Episode 202: Short Synopsis Points 5-8

Whether you homeschool, or wherever you teach with Charlotte Mason’s method, a working knowledge of her synopsis is essential. This second installment addresses the three instruments of education covered in points 5-8. Questions for your discussion group are included to help facilitate your conversation and application.

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“We can of course learn of them from Home Education and School Education, and certainly no one would venture to teach in the P.U.S. without first reading these books. To read once, however, is not enough; we must go back to them again and again…In the forefront of the modern editions of these books there is in smallish print a ‘Short Synopsis of P.N.E.U. Philosophy.’ It is a wonderful summary worth reading again and again to get one’s work-worn vision cleared.” (Wix, “A Few Roots”)

(5) Therefore, we are limited to three educational instruments––the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the presentation of living ideas.

(6) When we say that “education is an atmosphere,” we do not mean that a child should be isolated in what may be called a ‘child-environment’ especially adapted and prepared, but that we should take into account the educational value of his natural home atmosphere, both as regards persons and things, and should let him live freely among his proper conditions. It stultifies a child to bring down his world to the child’s level.

(7) By “education is a discipline,” we mean the discipline of habits, formed definitely and thoughtfully, whether habits of mind or body. Physiologists tell us of the adaptation of brain structures to habitual lines of thought, i.e., to our habits.

(8) In saying that “education is a life,” the need of intellectual and moral as well as of physical sustenance is implied. The mind feeds on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum.

“Over thirty years ago I published a volume about the home education of children and people wrote asking how those counsels of perfection could be carried out with the aid of the private governess, as she then existed; it occurred to me that a series of curricula might be devised embodying sound principles and securing that children should be in a position of less dependence on their teacher than they then were; in other words, that their education should be largely self-education.” (6/29)

“These three we believe to be the only instruments of which we may make lawful use in bringing up children.” (3/217)

“An easier way may be found by trading on their sensibilities, emotions, desires, passions; but of this the result must be disastrous.” (Story of Charlotte Mason, p. 102)

“The theory has been, put a child in the right environment and so subtle is its influence, so permanent its effects that he is to all intents and purposes educated thereby.” (6/94)

“That he should take direction and inspiration from all the casual life about him, should make our poor words and ways the starting point from which, and in the direction of which, he develops–this is a thought which makes the best of us hold our breath. There is no way of escape for parents; they must needs be as ‘inspirers’ to their children, because about them hangs, as its atmosphere about a planet, the thought-environment of the child, from which he derives those enduring ideas which express themselves as a life-long ‘appetency’ towards things sordid or things lovely, things earthly or divine.” (2/37)

“There are but three left for our use and to each of these we must give careful study or we shall not realise how great a scope is left to us.” (6/94)

“Wherefore, it is as much the parent’s duty to educate his child into moral strength and purpose and intellectual activity as it is to feed him and clothe him; and that in spite of his nature, if it must be so. (1/103)

“Divine Grace works on the Lines of Human Effort.” (1/104)

“‘ Sow an act, reap a habit ; sow a habit, reap a character ; sow a character, reap a destiny.'” (2/29)

“‘Begin it, and the thing will be completed!’ is infallibly true of every mental and moral habitude: completed, not on the lines you foresee and intend, but on the lines appropriate and necessary to that particular habitude.” (1/107)

“I was charged the other day with putting habit, the means of life-long discipline allowed to us, in the place of the grace of God. On the contrary, the PNEU recognises the laws of habit as laws of God, and the forming of good and the hindering of evil habits as among the primary duties of a parent. But it is just as well to be reminded that habits, whether helpful or hindering, only come into play occasionally while a great deal of spontaneous living is always going on towards which we can do no more than drop in vital ideas as opportunity occurs.” (PR 13, p. 484)

“The mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body; there are no organs for the assimilation of the one more than of the other.” (6/218)

“A curriculum which shall furnish children, not with dry bones of fact, but with fact clothed upon with the living flesh, breathed into by the vital spirit of quickening ideas. [She continued] A teacher objected the other day that it was difficult to teach from Freeman’s Old English History, because there were so many stories; not perceiving that the stories were the living history, while all the rest was dead.” (3/124)

“Again, we have made a rather strange discovery, that the mind refuses to know anything except what reaches it in more or less literary form.” (6/256)

“As a child grows we shall perceive that only those ideas which have fed his life, are taken into his being; all the rest is cast away or is, like sawdust in the system, an impediment and an injury.” (6/108-109)

“An Adequate Definition––Observe how it covers the question from the three conceivable points of view. Subjectively, in the child, education is a life; objectively, as affecting the child, education is a discipline; relatively…as regards the environment of the child, education is an atmosphere.” (2/33)