How do we measure success? Charlotte Mason said it wasn’t how much a child knows, but how much he cares, and the connections he makes. Most of the time, I don’t get much indication of how much any of my children care. I worry just like anyone else about where I’m falling short. When the kids were young, it was sometimes really hard to find signs of caring and connections. Somehow my kids never seemed to act out the stories they read in school like I hear about other people’s children doing.
Now that they’re older, I’m more likely to see connections in a dinner table argument over Richard III. I’d prefer not to have the argument, but it’s undeniable that the participants both know and care about the history they’ve studied. My kids normally don’t love their handicrafts, and that’s a subject that gets skipped regularly by at least one of them. But that one has voluntarily taken up macrame to make holders for planters. Sometimes a narration will reference other things we’ve learned about in the past, or will include a strong disagreement with the author’s opinion. These sporadic glimpses of caring and connections show me that we’re on the right track.
Mostly I have to see the success in forward progress, slow and incremental. So my 11 year old still has unsteady handwriting and can only write three or four words a day, but this is much better than the beginning of this year: he writes in cursive, he’s improving regularly, and he does it on his own. These are all huge improvements, so they constitute success even if copywork for us looks very different from someone else. Sometimes doing both a full Shakespeare play and a full Life from Plutarch is too much in a term; we sometimes switch off between the two or spread them over a longer period of time. If we’re still doing the plays and the lives regularly, slowly is still a success for us. We’re still getting the feast, just at a pace that we can handle.
Success is not about how we measure up to our own expectations. It’s not about how we compare to what we hear about other families’ accomplishments. It’s not about how completely we implement every piece of a Charlotte Mason education. Success is about how we persevere in spreading the feast, guarding the personhood, cultivating the love, making forward progress at a pace that isn’t destructive.
Imperfection is reality. We have to come to terms with the pressure our own pride and insecurity put on us. We have to put aside the pride that pushes us to achieve visible successes so we can feel successful, pushes us to achieve them *even if* those visible successes are not the right course for us right now. We have to get past the insecurity that tells us that someone else’s definition of success is what we have to achieve in order to know we’re doing well.
Charlotte Mason gave us a wide array of sign posts to aim for on our journey, of modes of transport that will help us get to our destination. Every one of them is good and useful, but not all of them are possible or even desirable in every family, for every child, at every time. The principles are still true no matter what, but what they look like in implementation changes based on our situation.
Some of the principles show us where we’re headed, our destination. For instance, we want our children to love the world around them, past, present, and future. That’s one of our goals. Some of the principles tell us how we can legitimately move toward that destination. Children are born persons, and our path toward the goals must respect our children’s personhood. Keeping the principles in front of us reminds us where we’re going and how we can safely get there, but it doesn’t tell us exactly how we need to travel along the way. So we have to make our plans with those principles in mind but also use our judgment.
A few weeks ago, I needed to get from one activity in a neighboring city to pick up a child at another activity in my town. I don’t know my way around in that neighboring city, so I thought I would follow someone else who did. I quickly realized that person wasn’t headed the same direction I needed to go, so I changed course, but by then I didn’t know which way I was going. I tried to wing it and got lost, so I pulled up a map app to help me get my bearings. The app couldn’t really get oriented at first and it sent me down a sketchy road to turn around. I went even when I knew I shouldn’t, simply because I didn’t want to stop and figure out where to go. The path on the screen looked safe enough, and finding my own path seemed unnecessary and time consuming. I followed the app down a path I had serious misgivings about, and it led me right into a hole. I couldn’t get out! I was totally stuck and unable to go anywhere. I tried to let the map rule me, to listen to the experts rather than my own judgment, and it ended in disaster.
I’ve often done something just like that in my parenting and my homeschooling. I read a book or listened to a comment and decided that I needed to change course in order to get a child sleeping through the night or potty trained or reading well or any of a number of lovely outcomes. But I didn’t stop to consider where I was on the grand parenting map and what was the best route for us to get closer to the goal (or even if this particular destination was a valid stop for us on the way to our ultimate goal).
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