A Full Life: The Works of Charlotte Mason

The Treatment of Defects

The Ultimate Object of Education––Suppose the parent see that the formation of character is the ultimate object of education; see, too, that character is, in the rough, the inherited tendencies of the child, modified by his surroundings, but that character may be debased or ennobled by education; that it is the parents’ part to distinguish the first faint budding of family traits; to greet every fine trait as the highest sort of family possession to be nourished and tended with care; to keep up at the same time the balance of qualities by bringing forward that which is of little account––the more so when they must deliver their child from eccentricity, pitfall to the original and forceful nature;––suppose they have taken all this into the role of their duties, there yet remains much for parents to do.

The Dreariness of a Motiveless Life––Amongst the immediate causes of eccentricity is the dreariness of daily living, the sense of which falls upon us all at times, and often with deadly weight upon the more finely strung and highly gifted. ‘Oh, dear, I wish I was in Jupiter!’ sighed a small urchin who had already used up this planet. It rests with parents to see that the dreariness of a motiveless life does not settle, sooner or later, on any one of their children. We are made with a yearning for the ‘fearful joy’ of passion; and if this do not come to is in lawful ways, we look for it in eccentric, or worse, in illegitimate courses. The mother, to whom her child is as an open book, must find a vent for the restless workings of his nature, the more apt to be troubled by––

     ’The burden of the mystery,
     The heavy and the weary weight
     Of all this unintelligible world’––

the more finely he is himself organised. Fill him with the enthusiasm of humanity. Whatever gifts he has, let them be cultivated as ‘gifts for men.’ “The thing best worth living for is to be of use,” was well said lately by a thinker who has left us; and the child into whose notion of life that idea is fitted will not grow up to find time heavy on his hands. The life blessed with an enthusiasm will not be dull; but a weight must go into the opposite scale to balance even the noblest enthusiasm. As we have said, open for him some door of natural science, some way of mechanical skill; in a word, give the child an absorbing pursuit and a fascinating hobby, and you need not fear eccentric or unworthy developments.

We must Save our ’splendid Failures’––It seems well to dwell at length on this subject of eccentricity, because the world loses a great deal by its splendid failures, the beautiful human beings who, through one sort of eccentricity or another, become ineffectual for the raising of the rest of us.

Causes of Oddity in Children––What is the mother’s course who notices in her most promising child little traits of oddity? He does not care much for games, does not get on well with the rest, has some little den of his own where he ruminates––Poor little fellow! he wants a confidante badly; most likely he has tried nurse and brothers and sisters, to no purpose. If this go on, he will grow up with the idea that nobody wants him, nobody understands him, will take his slice of life and eat it (with a snarl) all by himself. But if his mother have tact enough to get at him, she will preserve for the world one of its saving characters. Depend upon it, there is something at work in the child––genius, humanity, poetry, ambition, pride of family; it is that he wants outlet and exercise for an inherited trait almost too big for his childish soul. Rosa Bonheur was observed to be a restless child whose little shoes of life were a misfit: lessons did not please her, and play did not please her; and her artist father hit on the notion of soothing the child’s divine discontent by––apprenticing her to a needlewoman! Happily she broke her bonds, and we have her pictures. In the case of pride of birth, it is well that the child should be brought face to face and heart to heart with the ‘great humility’ of our Pattern. But that being done, this sense or family distinction is a wonderful lever to raise the little world of the child’s nature. Noblesse oblige. He must needs add honour and not dishonour to a distinguished family. I know of a little boy who bears two distinguished family names––Browning-Newton, let us say. He goes to a preparatory school, where it is the custom to put the names of defaulters on the blackboard. By-and-by, his little brother went to school too, and the bigger boy’s exordium was: ‘We’ll never let two such names as ours be stuck up on the blackboard!’

Danger of Eccentricity––Possibly, eccentricity is a danger against which the parents of well-descended children must be on the watch. These are born with strong tendencies to certain qualities and ways of thinking. Their bringing-up tends to accentuate their qualities; the balance between these and other qualities is lost, and they become eccentric persons. Mr. Matthew Arnold writes down the life and the work of a great poet as ineffectual; and this is often enough, the verdict passed upon the eccentric. Whatever force of genius and of character, whatever lovely moral traits they may have, the world will not take them as guides for good unless they do as others do in things lawful and expedient; and truly there is a broad margin for originality in declining to hunt with the hounds in things neither lawful nor expedient.

