Children are Born Persons – Simple Wonders

Episode #7 | Children Are Born Persons

It’s important to understand principles, to have a framework, before we move on to applying Mason’s methods.

So for the rest of the season we’ll be discussing the big ideas in Charlotte Mason’s 20 Principles. First, Children are Born Persons.

“We believe that the first article of our P.N.E.U. educational creed—“children are born persons”—is of a revolutionary character; for what is a revolution but a complete reversal of attitude?”

Why is it so revolutionary to think of children as persons? And how does this mentality change how we parent and teach children? In this episode we’ll explore what this seemingly simple phrase means, and how our current culture measures up.

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Episode Links

Children Are Born Persons | Charlotte Mason Poetry

Quotes

“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5)

“This is how we find children with intelligence more acute, logic more keen, observing powers more alert, moral sensibilities more quick, love and faith and hope more abounding; in fact, in all points as we are, only more so; but absolutely ignorant of the world and it’s belongings, of us in our ways, and, above all, of how to control and direct and manifest the infinite possibilities with which they are born.” (Parents and Children)

“These are things everybody knows; and for that very reason, nobody realizes the wonder of this rapid progress in the art of living, nor augurs from it that a child, even an infant child, is no contemptible person judged by any of the standards we apply to his elders. He can accomplish more than any of us could in a given time, and, supposing we could start fair with him in the arts he practices, he would be a long way ahead of us by the end of his second year.” (Charlotte Mason, Children are Born Persons article)

“Boys and girls are, on the whole, good, and desirous to do their duty… While many of us err in leaning too much to our own understanding and our own efforts and not trusting sufficiently to the dutiful impulse which will carry children through the work they are expected to do.” (Charlotte Mason, School Education, pg 40)

“I am considering a child as he is, and I am not tracing him either, with Wordsworth, to the heights above, or, with the evolutionist, to the depths below; because a person is a mystery; that is, we cannot explain him or account for him, but must accept him as he is.” (Charlotte Mason, Children are Born Persons article)

“BF Skinner could be described as a man who conducted most of his experiments on rodents and pigeons and wrote most of his books about people.” (Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards, p 6)

Read the Episode

The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine, to him that has a sense for the godlike.” —Carlyle

Pyramid: first level. Children are unique individuals, born with previous experience, genetic and spiritual attributes.

Children are born persons.

They are not born either good or bad, but with possibilities for good and for evil.

Questions to ask From Good Inside:

• What is my most generous interpretation (MGI) of my child’s behavior?

• What was going on for my child in that moment?

• What was my child feeling right before that behavior emerged?

• What urge did my child have a hard time regulating?

• What is a parallel situation in my life? And if I did something similar, what might I have been struggling with in that moment?

• What does my child feel I don’t understand about them?

• If I remember that my child is a good kid having a hard time… what are they having a hard time with?

What deeper themes are being displayed underneath this behavior?

Non-negotiable Needs

Attachment
Rest that comes from unconditional love
Freedom to feel emotions — not freedom to act on emotions or behave however they want
Free, spontaneous play out in nature

Intellectual attainments and abilities rest with a person of any nation or time period, because we are children of God.

Breaks: 13:44; 19:31; 25:36

Read Charlotte’s Words

Home Education: Part 1: Code of Education in the Gospels (p. 11-20)

School Education: chapter IV (pgs 36-43)

Before we can begin employing methods we need a framework to guide us. By framework I mean a philosophy, or principles. Having a framework to base your methods on is essential, but rarely found in parenting or educational training.

It’s important to fully understand the “why” before we move on to the “how.” So For the rest of this season I’ll introduce you to Charlotte Mason’s 20 principles. I feel it’s important to mention once again that this isn’t just for home educators– these are important for all adults working with children.

So, let’s begin: Her first and foundational principle is that children are born persons.

Why is it so revolutionary to think of children as persons? It seems rather simple. So Let’s dissect this a little bit. Children are born… which means from the moment (and even before) they are separated from their mothers. The Lord told Jeremiah, the ancient prophet, that He knew him before he was born:

“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5)

We are born Persons. Person does not simply mean a human; it means the combination of body and soul. The word Person is also the root word for personality. The unique physical and spiritual traits of each individual person.

