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Charlotte Mason in Modern English
Charlotte Mason's ideas are too important not to be understood and implemented in the 21st century, but her Victorian style of writing sometimes prevents parents from attempting to read her books. This is an imperfect attempt to make Charlotte's words accessible to modern parents. You may read these, print them out, share them freely--but they are copyrighted to me, so please don't post or publish them without asking.
~L. N. Laurio
pg 83
Chapter 9 - The Culture Of Character: The
Treatment of Defects
The
Ultimate Purpose of Education
Suppose that a parent realizes that the ultimate purpose of education
is to form good character. Suppose the parent understands that
character is comprised of the child's inherited tendencies, still in
their rough stages, but modified by the child's environment, and
character can be debased or elevated by education. And this parent
knows that his role is to spot the first signs of family traits.
Positive traits are to be valued as the most excellent kind of family
inheritance to be nourished and carefully tended. The parent also needs
to encourage the child in activities he may not think he's interested
in so that the child will be balanced. This is even more important if
the child is eccentric. Eccentricity can be a pitfall of the original
nature, which can be a powerful force. Even if the parent has accepted
all of this as part of his
parental role, there's still much more to be done.
The
Defects of our Qualities
We're all prone to what the French call 'defects of our qualities.' In
the same way that bad weeds grow quickly, the defects of even an
excellent character can choke out positive traits. For instance, a
little girl may love with as much devotion and passion as a woman, but
she's possessive and jealous of
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sharing anyone's affection, even when it's her mother. Perhaps a boy is
ambitious. He likes to be the leader in the playroom and his leadership
is healthy for his siblings except for his argumentative little brother
who refuses to follow anyone's lead. The two of them are such odds that
they can barely be in the same room together, and the older brother
acts like a tyrant when anyone crosses him. A shy, affectionate little
girl isn't above lying to protect her sister. A high-spirited little
girl never lies, but sometimes she bullies others. And so on, without
end. What is the parents' responsibility here? To make the most of the
good quality by making the child feel like that quality is a virtue to
guard--a family possession
that's been inherited, and, at the same time, a gift from above. A bit
of simple, reasonable teaching might help, but be careful of overdoing
it with too much talking. 'Are you just about finished, mommy?' said
one bright little five-year-old girl in the most polite way possible.
She'd been listening a long time to her mother preaching at her, and
she had her own things to do. A wise word here and there might be
useful, but it's more effective to carefully hinder every quality's
'defect' before it ever gets started. Don't give the bad weeds any room
to grow. Or, defects can sometimes be reclaimed and turned around to
feed the quality they come from. For instance, the ambitious boy's love
for power can be turned into a desire to win his restless brother by
love. A loving girl's passion can be turned around to include everyone
that her mother loves.
Children
with Defects
Heredity and the duties attached to it has another aspect. In the same
way that a child with an admirable family tree may very well inherit
the best of his ancestors, such as a well-proportioned body, clear
intellect, or high moral sense, he also has some risks. As one person
puts it, not all the women
pg 85
have been brave, nor have all the men been pure. We all know how the
tendency to have certain diseases run in families. In the same way,
temper, temperament, moral sense and physical nature can be carried
down through the lineage with a taint. Some unfortunate children seem
to have inherited all the negative traits and none of the good ones.
What can parents do in a case like that? They can't reform him, that's beyond human
skill and ability once a person has realized all that's within his
nature. But they can transform
him so that the person he was calculated to become never develops at
all. Instead, another person comes to light who's blessed with only the
virtues that originated from his defects. This brings up a useful
law of Nature that underlies the whole subject of early child training,
especially the case of a mother who finds that she needs to birth her
child again into a
life of beauty and harmony. The old words of Thomas a Kempis seem to me
to be the fundamental law of education, and it's simply this: 'Habit is
driven out by habit.' People have always known that constant use
becomes second nature, but no one understood why, and how much it
implicates, until recently.
A
Malicious Child
Perhaps a child has a hateful habit that's so constant, it threatens to
be his only quality and become his character
if nothing is done. He's spiteful, sneaky, and sullen. No one is to
blame for it; he was born that way. What can be done with such a
chronic habit of nature? It can be treated as a bad habit and dealt with by developing
the opposite good habit.
Perhaps Henry is not just mischievous, he's a malicious little boy.
