CHARLOTTE MASON'S 20 PRINCIPLES: PRINCIPLE 1: "CHILDREN ARE BORN PERSONS"




If you're not familiar with Charlotte Mason's 20 Principles of Education, you might visit them here. These are the bedrock ideas on which a Charlotte Mason education is founded. The better your understanding of these foundational principles, the more empowered you are to apply the methods which grow from the principles in your own home, with your own children. The more these ideas inform your thinking, the more flexibility you have within their parameters. Thus the Charlotte Mason method becomes for you not a series of must-do activities – or a "style" – but a way of thinking about education in a large way, which generates your actions in implementing that education.

Today let's unpack Principle 1: 

Children are born persons. 

Some thoughts about what this means:

First of all, I think it's helpful to consider what we know, thanks to technology, about the child as a PRE-born person.

We know that in the womb children recognize their mothers' voices, and voices of others in their immediate environment prior to birth.

We know that newborns can recognize speech patterns from things read aloud prior to their birth -- that they will respond, say, to nursery rhymes recited while they were still in the womb.

We know that pre-born children dream.

-- and this is just what studies have been able to demonstrate, beyond a reasonable doubt, about the cognitive life of the child prior to birth.

Why, then, would we doubt that our BORN child has all these capacities? 

This is the *bare minimum* of what we can say about a child prior to birth. 

WHY would we not consider our BORN child to be a cognitively complex individual, capable of reason? 

WHY would we not trust our BORN child to know and intuit things? 

WHY would we not marvel at the dignity and goodness of our BORN child, as the same person we marveled at as a pre-born child? Why would our born child not be every bit as miraculous to us?

And why would we not assume that our born child has an intellect, and can know, grasp, observe, and process things, without our having to teach him how to do it? We don't have to teach our pre-born child to think and dream and recognize. He doesn't lose all those miraculous abilities simply by passing through the birth canal. 

Children deserve to be taken seriously, not as nuisances but as people, seen and heard. In the time I've been home-educating my children, it has occurred to me to wonder: why would I ask my child to put up with situations that I myself would not put up with? 

For example: when my oldest was still in school, we once received a report noting that she objected to being hit with the ball while playing rounders (a British game I know nothing about, but my daughter apparently does), and needed to develop a better attitude. What I wanted to say to the teacher at the time was: Let's throw a ball at your face and see what kind of attitude you have about that. 

Children have zero power, often enough, to change their situations, which means that they often get stuck in situations that adults would change in a heartbeat if the situation defined their life. I think about this when people say things like, "Well, getting picked on in school is just part of life." Yes, hello. In your workplace, if someone is picking on you, does the word "harassment" not occur to you? Would you not file a complaint and expect to be heard? Or change jobs? Yet you'd be fine with having your child walk into situations that you wouldn't put up with for five minutes? Why is that? 

I guess my point here is: if you are a person deserving of respect and a decent day-to-day life, so is a child, and if that child is at home with you all the time, then it is your responsibility to ensure that your child is receiving those things. This might mean, among other things, that you're not displaying every moment of that child's life on the internet. There's a lot of performative homeschooling Instagram out there. Before that, it was performative homeschooling blogs. Consider, before you post, how you'd feel if the pictures you're posting were of you. I confess, I enjoy seeing posts about my friend's children and their day-to-day lives, and I certainly don't think these things are always performative or exploitive. But it is all too easy not to consider how the human beings who are your children will feel about having their lives shared with potentially hundreds of random strangers, as if they were props, not people. 

Children really are thinking, reflective, observant people. 

I have one child who can mimic me -- things I apparently have said, with mannerisms I had no idea that I had -- with frightening accuracy, to gauge from the hilarious reactions of this child's siblings whenever he does his impressions of me. 

They register what you say and do. They can read you. They form their own thoughts about their lives, their relationships, the people they know, the nature they observe. They extrapolate meanings from these things. You don't have to teach them how to reason that way. They just do that, because it's one of the things human beings are wired to do. 

I can remember sitting up one night with a 7-year-old who couldn't sleep, in England where we lived at the confluence of three pubs. It was eleven p.m., and the pubs were letting out with their usual hubbub, people stumbling down the pedestrian lane by our building and spilling out into the busy street where the taxis were idling. The 7-year-old turned to me and said, "You can tell when people have been drinking alcohol, because their brain says, Sing and be stupid! Sing and be stupid!" She was pretty much totally not wrong. 

Meanwhile, they can tell what is important to you, and what you're just putting on. If you're just doing something – like, say, the rosary –because you think it's good for the children, THEY KNOW THAT. You had better believe in what you're doing. Otherwise, don't do it.

Like us, children are human beings in the process of growing. 

This growth will stop when they enter heaven, not before.

Our children are not our possessions, and their function is not to make us look good. They also do not want to disappoint us or make us angry. 

