PRINCIPLE 5: ATMOSPHERE, DISCIPLINE, LIFE

Here's Principle 5 in full:

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."

I am noticing, myself, as perhaps I've never noticed before, just how much these principles build on each other, how they're part of the same syntax of thought. Just as the "but –" in Principle 3  is significant, so is the "therefore" here. Principle 5 is part of the same thought as Principle 4, which completes Principle 3, which extends Principle 2. And all of it grows from the root of Principle 1. 

All that to say: this isn't a list so much as it is a system of thought. Each item in the system is expanded and developed by the other items. 

In the case of this principle, we have Principle 4 to explain why we are "limited to three educational instruments." Principle 4 is the "don't" principle, all the things we cross off our list of possible ways to enact our children's education and discipline (which to my mind amount to pretty much the same thing anyway). As you might recall, Principle 4 says, "Don't use fear or manipulation as tools for education." So, if you can't use fear or manipulation, what's left? 

Well, basically the whole world . . . 

As always, the annotation to Principle 5 here is helpful. The "instruments" available to us as our children's teachers are

"the child's natural environment"

"the training of good habits" 

"exposure to living ideas," 

which does, really, amount to more or less the whole world, boiled down to three broad categories, one to do with the child's outer surroundings, and the other two to do with his management of himself and his inner life. 

Of course, these three categories – atmosphere, discipline, life – receive a thorough treatment in Volume 6: Towards a Philosophy of Education. Here Charlotte Mason discusses "atmosphere:"

Schools may add Latin and sums and whatever else their curriculum contains, but the actual education is, as it were, performed upon a child by means of colour schemes, harmonious sounds, beautiful forms, gracious persons. He grows up aesthetically educated into sweet reasonableness and harmony with his surroundings.

In other words, beauty matters. Now, "beauty" doesn't necessarily mean "fancy" or "expensive." It doesn't mean that you need to have an extensive property with sweeping vistas. Our house, as a matter of fact, looks out on a community-college parking lot. 

What "beauty" does mean – at the risk of stating the obvious – is not ugly. It also means not utilitarian. In other words, say you have a designated schoolroom (I never have, but you might). What are you going to put in it? Just whatever will get the job done? Some hard chairs and desks, maybe a kiddie poster with the alphabet on it, to make it look like school? A big bright overhead light? 

Or will it be a room you want to live in? So maybe it has a battered old table in the middle for people to sit and do copywork and math. I mean, here is my kitchen table, which is one of my treasured possessions, just because we've done so much on it over the years: 

When I took this picture, my youngest daughter had just graffitied the tile top in dry-erase marker, so it was kind of a work of art. We have done math in dry erase on that table, we have dissected owl pellets on that table . . . and we eat dinner on it every night, thanks to the magic of tablecloths. My mother bought me this table for my first apartment, at a place called The Work Bench, in 1986, and when I say it's not a fine piece of furniture, maybe I don't even have to call your attention to the decomposing fiberboard around the edge of the tile. My point here is that beauty, again, doesn't mean perfect. 

But it does mean that colors are inviting, that furniture is inviting, that things are orderly and comfortable. Really, I'm talking about your whole home, not just your schoolroom, which if you have one should feel like just another room where you live, and not like school. "Atmosphere" also doesn't mean that your home has to be a children's theme park. And it doesn't mean decorating your children's rooms for them, to your taste instead of theirs. 

What if parents and teachers in their zeal misread the schedule of their duties, magnified their office unduly and encroached upon the personality of children? It is not an environment that these want, a set of artificial relations carefully constructed, but an atmosphere which nobody has been at pains to constitute. It is there, about the child, his natural element, precisely as the atmosphere of the earth is about us.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking about all the things that aren't furniture or paint colors or accessories or housecleaning strategies, but that contribute immeasurably to the sense of an inviting, nurturing, functional, thriving home and family. 

Here I'm indebted to executive-function counselor Yulia Rafailova , and notes I took at an executive-function webinar she gave last year, that I think speak to Charlotte Mason's notion of "atmosphere." The context of my notes is the issue of supporting a child with poor self-regulation, poor working memory, and poor cognitive flexibility – the three hallmarks of executive function – to function better. And the thing that was striking to me was Yulia's assertion that the key to positive change lies with the family system as a whole: the home and the people in it. Rather than focusing on "fixing" the child who's not functioning, she said, she urges families to look at themselves and how they function in their homes. 

My notes were extensive, and I'm not going to replicate them here (UPDATE: I did post them here), but two major things stood out to me that seem applicable here. 

If your home isn't orderly, people in it are not going to function well. If your home IS orderly, people in it will function better. 

By "orderly," I don't mean "immaculate" all the time. But I do mean that there's a place for everything, and everything has its place. Yulia would also say: if you don't have a place for it, get rid of it. If you can make your home function better for you, then there will be less chaos, less overwhelm, less decision fatigue, less stress. Your home will be a place where people feel good. 

If you want your children to regulate their emotions, you have to regulate your emotions. You can make your whole home environment calmer if you can be calmer. 

Note that Charlotte Mason includes "gracious people" as part of her proposed atmosphere. If your home atmosphere is going to include gracious people, guess who gets to be gracious first? And it really can't be fake gracious. If you are wound very tightly, and you don't feel very gracious toward the other people in your home a lot of the time, then something needs to change. If you need help managing your stress levels, get it. If you just need to take better care of yourself, and feed your own mind and soul some, then do it. Whatever you need to do to create some serenity in yourself: do it. The only way for your home to be serene is for that serenity to come from you. Somehow. By God's grace. (Fun fact: this is what Eucharistic Adoration is for). 

