I am now reading Chapter 5 of Charlotte Mason's Towards a Philosophy of Education, her 6th book in her Homeschooling series. If you are new to homeschooling, or even if you're not and would like to learn about the Charlotte Mason method of teaching, read along with me. View her books in Ambleside Online and let's be amazed together.
I learned a new term this week. Maxima Reverentia Devetur Pueris. Google translate says it means the greatest respect is due to children. The greatest respect should be given to children. In other words, we owe our children the greatest respect. I looked back at the title of the chapter and it says The Sacredness of Personality. So I have a feeling that this chapter will talk about how parents and educators must not look down on children just because they are young and we are older.
I'm sure most of us were raised believing that children are only to be seen, not to be heard. That children should obey their parents' commands without question and just do as they are told. Children are seen as chess pieces that the parents move here and there, expecting the kids not to question the judgement of their parents. This chapter was a reminder to me that as parents, we need to stop thinking that we are superior from our children and that we may do to them as we please. This is an old notion that needs to be abolished. Our children does not belong to us but to the society, thus our responsibility is to make sure that they become productive citizens of the world in the future.
The term maxima reverentia devetur pueris means that we should respect our child as a person. Just like the way we would also want us to be respected by others. Children has their own personalities and like I always mention, we are just here to lay down the rails to them and simply watch as they unfold their personality before us. We need to be extra mindful and intentional with the way we treat our children so that they will feel free to truly let their personality shine.
As parent educators, we need to see that our children's brains are a very powerful spiritual matter, capable of understanding and digesting knowledge, which is why we need to feed them a banquet of ideas. The sooner we understand how powerful every child's brain is, the more effective and efficient teaching techniques could be formulated. Spoon feeding our children with endless information, explaining each topics to them before they could even reword it in their minds is simply undermining their ability to understand sentences and paragraphs on their own.
The more that the teacher talks, the less the student learns. I know it might seem counterproductive but we should know that our children are very much capable of understanding us without having to dumb down (or baby talk) the words for them. It is also very condescending of us to think that they need to repeatedly hear a passage or that they immediately need an explanation after reading a passage to them.
This is why I never repeat a reading to my little girl. I know she is capable of understanding me, she just needs to focus her attention when I talk to her or read to her during our lessons. It took me a lot of time to learn to respect her brain's capabilities. I was used to reading my books over and over again, I am used to reviews and refreshers. But with the Charlotte Mason method, I unlearned everything that I was taught from my childhood. Instead, I appreciated and learned to respect the personality of my child in our homeschooling journey. I respect that she is capable, I respect that her brain is powerful. She just does not know a lot of things yet, but with the way that she's studying now, I know she's going to discover a whole lot of things in the world. All she needs is for her parent educators to respect her ability and her personality.
maxima reverentia devetur pueris.
Ain't that a beautiful phrase?
