The Philosophy of Education Vol. 6 Book II Ch. 1

Theory Applied

A liberal education is the “birth-right” of every child. Charlotte felt all children could and should learn from “intellectual strong meat.” First we need to understand what she calls “the relativity of knowledge and the mind”. She points out: “The mind receives knowledge, not in order that it may know, but in order that it may grow, in breadth and depth, in sound judgment and magnanimity. But in order to grow, it must know.”

The mistake teachers make is to depreciate themselves and the office of teaching. Some are teaching as if it were a tiresome task of spoon-feeding watered down facts. Teachers should see themselves as part guide, philosopher, and friend to the students.

We depreciate the children when we view them as products of education and environment and not as persons. Adults either reverence or despise children. When we regard them as incomplete and undeveloped people, who one day will become complete we reverence them, unlike viewing them as weak and ignorant and that we need to “inform” that ignorance and whose weakness we must support, we actually commit the offence of despising them.

We begin to lose the child’s mind the day he starts school because we embrace the belief that a child only knows what they see and handle rather than what they conceive in their mind and figures in their thoughts.

In England education systems, common thought in the years before WWI was that it didn’t matter what a child learned only how they learned it. “Knowledge” was not taken seriously. Then some, like Charlotte, started to see that ignorance was the stumbling block not only with the difficulties England faced at home but also abroad. Charlotte said that the only cure for ignorance is knowledge. But what is “knowledge”? She said that one thing is certain: nothing becomes knowledge to us until our minds “act upon it, translate it, transform it and absorbed it.” Basically until we ourselves process the information into ourselves it is not knowledge just facts. We may “teach” or “tell” the information to the student but until the act of self-education occurs, our efforts are like “putting veneer on the surface of a child’s nature.”

The results Charlotte was consistently getting in her school:

- Children, not teachers, are responsible for learning

- Teachers may sum up or enlarge the material but actual work is done by the students

- Students read in each term anywhere from 1,000 -3,000 pages, according to age, in a large number of books

- Only a single reading of material is presented

- Readings are tested by narration or by writing on a test passage.

- No revision is attempted for the final exam because too much ground has been covered and students “know” what they have learned.

- What has been read the children know and are able to write it with ease and fluency. They usually spell well too.

- Exams last one week and the children write between 20-60 sheets of paper according to age and class.

- It is rare that children are not able to answer all the questions on exams in history, literature, citizenship, geography and science. Some do better in one subject than another by writing more in one than another but all children know the answers to the set questions.

Teaching begins this way when the children are six years old. Charlotte not only educated the clever child using these methods also but the average children and even, what she called, “backward” children. The time spent learning during the day was the same or less than other schools with more learning accomplished. The students didn’t need to “take notes” or “cram” or do hours of homework because the “knew” the material presented.

The desire for knowledge, also known as, curiosity, is the “chief agent in education.” The natural desire for knowledge is lost when we use other vices such as, prizes, marks, or praise.

When we grasp the concept of children being born persons then the understanding that they are born with the “power of attention, avidity of knowledge, clearness of thought, discrimination in books even before they can read and the power of dealing with many subjects” enables us to confidently educate our children using these methods.