CMP Review 2024-02-06

February 6, 2024

In a powerful passage in School Education, Charlotte Mason quotes Henry Latham’s Pastor Pastorum:

Our Lord … reverenced whatever the learner had in him of his own, and was tender in fostering this native growth… Men, in His eyes, were not mere clay in the hands of the potter, matter to be moulded to shape. They were organic beings, each growing from within, with a life of his own.

This profound observation about the teaching methods of Jesus Christ sheds light on Charlotte Mason’s first principle: children are born persons.

But only a few principles later we read Charlotte Mason speaking of the “discipline of habits, formed definitely and thoughtfully,” as a primary instrument of education for parents and teachers. What is more definitely and thoughtfully formed than clay in the hands of a potter?

Have we found a contradiction? Or a deeper truth? Consider with Laura Teeple in her second article on Charlotte Mason’s paradoxical principle here.

@artmiddlekauff