Last time I introduced you to the Well-Educated Heart (WEH) philosophy of education. Marlene Peterson, the woman behind the WEH, sees herself as having not created but discovered a new approach to education with deep roots. She cites many influences, among them Charlotte Mason, a late 19th/early 20th century British educator. My own philosophy of education is based largely on Mason’s and I have written much on her approach so I thought it would be interesting to compare the WEH with Mason to see just where they agree and where they differ.
Sources and Origins
Though they do not end up in the same places, both Peterson and Mason claim to have found (not created) a philosophy of education and both claim some religious basis for their approach. Mason bases her philosophy on what she calls the three gospel principles which she finds in the biblical book of Matthew. Peterson does not cite a specific textual source for her philosophy but does say that she sought God’s methods for education.
Peterson cites a number of earlier thinkers that informed her ideas. She mentions Masons specifically though as far as I have seen the main, if not the only, idea she gets from Mason is that “true education is between child’s soul and God.” Though Peterson cites this line specifically more than once, I cannot find where Mason said these exact words.1 It is true, however, that Mason speaks of the Holy Spirit as “the Great Educator” and her 20th principle reads:
“We allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual and ‘spiritual’ life of children, but teach them that the Divine Spirit has constant access to their spirits, and is their Continual Helper in all the interests, duties and joys of life.”
Based on the how much she discusses him, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi seems to have been a bigger influence on Peterson. Like Pestalozzi, she places a large emphasis on the role and influence of the mother and she sees the child as a basically good creature who will develop along the right lines without outside negative influences. She attributes to Pestalozzi her emphasis on educating the feelings before the mind.
Perhaps second after Pestalozzi, Peterson cites Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the modern kindergarten movement, as one of her influences. Mason also knows Froebel but largely rejects his kindergarten movement. For Peterson, the child is a plant to be cared for tenderly, an image which Mason again rejects.
“Now persons do not grow in a garden, much less in a greenhouse.” (Mason, Home Education, p. 186)
” . . . it is questionable whether the conception of children as cherished plants in a cultured garden has not in it an element of weakness.” (Mason, School Education, chapter 6)
The Parts of the Person and His Abilities
Peterson’s approach, as its name suggests, is primarily about educating the heart. Feelings are prioritized over reason. Then child in the WEH philosophy develops through stages and in the youngest years it is not clear that he has intellectual abilities as such. Peterson says, for instance, that little children hear and respond to the music, not the content, of language. There is skepticism about human reason but seems to be no corresponding qualms about the emotions.
Mason is explicit that the child is born as a person with all the faculties of an adult. He does not need to be taught to think and from the youngest ages he is to be fed a diet of ideas.2 Ideas, for Mason, are the food of the mind and to withhold them from a child would be to starve him intellectually. Yet we should not think that Mason elevates the mind to the exclusion of other parts of the person. As I have argued elsewhere, Mason does not see the mind as separate from the child’s spirit but rather to feed the child’s mind on ideas is also to feed his spiritual nature. The two are so closely entwined as to be inseparable. Nor does the mind operate in isolation from the heart. The goal of education for Mason is to teach the child to care — to build relationships with what he studies about and to develop affinities for all manner of things. So one might say feeding the mind/spirit builds the heart as well. We must not make too big a distinction here; I believe Mason tends to see the person as a unified whole and tends not to distinguish parts within his nature.
Mason has a skepticism of the child’s reason but also of his emotions. Both, if left untrained, can lead one astray. In terms of the goodness of the child’s nature, Mason seems to take a slightly more pessimistic view. Both would see potential in any person to accept the good.3 However, Mason acknowledges that, if left to his own devices, the child will not choose the good, true, and beautiful. His mind must be filled one way or another and if we are not deliberately giving him good spiritual and intellectual food, he will ingest the bad. Mason also devotes a chunk of her time to what he calls “habit training.” There is in this a recognition that we will not naturally form good habits and that there does need to be some degree of discipline that occurs.
For Peterson, there is less explicit recognition of how a child might go wrong. Perhaps it is just not a topic she feels the need to bring up in her writing on education, but I saw no talk of discipline. While the implication is there that a person’s heart can be hardened and that he might not find joy or return to God in heaven, this comes across as more of the absence of goodness than of a turn to badness per se.
