"The work of education is greatly simplified when we realize that children...want to know all human knowledge: they have an appetite for what is put before them."
BY REBECCA SANDBERG
Questions pertaining to truth often haunt and break the heart; and keep us up at night to ponder the very nature of being: what we are and how we are meant to live. The discipline and passion to follow a question mark all the way around the crooked curve, down the straight, and eventually put a full stop with a period is a marvelous effort of those who would try.
Education reformer Charlotte Mason (January 1, 1842 - January 16, 1923), challenging and questioning the conventional notion that children were meant to be seen and not heard, writes:
Diet for the body is abundantly considered, but no one pauses to say, ‘I wonder does the mind need food, too, and regular meals, and what is a proper diet?’
Daring to follow the question, Mason wrote a prolific six-volume philosophical treatise on education, and then, at the age of fifty, solidified her work by founding the "House of Education". Of the opinion that she had an answer, she writes:
I have asked myself this question and have labored for fifty years to find the answer, and am anxious to impart what I think I know, but the answer cannot be given in the form of ‘For' this and that, but rather as an invitation to ‘Consider’ this and that; action follows when we have thought duly.
Opposing the dogma of lack in children and insisting rather on the principle that children are born persons, Mason adds:
Our crying need today is less for a better method of education than for an adequate conception of children, children, merely as human beings. Our business is to find out how great a mystery a person is qua person.
Continuing the trajectory of such a shift in thinking about children, she writes:
The work of education is greatly simplified when we realize that children, apparently all children, want to know all human knowledge; they have an appetite for what is put before them, and, knowing this, our teaching becomes buoyant with the courage of our convictions.
(...)
It is not for lack of earnestness and intention on the part of the teacher; his error is rather want of confidence in children. He has not formed a just measure of a child’s mind and bores his scholars with much talk about matters which they are better to understand for themselves much better than often he does.
Cross-pollinate with Emerson on education and respect of the pupil and then gander at Mason's philosophy of education as an atmosphere, a discipline and a life.