Charlotte Mason was saying that a child doesn’t become a person through their experience and education. They are already born with a personality.

Sacredness of Personality

A person is truly a mystery. In the social sciences we rarely find replicable studies about people, or figure out a tried and true theory of development because every person is so uniquely different. A person is much more complex than what studies and experiments can reveal. All because of personality.

I believe that, besides relationships, developing our Personality (our character) is our purpose for coming to earth.

And, like Mason, I believe it is the reason for education.

What makes up personality? And what parts are we born with?

Intelligence

In other words, children lack experience, not intelligence.

Think of all the things he accomplishes in just three years!

Learns how to speak a language, maybe even two
In addition to speaking, he learns how to control his vocal chords to sing
Learns abstract concepts like time and space
Distinguishes and sorts knowledge to make sense of the objects around him (mostly through five senses)
Learns how to control the most advanced piece of technology in the world: his body. Picking up and throwing items, running, jumping, and controlling their bladder.
Reads facial expressions, tone of voice, and many other social nuances that require great intelligence and observation

Desire

And children accomplish all this without a single reward or incentive program. Why? Because they are born with a natural desire to learn, develop, master skills. Not only are the born with desire, they are born with a natural curiosity.

Think about the many times your toddler and preschooler asked to help with household chores, or imitated you cleaning and cooking. Think about all the times they made a mess while attempting to satisfy their curiosity and desire for knowledge. How many times did they endlessly pull themselves up on furniture, throw their sippy cup on the ground, or crawl up the stairs. They have a burning desire to master skills and gain knowledge.

Feelings

For many years, especially since the 1950’s it was believed that emotions were learned, mostly by stimulus from the environment. It was believed that children’s emotional lives were not very deep; an infants apparent yearning for his mother was nothing more than an indication of his biological needs for nourishment and physical comfort. It was simply conditioning.

But more in-depth and creative experiments have shown that we are born with emotions, they are not learned. And we are born extremely adept at sensing all emotions, especially hypocrisy. Children are much more perceptive than adults give them credit for. They can see through insecurities, honesty, and commitment.

[share story of Calvin asking why I said that in a “sad voice” or “angry voice”]

Communication and emotions, pages 16-19 Between Parent and Child

Chapter 12 School education, pages 128-29

Possibilities for Good and Evil

Children are not born inherently good, or inherently bad, but with possibilities for both.The theory for many years was that children are born evil; inherently lazy, dishonest, and selfish. Wholly a “natural man.” The parents’ job was to “beat the devil” out of them, sometimes literally. If you didn’t “educate” children then they would be left in their sinless state. But then a theory was born that education was the problem! Children are born inherently good and any evil traits they developed was because of the influence of the world. So it was the parents job to essentially step aside and let the child develop naturally. They simply provided a safe environment for the child to learn on their own. Any egotistical, selfish, and impulsive traits would iron themselves out with time.But Charlotte Mason believed neither was true.

Members of my church believe that we are all born with the light of Christ; with an attraction to the good, true, and beautiful. But researchers at Yale University wanted to know if babies are born moral or if they learn morality from their environment. Since babies can’t communicate via speech, the researchers had to devise another way to understand what the babies felt and thought. When studying infants the most effective way to know what a baby is interested in is where they look and how long they stare. So the researchers set up a puppet show where one character is trying to get to the top of a hill. Then a “nice” puppet comes in and pushes the struggling puppet up the hill. The curtain goes and the struggling puppet is trying to get up the hill again, but this time a puppet comes from the top of the hill and pushes the other puppet down. After watching the show a few times the infants are offered a choice between the two puppets: the helper or pusher. Eighty percent of infants chose the helper.

Children are born with both the light of Christ and the natural man. The natural man is the passions, desires, appetites, and senses of the flesh. Children have these two opposing forces and it is the job of education and parents bring out the light of Christ to temper the natural man. (Mosiah 3:19; 16:5)

In addition to these two possibilities for good and evil, we are given agency to choose between these forces. Charlotte Mason was spot on when she observed that children are not born either perfectly good or perfectly evil, but possibilities for both. And it is the job of parents to teach children what is right and wrong and nurture good habits.

