One of the questions I have been asked in Charlotte Mason Boot Camp again and again over the years is whether therapies used with special needs kids violate Charlotte Mason’s principles. I’m sure that, yes, there are therapies out there that are a bad idea — that totally violate the principles we hold dear. But that’s not the question. The question expresses a secret fear that a special needs child can’t have both his therapy (any therapy) and also a Charlotte Mason education. Is giving a child therapy at all a violation of Charlotte Mason’s principles? is the real question underneath, however it was asked.
Charlotte Mason expected kids to learn most things naturally and when our kids don’t pick those things up, we panic. How do we help our children and still give them the education we want them to have?
The answer is simple: go ahead and incorporate the therapies your child needs.
Yes, there is more to it. If there are, say, three therapies available for whatever ails your child, probably one of them stands out as being more aligned with our principles and methods (or one stands out as definitely not aligned!). So yes, know your principles and use your discretion. But being careful isn’t the same as rejecting therapy outright.
Where did I glean Charlotte Mason’s position from? She mentions it briefly in a book review buried in the appendix at the back of Volume 5. I had completely forgotten about it until I re-read it this week for my local Charlotte Mason book club meeting. Charlotte Mason offers us a quote from a book called Educational Studies and Addresses by T. G. Rooper, which covers the “treatment of mentally deficient children” found in an article on the French educator Séguin:
Now in a normal child the various parts of the nervous organism work so rapidly and promptly that it is almost impossible to follow the process of co-ordination. It is indeed quick as thought. In the cretinous child, owing to want of co-ordination, different movements can be studied before they are combined into a whole. The method of training such children consists in doing for them artifically what in the ordinary child is done naturally. (Formation of Character, p. 437)
Isn’t this what most therapies are doing? I think of a woman I know, down on the floor, making sure a child struggling with learning disabilities can really crawl. She told me most dyslexics never crawled correctly and teaching them to do so, even when they are bigger, can help them better learn to read. This is the theory behind Brain Balance and a host of other similar approaches: manually coordinate what ought to have happened naturally … but didn’t.
Charlotte Mason didn’t object to this. She recommended the book and carefully selected the quote! What she objected to was doing for the child — any child — what he could do for himself.
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