Ep 02 | Children Are Not Born Good or Bad (Principle #2)
This is the principle that first sent me running from Miss Mason and eventually brought me back. Rather than have you make the same loop, I’ll save you the time and let you in on the secret now: she’s talking about a child’s character, not the state of a child’s soul. All children have the capacity for good or evil, and education should draw a child towards goodness with the best of ideas. But, I also like to use my personal favorite tool: winking.
Video Resource | Let’s get practical.
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Principle #2: Children are not born either good or bad, but with possibilities for good and for evil.
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Are your theological alarm bells ringing? It’s okay if you say yes; they did for me the first time I read Miss Mason’s principles. In fact, they rang so loudly, that I promptly closed my computer tab and thought, “Well, Charlotte Mason is not for me.”
This was four years ago.
Oh, how far we’ve come.
When Miss Mason says that children are not born either good or bad, she’s not making a theological argument about their moral righteousness. If you’re curious, Miss Mason was Anglican and in good standing with the Church of England. But if you read through her work, you’ll quickly pick up on the tension she consistently held through her educational philosophy: that man is both fallen and in need of a Savior and a bearer of the Divine Image. She affirms both; it’s a yes and a yes.
So if she’s not talking about a child’s salvation, what is she getting at? A child’s character.
You see, there was this belief in her time that character was a bit like genetics. If your dad had blue eyes, you had blue eyes. If your dad was a thief, you were likely to be something akin to a thief, or at least inherit the character of someone prone to thievery. Just like you can’t change the color of your eyes, they thought, you couldn’t change your character. So why would you educate such a wayward, unteachable child? Well, for them, you wouldn’t.
Let’s back up a bit to Miss Mason’s first principle: children are born persons. Meaning every person is born with the Divine Image, with a soul. And so her second principle comes into play:
Because of this divine image, all persons deserve respect, all persons are capable of reverent learning because of common grace, and so all persons should be educated in a way that honors these truths.
Every child is born with capacities and appetites—and these are not moral or immoral—but they can be directed into moral or immoral uses and expressions. Miss Mason’s point is that the aim of education is to instruct and direct these capacities and satisfy these appetites with the very best of ideas.
I may have dismissed Miss Mason the first time I read her second principle, but it was this same principle that drew me back to her. Her humility and conviction that classical education was to be commonplace—in every home and school—was the missing piece in the broader classical conversation which has been and is prone to a sort of elitism. But all children, no matter their temperament, inclinations, behavioral dispositions, economic status, race, ability, or what have you were made to be formed by the truth, goodness, and beauty of God.
Children are not born either good or bad, but with possibilities for good and for evil.
So what do we do with this principle?
It’s our duty, as mothers and educators, to know what passions and parts make up each of our children. We need to know their temptations, their weak spots, their delights, and their strengths. This is foundational for helping them lay the tracks of good habits, grow the muscles of virtue, and foster their natural gifts. Who knows a child more deeply than a mom? Who else hears the single creak of a floorboard and the click of a lock and knows, without a doubt, what all three seemingly silent children are into at that exact moment? Me. I do. I always know.
Children have potential—for good or evil. It’s important we moms have imaginations to see where a child’s natural disposition or repeated behaviors can lead. It can be dangerous or it can be delightful living.
And–this one is hard, I know—we must remember that no matter how difficult, disappointing, or overwhelming the apparent failings of a child may be—their anger, their selfishness, their fearfulness, their laziness—it’s not their unchangeable character. It may feel like it never changes, but we can’t grow weary in doing good.
I have been in that moment where it seems like nothing will ever change or this child is just like this, and things can feel a little bleak. But, there’s a line from Miss Mason that encourages and delights me, like I get the giggles over it. She says, “In every situation, there is the opposite tendency waiting, and we must bring the wit to give it play.”
What she means is that in every situation in which you find yourself face-to-face with one of your children in high stinker mode, the opposite behavior is waiting within the child. It’s our job to have the wit to bring that tendency to play, to bring it out.
Which leads me to the wink.
A couple of weeks ago, my friend who just had her second baby, asked our group thread about handling the behavior changes of her oldest. What had we experienced with our kids after bringing home new babies? What worked? What didn’t?
I mentioned that I often encourage my kids with a fun, outlandish sort of statement and a wink. It’s my discovery that can diffuse a situation, call a child back into fellowship, and move us right back into the wild merriment that usually marks my day.
It’s the wink and the declaration that I will have to cut off the wounded leg that soothes an upset child after a fall. It’s the wink and the face of shock and panic as I announce to the other children that this child has grown a dragon’s tail to match their dragony heart and selfish hands and quick! We must all smother him with love until the boy returns!
The boy always returns to the arms of his winking mother.
The wink also, unsurprisingly, keeps me rightly ordered in tiring moments. By winking, I remind myself of the opposite tendency just dying to come out of my kids and myself if I’m willing to do the work to look for it and bring it to life.
I think learning to call out that hidden, better tendency is one of the best tools from principle 2.
Being a mom requires a bit of imagination. You have to be able to look at a rascalberry child who stares blankly at you while you read poetry or who wiggles a single toe in defiance of the order to sit still and still see the good that may come. This is not without great effort, mind you. In fact, Miss Mason specifically encouraged educators to keep a bird’s eye view of what is common to all children in mind when teaching day after day. I think it suffices to say there is no sin uncommon to man or lady child.
I bumped into a friend outside of the church sanctuary a few weeks ago–because babies can be loud and all—and in a few short minutes of swapping stories, we were both feeling a lot better about two of our sons. If you’ve hung out with young boys lately, you’ll know they’re marvelous and possibly all headed towards lives of criminal activities.
