CMP Review 2023-05-30

May 30, 2023

Nancy Hatch studied at the House of Education and spent a lifetime meditating on the principles she learned there. At the top of her list was Charlotte Mason’s first principle. “One of Charlotte Mason’s greatest contributions to educational thought was her statement that the child is a person,” wrote Mrs. Hatch. “She herself called it a revolutionary idea.”

After spending many years as a headmistress of a PNEU school, she began writing and speaking on the topic of “children as persons.” Mrs. Hatch engaged with the full scope of the idea, including the inherent rights of the child. But that raised an interesting question. Did the notion of authority and obedience somehow encroach upon the personhood of the child?

Hatch’s firm answer was “No.” Writing in 1961, at the beginning of the “countercultural decade,” she insisted that “It is misleading [to] suggest that authority violates the rights of the person.” The real problem, she explained, is that “the obedience most often inculcated by parents is no obedience at all, it is a mere invention to save themselves trouble in dealing with their children.”

Read or listen to Mrs. Hatch’s careful explanation of how obedience, when rightly understood, is not inimical to, but rather essential to, the personhood of the child. Find it here.

📷: @aolander

@artmiddlekauff