But it’s important to remember that because of agency children may not always follow the path their parents want or expect. This is an important part of being born a person: they are not to be treated as a product, property, or extension of the parent. The child has a right to either accept or reject the ideas and beliefs of those around them.

License: Excess of liberty; exorbitant freedom; freedom abused, or used in contempt of law or decorum.

Liberty in metaphysics, as opposed to necessity, is the power of an agent to do or forbear any particular action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, by which either is preferred to the other.

Thus liberty entails the responsible use of freedom under the rule of law without depriving anyone else of their freedom. Freedom is broader in that it represents a total lack of restraint or the unrestrained ability to fulfill one’s desires.

So, does our society as a whole believe that children are born persons? Or do we require a revolution, like in Mason’s time?

Let’s look at the theories and views of children that dominate society today:

Behaviorism

By far the most widespread theory used in parenting and education is behaviorism; this idea is that behavior, and therefore personality, is based on external influences. Behaviorism really took off in the 1950s from scientific experiments done on animals. Behaviorism works great on animals, but we’re finding it isn’t as effective for humans as we once thought. But why?

There are essentially two types of behaviorism: classical and operant. Classical conditioning associates involuntary behavior with a stimulus (think Pavlov’s dog experiment) while operant conditioning associates voluntary action with a consequence. And here’s where it gets a little tricky. We all know that classical conditioning works well for training the body. This is essential for habit training and can be useful in education (in fact it’s one of the three instruments of education). But operant conditioning is the use of rewards to manipulate someone to behave a certain way. It’s relatively new to psychology and when people talk about“pop behaviorism” this is what they’re talking about.

Unfortunately We’re finding operant conditioning is not as effective with people as with animals because we’re changing behavior, not character. In fact, studies continually prove that operant conditioning stifles character growth.

The man who really popularized behaviorism and the “do this and you’ll get that” idea was BF Skinner. He truly believed that humans are just complex organisms He insisted that organisms (including us) are no more than a “repertoire of behaviors.” We are born blank slate and it is our environment and genetics that determine everything. He said “A person is not an originating agent; he is a locus, a point at which many genetic and environmental conditions come together in a joint effect.”

He believed love, morality, and genius are all the result of reinforcements from the environment. And our society has unconsciously adopted this man’s theory of mankind, especially in parenting children. The idea that children are born blank slate and the only way we learn and become people is through external stimulators. It’s been absorbed into daily, unquestionable practice in schools and homes to change behavior and make kids learn.

As Alfie Kohn said: “BF Skinner could be described as a man who conducted most of his experiments on rodents and pigeons and wrote most of his books about people.” Punished by rewards p 6

The biggest problem with behaviorism is the same as it was in Mason’s day. She said “The reason is, perhaps, that we regard person as a product, and have a sort of unconscious formula, something like this: given such and such conditions of civilization and education, and we shall have such and such result, with variations.”

The idea that people are the product of their environment and genetics is just as dangerous today as it was in Victorian England. It develops into prejudice, racism, and the belief that one socioeconomic class is better than another. Mason believed that every person, no matter their station in life, ethnicity, or country of origin was born persons. We are all born children of God with the same capacity for intelligence, morality, and feelings. This was radical in her day when the popular belief was that children born to poor families were inherently less intelligent and certain races were inferior.

And, unfortunately, we still do this today. In her book The Smartest Kids in the World, Amanda Ripley investigates the differences between The United States and three countries that have strong education systems: Poland, South Korea, and Finland. In Finland she interviews a teacher who lives in a more diverse part of Finland, one that is host to a large percentage of immigrants. Despite most of his class learning Finnish as a second language, they are all doing extremely well academically. He said that he doesn’t look at each child and alter his expectations based on their socioeconomic status or if they come from a broken home. He has the same expectations for each child, and provides them with the tools they need to meet those expectations. In comparison, many elementary teachers in the US believe it is compassionate to lower standards or expectations based on the child’s SES, family struggles, and even race.