Oh, and also: if there is a lot of bickering in your marriage, or a lot of cold-shouldering and slamming of kitchen cabinets, get help. Atmosphere shouldn't be the only reason you'd want to do that, but marriage dynamics do also generate the tone of the environment in which your children live and receive their education. If you and your husband (or wife) can't be gracious to each other without gritting your teeth or putting on an act: get help.  

***

Here is Charlotte Mason talking about "discipline," the second "instrument" of education: 

Education is not after all to either teacher or child the fine careless rapture we appear to have figured it. We who teach and they who learn are alike constrained; there is always effort to be made in certain directions; yet we face our tasks from a new point of view. We need not labour to get children to learn their lessons; that, if we would believe it, is a matter which nature takes care of. Let the lessons be of the right sort and children will learn them with delight. The call for strenuousness comes with the necessity of forming habits; but here again we are relieved. The intellectual habits of the good life form themselves in the following out of the due curriculum in the right way. As we have already urged, there is but one right way, that is, children must do the work for themselves. They must read the given pages and tell what they have read, they must perform, that is, what we may call the act of knowing. 

Note that she is first and foremost focused on "intellectual habit," not on "put away your toys." She is focused on cultivating the habit of learning, rather than being taught. If you've had a chance to read anything about her method at all, then you know that this learning takes place by reading living books,  then narrating them. It is narration that is this "act of knowing." In "telling what they have read," they are enacting their own learning. This is the central "discipline" on which all education turns. 

I remember reading, in a math book of all things, a little introductory essay about the importance of doing problems correctly. This essay noted the process of growth of dendrons, I believe they're called, in the brain: when you learn something, your brain literally grows pathways for learning that thing. Of course, if you're doing math, and you persistently get problems wrong, then you can grow dendrons that encode those wrong processes into your brain, which means that you will continue to get that kind of problem wrong, until you make the effort of rewiring those pathways. (The book was Lial's Basic College Mathematics, in case you were wondering). 

Here is Charlotte Mason on essentially the same thing, though with a larger perspective than just getting math problems right: 

The reward is two-fold: no intellectual habit is so valuable as that of attention; it is a mere habit but it is also the hall-mark of an educated person. Use is second nature, we are told; it is not too much to say that 'habit is ten natures,' and we can all imagine how our work would be eased if our subordinates listened to instructions with the full attention which implies recollection––Attention is not the only habit that follows due self-education. The habits of fitting and ready expression, of obedience, of good-will, and of an impersonal outlook are spontaneous bye-products of education in this sort. So, too, are the habits of right thinking and right judging; while physical habits of neatness and order attend upon the self-respect which follows an education which respects the personality of children.

Physiologists tell us that thoughts which have become habitual make somehow a mark upon the brain substance, but we are bold in calling it a mark for there is no discernible effect to be quoted. Whether or no the mind be served by the brain in this matter, we are empirically certain that a chief function of education is the establishment of such ways of thinking in children as shall issue in good and useful living, clear thinking, aesthetic enjoyment, and, above all, in the religious life.

Again, when we think of habits, we tend to think first of putting toys away, making your bed, and so on. And she doesn't not mean those things. Earlier volumes devote themselves extensively to habit training. But her primary concern is with training the mind to the "habit of attention," to be able to read a difficult passage in such a way that the child can retell it in great detail, leaving nothing out. As with math, the more perseveringly the child performs this action – and performs it well – the more the brain creates pathways for that intellectual action. 

But more than that, Charlotte Mason points out, the inculcation of "habits of decency and order" contributes to the sense of harmony in the home, and prevents a lot of what we now call "decision fatigue." 

It follows that lines of habit must be laid down towards given ends and after careful survey, or the joltings and delays of life become insupportable. More, habit is inevitable. If we fail to ease life by laying down habits of right thinking and right acting, habits of wrong thinking and wrong acting fix themselves of their own accord. We avoid decision and indecision brings its own delays, "and days are lost lamenting o'er lost days." Almost every child is brought up by his parents in certain habits of decency and order without which he would be a social outcast. Think from another point of view how the labour of life would be increased if every act of the bath, toilet, table, every lifting of the fork and use of spoon were a matter of consideration and required an effort of decision! No; habit is like fire, a bad master but an indispensable servant; and probably one reason for the nervous scrupulosity, hesitation, indecision of our day, is that life was not duly eased for us in the first place by those whose business it was to lay down lines of habit upon which our behaviour might run easily.

So really, "atmosphere" and "discipline" complement each other in significant ways. You can't slack at discipline – which means more like regular mealtimes and steady routines, where everyone knows what's supposed to happen next, than it does anything else – and have a calm and ordered atmosphere. And if your atmosphere is chaotic, likewise you won't have much discipline. 

***

What about education as "life?" 

Here Charlotte Mason quotes Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 

"From the first or initiative idea, as from a seed, successive ideas germinate."

If "Education is a Life" means "exposure to living ideas," then this is why those living ideas are important. "Thought begets thought," Charlotte Mason says elsewhere in Volume 6: education means exposure to the thoughts of good and interesting minds, so that you are able to have more thoughts. The thoughts that come to you, the student, through the medium of the living books you read – the way the writer's mind speaks to yours – anyway, those thoughts enter your mind and become part of your thoughts, and help you "germinate" more. 

This is the whole point of education: to help a "born person" grow as a thinker and a knower. It is to feed the life of the mind, and thus feed that "born person's" whole life, all his actions and endeavors, the decisions he makes, the atmosphere he creates around him. 

Charlotte Mason says, further: 

Education is a life. That life is sustained on ideas. Ideas are of spiritual origin, and God has made us so that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another, whether by word of mouth, written page, Scripture word, musical symphony; but we must sustain a child's inner life with ideas as we sustain his body with food.

"If music be the food of love," says Orsino at the start of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, "play on!" If ideas be the food of life, speak on, read on, play on, learn on, think on, know on.