There's decorating, and there's decorating . . .
Here is what Charlotte Mason has to say about education as an atmosphere:
As with the five previous principles of a Charlotte Mason education, this latest one unfolds out of the one before it. And as always, I am struck by the interrelatedness of these ideas. These aren't twenty discrete, autonomous ideas, but twenty ideas which all give birth to each other, which is the hallmark of Charlotte Mason's thought. Hers is very much an associative mind, so I suppose it's no surprise that in the big picture of her philosophy, the idea of the mind's connection-making is so central. To one degree or other, all our minds do this; it's certainly an intellectual strength that an education should be oriented to encourage.
Anyway, if Principle 5 sets out the three "instruments" by which education is implemented, then it stands to reason that the next items in the series should unpack what each of those "instruments" entails. I actually talked a good bit about "atmosphere" in my Principle 5 post, but I'd like to look again at the way Charlotte Mason defines the idea of "atmosphere" here.
Let's begin, in fact, at the end.
"It stultifies a child to bring his world down to the child's level."
What does and doesn't she mean by this?
Does she mean don't provide a little table and chairs for your preschooler? Does she mean don't hang pictures low so that your child can see them? Does she mean your house is really for grownups, and children need to learn not to touch things? Does she mean that children merit no accommodations in the world they inhabit, and that they just need to learn to suck it up?
Well . . . yes and no. Or no and yes. It's well worth your time to read the entire passage in Volume 6 devoted to this principle. Now, first of all, it ought to be clear to all of us that whatever she means here, it doesn't entail violating the First Principle, that "children are born persons." They too are members of their own households and citizens of their world. Not "bringing the world down to [their] level" can't possibly, in any construal, mean treating the child like a non-person, seen but not heard, and maybe not seen, either. As I said above, each of these Principles grows out of the preceding ones, and if Principle 6 is an outgrowth of Principle 1, then what it means must have its roots in that principle.
One thing Principle 6 does suggest, in accord with Principle 1, is that children are human beings, not demigods. They're not what Charlotte Mason rather derisively refers to as 'high-souled' little persons whose entire environment is meant to enthrone them. She says:
"A plant carefully protected under glass from outside shocks looks sleek and flourishing but its higher nervous function is then found to be atrophied. But when a succession of "blows"(electric shocks) "is rained on this effete and bloated specimen, the shocks themselves create nervous channels and arouse anew the deteriorated nature. Is it not the shocks of adversity and not cotton wool protection that evolve true manhood?"
She's writing, mind you, in the aftermath of World War I, hence the particular criticism of the Germans, whose "utilitarian" educational system she's already blamed, essentially, for the moral character of that country which made it Britain's enemy in the war. This might or might not be unfair, but there it is.
But let's try to look at her larger point. What stands out to me in this passage, for example, is that instance of Tommy's parents who invest their life savings in a statue for Tommy to look at, for the improvement of his soul. What might we see in this?
Well, we might say, isn't it true that Tommy can improve his soul by the contemplation of beauty?
Yes, actually, it's quite true that Tommy can improve his soul by the contemplation of beauty. We do do art study, and composer study, and we marvel at nature, and we say that contemplation of all these things in their goodness bring us to a contemplation of God's goodness, which manifests itself sacramentally in the goodness of creation.
So why are we criticizing Tommy's parents?
It seems to me that what we're criticizing are these things:
that in spending more money than they have on this object for Tommy, Tommy's parents have turned him into an idol,
and
that they don't actually value the statue in itself, as a work of art (we'll just assume it is good art), but as something like medicine for Tommy.
Also, what seems to be implied in this little scenario is that they don't value their home as their home, or themselves as human beings, with tastes and inclinations of their own. They're just King Tommy's minions, emptying themselves out to construct a domain fit for King Tommy.
In case anybody thinks that this kind of self-emptying is the duty of parents, check out that plant under glass, later in the same passage. If you want to know what King Tommy is going to look like, some years hence, the words "effete and bloated" are key here. So is the phrase "deteriorated character."
And why? Well, weirdly, because parental worship of King Tommy both elevates him to some super-human echelon AND relegates him to a denigrated position where he's continually in need of moral remediation. Note that he needs to "make his soul" by looking at that statue. Don't they think he has a soul? Apparently they don't.
So just as much as they're his minions, they've also made themselves his creators – and all of this is wrong. All of this dehumanizes Tommy. If his character deteriorates, it's because his whole environment is oriented around the belief that he didn't have an intrinsic character to begin with. What they're worshipping, all of this seems to say, is a block of wood. So why would anybody be surprised if the prophecy fulfills itself, and what Tommy grows up to be is, in fact, a breathing block of wood?
