Ep 01 | Children Are Born Persons (Principle #1)
‘Children are born persons,’ seems kind of obvious. What else would they be born as? But as we dive deeper into this principle, it’s easy to see how quickly we forget this little truth and how, consequently, our education misses its mark. Before we ever choose a curriculum or resource, we need to understand what a child is and how they learn. This is the first principle.
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Principle #1: Children are born persons.
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I don’t know about you, but when I read Miss Mason’s first principle, I thought: well, obviously.
But the more I’ve thought about it, the less sure I am that this was or is obvious. Miss Mason clearly felt it needed to be said in the late 19th century. As it often goes, in Victorian England there were two ditches in regards to thinking about children.
The first, recognizable to us in 2022, was the glorification of a child. Parents have always been tempted to see their child as God’s greatest gift to mankind, to behold him or her as the greatest splendor and glory on this side of eternity.
On the flip, children were to be seen, not heard. They were lumps of clay, just waiting for a little pull here and a push there, to be formed in whatever image the parent or educator had in mind.
She wrote this principle soon after World War 1 when life had been utterly upended. The high-ideal, formation-focused Miss Mason was devastated by the behavior exhibited in the war. She argued that, on some level, the German education focus on efficiency, productivity, and utilitarian progress resulted in moral decline, and, contributed to the atrocities of World War 1. Don’t forget; it used to be a commonplace idea that education was about moral formation.
Children were not respected as people. By centering life around an infant or by ignoring a child’s God-given faculties at home and school, Victorians missed that children were born with the faculties of mind and spirit that move them in the same springs of conduct as adults.
So, for Miss Mason writing on how to educate a child, it was necessary to defend a child as a person, because how you view a child is foundational in your educational pedagogy. We teach differently depending on what we believe about children. Before we can ever choose a method, a curriculum, or even a resource, we have to establish what children are and how they learn.
So, what exactly does it mean to be born as a person in Miss Mason’s mind?
Well, in the most simple terms, it means a child is born complete. They’re just like you and me.
Let’s start with the body. When a baby is born, if all is well, children have all of their physical parts. Parents are dutifully aware of this part of a child’s personhood. They count toes, marvel at cheeks, stare into eyes, and hold the swaddled baby close. They also intuitively know that this baby’s body, while complete and able to perform the functions for which it was intended (you know, eat, sleep, poop), is immature. Babies need help to grow. So, parents practice tummy time with their infants. They encourage them to roll, crawl, walk, and run. They feed them the right food at the right time, giving those tiny bodies what they need to grow and develop. And through the years, muscles, reflexes, abilities blossom due to good care. And no parent ever wonders when exactly a child became a real physical person. We know they’re just born as persons.
Well, the mind is as complete and beautiful as the body right at birth. Just like a child is born with everything they need to eat, and do it immediately, a child’s mind is equipped at birth to learn. At first, a baby can only see so far in front of its face; basically the distance to his mother’s face. But slowly, and without a parent’s help at all, the room comes into view. He spends long stretches of time staring at shadows and his own hand. His curiosity only continues to grow as he’s able to move. He repeatedly drops things from his chair, waiting to see first if it will, once again, fall to the floor, and second, to see if you’ll pick it up again. Babbles become words, and he communicates! A child is born endlessly curious, showing his reasoning and his imagination. Have you met a young child who asks why about everything? Who delights in telling you the one thousand types of bugs he’s learned about? Who asks you to read that story once more? And once more?
No parent ever thinks, “Ah, yes, do you remember when they really became a person? Finally had a working mind?” No, never. The mind begins as an immature mind but it continues to grow. All on its own.
And much like a body, a mind is supposed to be fed a healthy diet.
Now, here is a good spot to introduce Miss Mason’s use of mind and brain. She uses them with intention, and I’ll try to do the same throughout the season.
When Miss Mason refers to the brain, she means the organ. The neurons, the neurotransmitters, the stimuli. But when she refers to the mind, she means the immaterial part of a child: their reason, imagination, reflection, and judgment. The part of them that gives them their personality; the thing that makes them them. You could also describe the mind as the spirit, the soul, or the intellect.
If it helps, her illustration is that a piano is not music, but an instrument of music.
I really like that one.
Now, perhaps you’re thinking that we in 2022 are so wise as to know that children are born persons. Especially all of us homeschool moms.
