CMP Review 2024-06-06

June 6, 2024

Charlotte Mason believed that the “The Great Recognition Required of Parents” had sweeping implications for how lessons should be conducted. This recognition, that “God, the Holy Spirit, is Himself the supreme Educator of mankind,” was not for her merely an abstract theological conception. Nor was it simply for the comfort and reassurance of the educator (though it is indeed a comforting and reassuring insight).

More than all of this, Charlotte Mason believed that the “Great Recognition” challenges us to consider how the supreme Educator operates. “We are told that the Spirit is life,” she writes; “therefore, that which is dead, dry as dust, mere bare bones, can have no affinity with Him, can do no other than smother and deaden his vitalising influences.” Because the Holy Spirit is “the Lord, the giver of life,” we should offer our children a living education.

The implications, according to Charlotte Mason, are vast. “There is no subject which has not a fresh and living way of approach,” she claims. The challenge for educators of every generation is to find this fresh and living way for all subjects. Even piano. “In teaching music,” writes Mason in Parents and Children, “let him once perceive the beautiful laws of harmony, the personality, so to speak, of Music, looking out upon him from among the queer little black notes, and the piano lesson has ceased to be drudgery.”

In Home Education as well, Mason points in hope to a means to “do away with the deadly dreariness.” She sensed that a key element is that “the child’s knowledge of the theory of music and his ear training keep pace with his power of execution.”

The making of music is joyous, and learning piano can be a delight when it is suffused with meaning and beauty. Joy radiated from the keys as my son played his pieces at a small local recital this past Friday night. There was no competition or judge or rule or evaluation. There was simply a celebration of the Spirit’s work — and there was life.

@artmiddlekauff