That is never their desire. Sometimes it happens that we are disappointed or angry, but that is a situation that our children want to avoid, and they are often surprised and horribly grieved when it happens. They do not go looking for it. What they want is our love, and to know that there is nothing they can do to lose our love.

Meanwhile, our job is to extend to them the same charity that we would extend to any other person. The catechism notes that it's an offense against charity to presume that another person's intentions and motives are bad. We are impelled to assume the opposite: that someone might mess up, but that the person's intentions are essentially good. 

How often do we assign blame to our children – "He's not doing his work because he's lazy," "She's just disobedient" – in ways that we would not if the person in question were an adult? Our children have fallen natures, just as adults do. But they aren't MORE fallen than we are. If we would want grace extended to us in our mistakes and lapses, then we MUST extend that same grace to our children. 

All of us are fallen and fall short. Yet we are made in the image of God. We exist at all because of His love, and He loves us beyond our reckoning. 

If this is true of us, then it is also true of our children.

As parents, charged with the responsibility of instructing our children in the faith, our number-one consideration must be: how do I show my child, every day, what God's love looks like? 

More thoughts: 

It can be very tempting to think of our children as extensions of ourselves, not as whole separate people, in whose creation we were privileged to cooperate, but whom we did not in fact make ourselves. We might not even realize that that's what we're doing, but it's an easy habit of thought to slide into. 

What do I mean by this? 

Well . . . for example . . . if you think (as I have thought, and as most of us perhaps have found ourselves thinking at one time or other) that by homeschooling your child you will save that child from making the dumb mistakes you made, then you are not really viewing your child as a born person with free will. You are viewing your child as your own chance to get things right. And you're lying to yourself, as well as being unfair to your child, so when you catch yourself in this assumption, tell yourself to stop it at once. 

I can pretty much assure you that whatever dumb mistakes you are envisioning, your child will almost certainly make other ones, and they'll be things you didn't think of. That's because your child is a completely other, wholly new, separate creation from you. 

That doesn't mean you don't do your best to form your child in wisdom. You're not off the hook for that. It's one of the deep paradoxes of parenting that the things you can't control are still the things you most need to teach: character, and the power of discernment. Those things lie at the heart of a Charlotte Mason education, anyway. Of course you teach them, and you teach them most powerfully by modeling them yourself. But these are not prescriptions or preventatives, and your child as an adult won't be a factory product of those lessons. He will, you hope, be a sensible person who will make good decisions most of the time. But he'll still be human, as you are. 

A corollary to this is that you are more or less powerless to ensure that your child will practice the Catholic faith as an adult. You cannot make another person be a Catholic. 

**Edited to add: Of course the graces imparted through the sacraments of baptism and confirmation are indelible. Once you're marked with those graces, that's it. You can't just take off your Catholicism like a coat you've outgrown. So I guess it's more accurate to say that you can't make somebody want to practice his or her faith. You can't force or brainwash someone into being a practicing Catholic. That's really what I mean when I say that you can't make another person be a Catholic.**

Again, that doesn't mean you don't try. It is your job, after all, as the catechism tells us, to educate your children in the truths of the faith. On the other hand, there is exactly one soul whose work of salvation you are given to cooperate in, and that soul is YOURS. Not your child's. You can't save your child's soul for him. 

What you CAN do, meanwhile, and what I think that directive to us as our children's primary educators means, is FEED that soul, as Charlotte Mason suggests, on the meat of ideas, on connections, on things that that soul can love. Yes, you have to know the truths of the catechism, but what is knowledge? Again, as the historian John Lukacs has said, all knowledge is "personal and participant." How does a child truly "know his faith?" Not by memorizing it – though memory work certainly may have its place in religious formation – but in a "personal and participant" way. What that means might be a subject for another day, but as you, too, are a born person, I feel comfortable leaving you to ponder what "personal and participant" knowledge of the faith might look like for your children. 


Meanwhile, as I've watched my own children grow up and find their way, which is an ongoing process occupying their entire lives, and a process whose end I likely won't live to see, I've considered just how much the vocation of marriage, with the accompanying work of parenthood, has been given to ME as a means of my own salvation. It's the means by which God has called me in radical ways to trust Him, to surrender the illusion of my own control over things into His hands, and to hope, again in radical ways, in His goodness and mercy, and the continual action of His grace in all our lives. 

Parenting can be scary. But the more we can let go and trust that God has a plan for each of our children – with which we cooperate, but which we ultimately don't control – the more we can rest in His grace, and catch glimpses of it at work in our children, even in dark moments. 

If we run the race with endurance, as Saint Paul says, assuredly we will wear the crown. But I don't think our children are that crown. They are born persons, themselves, running their own races as those races are set before them, with their own crowns to gain at the end. And this is good. Sometimes it's kind of nail-biting, to be honest, but it is also a joy to witness: the miracle of their personhood, which is always, always, a miracle of God's love.