But in our conversation, I was reminded of one of my Mason tricks that can help a mom to keep this bird’s eye view: it’s called the Mother’s Diary. There are many ways to keep one of these but the heartbeat is to observe one’s children and keep simple notes on the gradual progress and unfolding of their minds. It’s one way to practice Mason’s idea of a mother’s thinking love. You can keep notes on the physical, emotional, and spiritual growth and difficulties; it’s up to you. But it helps you to see the progression being made (which is often lost in the weeds of the day), to see where a child has made great strides (even though you’ve already forgotten they’ve done it), and to make intentional plans about how to best partner with your children in particular struggles (rather than feel snowballed by them regularly).
Because it is vital, as the mom and the home educator, that we keep addressing ourselves to our children’s minds and appetites, trusting that both are there in working order and will respond in time.
In principles one and two, Miss Mason makes it clear that we should not underestimate the mind of a child. To see children as silly, incapable, bad, short adults is to treat them as such, and then, when they’ve grown, they seem to be silly, incapable, bad, short adults in need of flashy entertainment to keep their attention and dumbed-down ideas fed to them by algorithms through scrolling screens.
Okay, that was a bit of a broad brush. I know not everyone in our generation is like that. But as it is the general characteristic of our time, I think it’s fitting to think about as we think about how we treat our children today.
It’s a common notion now, just as it was in the early 1900s, that it’s our inalienable right to think as we please. Up until very recently, most people believed that our bodies are ruled by physical laws, and our affections, love, and justice are ruled by moral laws. But, our minds are free agents.
This, Miss Mason wrote into her second principle, is the neglect of the intellect. Because yes, even our minds have a tendency towards good and evil. So, one of our duties in our home education is to teach our children that there are right and wrong thoughts, that it’s possible for us to take captive our thoughts and to change them according to what is true, good, and beautiful; and, consequently, to change our attitudes. We don’t have the right to accept everything that pops into our minds as truth—Miss Mason actually says it’s a matter of justice and truth in how we think about others, form opinions, and then engage the world. Our thoughts are not actually our own; and, in regards to education, to think fairly requires knowledge as well as consideration.
(Side note: of course, this has to start with us, right? If I don’t control my thoughts and attitudes…well, you can see the concern.)
Okay, but how do we do this? Miss Mason breaks this down into a few categories: the well-being of the mind, the intellectual appetite, the misdirected affections, and the well-being of the soul.
I’ll try to keep this short.
When it comes to the mind: charm and enlighten the imagination. This is, of course, why every CM curriculum option you find talks of living books and laying the feast. We know that to drone on and on until a child quote knows it end quote is a sure-fire way to deaden the imagination. We avoid long lessons that create space for a child to learn the habit of inattention. We don’t overwhelm the child with excessive work or dismal exams. We offer a wide range of subjects, introduce ideas with which a child can wrestle and work out (yes, even the youngest of children), and we show, in every part of our home education, that we believe a lively and engaging intellect is present in every child.
For the intellectual appetite, it’s respecting the child’s personhood and avoiding manipulation. Do you remember last season when I repeated the phrase “for it is right” for like four episodes? The reason for doing something? Because it is right. Seems so simple, so direct. Well, Miss Mason is back at it with a new one: The delightfulness of knowledge is sufficient to carry a student through their education. Simply the gift of learning is all you need to motivate a child. Last episode, we discussed that a child’s curiosity has to be protected in education because it’s that desire that motives true learning. All kids have desires for certain things: to be approved of, to be first, to lead and manage others, and so on. But if we play on those, if we pique them to get what we want in the moment, we very quickly derail a child and set them on a path that effectively chokes out the curiosity we actually want in our children.
Now, this may go down as one of my more unpopular views on the internet, but we have to educate the feelings of a child. Yes, feelings. But this is difficult because children take in bits and pieces of what’s around them to figure out what is love and justice, what’s right. No one really knows what a kid might take in, so this is why we give an education and home life rich with poetry, history, romance, geography, travel, biography, and science.
What I find interesting about the person part of children (and all of us, really) is that we can’t kill or paralyze the capacities given to us by God. What often happens is that they’re choked out, and this wreaks havoc and destruction where it should have cultivated soil for the fruit of good living.
Which, soil leads me straight to the well-being of the soul. What can education do for the soil? How is the soul of a child to be satisfied? We all have an insatiable desire for the infinite. We must have a God, and as Miss Mason wrote, a serviceable religion will not do because we have in us an infinite capacity for love, loyalty, and service which we cannot expend upon any other.
The knowledge of God is the greatest thing in education, and we have a treasury of divine words and ideas waiting to be read and known and told by our children in the Bible and we have a world alive with creation that draws us into the life and love of God. An education that fails to show a child this, to meet the needs of the soul, is not actually an education, not really. Children are waiting for and in need of direction, but even more, they need the formative influence of knowledge about God and his world.
Introduce them. Believe they were made for it. The second principle is one of great hope: our children are not set in stone, but full persons with minds, souls, and bodies made to be delighted by, called to, and formed towards the goodness of God. And while education seems overwhelming or a bit complicated, offering a child a life filled with the very best of ideas is actually easier than you’d think. We don’t need controlled child-sized classrooms, flashy animated materials, or even the unicorn perfect curriculum. Education is about becoming more human, about loving the right things in the right way. And we do this through a simple pursuit of that which is true, good, and beautiful.
Isn’t this fun?
I’ll see you guys in two weeks.
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