Ep 05 | Atmosphere, Discipline, and Life: A Primer (Principle #5)
Now, maybe you feel differently, but it can feel like everything you’ve ever known to ‘teach’ in motherhood is off the table after Mason’s fourth principle. It’s a bit jarring to feel stuck in a moment asking yourself, ‘Wait, is that going to manipulate them? Will this? What. Can. I. Do?’ But Mason encourages us to focus on what is possible once we cross the hurdle of the fourth principle. She says:
‘Having cut out the direct use of fear or love, suggestion or influence, undue play upon any one natural desire, emulation, for example, we are no longer free to use all means in the education of children. There are but three left for our use and to each of these we must give careful study or we shall not realize how great a scope is left to us.’
Well, here we go, my friend. We are finally at the threshold of the mother-teacher’s tools.
Consider today’s episode your very own primer on the atmosphere, discipline, and life of a Charlotte Mason education. We’re going to take a high-level look at all three as interdependent tools, and then in the next three episodes, we’ll focus on each one separately.
Are you ready?
Video Resource | Let’s get practical.
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
Principle #5: 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."
__________
Pop quiz: what is the point of education?
I’m kidding. Just making sure everyone’s been listening, because we’ve covered a lot in the first four episodes of this season. We’ve learned what a child is, what they can grow to become, how our authority partners with their docility, and how to motivate a child with what’s right.
Do you know what comes next? How to teach a child.
Oooh, I’m so excited. Okay, let’s start from the ground up.
Since children are born persons, they’re born with an innate sense of a moral code—there’s a should or an ought in how they respond to God and others. But, having that innate sense doesn’t mean they know what’s right or wrong.
I remember it dawning on me a few years ago that when I said things like, “Be kind,” my children didn’t necessarily know which actions were kind and which weren’t. There was some much-needed instruction for the category of kindness. And the same sort of instruction is needed as we enter home education. When we teach, we should think of it like feeding our children’s minds in order to teach their consciences.
Now maybe you feel differently, but it can feel like everything you’ve ever known to ‘teach’ in motherhood or education is off the table after principle 4. It’s a bit jarring to feel stuck in a moment asking yourself, “Wait, is that going to manipulate them? Will this? What. Can. I. Do.” But Mason encourages us to focus on what is possible once we cross the hurdle of the fourth principle. She says,
Having cut out the direct use of fear or love, suggestion or influence, undue play upon any one natural desire, emulation, for example, we are no longer free to use all means in the education of children. There are but three left for our use and to each of these we must give careful study or we shall not realize how great a scope is left to us.
Well, here we go, my friend. We are finally at the threshold of the mother-teacher’s tools to rightly motivate a child to get them to learn.
Consider today’s episode your very own primer on the atmosphere, discipline, and life of a Charlotte Mason education. We’re going to take a high-level look at all three as interdependent instruments, and then in the next three mini episodes, we’ll focus on each one separately.
Are you ready?
I now hand to you the three tools of the mother teacher: the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the presentation of living ideas.
Or, to pull the Charlotte Mason tagline: an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.
First up, atmosphere.
The atmosphere of the home can generally be described as the feel or tone of your home. Nobody can force an atmosphere; it’s something created by the cares, beliefs, and efforts that unconsciously work themselves out of the minds, hearts, and hands of those who live there. It’s the ordinary happenings of home life, what kids experience in a holistic way: what they see, hear, learn, embody. It’s our duty to allow our kids to grow up with exposure to life as it is—the wonderful things like delicious meals and sounds of laughter and the difficult things like sibling squabbles and the consequences of carelessness. It’s important that they learn how to relate to their surroundings—whether those be a brother, an authority, a liturgy, a problem, or an uncapped marker sitting right next to a lovely white wall.
Mason encouraged this natural atmosphere to combat the opposite idea, which is a carefully constructed environment just for kids. The atmosphere of your home should be harmonious with what you teach and expect in your home education. By removing, reordering, and rearranging a child’s environment to suit them in their immature child ways, we inhibit an important part of their learning.
