Education as Moral Formation
Education is a contentious topic.
There are many people deeply invested in whether home education or some sort of collective school setting is more helpful. Beyond that (and within those divisions) there are debates about what form education should take.
Is education intended to be a process of imparting particular knowledge into students’ minds? Is the primary purpose of education to prepare students for gainful vocations? How should we choose a curriculum?
All of these questions and more are the subject of consideration, research, and debate among parents and sometimes the educators themselves.
My family adopted a form of the "Charlotte Mason” approach to education when we began our homeschooling journey a dozen years ago.
In her book, For the Children’s Sake: Foundations of Education for Home and School, Susan Schaeffer Macaulay provides an overview and commendation of the Charlotte Mason approach. As her middle name indicates, Macaulay is the daughter of Francis and Edith Schaeffer. She experienced some of the eclectic approach of her parents toward the world at L’Abri. This, no doubt, influenced her affection for Charlotte Mason’s approach to education.
The book was originally published in 1984 and was out of print when we were deciding on a basic educational approach. Crossway brought the book back into print in 2022. It would have been helpful for us as we made our decision and as we tried to explain to others the basic method we intended to use in educating our children.
Who in the World is Charlotte Mason?
Charlotte Mason was a British educator who lived from the middle of the 19th century into the first quarter of the 20th century. She, therefore, witnessed the rise of modern, pragmatic educational techniques. Many of the modern techniques drove shifts from more traditional, classical models of education toward a model of education designed for the practical goals of offering a broad education that was practically geared to create citizens who could be good workers.
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The goals of what some critics call a “factory model” of schooling were to make education more broadly available to all children and to help them advance in an increasingly industrial society. In many cases, as Dewey and others have written, these goals included explicit attempts to limit the effects of parents and family on the outcome of children’s education. In the minds of progressive thinkers this was a path to improvement and enlightenment.
In contrast, Charlotte Mason’s approach focused on the formation of character and encouraged a more personal view of education. Her philosophy generated mottos that both summarized and informed the movement: “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life” and “Education is the science of relations.”
Mason was an advocate for exploration of nature, reading “living books” (not text books) together, and seeking the interrelationship between concepts across academic disciplines. Perhaps most striking among the themes she espoused is the belief in the distinct personhood of children rather than beings that are being formed into personhood through education. As a result, education should begin with a humane rather than a mechanical approach.
Macauley’s Presentation
In For the Children’s Sake, Macauley presents the Charlotte Mason approach largely as we have experienced it in our household. There is a strong emphasis on home education, though she also provides examples and evidence from some schools (particularly in the United Kingdom context) who have followed Charlotte Mason’s basic methods in a classroom setting.
After a brief overview of Mason’s life and writings, Macauley sets about outlining the principles of the Charlotte Mason approach.
This begins with avoiding patronizing content and emphasizing stories that encourage wonder and delight. “Living books” with real stories—not moralistic ones, but stories that raise questions and cause children to wrestle with reality—are in order. Once the story is told, asking children to narrate back what they understood is an important aspect of hearing how the stories have influenced them. The narration process is also part of increasing the understanding by children. The goal of much of this reading is to help the student learn to read and understand for himself.
Education includes much more than mere conveyance of information as Macauley describes it. It includes the discipline by the teacher or parent, which focuses less on unreasoning authority than on relationship building. Since education is “a discipline” and “a life” the process doesn’t begin when the books are closed. This is a reason why the Charlotte Mason approach is appreciated by many homeschoolers.
As Macauley presents it, one of the main goals of Charlotte Mason’s approach is to get children to see that all knowledge is of a piece. It’s all interrelated, so that science and literature cannot be divorced from each other. We approach them in distinct ways, sometimes, but all truth is God’s truth. Therefore, we should expect to see them all together. Grasping these interconnections is part of understanding that “the heavens declare the glory of the Lord.” (Ps 19:1)
A Useful Resource
More than a decade into our home education experience, Macauley’s book fairly represents what we have been trying to do. I commend For the Children’s Sake to parents trying to figure out how to make a choice about educational methodologies. The Charlotte Mason approach is worth consideration, at least.
Macauley is realistic about the approach. She repeatedly notes areas in which she didn’t always get it right, because any educational process entails imperfect humans helping imperfect humans to learn. But she also provides illustrations of ways that her chosen approach can be self-correcting.
The strength of the Charlotte Mason approach, based on my experience, is that it tends to push the parents and students back to the main point of education: the formation of character. It reduces the impetus to try to create baby geniuses and reminds parents that flourishing is more significantly spiritual than academic.
For those exploring models of education, For the Children’s Sake is a helpful, readable volume. Even if a family decides to adopt a different basic model of education, there are aspects of the Charlotte Mason approach as Macauley describes it that can be helpful.
The way we talk about humans also has moral implications, which are more significant than how we treat our pets. In his 2011 book, Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, David Livingstone Smith explores how language changes culture and leads to the justification of extreme violence against others, especially when they become perceived as less than human.