From their methods we can clearly see which teachers view children as born persons. One sees children as a product of their genetics and their environment, the other sees the intelligence, determination, and resilience that are present in all people.

You may still feel skeptical about this idea, that children are more than their environment and genetics. So let me share one more story from the book, The Knowledge Gap. An elementary school teacher at a magnet school in Washington D.C.was given a new curriculum, one that was based on learning about big ideas and events–like Ancient Greece and the War of 1812. A lot of the books she needed to read aloud and the vocabulary was much more advanced than the students were used to. She was skeptical, because most of her students came from very poor, broken homes, and many were still learning English as a second language. But she gave it her best shot and was shocked at the success. The students devoured this new knowledge and rose to the occasion. They asked deep questions and made connections. They remembered and used their new vocabulary. They loved learning.

Stages of Development

Piaget, Erikson, Freud, and others have attempted to explain different behaviors and skills that are developed in childhood by dividing them into stages. In Piaget’s view children in early childhood (preoperational stage) are not capable of abstract thought yet. But anyone who has had a genuine conversation with a preschooler knows this isn’t true. My five year old once commented one day: “Doesn’t it feel weird to be alive? For a while I wasn’t alive, and now I am. It’s weird to think about.”

Thinking about one’s thoughts (metacognition) is an advanced cognitive skill that psychologists didn’t think was possible until later childhood.

Although stages can be useful in getting a general understanding of how most children develop, it has contributed, in my opinion, to a diminished view of children. Adults tend to see these stages as steps to personhood. In each stage the child becomes more of a person; their mind becomes more capable. We are more likely to deprive children of abstract ideas in elementary school because they aren’t “developmentally appropriate” when in actuality children are craving intellectual food. The problem with the social sciences is that scientists restrict experiments to what can be quantified at that moment in time. They study the physical development of the brain and body, but it is much more difficult to study the spiritual and emotional dimensions of a person, and nearly impossible to quantify them.

When adhering strictly to developmental stages we tend to limit a child’s mind to their physical and lingual developments, and forget that their intelligence is much deeper and complex than we can quantify with those two measures.

Do I consider children born persons?

Children don’t have the ability to reason, so I make the decisions for my child / I’ve noticed my child is very capable of reasoning, but he needs my experience and knowledge to help him understand right and wrong and the consequences of each choice.

Children lack desire to do anything but play and have fun / Children are born with a desire to learn and become better.

Children don’t have a sense of responsibility. The only way to motivate them is by giving them rewards or taking away privileges/ My children have a natural desire to have purpose and be needed, as long as I keep the tasks within their skill level and give constructive feedback.

The only way to get kids to read books is if it has potty humor and/or simply ideas/ Children have intelligent minds capable of finding interest in many topics, if presented correctly.

I regularly reprimand my child in public. They aren’t old enough to feel shame or embarrassment/If my child makes a mistake I redirect them or talk to them in private.

Kids say the darndest things! I have no reservations about laughing at what they say / I listen to my child with respect and respond appropriately.

My goal as a parent is to ensure my child adopts my beliefs and opinions/I want my child to seek truth and do what he knows is right, even if it’s not popular.

I regularly tell my child what to think/I respect my child’s opinions and ask them follow-up questions to encourage deeper thinking.

I save the higher-quality food for adults and the lesser quality for kids. They just don’t appreciate the finer things in life / children learn to appreciate whatever they’re regularly given. I feed them healthy, delicious food from the start.

When my child hits, refuses to share, or shows other age-related behavior I ignore it because they’ll eventually grow out of it / No matter the age my child is I always teach them what is appropriate behavior.

Children and teens are egocentric and selfish, that’s just how they are / Children are born with egocentric tendencies, but they are just as capable of being taught to think about others.

When a child speaks to me I smile, nod, give a generic answer and move on to my adult conversation / When a child speaks to me I bend down to their level, look them in the eye, and acknowledge what they said by repeating it or asking follow-up questions. Like all people, children want to share ideas and connect with others.

When it comes to behavior, Look at the WHY.

Solicit good intentions

Why is my children behaving this way?

Feelings, trauma, relationships, neurological deficiencies (lacking skills)

When is my child behaving this way?