We intuitively know that what surrounds a child is important but it also has to be genuine. The habits, ideas, and actions around them profoundly shape their loves, their thoughts, and their behaviors. So much is learned at home and so much is practiced at home. As full persons, children have real work and real virtue to offer their atmospheres. They’re building the family culture just as they’re learning from it. They can make the home beautiful through chores and creativity, or they can make it inhospitable for everyone.
It also has to be genuine because so much of what’s learned is the unconscious overflow from what we moms actually love, think, and do, not what we say we love, think, and do. Just think about everything a child picks up on that you don’t set out to teach in a given day:
How tone can build up or tear down
If interruptions are cause for irritation or cheerfulness
If you measure the goodness of a day by your productivity
How you attend to your toy—I mean, phone—instead of people
How you attend to your book instead of people
If your space is kept in order or if it’s not
If you sigh or lolligag when asked to do something
If you love the work given to you or treat it as a to-do list
If you can expect obedience without being obedient
I seriously doubt any mom sits her children down and explains as a formal lesson that a good day is one where all the things she thinks to do are completed with little interruption from them, but, it’s something communicated through the atmosphere of many homes.
You see, kids are well-tuned hypocrisy meters, and this point brings me daily to repentance. I can talk here of truth, goodness, and beauty and I can repeatedly say lovely, noble family rules of the same nature, but my kids see the ways I fail to pursue these ideals. And yours do too. The anxious undertones, complaining spirits, wasted time, all of those things are felt, seen, and learned in our atmosphere.
I don’t share this to be a major downer; this is just part of life. There will be good days and there will be bad days. Our sins are part of the package, but here is where Mason comes in with the soothing balm of the gospel: she reminds moms to trust God. He wills and works in ways we don’t understand, drawing straight with our crooked lines, turning our strivings into works of grace. Our duty is to model what it looks like to be a whole person: to strive towards the better things, to repent when we fail, and to do it all again with joy.
The goal is not a perfect atmosphere. (Should I say, just to make it really clear, that’s not even a possibility?) But the atmosphere of our homes is a teaching tool, and we can use it to bless, edify, and shape our children with truth, goodness, and beauty.
Our second tool is discipline, or habit training.
Last season, I did a mini-series on habit training, so if this is a completely new idea to your or you’d love a quick brush-up, go find those episodes.
Remember, we educate for moral formation. This pedagogy is not built on fact accumulation but on instilling virtue in our children. In the last episode, we discussed the motivation of the will in doing right because it’s right. But, that’s also kind of hard—especially for young kids just getting started on choosing what’s right. The will actually gets tired when it has to make constant decisions. And that’s where God’s design for habit formation comes into play.
Mason repeats throughout her work that habits rule in 99 of every 100 actions, and when something is a habit, it doesn’t require much effort. Formed habits make doing what’s right easier, or more ‘natural’ if you will. The evidence of virtue is that doing the right thing requires almost no effort, that it’s a delight to do it because it’s so normal.
Habit training is about setting the norm for our children so that they have to think to choose what’s bad, not what’s good. It should be normal to tell the truth, not to ask yourself if you should choose to tell the truth. That’s the gift we’re trying to give our children.
For the early years, it’s important to start with concrete habits before aiming for abstract habits. For example, instead of only saying, “You need to obey,” which for a youngster doesn’t really mean anything as it’s a bit abstract, you can say, “When mama says, ‘Come,’ you give me your eyes and run to me as fast as you can! That’s how we obey.’”
Teaching the concrete side of virtue lays the foundation for the future character of your child. And yes, this takes a lot of work, especially if your child has learned or formed bad habits that need to be replaced with new, good ones. Either way, you have to be willing to be in it with your child as they learn, which doesn’t mean being on top of them constantly nagging. It means you’re willing to cheerfully partner with them to help them form the muscle memory, if you will, to do what’s right.
There are three steps to training a habit the Mason way:
First, you need an inspiring idea. Telling your child to practice cheerfulness is a good thing, but giving them a living idea of gratitude or complaining is far more meaningful. The picture of Mary, Mary Quite Contrary from The Secret Garden will impress the mind of your child with the nastiness of complaining and the beauty of gratitude in a way that gives the habit purpose and meaning. It’s not an arbitrary thing when there’s an inspiring idea taking root in your child’s mind. There’s reason to do it.
