The Purpose of Education: Becoming More Human
As homeschooling moms, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Our eyes gaze over the expanse of curriculums, methods, courses, classes, memberships, podcasts, articles, books, Facebook groups, and more, it can feel as if we’re suffocating. We want to make the right choice, the one that will ensure we form beauty-loving, goodness-pursuing, truth-filled children. We want our children to look back on their homeschooled days with gratitude, not resentment and bitterness for how flustered we were all the time and how ill-prepared they were for the future.
I wonder if when we give into that overwhelmed, anxious toiling, it’s because we’ve forgotten the true purpose of homeschooling? A friend of mine reminded me of our purpose as homeschooling moms with a story from her own at-home classroom.
As a friend of mine reviewed the school year with her daughter, she covered academics and then moved into the spiritual. In the beginning of the year, they discussed truth as objective and how to know what is true, and then
After a moment, her daughter said, “You know, Mom, I think that because of this year of homeschooling, I am becoming more human.”
Her mom smiled. “Explain that to me.”
Her daughter explained how God had sanctified her throughout the year, which meant she was becoming more and more like Jesus. That’s what made her “more human.”
While precious and adorable, this comment contains an important reminder for us moms. While of course we are all fully human and each made in the image of God, it’s true that an education which teaches us to pursue and love what is right and good makes us more whole and who God created us to be.
Charlotte Mason said that every child is born a person with a mind desiring and requiring to be fed by ideas. She believed that we lower a child’s humanity when we attempt to spoon-feed them pre-chewed ideas and opinions. Instead, she encouraged parents and educators to trust how God made their children—fully able to digest whole and grand ideas for themselves and gather the right principles from the books we read them. Therefore, as we nourish them on these grand ideas of God, history, science, math, words, and art, we are nurturing them as the fully-made humans that they already are.
Charlotte Mason believed there was more to education than simply equipping a child with only the things he needs to become successful in a well-paying job. She believed education should form our loves, our wills, and our minds. Education is more than stuffing knowledge into a bucket in our heads; it’s about forming children of character who love God and serve him. An education that accomplishes this molds us into Christlikeness, the way God intended us to be before the fall.
C. S. Lewis set out to show us what happens when we don’t offer this kind of education for our children: It leads to the abolition of man. When we only focus on one aspect of our children, such as their brains or their affections, we begin to form them into something un-human. If we abolish truth and reality for whatever each person values and believes, if we view dry facts as the only important part of education, we create heartless, affectionless children who do as they please with no care for those around them. They have not trained their affections, and so their affections turn in the very direction sin leads each of us naturally: ourselves.
Perhaps this only adds more stress to you. Now it feels like if you don’t choose the right curriculum and method, you’ll create some kind of sub-human monster. Let’s bring this back to its simplest level that both Mason and Lewis are saying: Education is about training our children to love what is right and pursue truth. It’s not just them either. Lewis quotes two others from history in Abolition of Man. “St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.” Education is about forming people who love God and see that all truth and goodness and beauty first come from his hands, because he is the source of truth and the most beautiful and good Being.
At the end of the day, you can do whatever method, choose whichever curriculum, join any co-op, participate in whatever courses you like as long as they are training your children to love what is right and pursue truth. This is what makes our children “become more human.” It wasn’t the classical, Charlotte Mason method that made my friend’s daughter proclaim that. It was the mom who loved her, served her, and sought each day to guide her daughter’s affections towards the good, the true, and the beautiful. That’s the work, and that’s why it’s women and mothers like her that I want to learn from as I grow into the role of a homeschooling mom.
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