand and make sense of life, the method and means of education easily take on competitive values focusing on finishing first and obtaining the highest marks. The emphasis moves from the process to the product. Students become anxious to finish tasks and do the next thing rather than participate in the work of attending and reflecting. The teacher then bears the weight of adjusting lessons so that they can be assessed objectively. The learner sees himself as one whose work is to adapt from one scheme to another in order to gain the promised result. Knowledge is no longer seen as a human response to the great inheritance before us, but as a commodity to be gained in order to procure whatever it is one desires.

It was not toward methods that Miss Mason pointed her students; it was to the depth and breadth of a broad and rich curriculum founded on many living books and ideas. Hers was always an applied philosophy of education—the “knowing and doing” to be lived out with real integrity. Provide the student with an abundant feast of learning, and she will educate herself—the powers of curiosity, attention, retention, and expression naturally turned on to the meat of this curriculum.

The teacher may then take the natural role as discipler, as co-learner, as both authority, habit-builder, and fellow pilgrim in this journey of faith and learning. The idea to keep in mind (and heart) is a theological one that has immense implications for educators: Both we and our students are fallen creatures who will continue in the lifelong battle of flesh against Spirit. For the children and students, the teacher’s role as godly mentor and keeper of accountability (a bit like Miss Mason and her young teachers) becomes for his charges a spiritual and necessary relationship.

I know that we are living during a time when it is not a usual practice to say no to requests that do not bear an evil intent. Yet the question is not what the book does not do, but instead what silly stories and twaddle does cultivate in children. What enthusiasms are generated by this kind of thought? What tastes are cultivated? Children must grow up on the best. There must never be a period in their lives when they are allowed to read or listen to twaddle or reading-made-easy. There is never a time when they are unequal to worthy thoughts well put and inspiring tales well told.

Narration instructs the conscience. The interior life of the child is developed through listening to stories and myths that are repeated over again. “Every time a child rattles one off, he taps deep into those emotional roots, for the stories get told from their ‘inner senses’ out.”9

Narration increases brain activity. The culmination of current research suggests that brain activity is enhanced when learning involves challenging tasks and information, a tolerance for ambiguity, literary language, and intrinsic motivation. When narration is used with literature that encompasses “the best thought of the best writers,” we have this optimal state of the mind.

Narration provides far more information about students’ comprehension than answers to questions. Narration incorporates individual constructs, organization, meaning, and vocabulary without the support clues provided by the questioning.11

Narration moves the learner from rote or taxon memory to locale memory. Narration is a strategy in which the learner rehearses, relives, modifies, and integrates interpretations of the author’s messages into her own reality, thus bringing about a greater degree of transfer and meaning.12

“[W]e must never forget that without narration the mind will starve; whatever disciplinary exercises we use, they should be in addition to and never instead of narration.”

The role of the teacher is that of one who gives direction and elucidation in lessons, one who shares sympathies in studies, speaks a vivifying word here and there, provides a full reservoir of right thought, lays down lines of habit, exercises several powers of the mind, and sows opportunities for learning. The teacher relies not upon approbation, avarice, emulation, or vanity to bear undue influence upon the learner, but upon the child’s innate ability to know. The educator does not manipulate, taking on the responsibility for the child’s knowing, but provides a fitting environment wherein the mind is sustained upon ideas, thus continuing the act of education, self-education. And this education is produced from living thought found in living books.

Miss Mason held out the vision: “We shall train a race of readers who will demand literature— that is, the fit and beautiful expression of inspiring ideas and pictures of life.”21

The sad thing we find is that students today do not bring with them the rich and varied background of reading necessary for them to tap into these avenues of expression. What they do bring is a culture of television, pulp trade books, and a lifestyle too busy for quiet times to read. My experience has shown that children raised from the beginning in the world of books (both at home and school) are well able to “compose” for themselves with words and sentences showing knowledge well expressed.

Acquaint the students with these poems through a careful reading. Attend to what is really there. Pause at punctuation. Read silently. Read aloud. Read individually. Read chorally. • Learn to enjoy the poem, and share this enjoyment through reflecting upon: Feelings the poem suggests. Ideas brought to the reader’s attention. Literary forms used. Words evoking rhythm or the sound and beauty of the language. Connections and inferences to one’s own life experience.