Perhaps. But I think it’s worth exploring and saying it again. Like maybe just a little louder for the people in the back.
Here are some ways we moderns deny that children are born persons:
We offer children watered-down, pre-digested ideas. Rather than allowing children to engage with ideas and consequences, we place bolded call-out boxes at the end of textbook chapters that present the facts in bulleted form. A child neither thinks about the ideas nor forms his own thoughts. He just needs the chosen facts.
We routinely develop kids’ tastes towards junk. This is obviously different than age-appropriate considerations. I mean that we train children towards kids’ menus of the same three food options; read books with ugly illustrations, empty storylines, and untrue ideas; play annoying music that grates on the ears; and overuse screen time which is passive in form and often, in today’s market, tells a tale of self-obsession and forms an imagination of self.
We manipulate children’s wills through rewards, threats, fear, competition, guilt, grades, and affection.
We prioritize convenience over curiosity and growth, rushing children along, skipping out on the read alouds, doing their work for them, zoning out on our phones, and allowing bad habits to grow roots.
We allow the technology-obsessed culture and language to shape how we think of our children as learners. We think of them as data processors whose neurons fire in response to stimuli. If we program them with the right information, we’ll get a competent adult in the end.
Now, if you heard one of those and felt like that happens in your house, just know that I grabbed all of these examples from instances in my own life. The good news is now we know, and now we can reorient our framework about who our children are and how they were made to learn. In fact, Miss Mason offers some good encouragement, and kind of a kick in the pants, when she wrote, “The consequence of truth is great, therefore the judgment of it must not be negligent.”
Children are born persons. This is actually a pretty big statement, isn’t it?
So, now that I’ve certainly convinced you that children are marvels, how exactly do we go about teaching them? Or what is it that feeds the mind?
Miss Mason starts by encouraging moms that children have minds, so play, movement, and environment are desirable. We should be paying attention to these things. But the most important thing we offer our children, from tots to graduating students, is ideas.
You see, education is a bit like faith, it’s evidence of things unseen. When we offer ideas to our children, we’re touching the immaterial part of them. As she wrote, what’s born of spirit is spirit.
So, an idea must come first for any learning. It demands to confirm and to illustrate. Which is kind of an odd phrase, but what she means is, when your child encounters an idea, first, they receive it. It may seem like nothing is happening; it may seem like they disagree immediately and move on. It may seem like it’s truly struck them. But the idea has been received. Then, at some point, it’ll begin to stir interest and feed their natural curiosity. (Which is, of course, the hard part for us moms. The idea is presented. Our motherly guidance and wished-for-answers are not yet presented.) Once the idea sparks something in the mind, the child can’t escape it. Everything begins to stoke this idea: something else he’s read, a conversation with a friend, an observation on a long drive. The idea takes root and forms a thought that shapes the child. She also refers to this as the ‘inspiring idea’ and she connects it to every part of a child’s life. Want a child to work on a habit? First, give them an inspiring idea. Want them to work in the home? Inspiring idea. Want them to grow in virtue? Inspiring idea.
So, naturally, if ideas are the food for the mind, we want to give our children the very best ideas. That’s our job. Not to do the heavy thinking for them, or insist they end at our opinion, or even to make knowledge flashy and fun, but to provide the very best ideas and leave the child to deal with it as he chooses.
One large shift in this framework is that learning becomes the responsibility of the student, not the mother. Yes, we offer the ideas, we lay the feast, but we don’t do the chewing. Miss Mason said, “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 the right sort and children will learn them with delight.”
Children are motivated to learn; it’s part of how they’re made but it’s also something they can lose. I know children and adults who don’t find anything interesting about the outside world, who claim boredom while never leaving indoors or opening a book. Their natural curiosity has been dulled. One of the best reminders for us, as we begin practicing our philosophy, is to guard a child’s curiosity.
There were these Scottish philosophers who wrote about the doctrine of desires. One of those was a Desire of Knowledge, or curiosity. This is foundational for education but, they wrote, it could easily atrophy if other desires were more regularly used: things like place, emulation, prizes, power, praise, vanity, or ambition. Think about our modern schools, workplaces, and even, sometimes, our homes. All of these are present, prioritized, and modeled.
We’ll never escape things like competition or praise—and they can, on occasion, I think, be good—but the question you must ask yourself is this: if my child is a person, formed by what they repeatedly do and pursue as a flourishing life, then do I want them formed in the image of competition, vanity, power, or status?
