I do not expect this response to be tidy or perfect. Life is messy, a bit like an artist’s studio where masterpieces are in process. There are handprints on my walls and laundry piled high. The older children are currently outside my window “making ink from wood ash”. This may explain at least some of the handprints and laundry. I do hope that in sharing my heart your burden will feel lighter.
I spent quite a bit of time searching for answers before coming back to this. What if education isn’t actually about completing the curriculum? What if its focus is something other, perhaps greater, than knowing what those books say? What if education is actually the process of developing character, of growing into all that a person is created to be? I’ve been mulling this idea over for months. Marinating in it. Trying it on throughout the day. It seems scary to me. How is it then measured? What does it look like from day to day?
Charlotte Mason wrote (you knew I’d talk about her, right?):
“The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?” {Vol. 3, pp. 170&171} |
Thankfully, I’m in luck. According to Miss Mason there are three instruments for education. They are an Atmosphere, a Discipline, and a Life. When I first began reading and thinking about these tools I thought of them as a first, second, and third, wanting to fully grasp the first before moving on to the next. However, I think it is better to think of them all as equally essential, like the legs of a tripod. You can lengthen each leg, but if not kept equal, your camera is going to sit crooked. I’d like to emphasize the first one here because I think that so often we get caught up in how much we need to be “doing” that we forget what we already “have”.
Atmosphere
It is not an environment that these {children} want, a set of artificial relations carefully constructed, but an atmosphere which nobody has been at pains to constitute. It is there, about the child, his natural element, precisely as the atmosphere of the earth is about us. It is thrown off, as it were, from persons and things, stirred by events, sweetened by love, ventilated, kept in motion, by the regulated action of common sense. {Vol. 6, p. 96, emphasis mine} |
I remember my grandmother’s house from when I was a child. I’d walk through the door and feel as though I had come home. The smell of something wholesome always seemed to hang in the air. There was a peace that could be felt even during the busiest days of hay-making. There was laughter - lots of laughter. But even in times of sadness and loss, there was still a deep knowing of security and joy. Family members pulled together; even the youngest children had jobs to do. Everyone was an essential part. And through this each of us learned and grew. This is what comes to my mind when I think of “Atmosphere”.
In a Parent’s Review Article, The Atmosphere at Home, M.F. Jerrold wrote:
[T]here is nothing in the way of direct teaching that will ever have so wide and lasting an effect as the atmosphere of home. And the gravest thought concerning this is that in this instance there is nothing to learn and nothing to teach: the atmosphere emanates from ourselves--literally is ourselves; our children live in it and breathe it, and what we are is thus incorporated into them. There is no pretence here or possibility of evasion; we may deceive ourselves: in the long run, we never deceive our children. {emphasis mine} |
My husband, bless his heart came to me a while back and, as though carefully treading barefoot across a floor covered with broken glass, told me how our home was not the place of peace and joy that it had once been. For my part, I had been waiting for a shift in circumstances in order to return the joy and peace, but, in that shame-filled moment, I knew that before anything else could change, my heart must. Further down in the same article the author says
And as love and faith are the two wings of Divine, so they are of natural religion, and it is their strong protecting wings that our children must ever feel around them. We are all familiar with Faber's lines: |
"There is no place wherein earth's sorrows Are felt more than up in heaven; There is no place wherein earth's failings Have such kindly judgment given." |
Finally, Susan Schaeffer Macaulay writes on this same subject in her book, For the Children’s Sake,
I would rather my child had a limited curriculum and access to limited educational resources and yet learned by basking in the atmosphere of someone who had true pleasure in the books that were pursued, than that he should go to some well-equipped and soulless situation where, theoretically, he could ‘learn’ at optimum speed. {Ch. 4, p. 74, emphasis mine} |
Of course, this is only one of the three tools, but I think because it is so difficult to measure or because Atmosphere just tends to already be there without effort we often think of it as unimportant, or we forget to think of it at all. Take some time to enjoy the atmosphere of your home. See the beauty and richness of it. When the circumstances of life feel overwhelming, a good place to begin is where we already are.
Humbly,
Misty