Random picture of some of my orchids, which have bloomed at last.
Almost to the end of the 20 Principles! It's been a while since our discussion of Principle 18, on The Way of Reason. If anyone is still here and reading, thank you! You're a patient person. Meanwhile, if you're new here, you might like to peruse the whole series before diving into this post, as the Principles build one on another, and Principle 19, under discussion today, will make a lot more sense in the context of the previous eighteen. You can also find a quick summary of these Principles at Ambleside Online. These Principles, discussed at length in Charlotte Mason's Volume 6: Towards a Philosophy of Education, form the backbone of her entire approach to education. If you want to feel both empowered and freed to educate your children on this model, but in lively response to the realities of your own particular home life and personalities, then internalizing these large ideas will give you scope to do just that.
What does Principle 19 say?
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. (source)
The initial therefore signals that this Principle hinges on what has come before. It signals as well that everything that has come before tends toward this ultimate purpose: that it is the child's responsibility, as he matures, to discern between truth and falsehood. This is really what Charlotte Mason has meant, in earlier principles, by "moral and intellectual self-management." The emphasis here is self-management. That's your goal: for the burden to rest not on you but on on your child, as he reaches adulthood, to seek and live in the way of truth and moral integrity. The educator-parent's burden, as the child matures, is to offer, as she says, "principles of conduct" – accomplished largely via the principles of Education as Atmosphere and Education as Discipline, through which principles the child will be exposed and habituated to the virtues – and, not unimportantly, "a wide range of the knowledge fitted to them," by way of the actual school curriculum.
This "wide range of knowledge" introduces the child, as befits his stage of maturation, not only to good ideas, but also to bad ones, in the context of their consequences. Children don't learn solely via good examples. Bad examples are, frankly, at least as instructive as good ones, in reading as in real life, and children are typically pretty good at recognizing when a protagonist in a story (whether fictional or "true") has made a moral blunder. Engaging with those examples in narration is a good way of assimilating and making sense of them. By this I don't mean that it's the parent's job to assign a moral to those episodes, or to lecture on the theme of decisions-have-consequences. The child knows that there's a moral lesson to be learned, and recognizes what it is, simply by having it presented to him, especially in the overall context of home atmosphere where the difference between right and wrong is always clear.
One of the best things you can do for your child, in terms of moral development, is to give him credit for having at least that much sense, and always to talk to him from that vantage point. Giving somebody credit for having some modicum of moral sense – especially as you've spent that person's lifetime modeling virtue to the best of your ability and habituating people in your home (including yourself) to the practice of virtue – is particularly good practice for parenting teenagers and young adults. Increasingly, as children mature, the responsibility for not being a moral idiot (or just vulnerably naive) is . . . you guessed it . . . THEIRS. Not yours. It is not your job to prevent your maturing child from encountering bad ideas. You can't really prevent someone from ever encountering bad ideas. While you're obviously not going out of your way to throw your child in the way of bad company and loose morals, it's simply impossible to filter out every bad idea that might come your child's way, and you might as well not lose sleep trying.
For example: yes, you should do all you can to prevent your child's exposure to pornography – but you should also be actively teaching those principles regarding human dignity and sexuality that enable him (or her) to reject any degrading imagery that might come his (or her) way, recognizing it as degrading and unworthy. You should be actively reinforcing for your child the dignity and goodness and graced givenness of the body – which holds true even if a person doesn't conform to culturally-constructed gender stereotypes (that is, a girl who doesn't like to wear dresses and does like to split firewood isn't any less a girl for all that). If you want your child not to treat himself or others in destructive and degrading ways, then your job as a parent is to model and teach the good ideas that cast the bad ones into obvious and sharp relief. You want to give your child some positive context from which to say, "But why would I ever want to do that?"
UPDATE: Consider these ideas in light of the fact that your child is going out into the world as an adult – innocent as a dove but also, one hopes, as wise as a serpent when it comes to reading signals and behaviors and discerning whose intentions are good and whose are not. How to recognize danger signals – from a friend, from a date, from an academic figure, from a spiritual leader – this is a life skill, and absolutely crucial to "moral and intellectual self-management." Consider also that a healthy dose of personal self-respect, while not an inviolable suit of armor, goes a LONG way. Groomers, abusers: they look for who's vulnerable, who's starved for attention and affection, who lacks the skills to get what they need in healthy ways. Please do not let this be your child. Ensure that your child is not starved for attention and affection. Help your child to grow in healthy self-respect. Teach how to set boundaries. If you don't know how to do this, then for your own good, please find a way to learn.
As with relational dynamics: if there's anything in your own life that creates an obstacle, preventing you from being able to talk frankly with your child about sex and the body, then that is something to work on. If you as a parent have shame related to sex, for example, or to the reality of your own body, then for the sake of your own happiness, first of all, that's a reason to seek counseling. You're not going to be in a good place to help your child if you think of sex as essentially dirty or shameful (even in marriage), or your body as something to be ashamed of. You can't teach and model chastity from a negative place, because chastity turns on positive respect: respect for the integrity of your own body and the integrity of others' bodies, as God's good creations. The really chaste person isn't ever saying, "Oh, no, I shouldn't be doing this!" Chastity instead says, "I respect myself too much to do that, and I respect you, too." If any of this is difficult for you personally – maybe especially the self-respect part – please seek some help. You will be happier – and yes, you deserve to be happy, and there's no theological reason for you not to move in the direction of happiness. In learning to love, accept, and respect the Imago Dei in yourself, you will also be a more effective parent and educator for your children.
