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The sense of must should be present with children; our mistake is to act in such a way that they, only, seem to be law-compelled while their elders do as they please.
Basically, parents are in charge, but that that does NOT mean parents have the right to make up and/or break rules merely to suit themselves. Being the authority figure does not mean you have the right to be a dictatorial autocrat and substitute your whims for rules and guidelines carefully reasoned and based on sound principles.
The parent or teacher who is pestered for 'leave' to do this or that, contrary to the discipline of the house or school, has only himself to thank; he has posed as a person in authority, not under authority, and therefore free to allow the breach of rules whose only raison d'être is that they minister to the well-being of the children.
If there are too many exceptions being made for your 'rules,' you should probably change the rules, as rules for which you can constantly make exceptions are rules that are apparently not in place for the well-being of the children and should be reconsidered.
An alternative is that you are carelessly disregarding of the well-being of the children, preferring to be the popular sugar-daddy sort of parent, and this is the sort of parent who is constantly 'pestered' for exceptions to the rule.
Some children are natural pesterers, of course, but I have found natural pesterers are strongly encouraged by any bending of the rules and it is best to have few, but strong and never bent rules for the child prone to pester for exceptions.
Two conditions are necessary to secure all proper docility and obedience and, given these two, there is seldom a conflict of wills between teacher and pupils.
Docility is a word we moderns loathe to hear in reference to children (or anybody, really), and it has fallen sadly out of fashion, in part because I think we misunderstand it.
It's always a good idea when reading an older book to use a dictionary contemporary with the author so as to see how the words the author uses were commonly understood at the time of the writing.
According to Webster's 1828 dictionary, it meant then:
Teachableness; readiness to learn; aptness to be taught.
We think of 'docile' as somewhat placid, complacent, dull and a little boring. But there is not any reason a lively, spunky, and interesting small human being cannot be docile- that is, engaged, cooperative, willing to meet the parent/teacher half way and ready and eager to learn.
So how do we get a child in a state of cooperative readiness to learn and the obedience necessary if you are to teach?
The conditions are,––the teacher, or other head may not be arbitrary but must act so evidently as one under authority [see also Parents and Children. By the Writer.] that the children, quick to discern, see that he too must do the things he ought; and therefore that regulations are not made for his convenience. (I am assuming that everyone entrusted with the bringing up of children recognises the supreme Authority to Whom we are subject; without this recognition I do not see how it is possible to establish the nice relation which should exist between teacher and taught.)
Basically, this is a further expansion of the first point in this section- do not be arbitrary and inconsistent, do not have rules based on your dictatorial whims- and, according to this author, recognize the supreme Authority, that is God, and that you are merely stewards of the children entrusted to you, not their owners.
The other condition is that children should have a fine sense of the freedom which comes of knowledge which they are allowed to appropriate as they choose, freely given with little intervention from the teacher. They do choose and are happy in their work, so there is little opportunity for coercion or for deadening, hortatory talk.
This point is a significant one in the Charlotte Mason method. To understand it, we must lay some groundwork.
First of all- hortatory talk according to Webster's 1828:
a. Encouraging; inciting; giving advice; as a hortatory speech.
I think of hortatory speeches as those manipulative, sugary sweet, artificial speeches that go something like this, "Now we want to be good little children, don't we, and so we do not want really want to take away the toy from little Joey or color in our picture books, do we? We want to use our nice words, don't we, and...."
Gak. The child is at a disadvantage because of his more limited vocabulary and small size, but most often when this sort of talky talky is going on, if he could only articulate it the child would most likely be responding belligerently, "WHO is this 'we?' Obviously I DO want to take the toy and color in my picture book or else I would NOT have done it!"
Hortatory talk would also be that talk which tells children what lessons they must draw from their books without giving them the opportunity to choose for themselves- even if sometimes they will choose what we would not.
Many people mistakenly believe the CM approach is child-led and that the teacher/parent is to do nothing but give the child books, and this is false. But it is true that Miss Mason did not wish the adults to come between the child and the books.
Charlotte didn't criticize teacher involvement, but she did want to see the teacher's input placed in proper proportion. She speaks of "new" educational systems (those quotation marks are scare quotes which Charlotte uses to indicate that she does not, in fact, consider them new), which offered a grain of knowledge diluted in a gallon of unnecesary words from the teacher. I think she wanted a different balance- not the teacher centered lecture method, and also not the child as center of the universe method- in fact, she specifically criticized "Rousseau's primitive man theory, that a child must get all his knowledge through his own sense and by his own wits, as if there were no knowledge waiting to be passed on by the small torch-bearer…" page 325, v 6
Let the children at their books, real books, living books. Do not give long, emotionally and intellectually manipulative speeches about the books, let them read the books. Certainly discuss them with the children, offer points for them to notice, but in proper proportion- that is, the book should not be dwarfed by long speeches and pages of worksheets.
quoted portions From Volume 6, Towards a Philosophy of Education, by Charlotte Mason, pages 72-73
