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Originally Posted by mamazee  This is based on the philosophy that people are born inherently bad (or full of human lusts or whatever she says) and have to be turned good. Which I just disagree with. I think kids are born good people and need nurturing but don't need to be changed.
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Originally Posted by Pepper44 I like a lot of the Charlotte Mason schooling ideas, but her thoughts on parenting are very...old school. She believes in child training and a set of consequences to back up the parent when the children disobey.
She also believes that children are born sinful and naturally need to be taught not to follow their sinful nature. Doesn't that sound frighteningly like something from Babywise??
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I've read the Charlotte Mason books and am a former christian with years of intense theological education. Her views do represent classical theological ideologies from both before and after the reformation. She did view children as being conceived and born in sin (the original kind). This means their 'will' had to be
broken in order to implement/accept the god-nature, oddly through behavioural training, which is in many ways even patently contradictory to classical theology which expresses that the sin nature is overcome
only by the holy spirit (so which is it???) but I digress and I am admittedly presenting a simplified view.
In any case, that is what she referred to here. That 'willfulness' is the signpost of the sin in the child. This is why, and evidenced, in infant baptism, the parents speak on behalf of the newborn in "renouncing the devil" so that s/he is cleansed of original sin and ready to receive the holy spirit. Previous to this event, the infant is thought to be influenced by the devil and in certain points in christian theology, as many know, unbaptised infants were thought to line the walls of hell.
I don't find there to be any difference in this view when compared to later baptism, though Mason would have been part of a group that baptized infants. The child baptised later on still renounces the devil and accepts the holy spirit into his/her heart. This child was before this covered by the parents' renunciation of the devil. Any way it's done, the child is in need of salvation from his/her evil heart because of the sin passed down through Adam and Eve, was under the influence of the devil, and willful against the will of god.
I agree with the pps I quoted, and there is a reason that Babywise is more widely accepted in christian groups than any other or in the mainstream, even though hitting children, for instance is still widely accepted in secular society.
Mason has a lot of really intersting thoughts and ideas and I appreciate that she was pioneering a different and much more gentle view of children than was prevalent at the time, but as far as parenting understanding goes, I think that there has been enormous progress through humanist and secular ideas, so I personally find it much more useful to read from these sources rather than having to sift texts like Mason's for tidbits or 'nuggets' as you wrote. There are
whole books that I would say are 'gold' as far as what they express about the reality of human nature, requiring little to no sifting, so the one's with nuggets have been usurped in my opinion and study.
I have, however, found some really great practical ideas in her books about teaching children, and although the sifting was fairly extensive at times, I have enjoyed many of them. There are other books that condense this information from her books and I haven't read any but perhaps there is one that expresses the beneficial aspects of her writing and not so much the judeo-christian theologically based parts.
As it is, I have had no trouble finding suitable living books and presenting some of the activities to my children that she wrote about. I also really love her (general) perspective on learning through observation and nature, which by the way does really diverge from classical theology which expresses a distinct lack of trust in such methods of learning for children because of their 'wills' and 'inclinations'. What she was getting at, of course, was the scientific method, and a secular/humanist perspective, and I would suppose that had she lived longer or taken her views a bit further, she may have ended up excommunicated from her church. She was leaning away from classical theology, and not toward it overall- though she didn't directly oppose any of it that I recall.
She was an anglican adherent too, so her views were not as extreme as some others in her time and certainly now. Even still, I am personally very sensitive to the mores and underlying philosophies expressed by christians, and I found her writing to be rife with archaic christian teachings in many ways that non-adherents do and would find very offensive. In fact, she was too liberal for some groups of christians then and now too, so either way, she was cutting a fine line, I think.
Her perspective on child-rearing was gentle relative to her era, but I would not consider it gentle now and in my life. Perhaps it was gentle even compared with the Ezzos' and Pearls' methods, but that's a bar set too low to warrant anything but concern in my opinion. It isn't gentle compared with Kohn or Leidloff, for instance, who both consider respect (so assuming the best of a person's intentions and allowing that s/he is capable of doing good because it is good and for no other reason or agenda) to be encompassed by 'gentle'.
I don't mean to cause offence to christianity or christians, but since it is an open question in this thread, I thought I'd join in with my views.