****ADDENDUM: I have recently been reading Sheila Wray Gregoire's The Great Sex Rescue (affiliate link), which I'd like to recommend here, particularly if you, the parent, are seeking ways to talk to your child about chastity – especially if you're seeking ways that don't fall into the shame-based language of the evangelical purity culture, which unfortunately seems to have leached into some elements of Catholic homeschooling and parish culture.
Gregoire is herself an evangelical, not a Catholic, but one thing that strikes me as I read this book (well, REALLY what strikes me is that she just ought to be Catholic, because in so many ways she's already there) . . . anyway, one possibly useful-to-you thing that strikes me about this book is that in dismantling harmful (and as she frames it, unbiblical) teaching about sex, the body, modesty and chastity, what she's doing is not just restoring a more biblical view of these things. She's restoring a view that's far more in line with what the Catholic Church has to say about the body and human dignity: re-learning to view the female body, for example, as something other than simply a near occasion of sin for men, helping men to view women as whole persons and develop habits that support that view, and so on.
I am wishing I'd had this book ten-plus years ago, when my first daughter was in high school, but I'm finding it very helpful even now. It's not a book I'd necessarily read with children, even teens – the target audience is married people or those preparing for marriage – but I think it's potentially an excellent book for parents to read, as they work to develop a language for talking about sex and the body with their children.****
Of course, the moral life is about a lot more than sex, but since that's where so many of us struggle, and where so much of our worry about our children is focused, I thought it was worth bringing up as a kind of paradigm for what Charlotte Mason might be talking about in this principle. One of the realities, too, of parenting children through adolescence and into adulthood is that our children, like ourselves, are sexual beings, and that this is part of their created human wholeness. Pretending that that aspect of their humanity doesn't exist won't make it go away. Nor should we want it to go away. Being sexual, as in having complex and integrated physical and emotional desires, isn't bad. It doesn't mean that our children aren't innocent. We don't make them more innocent by avoiding conversation about those things, or by pretending to ourselves that they're still little children. The reality of the body as it matures is not intrinsically corrupting or degrading – though what we choose to do with the body may be. I think that's an important distinction to hold in mind.
Of course, in raising children, there is always some risk involved, and a certainty that there will be errors on the side of "loose thinking and heedless action" of one kind or another. We are bringing up human beings, after all, and even our best educational efforts can't preserve them from original sin.
BUT our educational efforts are well placed if they are ordered toward discernment – what's a bad idea as well as what's a good one, and why it's a bad idea, which is not the same thing as and if you do that, you will be a bad person. Again, "loose thinking and heedless action" can refer to a lot of things that aren't sex. Charlotte Mason liked to have her oldest students read The Communist Manifesto, for the sake of thinking through why its ideas were bad ones, so as to recognize such ideas when encountering them in the wild. Many of those ideas are rooted in a view of the human person that is utilitarian and materialist, a view that drives so many bad ideas related to human functioning in society – including but certainly not limited to how human beings interact sexually with each other. Again, sex tends to be what parents worry about – how to talk about it with their children, but even more, what their children might do in some unsupervised moment – but it offers a useful figure for moral formation generally.
Ultimately, there is always some grace involved, plus a lot of work on the part of guardian angels. This is not to say that my children, like every other fallen person on the planet, including myself, have not, from time to time, exercised some "loose thinking and heedless action" in one way or another, but those incidents have generally, and mercifully, served as learning experiences rather than a whole way of life. Grace tends to work that way, too. It's not always a preventive. Sometimes it's a means of corrective reflection, and we do our children a favor by giving them (appropriate for their age and developmental stage) a longish leash that doesn't restrict them from ever making a mistake. The Christian life, after all, isn't about never messing up. It's about the recognition that we do mess up, and will mess up, and that God extends to us both His mercy and his sanctifying grace, so that through the gift of the sacraments we are strengthened in both our resolve and our ability to grow in the virtue that turns us from our sins.
Ultimately, there is always some grace involved, plus a lot of work on the part of guardian angels. This is not to say that my children, like every other fallen person on the planet, including myself, have not, from time to time, exercised some "loose thinking and heedless action" in one way or another, but those incidents have generally, and mercifully, served as learning experiences rather than a whole way of life. Grace tends to work that way, too. It's not always a preventive. Sometimes it's a means of corrective reflection, and we do our children a favor by giving them (appropriate for their age and developmental stage) a longish leash that doesn't restrict them from ever making a mistake. The Christian life, after all, isn't about never messing up. It's about the recognition that we do mess up, and will mess up, and that God extends to us both His mercy and his sanctifying grace, so that through the gift of the sacraments we are strengthened in both our resolve and our ability to grow in the virtue that turns us from our sins.
All of this provides a necessary frame for this fundamental idea: that the ultimate end of our children's education is their own moral agency in the world. It means that we should be able to let them go at the appropriate age – to college, to work, to whatever lies ahead in their adult lives – and not continue to feel that we have to protect them or make rules for them or prevent them from coming into contact with ideas that will corrupt them. Instead, it's their job not to let themselves be corrupted, and if we've done our own job well, then they will largely, if not perfectly, succeed in theirs.