A Full Life: The Works of Charlotte Mason

CHAPTER VI - SOME EDUCATIONAL THEORIES EXAMINED

1. What do we owe to the Schools of Pestalozzi and Froebel?
2. What is the source of weakness in their conceptions?
3. Compare ‘make children happy and they will be good’ with ‘be good and you will be happy.’
4. Show the fundamental error of regarding man merely as part of the Cosmos.
5. Show that the struggle for existence is a part of life even to a child.
6. That any sort of transition violates the principles of unity and continuity.
7. Why is the Herbartian theory tempting?
8. Show that this theory treats the person as an effect and not a cause.
9. Show that the functions of education are overrated by it.
10. Show that this system of psychology is not in harmony with current thought in three particulars.
11. Show that educational truth is a common possession.
12. What are the characteristics of a child who is being adequately educated?
13. What, roughly speaking, is expressed in the word person?
14. Show how a person is like Wordsworth’s ‘cloud.’
15. Describe an adequate doctrine of education.
16. Show how it is in touch with the three great ideas which are now moving in men’s minds.
17. What would you say of personal influence in education?
18. What is implied in saying, Education is the science of relations?
19. Why must teaching not be obtrusive?
20. What attitude on the teacher’s part arises from the recognition of a child as a person?

CHAPTER V - PSYCHOLOGY IN RELATION TO CURRENT THOUGHT

1. Characterise the educational thought of the eighteenth century.
2. Show that we, too, have had a period of certainty.
3. Account for the general dissatisfaction we labour under now.
4. By what tests may we discern a working psychology for our own age?
5. Illustrate the fact that the sacredness of the person is among the living thoughts of the age upon which we are being brought up.
6. On what grounds do we demand of education that it should make the most of the person?
7. How is ‘the solidarity of the race’ to be reckoned with in education?
8. Show that the best thought of any age is common thought.
9. Discuss Locke’s States of Consciousness.
10. Show that this theory does not provide for the evolution of the person.
11. How does modern physiological psychology compare with Locke’s theory?
12. How does Professor James define this psychology?
13. Show that this definition makes the production of thought, etc., purely mechanical.
14. How far is this assumption ‘unjustifiable materialism’?
15. What is Professor James’ pronouncement about what is called the ‘new psychology’?
16. Illustrate the fact that a psychology which eliminates personality is dreary and devitalising.
17. By what signs may we recognise the fact when the ‘new psychology’ becomes part of our faith?
18. Show that this system is inadequate, unnecessary, and inharmonious.
19. At what point does it check the evolution of the individual?

CHAPTER IV - SOME OF THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN AS PERSONS

1. Why should children be free in their play?
2. In what respect are organised games not play?
3. Why should we beware of interfering with children’s work?
4. Show that children must stand or fall by their own efforts.
5. Show the danger of a system of prodding.
6. How far may we count upon the dutifulness of boys and girls?
7. How far should children be free to choose their friends?
8. To spend their pocket-money?
9. To form their opinions?
10. Show that spontaneity is not an indigenous wildflower.

CHAPTER III - ‘MASTERLY INACTIVITY’

1. Contrast our sense of responsibility with that held in the fifties and sixties.
2. Show that the change in our point of view indicates moral progress.
3. What kind of responsibility presses heavily at present upon thoughtful people?
4. Show that anxiety is the note of a transition stage.
5. Why does a sense of responsibility produce a fussy and restless habit?
6. Why should we do well to admit the idea of ‘masterly inactivity’ as a factor in education?
7. What four or five ideas are contained in this of ‘masterly inactivity’?
8. What is Wordsworth’s phrase?
9. What is the first element in this attitude of mind?
10. Show that good-humour is the second element.
11 That self-confidence also is necessary.
12. What may mothers learn from the fine, easy, way of some fathers?
13. Show that confidence in children, also, is an element of ‘masterly inactivity.’
14. Why must parents and teachers be omniscient?
15. Show why ‘masterly inactivity’ is necessary to the bringing up of a child whose life is conditioned by ‘fate and free-will.’
16. What delicate poise between fate and free-will is to be aimed at for the child?
17. Show the importance of a sound mind in a sound body to the parent.
18. What may we learn from the quality which all the early painters have bestowed upon the pattern Mother?
19. Give one or two practical hints for tired mothers.
20. Why is leisure necessary to children’s well-being?
21. What is the foundation of the ‘masterly inactivity’ we have in view?

CHAPTER II - DOCILITY AND AUTHORITY IN THE HOME AND SCHOOL (Part II––How Authority Behaves)

1. Show, by example, that it is easy to go wrong on principle.
2. Distinguish between authority and autocracy.
3. How does autocracy behave?
4. Show that it is the autocrat who remits duties and grants indulgences.
5. How does authority behave?
6. Give half-a-dozen features by which we may distinguish the rule of authority.
7. What are the qualities proper to a ruler?
8. Distinguish between mechanical and reasonable obedience.
9. Show the use of the former.
10. Show how acts of mechanical obedience help a child to the masterly use of his body.
11. How is the man, who can make himself do what he wills, trained?
12. Why is the effort of decision the greatest effort of life?
13. Show how habit spares us much of this labour.
14. Show how the habit of obedience eases the lives of children.
15. How does authority avoid cause of offence?
16. Show that alert authority in the home is a preventive force.
17. Show how important the changing of the thoughts, diverting, is in the formation of habit.
18. Show that children, too, exercise authority.
19. What question might parents put to themselves daily as an aid to the maintenance of authority?

