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On Principles 1, 2 & 20: The Defining Issue

Charlotte Mason

Principle 1: Children are Born Persons

“No sooner doth the truth…. come into the soul’s sight, but the soul knows her to be he, first and old acquaintance.” 

“The consequence of truth is great, therefore the judgment of it must not be negligent.”

Reference: Volume 6, Chapter 2

Here Charlotte quotes Benjamin Whichcote, who was the founding father of Cambridge and a puritan divine (an archaic word for theologian). I won’t attempt to unpack his words but I will say that with these quotes she is setting the stage to highlight the importance of truth and its inseparable affiliation with the soul.

To understand Charlotte’s first principle you have to know who she was talking to. The Victorian era may have been coming to a close by the time she published A Philosophy of Education, but she originally said this in her first Home Education volume and was very much talking to Victorian educators and parents.

To say a child was “born a person” carries a distinction that we take for granted today. Of course a child is born a person, we think. What else would he be born as? “But truths get flat and wonders stale upon us,” Charlotte said and isn’t that right? We read our bibles every day and skim the details, “yes, yes…the garden, the flood, the gospel, and so on…” but take the gravity of that truth lightly and while small children wonder at the world around them we stroll carelessly past a robin’s nest. How quickly we breeze past what is too familiar.

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