Secular Charlotte Mason

This is open for discussion.  Please join us.  Agree and disagree respectfully please.   Please note: most of this is Charlotte Mason's original words, with some changes.

Charlotte Mason's 20 Principles (modern secular version)

1. Children are born persons - they deserve respect and consideration, and should not to be treated as lesser because of their lack of knowledge and experience. Children are born with their intellect and personality which is influenced by life experience. Modern children sense their equality.*

2. Children are not born all good or all bad; every person has the potentional for good and evil. Do not think your children have inherited their badness from someone else.

3. The principles of authority and obedience are natural and necessary.** We are all subject to certain rules and laws whether we like it or not. However --

4. These principles are limited by the respect due to the personality of children, which must not be encroached upon whether by the direct use of fear or love, suggestion or influence, or by undue play upon any one natural desire.

5. Therefore, we are limited to three educational instruments--the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the presentation of living ideas. The P.N.E.U. Motto is: "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life."

6. When we say that "education is an atmosphere," we do not mean that a child should be isolated in what may be called a 'child-environment' especially adapted and prepared, but that we should take into account the educational value of his natural home atmosphere, both as regards to persons and things, and should let him live freely among his proper conditions. It stultifies a child to bring down his world to the child's' level.

7. By "education is a discipline," we mean the discipline of habits, formed definitely and thoughtfully, whether habits of mind or body. Physiologists tell us of the adaptation of brain structures to habitual lines of thought, i.e., to our habits.

8. In saying that "education is a life," the need of intellectual and moral as well as of physical sustenance is implied. The mind feeds on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous exposure to a wide variety of ideas and experiences.

9. The child's mind is not a blank slate, or a bucket to be filled. It is a living thing and needs knowledge to grow. As the stomach was designed to digest food, the mind is designed to digest knowledge and needs no special training or exercises to make it ready to learn.

10. Herbart's philosophy that the mind is an empty receptacle waiting for enticing bits of knowledge lays too much responsibility on the teacher to prepare detailed lessons. Children taught on this principle are in danger of receiving much teaching with little knowledge; and the teacher's axiom is,' what a child learns matters less than how he learns it."

11. But we, believing that the normal child has powers of mind which fit him to deal with all knowledge proper to him, give him a full and generous curriculum; taking care only that all knowledge offered him is vital, that is, that facts are not presented without their informing ideas. Out of this conception comes our principle that,--

12. "Education is the Science of Relations"; that is, a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books, for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of "those first-born affinities" or to challenge a child to see something in a new way.

13. In devising a SYLLABUS for all normal children, three points must be considered:

(a) He or she requires much knowledge, for the mind needs sufficient food as much as does the body.

(b) The knowledge should be various, for sameness in mental diet does not create appetite (i.e., curiosity)

(c) Knowledge should be communicated in well-chosen language, because his attention responds naturally to what is conveyed in literary form.

14. As knowledge is not assimilated until it is reproduced, children should 'tell back' after a single reading or hearing: or should write on some part of what they have read.

15. A single reading is insisted on, because children naturally have great power of attention; but this force is dissipated by the re-reading of passages, and also, by questioning, summarising, and the like.

Acting upon these and some other points in the behavior of mind, we find that the learning potential of children is enormously greater than previously thought and not completely dependent on initial circumstances, such as home life.

Nor is the accuracy of this statement limited to clever children or to children of the educated classes: thousands of children in Elementary Schools respond freely to this method, which is based on the behaviour of mind.

16. There are two guides to moral and intellectual self-management to offer to children, which we may call 'the way of the will' and 'the way of the reason.'