Appendix

Questions for the Use of readers [See note at the end of the volume.]

CHAPTER I - DOCILITY AND AUTHORITY IN THE HOME AND SCHOOL

1. In what points are there better relations between children and their elders than there were a generation or two ago?
2. Characterise the elder generation of parents.
3. What of ‘ill-guided’ homes?
4. Give an example of martinet rule. Name some notable men who grew up under such rule.
5. Compare the arbitrary parent now with the arbitrary parent of the past.
6. Was arbitrary rule a failure?
7. What thought should encourage our own efforts?
8. Show that arbitrariness arose from limitations.
9. That it is one cause of the reticence of children.
10. In what way has the direction of philosophic thought altered the relations of parents and children?
11. What effect has the doctrine of the ‘Infallible Reason’ upon authority?
12. Show that English thought again proclaims the apotheosis of Reason.
13. What is the final justification of the idea of authority?
14. Why is the enthronement of the human reason the dethronement of the highest authority?
15. Show that the spread of an idea is ‘quick as thought.’
16. Why has the notion of the finality of human reason become intolerable?
17. On what grounds would you say that authority and docility are fundamental principles?
18. Show that self-interest does not account for the response of docility to authority.
19. Show that the work of the rationalistic philosophers was necessary.
20. Show that they hold a brief for human freedom.
21. Describe the way in which the education of the world seems to be carried on.
22. Show the danger of the notion that authority is vested in persons.
23. Show that a person in authority is under authority.

The Children’s Magna Carta.––My plea is, and I think I have justified it by experience, that many doors shall be opened to boys and girls until they are at least twelve or fourteen, and always the doors of good houses, (’Education,’ says Taine, ‘is but a card of invitation to noble and privileged salons’); that they shall be introduced to no subject whatever through compendiums, abstracts, or selections; that the young people shall learn what history is, what literature is, what life is, from the living books of those who know. I know it can be done, because it is being done on a considerable scale.

If conviction has indeed reached us, the Magna Carta of children’s intellectual liberty is before us. The need is immediate, the means are evident. This, least, I think we ought to claim, that, up to the age of twelve, all boys and girls shall be educated on some such curriculum, with some such habit of Books as we have been considering. (It is highly encouraging that the new regulations of the Board of Education both for primary and secondary schools lend themselves to the lines of work advocated in these pages.)

An Educational Revolution.––I add appendices to show, (a) how a wide curriculum and the use of many books work in the Parents’ Review School; (b) what progress a pupil of twelve should have made under such conditions; and (c) what use is made of oral lessons. Should the reader consider that the children in question prove their right of entry to several fields of knowledge, that they show a distinct appetite for such knowledge, that thought and power of mind develop upon the books we read, as they do not and cannot upon the lectures we hear; should he indeed be convinced of the truth of what I have advanced, I think he will see that, not an educational reform here and there, but an EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION is before us to which every one of us is bound to put his hand.

Children delight In School, but not for Love of Knowledge.––It will be said with truth that most children delight in school; they delight in the stimulus of school life, in the social stir of companionship; they are emulous, eager for reward and praise; they enjoy the thousand lawful interests of school life, including the attractive personality of such and such a teacher; but it seems doubtful whether the love of knowledge, in itself and for itself; is usually a powerful motive with the young scholar. The matter is important, because, of all the joyous motives of school life, the love of knowledge is the only abiding one; the only one which determines the scale, so to speak, upon which the person will hereafter live. My contention is, to repeat what has been said, that all children have a capacity for and a latent love of knowledge; and, that knowledge concerning persons and States can best be derived from books, and should be got by the children out of their own books.

In a hundred biographies there are hints of boys and girls who have grown up on books; and there is no doubt that in many schools the study of books is the staple of the work. This probably is the principle which keeps our great public schools perennially alive; they live, so far as they do live, upon books. The best public schoolboy is a fine product; and perhaps the worst has had his imagination touched by ideas; yet most of us recognise that the public school often fails, in that it launches the average and dull boy ignorant upon the world because the curriculum has been too narrow to make any appeal to him. And we must remember, that if a young person leave school at seventeen or eighteen without having become a diligent and delighted reader, it is tolerably certain that he will never become a reader, it may be, however, that the essential step in any reform of public schools should come in the shape of due preparation upon a wide curriculum, dealt with intelligently, between the ages of six and twelve.

An Educated Child.––Knowledge is, no doubt, a comparative term, and the knowledge of a subject possessed by a child would be the ignorance of a student. All the same, there is such a thing as an educated child––a child who possesses a sound and wide knowledge of a number of subjects, all of which serve to interest him; such a child studies with ‘delight.’