Unconsidered Aspects of Moral Training: School Education by Charlotte Mason (updated)

'We too are under authority and there are limitations to parental authority.' 

School Education by Charlotte Mason

The limitations to the parental authority we exercise over our children in the area of moral training become more evident as our children mature. When our children are little we have broad overarching responsibilities which tend to obscure these limitations. As our children mature our parental authority is not so black and white anymore, and if I treat my 14 year old the same way I'd treat a 6 year old in how I wield my authority, he is not going to develop any moral muscle.

One of the biggest strains of parenting is adjusting our authority as our children mature and knowing how, when and where to extend or limit the boundaries we have in place.

Morals don't come by nature:

'An educated conscience is a far rare possession than we imagine.'

A sobering thought!

'An educated conscience comes only by teaching with authority and adorning by example.'

Our authority needs to be paired with example. I can't hide behind my authority for very long. They'll spot hypocrisy or double standards a mile away.

I haven't tried to come up with 'lessons' for transmitting moral training or even done much in the way of pre-planning times for this, but something I've purposely tried to do is to live in a devotional context. Every day I have opportunities for devotional living and moral training. Reading quality literature and discussing the various characters and their actions is a way to develop an educated concience. So is taking the common little incidents of daily life and using them as tools for both our children and ourselves. Often these incidents seem like interruptions but I've realised that part of my own moral training has been to see these things as God might see them and ask, "Lord, what can I learn from this?" and "What can I teach my children in this situation?"

God's Word, poetry, biography and the use of mottoes are some suggestions Charlotte Mason gives to help us in the moral training of our children.

Mottoes

I grew up with one or both of my Grannies in the home for many years and both of them used many little sayings or proverbs that were in common use in their day. I now rarely hear anyone quote mottoes or proverbs in everyday speech. 

It's a similar situation with Folksongs - they've almost died out in general society; mottoes even more so, and if we are to keep them alive we need to make a conscious effort to use them.

A stitch in time saves nine.

Good, better, best, never let it rest, until your good is better and your better best.

Do the next right thing.
Leave it better than you found it.

Even a child is known by his actions by whether his conduct is pure and right.

A soft answer turns away anger.

Is it true, is it kind, did I really have to say it?

Let another praise you and not your own mouth, someone else and not your own lips.

Treat others the way you'd like to be treated.

Honour one another above yourselves.

Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

Civility costs nothing.
Practice makes perfect. 

Tomorrow, tomorrow, not today - that's what lazy people say!
Make hay while the sun shines.
Laughter is the best medicine.
The grass is always greener on the other side.
Good things come in small packages.

Measure twice, cut once.
Slow and steady wins the race.
Pretty is as pretty does.

The biographies of famous Greeks and Romans by Plutarch and the reading of poetry have opened doors for moral instruction in our home. I might read a poem aloud and something will resonate with me so I'll share it with our children. Sometimes I'll give some background information on the poet or the poem and why it was written and we'll talk about that. Or we'll be having our Plutarch reading and we'll get into a discussion over one of the questions in the study notes.

When I use my own experience and am honest about my weaknesses and flaws it has helped my children deal with their own. I tend to have a quick temper and have had to learn some hard lessons about keeping myself in check. I have two children who have a similar disposition, although one of them has had a harder time dealing with it than the other. He knows I've had a similar struggle and I've had some good opportunities to educate his conscience in his teachable moments ie. not when he's in a passion!

I took some words to heart as a young Christian from something Edith Schaeffer wrote which was along the lines of, "In your anger, don't say something hurtful that you would never say if you were under control," and have impressed that on him.

Bible

Besides using the Proverbs, memorising scripture is an obvious way to train moral character.

'I have hidden Your Word in my heart that I might not sin against You.' Psalm 119

The accounts of men and women in the Bible, the good, the bad, the faithful and the unfaithful are there for our benefit but,

'In the matter of the ideas that inspire the virtuous life, we miss much by our way of taking things for granted.'

We know the story of Noah inside out and because of this familiarity we sometimes miss things but the other week we heard a sermon on love - 'Love Covers.' The speaker talked about Noah preaching for 120 years, building an ark before it had ever rained on the earth and the ridicule he received while he did it. After all his efforts only eight people were saved. After the deluge, Noah planted a vineyard and then he got drunk. He wasn't a wicked man. Perhaps he was discouraged. It was a moment of weakness. Later one of his sons came along, saw him drunk and naked, and called his two brothers to witness their father's condition. His brothers came but the two of them took a garment and placing it over their shoulders, walked in backwards so they didn't see their father's nakedness and covered him up. Their love covered their father's weakness. How easy it is to broadcast another's weakness as the younger son had done. This message was so powerfully conveyed that we won't be forgetting it, but we'd passed over it when we'd read it in Genesis the week before.