17. The way of the will: Children should be taught, (a) to distinguish between 'I want' and 'I will.' (b) That the way to will effectively is to turn our thoughts from that which we desire but do not will. (c) That the best way to turn our thoughts is to think of or do some quite different thing, entertaining or interesting. (d) That after a little rest in this way, the will returns to its work with new vigour. (This adjunct of the will is familiar to us as diversion, whose office it is to ease us for a time from will effort, that we may 'will' again with added power. The use of suggestion as an aid to the will is to be deprecated, as tending to stultify and stereotype character, It would seem that spontaneity is a condition of development, and that human nature needs the discipline of failure as well as of success.)

18. The way of reason: We teach children, too, not to 'lean (too confidently) to their own understanding'; because the function of reason is to give logical demonstration (a) of mathematical truth, (b) of an initial idea, accepted by the will. In the former case, reason is, practically, an infallible guide, but in the latter, it is not always a safe one; for, whether that idea be right or wrong, reason will confirm it by irrefragable proofs. If we want to believe something, we will refuse to see other evidence.

19. Therefore, children should be taught, as they become mature enough to understand such teaching, that the chief responsibility which rests on them as persons is the acceptance or rejection of ideas. To help them in this choice we give them principles of conduct, and a wide range of the knowledge fitted to them. These principles should save children from some of the loose thinking and heedless action which cause most of us to live at a lower level than we need.

20. We allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual and 'spiritual' life of children. {insert belief system here} Simply stated, spirituality is the internal processing of our feelings and decisions. Whether or not we ask for help from a 'higher power' in this endeavor, training a child in this process will help them in their interests, duties, and joys of life.

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* "Such major changes in our social structure are more readily perceived than the subtle change wrought by the fact that women and children claim their share in equality. Adults are usually deeply disturbed at the notion that children are their social equals. They indignantly deny such a possibility. "Don't be ridiculous. I know more than my child does. He can't possibly be my equal." No. Of course not. Not in knowledge or experience or skill. But these things don't indicate equality -- even among adults. Equality doesn't mean uniformity! Equality means that people, despite all their individual differences and abilities, have equal claims to dignity and respect. Our conviction that we are superior to our children stems from our cultural heritage: that people are inferior or superior according to their birth, their money, their sex or color, or their age and wisdom. No individual ability or trait can guarantee superiority or the right to dominate.

There is another factor that may play a part in our feeling that we must be superior to our children. We may have a hidden doubt of our own worth, a deep sense of not measuring up to our own ideals. Then a child, in his helplessness, makes a delightful object of comparison by which we can feel grand! But this is a false illusion. In fact, our children are often much more capable than we are and tend to outsmart us on many occasions." -- Rudolf Dreikurs, M.D. (1964). Children: the challenge, the classic work on improving parent-child relations--intelligent, humane and eminently practical

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** "These days many people resist the concept of power (authority). As children, some of us knew all too well the power of parents and became painfully aware of its potential for abuse. We are mindful that power leads to temptation and have experienced that those who seek power over others cannot be trusted. In some ways power has become a dirty word, as in power-seeking and power-hungry. It is not surprising that many have come to eschew it, an attitude I encounter frequently among parents and educators.

Many also confuse power with force. That is not the sense in which we employ the word power in this book. In our present discussion of parenting and attachment, power means the spontaneous authority to parent. That spontaneous authority flows not from coercion or force but from an appropriately aligned relationship with the child. The power to parent arises when things are in their natural order, and it arises without effort, without posturing, and without pushing. It is when we lack that power that we are likely to resort to force. The more power a parent commands, the less force is required in day-to-day parenting. On the other hand, the less power we possess, the more impelled we are to raise our voices, harshen our demeanor, utter threats, and seek some leverage to make our children comply with our demands. The loss of power experienced by today's parents has led to a preoccupation in the parenting literature with techniques that would be perceived as bribes and threats in almost any other setting. We have camouflaged such signs of impotence with euphemisms like rewards and "natural consequences."

Power is absolutely necessary for the task of parenting. Why do we need power? Because we have responsibilities. Parenting was never meant to exist without the power to fulfill the responsibilities it brings." -- Gordon Neufeld (2008). Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers