CMP Review 2024-08-27

August 27, 2024

A homeschool mother once sent me a link to a book review that encouraged child-directed learning. The article reinforced her sense that she should not have a time table in her homeschool. She opted instead for what she thought was more respectful of her children’s personhood: to “create a list of lessons and go in order enjoyably, stop when we are tired instead of pushing through.”

Ever since Maria Montessori revolutionized the very idea of school by creating a house where “children were free to come and go, rest or work, choose what they wanted to work on, worked at their own pace,” the idea of a time table has been under fire. The opposition was as strong as ever in the early 1970s after a British school inspector praised the Integrated Day: “An Integrated Day is one in which there are no class lessons as such. Instead, each child makes a unique synthesis of his learning experience.”

If, as Charlotte Mason said, all education is self-education, and if children are born persons, shouldn’t we just embrace this new way, the integrated day? The year was 1971 and Joan Molyneux was restating the Charlotte Mason method for a new generation. Little did she know that the daughters of Susan Schaeffer Macaulay would soon be visiting one of her PNEU schools. Was it time to revise the method to suit the times?

For Miss Molyneux the answer was no. Rather than abandon the time table, she wrote what may be its most brilliant defense. But she did more than just defend the time table. She also shined a light on the meaning of personhood. She explained that liberty is not license. Citing G. K. Chesterton, she explained that freedom is not merely feeling free. Far from discarding habit training as a relic of the past, she dignified it as an essential element of what it means to be human.

Molyneux’s profound explanation and defense of the Charlotte Mason method has been hidden away for too long. Read or listen to part four, on the discipline of habit, here.

@artmiddlekauff