Liberty and Law: Giving Freedom to Your Children
Charlotte Mason’s educational volumes and papers are about so much more than academics. They are about raising the child’s whole being—his body, his intellect, and his spirit. (Educate comes from a word meaning “bring out, lead forth.”) Central to her philosophy of education is the idea that children are born persons. As persons they have the unalienable right to liberty; and liberty is found within law.
Do you know the difference between a petulant child using tantrums or wheedling to get his way in a whimsical world (mother might give in), and a child who cheerfully obeys because she is secure within a constant framework?
The difference lies in what the mother communicates about the source of her authority. If your authority is founded in your own (often changeable) will, then why shouldn’t the child attempt to influence it?—or to exert his own strong will, for that matter? The mother must instead recognize and accept that her authority is deputized from God Almighty, and that she too is under his law. When she realizes the importance of her duty, that she must neither abuse nor abandon it, this is communicated to the child—by its constancy in things necessary and its glad liberty in things permissive.
I will leave the floor to Charlotte Mason from here on....
If we ask ourselves, What is the most inalienable and sacred right of a person quâ person? I suppose the answer is, liberty. Children are persons; ergo, children must have liberty. Parents have suspected as much for a generation or two, and have been at pains not ”to interfere” with their children; but our loose habits of thinking come in our way, and in the very act of giving their freedom to children we impose fetters which will keep them enslaved all their lives. That is because we confound liberty with license and do not perceive that the two cannot co-exist. We all know that the anarchist, the man who claims to live without rule, to be a law unto himself, is in reality the slave to certain illogical formulae, which he holds binding upon him as laws of life and death. In like manner, the mother does not always perceive that, when she gives her child leave to do things forbidden, to sit up half an hour beyond his bed-time, not to do geography or Latin because he hates that subject, to have a second or third helping because he likes the pudding, she is taking from the child the wide liberty of impersonal law and imposing upon him her own ordering, which is, in the last resort, the child’s will. It is he who is bending his mother as that proverbial twig is bent, and he is not at all deluded by the oracular ”we‘ ll see” with which the mother tries to cover her retreat. The child who has learned that, by persistent demands, he can get leave to do what he will, and have what he likes, whether he do so by means of stormy outcries or by his bewitching, wheedling ways, becomes the most pitiable of all slaves, the slave to chance desires; he will live to say with the poet:
Me this unchartered freedom tires
I feel the weight of chance desires...
Indeed, he already feels this weight, and that is why he is fretful and discontented and finds so little that is delightful in his life. Let him learn that ”do as you‘ re bid” is a child‘ s first duty; that the life of his home is organized on a few such injunctions as ” be true,” “be kind,” “be courteous,” “be punctual” and that to fail in any of these respects is unworthy and unbecoming; more, let him be assured that such failures are of the nature of sin and are displeasing to God, and he will grow up to find pleasure in obedience, and will gradually gather the principles which should guide his life.
But the first duty of the parent is to teach children the meaning of must; and the reason why some persons in authority fail to obtain prompt and cheerful obedience from their children is that they do not recognize ”must” in their own lives. They elect to do this and that, choose to go here and there, have kindly instincts and benevolent emotions, but are unaware of the constraining must, which should direct their speech and control their actions. They allow themselves to do what they choose; there may be little harm in what they do; the harm is that they feel free to allow themselves.
Now the parent who is not aware that he is living in a law-ordered world, that he has to “eat the fruit of his thoughts” as well as that of his words and actions, is unable to get obedience from his child. He believes that it rests with him to say what the child may do or leave undone; and as he does not claim papal infallibility, his children find out soon enough that the ordering of their lives is in their own hands, and that a little persistence will get them ‘leave‘ to do what is good in their own eyes. The parent, the mother especially, who holds that her children‘ s rule of life must be, ”children obey your parents for it is right” certainly secures obedience, as she secures personal cleanliness, or proper habits at table, because she has a strong sense of the importance of these things. As her reward, she gains for her child the liberty of a free man, who is not under bondage to his own willfulness nor the victim of his own chance desires.
[This excerpt is from Mason’s paper “Concerning Children as ‘Persons’: Various Forms of Liberty and Tyranny.” Continue reading about the various forms of liberty for children, including liberty of thought.]
Photograph: I love stone walls, so I have used them again and again to illustrate my (many) posts about the value of boundaries. Credit.
Friday, March 23, 2012