The Goal of Education
The goal of education for Mason is to, as she says, set the child’s feet in a wide room. By this she means that he should form relations with as many things as possible. Other words she uses for these connections we build are “intimacies” and “affinities.”
“Our aim in education is to give children vital interests in as many directions as possible –to set their feet in a large room.” (Mason, School Education, p. 166)
For Peterson, as we saw last time, the goal is joy. There is also an element of putting things together, however. She does not make forming relations as Mason would phrase it the goal of education but she does criticize curricula for making connections for children and speaks of their need to create order out of chaos for themselves4.
Methods
When it comes to the practical details of education, we can consider what the two philosophies have in common and where they differ.
Both Mason and Peterson eschew the use of force or coercion in education. For Peterson, this seems tp mean that the child is not obligated in any way to participate in his education but that he may be won over by the example of others (particularly his mother). She would allow the use of some incentives (read: ice cream) to help with early rough spots. The principle behind this stance is that as God does not force anyone to come to him, so we should not force children to learn (which ultimately is to lead them back to him). Mason would use natural consequences to get a child to do his schoolwork, e.g. not being able to have free time because he has wasted school time with dawdling, but she does not allow parents or teachers to be manipulative in how they deal with children. They must not for instance predicate their love upon the child’s obedience. Again, this is a principled stance — we are to respect the personhood of the child by not encroaching upon it or using his natural tendencies (eg. his desire for approval) against him.
For Peterson education is more about how the child learns (heart first) than what he learns. For Masen I would say the how is important but the what is also key. We must give children’s minds quality food — good books, beautiful art, etc.
Peterson has an emphasis on early learning through the senses which Mason would reject. For Mason, the mind is always in play, even in the early years.
Both Peterson and Mason use living books. In a Charlotte Mason education the child responds to what he reads and internalizes it through narration. The WEH uses notebooking. While there is some similarity here in terms of an emphasis on the child making what he reads his own, narration is designed to build composition skills in a way that notebooking cannot.5
Both give the arts a large role, value time in nature, and accord history a place of prominence in the curriculum. For Peterson, history and science/nature form the two educational tracks because they have to do with people and creation. Mason speaks again of relations and would see three areas of learning, including relations with people and things but also with God.
Though I have said that the WEH does not mention discipline as such, there is a emphasis on reading stories of heroes as a means to build character in children by their example. Peterson is careful though to say that we cannot be deliberate in how we do this. We cannot target these stories in such a way as to determine what they child will get from them because each child will come away from the story with his own lesson. Mason’s approach would be the same (and it is actually a pet peeve of mine that so many CM educators miss this and try to target stories to teach particular lessons — eg. “What book can I read to teach my child to be kind?”).
Peterson favors a spiral approach with a short rotation of subjects (each topic coming up once a year) and lots of repetition. Here is is quite different from Mason who eschews repetition and favors a slow, deep reading of books. For Mason, to repeat is to allow the child to develop the bad habit of not paying attention the first time.
Conclusions
Peterson does not claim that the Well-Educated Heart is a Charlotte Mason approach to education. While there are some significant overlaps in the practical details particularly, there are also many significant philosophical differences between the two, the emphasis on the heart as opposed to the mind being perhaps the most obvious. Though the two might use the same books, works of art, etc., their ideas will come out in how these materials are used.
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- An online search turns up sites which quote Mason as saying “Look on education as something between the child’s soul and God” but give no specific reference. I cannot find this quote in Mason’s Home Education series. ↩︎
- Though one must acknowledge here that a formal education for Mason does not start till age 6 so she has less to say on the toddler years. ↩︎
- As a Calvinist, this is where I most differ with Mason. See How I Do Charlotte Mason, Part 1. ↩︎
- This idea of Peterson’s — that what we are doing as we learn is mirror God’s creative act by to creating order ourselves within our minds — is I think the biggest contribution of her philosophy. ↩︎
- I highly recommend Karen Glass’s book Know and Tell for an explanation of Charlotte Mason style narration and how and why it works. ↩︎
Letters from Nebby 