Poetry can easily take on a less prominent role in our classrooms than in the days of the PNEU and even be relegated to an elective for a myriad of reasons. Yet it is poetry, “the line that strikes us as we read, that recurs, that we murmur over at odd moments—this is the line that influences our living.”45 And it is poetry that makes “us aware of this thought of the ages, including our own. Every age, every epoch, has its poetic aspect, its quintessence, as it were, and happy the people who have a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Milton, a Burns, to gather up and preserve its meaning as a world possession.”

“Shakespeare is for all students: of all ability levels and reading levels, of every ethnic origin,” states Peggy O’Brien, the head of education at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which is the chief repository for Shakespeare scholarship and education in the United States and England. Yet the teaching of Shakespeare has been somewhat limited to children in gifted and talented programs as well as high school and college level programs, effectively excluding a wide range of young people. In the foreword of a text designed to instruct elementary teachers in Shakespeare, Fred C. Adams responds to the question of age appropriateness this way: “I believe that the moment a child takes pleasure in a humorous incident, is frightened by a suspenseful occurrence, or is warmed by a human experience—that child is ready for Shakespeare.”49

Living during an era in which the market for children’s products exists as never before, one is tempted to play into the idea that children are in need of an undemanding, diluted text to furnish food for the mind in the way of great literature, including Shakespeare. Today’s research on the brain and Charlotte Mason’s insight regarding the mind at work both concur with the idea of challenging the student through the use of worthy thoughts in the form of literary language. There are manifold benefits in putting children in the way of beautiful language and vivid ideas. The younger child develops listening skills and appreciation for the beauty of language as he or she tells back what was heard. “Children take pleasure in the ‘dry’ parts, descriptions and the like, rendering these quite beautiful in their narrations.”50 Children also become confident readers and writers through the hearing and reading of well-written texts. Also through questions and discussion of the use of figurative language, characterization, elements of plot, setting, and themes, the student and teacher alike exercise the full power of the mind in analyzing, comprehending, reflecting, and synthesizing. These questionings and discussions generate an interior life as through contemplation and thought students come into relationship with the past, the present, and the transcendent.

The importance of ideas rather than information is perhaps more critical in science than any other subject. And the path is made straight and prepared by the study of nature. The specifics of nature study were discussed earlier, but the key element is that first students learn to observe, examine, and delight in living and real things without letting scientific “tidbits” destroy their enthusiasm. All this observation is “incidental, easy, and things are noticed as they occur.”63 Once introduced in this manner to living things, primarily on nature walks and field trips, the student is taken to the living books on the subject. The ideas that naturally arise in the child are fed by the teacher through these resources. “Our business is to give children the great ideas of life . . . of science . . . ideas clothed with facts as they occur, and leave the child to deal with them as he chooses.”64 So we see that the facts are not ignored, but they are given their proper place.

On a nature walk, one student happens to detect a camouflaged insect on a twig. This discovery leads to a natural curiosity of how and why the camouflage is used. Given a living book on the subject, the interest deepens and broadens until the whole class is eventually enthralled by the knowledge shared by the observant one. In the reading and sharing, scientific facts become a natural part of the ideas, like unobtrusive clothing that receives its proper interest. We need to work hard at finding science books written in a literary style—difficult but possible. Look for books that tell of individual scientists in pursuit of some particular knowledge or discovery; books beautifully written and illustrated about the life of bees, fish, or deer; stories of travels and expeditions to strange, new lands with diverse land forms, climates, plants, and people. The enthusiasm for science pursued in this way is protected by avoiding a strictly utilitarian approach to its subject matter. Nothing can kill the sense of awe and wonder in science more quickly than to teach the subject simply as practical preparation for another level of schooling or, as is most prominent, solely as preparation for a standardized examination.

Why is it that we can observe how wonder, truth, and beauty attract the interest of the younger child and yet let this interest be swept away by boring details in oversized textbooks when he or she enters a school? We must have the courage to teach for the sake of the children rather than for the system. When taught properly, science can be our students’ favorite subject.

Without telling us what we should appreciate or being adamant about what the painter was trying to say, the tour guide helped to inform our seeing. Teachers in schools with a little reading of the author’s life can do the same thing. In fact, they should do no more.

John Conant, in his book The Education of American Teachers (1963), well expresses the position languages take in the broad curriculum: “ . . . unless a person has acquired something approaching mastery of one foreign language, he has missed an educational experience of the first degree.”

She recognized the importance of what she called habitudes, those half-physical and half-moral habits of life that make things as “easy to do as not.”83 The proper repetition of a skill in physical training can make it automatic, and Miss Mason believed that the same automation can occur in courtesy, cooperation, and kindness. In other words, those who can show self-discipline in games are more likely to do so in life.