I began my education career as a teacher of exceptional children, a positive way of saying students with physical and/or mental deficits. I spent many years in public education, learning the ways to identify, prescribe plans for, and educate these unique students. Fast forward a decade, and I found myself homeschooling my own children and being introduced to the words of Charlotte Mason.
Mason’s foundational first principle, every child is born a person, caused me to rethink and question everything I had learned about education, in particular, educating students with physical and learning challenges. As I endeavored to understand one of my own children, I struggled to separate all the things I had been told about labeling, supporting, and prescribing from the idea that this child of mine was born exactly the way they were born: a person of infinite possibilities.
As I walked back into a classical Christian general education classroom years later I struggled to reconcile how my background, Mason’s idea of every child is a person, and the classical vision of a robust education could influence and inform what I was doing in the classroom, and especially with challenging students. As my school struggled to address the needs of a specific student, I began to question how Mason’s principle influences how we, in this tradition, view students, particularly those with distinct needs.
In her second volume, Parents and Children, Mason describes humans as “spiritual beings invested with bodies, living, emotional, a snare to us and a joy to us. My efforts to harmonize these threads began from Mason’s conviction that each student is an embodied being. My background had taught me to view the labels, the deficits, first, yet Mason was pointing me towards the person first, and even more distinctly towards the imago dei present in each person.
Stradford Caldecott applies this to education, “too often we have not been educating our humanity. We have been educating ourselves for doing rather than for being.” When our focus is on doing, the gap in ability between children is obvious. When our focus is on being, the idea that every child is born a person, education becomes an achievable goal. Stratford continues, “The purpose of education is to enable that humanity to grow and flourish.” This humanity includes the parts of us that snare us. The parts of us that can cause a teacher to struggle with the one who cannot seem to do as the rest. But this child, this person, deserves and needs the beauty classical education can offer just as much as the others. Perhaps even more.
Mason was responding to the idea that children of poverty were not as intellectually capable as those raised in affluence. This was the root of her grounding principle: Every child is born with potential, but also born this side of Eden, where the Fall has created malformations; or, in her words, snares.
The tradition of classical Christian education at its essence entails formation. Exposing students to good things that point to truth and beauty so that they might know what is good and, in return, see and understand the goodness of our Savior. Can a child with intellectual challenges pursue an education like this? Perhaps the question should be, why can’t a child with intellectual challenges be given an education like this?
In my final year in public education, I taught exceptional children. I had two students who were severely disabled, both physically and mentally. These two students could not speak to me, and they couldn’t control their body movements. But I knew what they loved and what they didn’t. I had the opportunity to influence those loves, exposing them to beautiful music, sunlight on their face, delicious food, and the simple experience of touching something soft and lovely. I had the pleasure of helping them discover the beauty of language, so they could, in their own way, communicate. Their bodies were nothing but a snare to them, but they also experienced joy. John Paul II declared this beautifully in his 1986 address in Australia, “No matter what our weaknesses or limitationswhether physical, emotional or spiritualthe life of each one of us is unique; it has its beginning and its end in God’s own good time.”
To return to Mason’s idea of the body, she reminds us that as teachers, we are not the sole educators. Even considering the classical goal of forming a child’s character and the notion of in loco parentis, there remains an even greater teacher: the Holy Spirit. Mason calls this “the Educator of mankind, in things intellectual as well as in things moral and spiritual, giving us new thoughts of God and new hopes of Heaven, a sense of harmony in our efforts and an acceptance of all that we are.”
This acceptance of who we are, of who our students are, and how their minds do or do not work, should be at the forefront of all the decisions we make as teachers. Mason insists, the mind “is an infinitely great thing, present in completeness and power in even the dullest of our pupils.” Present in completeness and distinct as God has made it—this declaration roots a student’s value in dignity, not productivity. The ability to read a “great book” is nothing without the dignity of humanness. Consider one of Mason’s most famous quotes, “The question is not—how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education—but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?” Our jobs as educators should be to enlarge this room. Children with special needs often find themselves in the smallest room because they are seen as less than, or too hard to educate, or too expensive. Yet of course, as Lucas Burhan writes, “A student with special needs may have a different capacity for communication, mobility, or traditional logic, but they have a full capacity for divine love and human connection.” They too have the capacity for that large room.
If the goal of a classical education is formation, pointing students towards the Good, True, and Beautiful, and ultimately towards a greater knowledge of God, why are we not leading the way in educating all students? Our tradition of laying the very best in front of students to form their loves and to develop a taste for excellence should not be dependent upon a student’s capacity. If the ultimate task of education is the cultivation of the spirit, even the least of us can experience that.
Image Credit: Claude Monet, “The Poppy Field near Argenteuil” (1873)