So for heaven's sake, what Charlotte Mason is saying here ISN'T don't have art in your home. What she is saying is, again, children are born persons. They aren't idols. They aren't blocks of wood. You don't have to worry about "making" their souls by means of some carefully constructed child habitat. They have souls already, because that is God's job, not yours or mine. The creation of a soul is clearly not what education is for. The soul is there, and needs feeding. That's what education is for.
Meanwhile, in what other ways does she elaborate on this principle. Let's read on:
Again, there's a lot we could say here. Perhaps one starting point might be to ask, again, how all of this grows out of Principle 1. What do all the items enumerated here, as part of the child's "natural atmosphere," have to do with the truth of the child as a "born person?"
For one thing, we've established, haven't we, that a "born person" has a soul already – it doesn't have to be made, or instilled, or taught to him. It pre-exists all our possible efforts in that direction.
And in previous discussions we've established that the intellect is indistinguishable from the soul, which means that it, too, is already there. All the things we can say about the soul are things we can say about the intellect, too. We can say, for instance, that the capacity for learning already exists in the child, which means that we don't have to make his atmosphere educational for him. It just is, and he learns what he needs to learn for the nurturing of his character by living in it as it is.
*He learns things, for example, through his interactions with siblings.
As the educator Francis Wardle has pointed out, even sibling fights are oriented toward the working-out of relationships, and it's generally better for adults not to intervene or moderate. (In fact, in his book Oh Boy!, Wardle has a lot of things to say about learning atmospheres which I think are entirely relevant to this discussion of Principle 6). Certainly having to give way to the baby, though it's easy for parents to feel that they're being unjust to their older children, is, as Mason says, a good lesson in self-denial.
Does this mean, then, that people are right when they say that children ought to put up with being bullied, because that's "just part of life," and they're better off learning what the world is "really like?" Again I'd refer to Principle 1 here. Does a "born person" ever need to put up with dehumanizing treatment? Do we as parents have the right to subject our children – who can't get themselves out of bad situations without help – to dehumanizing treatment, in the name of "toughening them up?" I hope it's obvious that I think the answer is no, and no, and no again. Resoundingly no. I don't think this is what Charlotte Mason is talking about at all. Whatever she says here cannot negate her first Principle, and I don't think it does. She's describing, after all, an atmosphere "sweetened by love," and "ventilated . . . by common sense."
Yes, you should intervene in bullying, whether it comes from an outsider or a sibling. Sweetening and ventilating your atmosphere does entail having rules and parameters about how people treat each other, and you're certainly within your rights and responsibilities to step in and say something about name calling or physically hurting someone. What you don't need to do is sort out the disagreement or stop the argument. Assume that they can do that themselves without your help. If the bickering bothers you, send them outside to do it, or turn on some music and make yourself too busy to listen.
*He learns things through interactions with other adults, and through exposure to what Charlotte Mason, as an Englishwoman of her time, would call different classes of people.
In this climate of exposed waves of sexual abuse, I know that we worry about other adults in ways that someone of Charlotte Mason's day would not be conditioned to do. And "ventilated . . . by common sense" is an important idea to keep in mind, always. That's another way of saying, "Apply your prudential judgment."
But encouraging our children to talk to people is a good thing, by and large. If they're home all day, they should know the mailman's name, for example (ours is Craig). They should know who the neighbors are. If you patronize the same grocery store all the time, and encounter the same person at the checkout, they should be encouraged to say hello and ask how that person is doing. Of course it's not always feasible to have children sit and talk to workmen when they're working in and around your home, but depending on what the workmen are doing, often they don't mind being observed from a safe distance and engaged in conversation.
I think there's also a sort of mandate here, implicit in the idea of class, to engage with people outside our immediate circles, whatever defines those circles: race or ethnic identity, socio-economic status, religion, schooling choices, and so on. If you're a homeschooler, and your children's social circle doesn't include any children who go to school . . . that's maybe a little insular. If you're a Catholic, and your child doesn't know anybody who isn't Catholic . . . that's maybe a little limited. If your circles don't include anybody who speaks a different language or belongs to a different ethnic group, ditto. While there are obvious moral implications to all this, I'm really thinking primarily of that principle of education as an atmosphere, and of what is going to feed the child's intellect and soul. Just as a wide and varied feast of books nourishes mind and soul, so does a wide and varied feast of other people, and of personal interactions, because that too is what the child, with his "genius for intimacy" is made for.
I think there's also a sort of mandate here, implicit in the idea of class, to engage with people outside our immediate circles, whatever defines those circles: race or ethnic identity, socio-economic status, religion, schooling choices, and so on. If you're a homeschooler, and your children's social circle doesn't include any children who go to school . . . that's maybe a little insular. If you're a Catholic, and your child doesn't know anybody who isn't Catholic . . . that's maybe a little limited. If your circles don't include anybody who speaks a different language or belongs to a different ethnic group, ditto. While there are obvious moral implications to all this, I'm really thinking primarily of that principle of education as an atmosphere, and of what is going to feed the child's intellect and soul. Just as a wide and varied feast of books nourishes mind and soul, so does a wide and varied feast of other people, and of personal interactions, because that too is what the child, with his "genius for intimacy" is made for.