I’ll take a guess and say that’s not the image any of us want our children to reflect. Miss Mason’s first principle is a reminder to teach children in a way designed by God for their formation, to teach the minds he’s crafted in his image to learn and grow according to what he says they should think about.
Curiosity is like a muscle. And it directly relates to something else Miss Mason loves to talk about: the will. Do you remember last year when I said that a stubborn child is not a strong-willed child, but rather a weak-willed one because he cannot make himself do the things he ought to do?
Yeah, that seemed to open a door for a number of people.
Well, when it comes to learning, a similar truth can be found: you can’t force a child to learn; he has to do it himself. True knowledge is not measured by fill-in-the-blank exams or multiple-choice testing. That’s regurgitation, possible rote memorization. Many children can do quite well with that without ever applying themselves to the work of learning, without ever being curious about God’s world.
Help your child stay curious. Miss Mason cautions against explaining things with too many words or offering them too many distractions by giving them lesser quality ideas. I think her example is not to give them any art that isn’t from the great artists, which makes me wonder what she would think of our constant, quick production of images online, in books, or on tv. But her encouragement feels obvious deep inside: if I set my child’s aesthetic appetite to the ugly, flashy, cheap offerings, they’ll find the work of observing and contemplating great art boring. Don’t believe me? How much easier and seemingly more exciting is binge-watching a Netflix series for hours than, say, spending fifteen minutes staring at a great piece of art and narrating it to another? How many social media squares have you placed in your mind this week? How many words from the great writers? Is it easier to eat a bag of popcorn than a plate of broccoli?
Curiosity and a steady stream of the best ideas develop a child towards the good gifts of God. It’s the undercurrent to learning to love the right things—like beauty—in the right way. If God created children as full persons from birth, then he intended for them to be repeatedly introduced to goodness, truth, and beauty. This principle is about showing your children how to live a life of honoring what God calls good. I know, that sounds like a big statement, but hang with me.
When we teach our children the best ideas, we show them what is worth thinking about. There are a great many things about which one could think on any given day, and we all make decisions on what we allow in our minds. And if you don’t intentionally decide, something will fill it regardless. But what we choose to think about is what we decide is most worthwhile. We decide that not only is it worth repeating, but it’s worth becoming a part of us. We become what we honor with our time and thoughts.
Who could’ve thought that what your child attends to, or what he pays attention to/what ideas he thinks on, could be shaping him even in the earliest years before formal instruction ever begins?
This is what it means to see your child as a born person. To understand that he or she needs an education built on a feast of ideas worth thinking about, worth loving, and worth imitating.
If you’re thinking, “But Autumn, you can’t just leave a child to wrestle with ideas. We can’t be certain what will come out of that. That’s not school.”
Yes, I hear you. It feels odd, I know, when you’re so used to the modern way of education. When it seems like control, rote memory, and right answers are crucial to learning. It’s a little unnerving, but this is not a system. You cannot put in A and get your desired C. That isn’t treating a child as a born person, that’s not respecting that his mind was born with what it needs to learn. Miss Mason offered a method of education, meaning you have an end goal in mind and you continually work in that direction. If you aim to have a child who pursues wisdom and virtue, you repeatedly offer ideas that uphold those principles. Your conversations will circle around those ideas, hopefully, you’ll live them out in front of your children. You’ll give them stories of people and places who exhibit such things, and you’ll make sure the framework of their home life has been one of goodness, truth, and beauty. You’ll trust God that in his design for the forming of imagination and the shaping of one’s affections, a child can be formed to his goodness and grace. That his image bearers can be trusted with lovely, noble ideas because it’s exactly what he intended them to think about. To give them a life of learning God’s goodness when they sit at home, walk by the way, when they go to sleep, and when they wake up is to give them what God desires for them as persons, as image bearers.
We educate with whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, and praiseworthy.
Or, you know, whatever is good, true, and beautiful.
I’ll see you guys in two weeks.
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Hey there. This season, on the off week of the podcast, I’ll be sharing a video with a practical angle to each principle. For principle #1, I’ll be discussing Miss Mason’s idea of the lever in education, how one pulls a child up towards the better things and ways. If you’d like to catch this season’s complementary videos, you can subscribe to The Commonplace on Youtube.
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