A mistake I made in the early days of mothering was placing too much emphasis on the outward appearance of virtue. Issues of the heart often go unchecked when we do this. I read this in Whatever Happened to Worship by A.W. Tozer:

'Benjamin Franklin...a deist and not a Christian...kept a daily graph on a series of little square charts which represented such virtues as honesty, faithfulness, charity and probably a dozen others. He worked these into a kind of calendar and when he had violated one of the virtues he would write it down. When he had gone for a day or a month without having broken any of his self-imposed commandments, he considered that he was doing pretty well as a human being.

A sense of ethics? Yes.

Any sense of the divine? No.'

In all of my thoughts and intentions regarding moral training, I want to inspire the children God has entrusted me with to godliness, and not just give them ethics.

"Lord, help me to see the things I need to see today in my children and give me the wisdom to reach their hearts in those areas."

Integrity, Inclination, and Doing the Next Right Thing

If you subscribe to my blog via email, you will have noticed there's a little postscript at the end of each post:

Do the next right thing...

I adopted this little quote when I read it in a book by Elisabeth Eliot at the beginning of my mothering journey, and it has served me well, because I have an unruly filly called Inclination who lives with me.  She likes to have her own way, and if I'm not careful, she will run after all sorts of things and lead me astray.

It is well to make up our mind that there is always a next thing to be done, whether in work or play; and that the next thing, be it ever so trifling, is the right thing; not so much for its own sake, perhaps, as because, each time we insist upon ourselves doing the next thing, we gain power in the management of that unruly filly, Inclination.

I have an email I need to send but I see a Facebook post and quick as a flash, Inclination rushes on and before I know it, forty minutes have flown past and the email is still waiting to be sent.
Or I'll be reading a book and stay up late to finish it, forgetting I have an early start the next day and I won't have time in the morning to organise anything. The filly gets loose and it takes all my power to get her back under control.

'Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow!' that unruly filly whinnies.

The dilatory, procrastinating person rejoices over a counsel he can follow! But not so fast, friend; this easy-going rule of life means "putting first things first." Now, the power of ordering, organising, one's work which this implies distinguishes between a person of intelligence and the unintelligent person who lets himself be swamped by details.

Intelligent - from the Latin, intelligens. To be endowed with the faculty of understanding or reason.

The power to distinguish what must be done at once, from what may be done, comes pretty much by habit. At first it requires attention and thought. But mind and body get into the way of doing most things; and the person, whose mind has the habit of singling out the important things and doing them first, saves much annoyance to himself and others, and has gained in Integrity.
What is worth beginning is worth finishing, and what is worth doing is worth doing well...Of course there are fifty reasons for doing the new thing; but here is another case where we must curb that filly, Inclination...

...let us do each bit of work as perfectly as we know how, remembering that each thing we turn out is a bit of ourselves, and we must leave it whole and complete; for this is Integrity.

Integrity takes in the whole moral character, particularly the mind, and we are continually making or marring this character. The word Integrity comes from the Latin word integer (integritas) or whole number; meaning that a person of integrity is a whole person, unimpaired and of a sound, understanding mind.

Doing the next right thing, remembering that each thing I turn out is a bit of myself and I must leave it whole and complete; these little acts of diligence, attention, and perseverance build a foundation for Integrity to rest upon.


The quotes above are taken from Ourselves by Charlotte Mason, Chapter XVII - Integrity: Justice in Action.

Update:

Thank you to 'Tasmanian' who sent me a link to this song - 'Show me the next thing, I'll do the next thing...step by step I'm running to meet you, in the next thing...'

Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival

Welcome to the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival for February 2014

Some Unconsidered Aspects of Intellectual Training

To read Charlotte Mason's ideas about this topic see here. The previous CM carnival, On Mindfulness, was dedicated to this topic also. The 'Some Unconsidered Aspects' sections of Volume 3 (School Education) contains some wonderful gems and surprises - ideas and facets I know I hadn't previously associated with Physical, Intellectual, Moral and Religious training.
I've appreciated working through CM's books and seeing how other minds grapple with the ideas presented within them. Certainly two (or more) heads are better than one.

Pythagoras by Raphael 1509-1510

Amy, our CM blog carnival hostess, writes about Intellectual Habits, the Fallibility of Reasoning and Being Transparent.
When I first started reading the Charlotte Mason series I started with A Philosophy of Education and was startled by her thoughts on the fallibility of Reason. It made me think back (and cringe) to times when I'd  justified my actions by putting a good face on them. I had thoroughly convinced myself I was right:

'For ourselves and our children it is enough to know that reason will put a good face on any matter we propose; and, that we can prove ourselves to be in the right is no justification for there is absolutely no theory we may receive, no action we may contemplate, which our reason will not affirm.' (Volume 6)

Amy suggests that fallible reasoning may be overcome and offers some wise suggestions to resist this tendency:

By testing with truth.
By thought turning.
By taking in big gulps of grace.

Aut-2B-Home  shares The Tale of the Sleeping Fish A Parable of Mental Habits to illustrate the mental habits of Attention, Concentration and Intellectual Volition and then gives us the moral of the story. Lovely!