Second, you should only focus on one habit at a time. Any mom knows how difficult it can be to teach a new habit–like I said, it takes some major effort from both you and your kid. Whenever you’re unlearning a bad habit, it’s not enough to just stop the habit. It needs to be replaced with a good one. So, if your child has the habit of sighing dramatically and announcing, “I don’t like this!” as soon as you set dinner before them, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to just make that stop. You need to give a replacement of, “Thank you mom for my dinner!” to fill that previous habit track.
Third, you have to be consistent. You can’t let up until you know the habit has been fully formed. I remember reading a tip from Karen Glass once that said if you’re training a habit in a child under six, they probably don’t need to know that you’re working on something, but if you’re working with an older child, they need to be tapped into the habit training. They need to know the what and the why.
In habit training, we’re attempting to make the path to virtue a little smoother for our kids. We’re trying to work with God’s design in the formation of persons so that until they’re grown and mature and able to command themselves, their norm in our homes is towards goodness. What a gift to a child to be taught what is right but also to be taught how to embody it every day in your home.
All right, so our last tool is education is a life, or the generous, living curriculum.
We, as the resident lady philosophers of our homeschools, already know that children are born persons, meaning just as they have a need for physical nourishment, they also have a need for mental nourishment. They’re hungry. In every possible way.
While you can feed the mind many things, it will grow and function best when fed the very best of ideas. That’s what it’s made for. Mason believed the mind takes in ideas best when shared in stories or narratives, so living books are the foundation of her educational method and for good reason. Consider the difference between telling your child, “Don’t be bad,” and reminding them of Peter Rabbit. Nobody likes a rule, but everyone loves a story—a generous, living curriculum understands that.
Since we’ve discussed, at length, the metaphor of eating, feasting, and digesting in other episodes this season, I think it’ll be more helpful today to think of ideas like little seeds.
When your child takes in an idea about courage, faithfulness, prudence, or justice, it’s like a tiny seed that gets buried in their minds. It, as a seed does, will take root and begin to grow. It will, eventually, bear fruit if the child learns to act in accordance with the idea.
This is the tool that Mason uses to connect the child’s mind, will, and reason. We’ll get to will and reason in more detail in later principles, but here we see that our education must teach us what’s right, so when an idea is accepted by our will, our reason will justify it and we’ll be motivated to meaningful action.
One thing I love is that while home education keeps the long game in mind, we have the joy of seeing fruit from the very beginning. Children are capable of growing virtue even in the earliest years. They may share their most beloved toy with a sibling or offer their earned dollar to the church or let another child go down the slide before them or feed the dog day after day. When you see these actions you can know living ideas are forming your child.
Of course, we don’t know when a child needs an idea or how it should be presented or what will bloom when. But if a child is given many opportunities to form natural relations with the best of ideas, if that’s the regular rhythm of the house and the marked measure of their education, then we can watch for their attention, curiosity, captivation, and inspiration and pray the seeds take deep roots.
So that’s it for our primer. Those are your three tools, my fellow mother-teacher. An atmosphere, a discipline, a life. These are the ways that honor a child as an image bearer, that motivate a child towards what’s right, and that support a child as they learn. And they all flow from something so natural: a mother’s thinking love. You are, in some respects, the greatest curriculum in your child’s life. The home you build, the things you love, the ways you live, and the ideas you share are the most natural and formative instruments of home education. As you wrap your head and hands around these tools, consider—in everything—what it shows you about your loves, because love is the foundation of it all.
I don’t want to speak for you, but, I don’t want to be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal in our homeschool. I want to love truth, goodness, and beauty, and I want that love to spill out into the atmosphere, the discipline, and the life I offer my children. I want them to feel it, hear it, see it, and catch it.
In case you were wondering: that pop quiz at the top of the episode about the point of education? Love. That’s my answer, from every angle: for me, for them, for why and how, for every day from now until the end. Love.
I’ll see you guys in four weeks.
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