I have to smile at "lest admiring friends make fools of them," though I'm not completely sure what she means here. One possible reading is that, in the terms of her own world, the lower classes might tend to be too deferential to a child of the middle or upper classes, giving the child the fool-making idea that he is better than they are.
Mason warns, too, against sheltering or overprotecting children from realities of life, which impulse she classes with sugar-coated or condescending schoolroom lessons.
School, perhaps, offers fewer opportunities for vitiating the atmosphere than does home life. But teaching may be so watered down and sweetened, teachers may be so suave and condescending, as to bring about a condition of intellectual feebleness and moral softness which it is not easy for a child to overcome. The bracing atmosphere of truth and sincerity should be perceived in every School; and here again the common pursuit of knowledge by teacher and class comes to our aid and creates a Current of fresh air perceptible even to the chance visitor, who sees the glow of intellectual life and moral health on the faces of teachers and children alike.
Again, I don't at all think that she's advocating for the brutalizing of children, to "toughen them up," any more than I think she's advocating for bullying. I have walked out of movies with children who found the images too intense (All Dogs Go to Heaven, there's a hard spot in my heart for you . . . ). I have closed books that children found upsetting. I have conducted intense conversations privately with my husband, rather than going hammer-and-tongs at some disagreement in front of our children, in the name of openness and honesty. Again, ventilate your life with common sense, is what I think and try to do.
On the other hand, I haven't not listened to the radio news just because there were children in the car. As a result, I found myself once explaining what the phrase "abortion rights" meant, because a six-year-old, having heard it on the radio, had asked me about it, and a nine-year-old was listening in. Again, I was conscious of the need not to brutalize my children with details. I didn't, for years and years, take them to the March for Life, for example, because until they were teenagers and could better judge their own capacity for dealing with things, I didn't want them exposed to those bloody images of dead unborn children. Though there's certainly a grim and terrible truth to those images, I didn't think it was right or necessary to make children under twelve vulnerable to them.
(I have strong feelings, incidentally, about including young children in pro-life activism at all – praying at clinics, etc – because I think that, despite people's generally excellent intentions, the potential to weaponize, or "poster-ize," children for a cause, when they don't have the power to say no, is all too present, and if realized, inherently dehumanizing to them. This in no way detracts from the rightness of the cause. I see my conviction – subjective as it is – as entirely consistent with that cause.)
At the same time, in the face of my six-year-old's honest question, I was acutely conscious of the need to answer honestly, and to respect the human desire for even painful knowledge, with which this short human being was very naturally wired. If I wouldn't brush off an adult who asked me a difficult question with difficult answers, why on earth would I brush off a child? I might answer the child at a somewhat different level, but I wouldn't answer with less honesty.
Relatedly, I do like the way Mason spells out here that respecting our children's personhood and dealing with them honestly doesn't entail making them little adults. We are still parents. We do still draw the boundaries. It's our responsibility to – as she puts it – "relieve" our children of the "fatigue" of making decisions on a large scale. We decide when mealtimes happen. We decide that we're going to Mass and saying our prayers. We decide that the doctor's appointments are today, and that everybody's job is to open their mouths and say aah. We are the ones who settle the non-negotiables and make sure everybody knows that they're not up for discussion. To do this is a burden for us, and a relief for our children, and that's just the way the family operates. It's the foundational recipe for the whole atmosphere, with its sweetening love and ventilating common sense. It's not our children's job to solve our problems for us, though when they see us feeling sad, it may be their privilege and pleasure to comfort us.
In the main, the idea of "education as atmosphere" is an acknowledgment that the child, a human being created to know and learn, thrives best on the reality of a loving, open-hearted home in which honesty is the currency of conversation, and on a variety of social circles in which he can be trusted to navigate and engage with integrity and virtue. All of this is about functional healthy relationships, full stop. That's really what atmosphere means. There is a bit at the end of this section about emotionally charged atmospheres – how children can be sickened by adult anxieties about them, or expectations of them, which might never be stated but are in the air. Children do pick up on these things and internalize them, and then manifest what they internalize in various behaviors. As counselors like Yulia Rafailova point out, the solution is not to "fix" the child somehow, but to find and address whatever is going on in the family system as a whole to make things go wrong for that child.
This again is to say: atmosphere matters. It is an "instrument of education" in the sense that children learn profound unspoken lessons all the time from whatever goes on in their particular atmosphere. They learn those lessons because, as born persons, that's what they are, and that's what they're made to do.