Someone is always crying in the playroom because he's constantly
pinching, biting and hitting, making
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some child miserable. Even his pets aren't safe. He's killed his canary
by poking at it with a stick through the bars of his cage. Howls from
his dog and screeches from his cat are evidence of more of his cruel
tricks. He makes terrifying faces at his fearful little sister, and he
sets traps with string for the gardener as he goes about his work with
watering cans. There's no end to his mean-spirited pranks. They go
beyond the usual mischievousness of untrained boyhood. His mother hears
about his latest tricks and wonders what's to be done. An optimistic
parent with blind faith in the changes of time says, 'Oh, he'll grow
out of it.' Many experienced mothers will say, 'There's no cure for
him. You can't change what he is. He'll be a nuisance to society all
his life.' Yet this same child could be cured in a month if the mother
would determine to stick to the task wholeheartedly with a will
and all her effort. If he isn't cured by then, at least the cure will
have begun, and that's half the battle.
Special
Treatment
Let the month during treatment be an enjoyable and happy month for the
child. Let him live the whole time in the warmth of his mother's smile.
Don't let him be alone long enough to think about or do mean-spirited
pranks. Let him always feel like he's under a watchful, loving and approving eye. Keep him pleasantly
occupied and always busy. The purpose of this is to break him of his
old habit, and that will happen when a certain length of time has gone
by without him repeating the habit. But a new habit needs to be
established to take its place, since one habit drives out another one.
Lay new thought patterns over the old ones. Provide him with
opportunities to be kind. Every hour of every day, let him experience
the joy of pleasing others. Get him started planning little schemes to
please everyone else. Maybe he could make a toy, gather a dish of
strawberries, make wall shadows to amuse the baby. Take him on errands
to help poor neighbors, and let him give, carry and deliver something of
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his own. For an entire month, the child's whole heart will be
overflowing with deeds and schemes and thoughts of kindness, and the
clever mind that he previously used to think up mean-spirited pranks
will become a valued treasure to his family when he uses it to do good.
This all sounds like a great idea, but where is a mother supposed to
find time in her busy schedule to give Henry a month of special
treatment? She has other children and other duties. She can't just give
herself up for a month, or even a week, for one child. But what if her
little one was seriously sick, perhaps even at risk of death? Wouldn't
she make the time somehow? She'd let all of her other duties go so that
she could devote herself fully to her little boy, who would be her
first priority.
Moral
Sicknesses Need Urgent Attention
This is a point that all parents don't recognize: serious mental and
moral sicknesses require urgent, deliberate healing treatment. The
parents need to devote themselves wholly to the child's cure
temporarily, just
like they would if their child was hospitalized. Neither punishment nor
neglect, which are the two most popular treatments, ever cured a child
of any moral fault. If parents recognized the powerful and immediate
effect that treatment could have, they would never allow ugly weeds to
sprout in their child's character. Remember that, no matter what ugly
fault spoil the child's beauty, he's simply a garden that's been
allowed to grow weeds. The more weeds there are, the more fertile the
soil is. Even a child who has lots of weeds has every opportunity to
develop a life of beauty and character. Get rid of the weeds and
nurture and tend the flowers. It's not inaccurate to say that most of
the failures in life or character that people make are directly caused
by the casual, optimistic philosophy of their parents who believed that
'she's so young; she doesn't know any better. She'll grow out of it
once she matures.' But, like a weed, a fault left to itself will only
grow bigger and stronger.
pg 88
Someone may object to my advice for a short, determined round of
treatment. They'll say that the good results won't last. After a week
or two of neglect, everything that was gained will be lost. Henry will
be just as likely as ever to grow up as cruel and fierce as a tiger,
like a Steerforth [from David
Copperfield] or Henleigh Grandcourt [from Daniel Deronda]. But,
fortunately, scientific evidence is on our side.
One of the most interesting issues right now is the interaction between
the thoughts of the mind, and the physical configuration of the brain.
At this point, it appears that each is very much caused by the other.
The kind of thoughts that are persistently thought actually have the
power to shape the brain tissue, and the configuration of the brain
depends on the kind of thoughts we think.
Automatic
Brain Action
For the most part, thought is automatic. Without intending to or trying
to, we tend to think in the way we've gotten used to thinking, in the
same way that we walk or write without consciously arranging and
directing our muscles. Mozart could compose an overture, laughing the
whole time at the little jokes his wife made to keep him awake. Of
course, he had thought out the whole piece in his head beforehand, and
he just needed to write it all down. But he didn't consciously try to
create these musical thoughts, they just came to him in their correct
order. Coleridge thought up 'Kubla Khan' in his sleep, and wrote it all
down when he woke up. When you consider the rest of his thoughts, maybe
he would have been better off if he'd done most of his thinking while
he was asleep!