Work and Waste of Brain Tissue Necessary––This, speaking broadly, is the rationale of the matter: just as actually as we sew or write through the instrumentality of the hand, so the child learns, thinks, feels, by means of a material organ––the very delicate nervous tissue of the cerebrum. Now this tissue is constantly and rapidly wearing away. The more it is used, whether in the way of mental effort or emotional excitement, the more it wears away. Happily, rapid new growth replaces the waste, wherefore work and consequent waste of tissue are necessary. But let the waste get ahead of the gain, and lasting mischief happens. Therefore never let the child’s brain-work exceed his chances of reparation, whether such work come in the way of too hard lessons, or of the excitement attending childish dissipations. Another plea for abundant rest is that one thing at a time, and that done well, appears to be Nature’s rule; and his hours of rest and play are the hours of the child’s physical growth; witness the stunted appearance of children who are allowed to live in a whirl of small excitements.

A word more as to the necessity of change of thought for the child who has a distinct bent. The brain tissue not only wastes with work, but, so to speak, wastes locally. We all know how done up we are after giving our minds for a few hours or days to any one subject whether anxious or joyous: we are glad at last to escape from the engrossing thought, and find it a weariness when it returns upon us. It would appear that, set up the continuous working of certain ideas, and a certain tract of the brain substance is, as it were, worn out and weakened with the constant traffic in these ideas. And this is of more consequence when the ideas are moral than when they are merely intellectual. Hamlet’s thoughts play continuously round a few distressing facts; he becomes morbid, not entirely sane; in a word, he is eccentric.

Rest––At the same time, change of occupation is not rest: if a man ply a machine, now with his foot, and now with his hand, the foot or the hand rests, but the man does not. A game of romps (better, so far as mere rest goes, than games with laws and competitions), nonsense talk, a fairy tale, or to lie on his back in the sunshine, should rest the child, and of such as these he should have his fill.

Change––Next, provide him with some one delightful change of thought, that is, with work and ideas altogether apart from his bent for languages. Let him know, with friendly intimacy, the out-of-door objects that come in his way––the redstart, the rosechaffer, the ways of the caddis-worm, forest trees, field flowers––all natural objects, common and curious, near his home. No other knowledge is so delightful as this common acquaintance with natural objects.

Or again, some one remarks that all our great inventors have in their youth handled material––clay, wood, iron, brass, pigments. Let him work in material. To provide a child with delightful resources on lines opposed to his natural bent is the one way of keeping a quite sane mind in the presence of an absorbing pursuit.

Nourishment––Let him do just so much as he takes to of his own accord; but never urge, never applaud, never show him off. Next let words convey ideas as he is able to bear them. Buttercup, primrose, dandelion, magpie, each tells its own tale; Daisy is day’s-eye, opening with the sun, and closing when he sets––

     ’That well by reason it men callen may
     The daisie, or else the eye of day.’

Let him feel that the common words we use without a thought are beautiful, full of story and interest. It is a great thing that the child should get the ideas proper to the qualities inherent in him. An idea fitly put is taken in without effort, and, once in, ideas behave like living creatures––they feed, grow, and multiply.

Distinctive Qualities ask for Culture––It is, at first sight, bewildering to perceive that for whatever distinctive quality, moral or intellectual, we discern in the children, special culture is demanded; but, after all, our obligation towards each such quality resolves itself into providing for it these four things: nourishment, exercise, change, and rest.

Four Conditions of Culture––Exercise––A child has a great turn for languages (his grandfather was the master of nine); the little fellow ‘lisps in Latin,’ learns his ‘mensa‘ from his nurse, knows his declensions before he is five. What line is open to the mother who sees such an endowment in her child? First, let him use it; let him learn his declensions, and whatever else he takes to without the least sign of effort. Probably the Latin case-endings come as easily and pleasantly to his ear as does ’see-saw, Margery Daw,’ to the ordinary child, though no doubt ‘Margery Daw’ is the wholesomer kind of thing.

The duty of cherishing certain Family Traits––The duteous father and mother, on the contrary, who discern any lovely family trait in one of their children, set themselves to nourish and cherish it as a gardener the peaches he means to show. We know how ‘that kiss made me a painter,’ that is, warmed into life whatever art faculty the child [Benjamin West] had. The choicer the plant, the gardener tells us, the greater the pains must he take with the rearing of it: and here is the secret of the loss and waste of some of the most beauteous and lovable natures the world has seen; they have not had the pains taken with their rearing that their delicate, sensitive organisations demanded. Think how Shelley was left to himself! We live in embarrassing days. It is well to cry, ‘Give us light––more light and fuller’; but what if the new light discover to us a maze of obligations, intricate and tedious?