Week 1 Summary

Here is a short summary of this week's reading, taken from http://amblesideonline.org/CM/Summary1.html


Part I––Some Preliminary Considerations pages 1-6


As education is more available to all classes of people, we see more women enter the workforce. Not all of those women work because of financial necessity, some just love the satisfaction of doing something really important. But the work that is most important to society is raising children, not just in schools, but, even more, in the home, because early home life influences the character of the future man or woman more than anything else. "It is a great thing to be a parent: there is no promotion, no dignity, to compare with it. The parents of but one child may be cherishing what shall prove a blessing to the world."

Charlotte Mason is correct, there is no higher calling than raising the next generation, and it is good to enter into it with some knowledge, and to realize that we don't just raise them to be a blessing to ourselves as parents, but to all of society as well.

There are natural laws that govern everything, including raising children. Parents have to observe certain laws (feed it, love it) just to keep a child alive. So long as the parent provides love, nutritious food, wholesome playmates and diversions, the child does well left to himself––for awhile. He will grow up perfectly happy. But parents, and indeed, all the adults in society, owe the child more than that––they must also train him to be a useful member of society.

I––A Method of Education pg. 6-10
Child-rearing has gone from one of two extremes––from a Spartan-like existence designed to toughen kids up for the real world to almost child-worship, where the parents bend over backwards to please the child's whims. In our society, we seem to have a bit different variation of the Spartan extreme. Some children are neglected and some are over-indulged. She mentions that using a slipper in her day was pretty much "disallowed," leaving us to assume that corporal punishment was discouraged then as it is in our society today.

Raising children, like any venture, is best done when you have some idea or vision of the end result you desire. It's easy to get so focused on one aspect of child-rearing that everything else is neglected. It's much harder to keep the whole child in our vision, to be balanced and not get obsessed about one area. Our end goal is a child who is useful to his world, is trained to choose rightly, and whose love for many different things brings joy to him all his life.

Once you know what you desire as your end result, you just have to plan how to get there. Since children are living beings with minds of their own, a rigid system where the teacher follows steps A, B and C to get the result of Child D, won't work. What's needed is a method, a plan to arrive at the desired destination and some guiding principles to keep in mind along the way.