Attention - Children are born with natural curiosity unless something hinders it. Sometimes, physical or brain issues get in the way. Sometimes, the education system encourages them to pay attention to earn cheap rewards (grades, test scores, awards, candy). When offered nourishing food (ideas found in living books and real things) and allowed to explore them with an active mind, they eventually learn to pay attention. Some take longer than others to join the feast.  

Nebby explores Charlotte Mason's observations on the study of mathematics in her post More on Intellectual Training and draws our attention to the fact that Charlotte Mason refuted the idea that studying Mathematics alone will make a person more logical in the rest of life.

“ Remove the mathematician from his own field and he is not more exact or more on the spot than other men; indeed he is rather given to make a big hole for the cat and a little hole for the kitten! The humanities do not always make a man humane, that is, liberal, tolerant, gentle, and candid, as regards the opinions and status of other men.”

Speaking of mathematicians she has known Nebby observes:

Clearly, these people’s personal lives do not always reflect logical well-thought out decisions. They as much as any other people act on emotions and desires without due consideration of the logical consequences of their actions. 

Celeste at Joyous Lessons shares her thoughts on The Living Page, focusing on Copybooks. Celeste shares some of her gleanings from the second chapter of Laurie Bestvater's book, The Living Page.

"As an idea is spiritual, it needs a place to intersect with the student's own spirit, in this case, in the slowly emerging text of the meditative copy work ... taking time to write by hand slows us down and allows the truth to seep in" (30).

And that's the stickler. :)  She definitely sees the writing process itself as essential to the Keeping of a Commonplace, which comes as no surprise since she hinted as much in the first chapter.  I'll be thinking more about this as we move through the rest of the book, and as a model to my children, I plan to start a physical Commonplace soon.  I'm wondering whether that experience will convince me of writing's meditative effects. Right now, writing doesn't feel all that meditative to me, perhaps because I often have little hands grabbing at the page. ;)  But I'll be the first to admit that I could use a little "slowing down"!

 
Mama Squirrel also writes about Notebooks and Copybooks at Dewey's Treehouse.
I appreciated the honesty behind these words. A couple of my boys really struggled putting pen to paper and when they did it wasn't beautiful. My temptation was to take over and want them to come up to the standard of their precise and embellishment prone sisters.

Can we just put it that I felt like we were doing our best at the time, though we never did achieve such beautiful written work as some other homeschoolers I knew did? And that I sincerely did attempt to keep the writing practice personalized and meaningful, even if often it was my choice of text rather than the children's?

 

But here, I think, is Charlotte's point: other than demonstrating particular points of spelling or grammar, most of those benefits can be had even if the student chooses his or her own texts to transcribe. And possibly there are some side benefits that we haven't fully realized.

In her post the Ragged Schools of Scotland, Megan links Charlotte Mason's beliefs and educational thoughts with the work of Thomas Guthrie and Andrew Walker who ministered to the poor of Scotland.

Gentle whispers throughout the pages of each of Miss Mason's volumes woo us toward magnanimous thinking, toward proffering ideas to children instead of speed drills, toward seeing the infinite value of a human being instead of his utility to the state.

Miss Mason believed every living soul deserved to access the great minds of the past -- the great art, music, literature, inventions, poetry, and all the glorious ideas that came before them.  But just prior to the time she began saying such things, Thomas Guthrie and Andrew Walker were heading into Edinburgh's slums to offer the Gospel to those who thought themselves beyond reach, who others didn't even bother with -- the nameless, faceless poor.

Tammy's aim in her blog, Rarified   '...is to explore captain ideas and share them with kindred spirits.'
Her post One Does Not Simply Sit in Maths Class is one of many that does this and helps to encourage a love of Mathematics.
 

Math should make sense if one starts with the most basic understandable thought and then adds to it in a beautiful chain of reason.

 

Nancy at Sage Parnassus writes about 'sun dogs' and sheds light on this phenomena by quoting from A Prairie Dog's Winter and Shakespeare's Henry VI. Visit her blog to see the sun dog photo and learn what it is. I hadn't heard of it before but then we don't have blizzards in Australia. It's very interesting to have a glimpse of what all you folk in the Northern Hemisphere experience at this time of year.

The sun had two little snippets of rainbow some distance away from it, just above the horizon.  His father referred to this in Ukrainian: "the sun has ears," he said.  But the other children in school with William knew they were called sundogs.

I thought for my contribution that I'd link to a couple of CM bloggers that didn't actually send in posts but I think have helpful ideas and resources to offer:

A Generous Education shares some lovely art cards which are just ideal for picture study.

A Sabbath Mood has some great ideas for living science. Scroll down to see a number of posts on this topic.

The schedule for the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival is at the Fisher Academy International and any CM related posts may be submitted there. The topic for the next carnival is Some Unconsidered Aspects of Moral Training but any CM related posts are welcome.