'She falls asleep while sewing on the buttons,
And stitches them on as she's dreaming.'
That's not only possible, but very likely. For every one thing that we
deliberately make ourselves think about, there are a thousand
pg 89
words and actions that come to us on their own. We don't actually think
of them at all. But just as it takes a poet or musician to create
poetry or music, the words and actions that come from us without our
consciously trying to create them, are what define the true measure of
what we are. Maybe this is why so much emphasis is put upon every 'idle
word' that we speak--words spoken without intention or conscious will.
Little by little, we're getting around to Henry and his bad habits.
Somehow or other, the gray tissue of our brain grows to accommodate the
thoughts that we allow to have unlimited access to our mind. Science
hasn't even speculated on how
that happens yet. To illustrate, let's imagine that certain thoughts in
the mind run back and forth along the nerves of the brain tissue until
they've worn a path there. Busy traffic of the same kind of thoughts
will continue to travel that way because the path is well-marked and
broken in to make it easy for them. Imagine that a child has inherited
a tendency to have a resentful temperament. He's begun to have
resentful thoughts. They're easy for him to dwell on, and he finds it
satisfying to nurse them, so he continues. Before long, more of these
ugly thoughts travel into his mind easily and naturally. Resentfulness
is starting to become a part of who
he is, the defining characteristic that people know him by.
One
Habit Overcomes Another
But one habit overcomes and replaces another one. A watchful mother
sets up new paths in other areas. She makes sure that, while she's
leading new thoughts in through a new route, the old, well-worn path of
the old way of thinking is
abandoned and unused. Brain tissue is in a constant state of rapid
waste and rapid growth. New growth takes on the shape of the new
thoughts, and the old thoughts are lost in the steady wasting of the
old tissue. Before long, the child is literally reformed, not just morally and
mentally, but physically, too. The fact that
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the gray tissue of the brain acts like an instrument of the mind shouldn't
surprise us when we consider how the muscles and joints of a
gymnast, the vocal organs of a singer, the fingertips of a
watchmaker, or the tongue of a tea-taster develop to accommodate what
they always do. It's especially true that the brain and all other
organs develop to accommodate the earliest
things they've had to do.
This is perfectly suited for the parent who wants to cure his child's
moral fault. All he needs to do is to set up the course of new
thoughts, and hinder the old thoughts, until the new thoughts become
automatic and run on their own. Meanwhile, the paths where the old
thoughts used to travel are disintegrating as the brain replaces
tissue. And here is the parent's advantage. If the child returns to his
old thought patterns, which he may do, if it's a tendency he inherited
from birth, then he finds that there's no longer any place for them in
his brain. It takes some time and effort to create new paths for them,
and it's not difficult for his parents to hinder his efforts.
A
Physical Record of Educational Efforts
It's truer here than anywhere else that, 'unless the Lord builds a
house, those who build it work in vain.' But that doesn't mean that our
intelligent cooperation isn't our obligated duty. Training the will,
educating the conscience, and, as much as it's within our power,
developing the child's divine life, all happen at the same time while
we're
training the child to have the habits that will allow him to live a
good life. Good habits and divine life will carry the child safely past
his early
years when his will isn't strong and his conscience isn't trained,
until he's able to take the reins of his own life conduct and
character-molding, under God's direction.
pg 91
It's comforting to believe that even our educational efforts leave a
physical record in the child's brain tissue. But it also makes us aware
of the danger of leaving bad habits alone in the hope that they'll be
outgrown in time.
A
Mother's Love Isn't Enough for Child-Training
Some parents might think that all of this is too serious to think
about. Even 'thinking on these things' is enough to take the joy and
spontaneity out of the sweet relationship they have with their child.
After all, isn't parental love and God's grace enough to bring up
children? No one can be humbler about this subject than those who
haven't had the honor of being parents. The insight and love that all
parents are blessed with, especially mothers, is a divine gift that
fills onlookers with awe, even in many poor village families. But we
have enough instances of tender, affectionate parents who have reared
fools to recognize that it takes more than love. There are specific
paths, not always the old ways, but new ones, that are revealed step by
step as we go. The mother who determines to understand her role and
task doesn't find her labor increased. Her load is actually infinitely
lightened. Life isn't made more burdensome by thinking of these things
because, once we understand them and own them, we'll act on them
without even thinking about it as surely and naturally as a teacup
falls when you let go of it. With a little bit of painstaking effort in
the beginning, it will all become easy.
Paraphrased by L. N. Laurio
Please direct any comments or questions to me by emailing me at cmseries-owner at yahoogroups dot com.
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