I have tried to write this post for a long time. I looked it up. My first draft began back in 2020! I don’t know why it’s taken me so long. I’ve been talking about this sort of thing in Charlotte Mason Think Tank for years now. Perhaps I just needed a little more confidence in saying what I had to say. Perhaps I needed another graduate under my belt before I knew for sure that I was correct about this. Perhaps it just wasn’t fully formed in my mind.
Let’s compare two fictional little girls, sisters: Susie and Jenny. Susie was a born tattle-tale. She loved to talk, to express her opinions. She had many opinions early in her life, and she liked to make them known. Susie was precocious. She began reading at four. At five, she demanded geography lessons because she saw her older sister doing them, and this was complicated for their mother because Jenny … wasn’t like Susie at all.
Jenny really struggled. Jenny wanted to read as young as Susie did, but her memory did not function well at all. Jenny could only remember the names of a handful of letters at a time. When she learned new ones, she lost old ones. It took Jenny ages to learn all her letters. Phonics were no easier. Jenny had days where everything went swimmingly, followed by days when she went backwards, when weeks of work completely disappeared out of her brain.
Narration was another thing that came easy for Susie and very hard for Jenny. Think about it: born tattle-tales are partly that way because they love to tell and it is so easy for them. Susie didn’t really need to be taught to narrate; if anything, she needed lessons in being concise. Jenny, on the other hand, was painful to teach. Charlotte Mason said to teach it paragraph by paragraph, but Jenny’s memory was so poor her mother had to do it using only a sentence or two at a time.
It wasn’t just her memory. Jenny also had difficulty getting words out of her brain and into her mouth. Her mother could tell she had many thoughts, but they just wouldn’t come out! Narrations were so hard … for so many years. Jenny slowly improved, but then it was time to begin written narration, and what a mess that was. If Jenny found it hard to speak her thoughts, it was ten times harder to write them. Plus she couldn’t remember how to spell many of the the words.
Fast forward to the future; Susie and Jenny are both grown. They both read well — and the books they choose to read are wonderful. They both have strong opinions and know how to voice them. They both know how to write. In fact, Jenny even wrote a novel! Jenny still cannot spell, but she invented work-arounds for herself that are so effective most people can’t tell.
So tell me: Which sister benefitted most from her Charlotte Mason education?
My contention is that Jenny did.
Of course a Charlotte Mason education was good for Susie. She was given thousands upon thousands of pages of wonderful books over the course of twelve years. Who wouldn’t benefit from that? But Susie also came into this world with natural ability. It is highly likely that she would be an articulate communicator regardless of what methods were used with her. She probably would even have loved to read.
But Jenny? In the public schools, she would have been labeled and “accommodated.” No one would have called her to higher living. No one would have given her books far above her level. No one would have made her speak when she didn’t want to, or write when it looked like she couldn’t.
To whom did oral narration do the greatest service? The one who could already speak well, or the one who struggled every step of the way, but eventually reached the point where she could clearly articulate her thoughts on beloved books and more? To whom did written narration do the greatest service? The one born with a pencil in her hand, or the one who struggled to form letters and to spell, but eventually reached the point where she could write a whole book?
A Charlotte Mason education gives the greatest gifts to the ones for whom it is most difficult as long as they do not give up the struggle. I’m not saying a nonverbal autistic child is going to give an oral narration just because he’s Charlotte Mason educated. But I have seen beautiful fruit born in the life of an autistic child given living books (when others would have doomed his mind to the mundane and uninteresting).
Charlotte Mason once led a movement promoting a liberal education for all. Not for some — for all. In her day, this meant giving a beautiful education to the lowest classes. In our day, I firmly believe it means giving it to the kids who struggle. They are human. They may be humans who need medicine or vision therapy or whatever, but they are humans nonetheless. They deserve a human education.
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