Recently I was reading Volume 6 of Charlotte Mason’s Home Education Series. In her section explaining the nature of children as “born persons”, she acknowledges a striking truth: love and justice are the base of the affections.1
We have been endowed with the sense and capability of love and justice. No one has to teach a child what love is; they practice and desire it by nature. Virtually all of us at some point have had a small child come up to us with a gift. I remember being in Haiti on a mission trip where the orphans would let us play with their best soccer ball without us asking.
A child senses justice just as naturally, because everyone of them has cried for something to be fair. You don’t have to teach about injustice when someone else gets their way and they don’t.
These affections, though marred in many degrees, are endowed to us because we are made in the image of God. But love and justice are not just the base of the affections, they are the affections. All of the emotions we feel, in one form or another, come from either love or justice. Whether it be anger or sadness; kindness or disappointment; happiness or pride; bitterness or joy. They are either true or perverted forms of love and justice.
Love in education is found very easily. With this affection the student cultivates it not by having pre-packaged bite sizes of love for certain topics but by finds it on their own. Love of one subject may come naturally, but leaving it unchecked makes it a problem. The student is limiting their educational diet. No one lets a child only eat dessert. In the same way, no one should let a child only read history books. That provides a lack of nutrients.
In a classical education, the mind, body, and soul must be given a well-rounded meal everyday. No child is expected to eat only peaches and grow healthy. But if you give that child red meat, potatoes, and vegetables then you may expect it. The same is true for the classical mind, only when you give a wide range of maths, histories, sciences, fictions, plays, poems, paintings, sketches, musics, birds, tree, landscapes, languages, memorizations, recitations, stretches, sports, and other varied learnings of the world, then you may expect the mind, body, and soul to grow.
This is as necessary as feeding the child when they are ill-tempered due to hunger. How many of us find our angst removed when we take a long walk, listen to beautiful music, or read a classic? When we are given a nutrient dense education our temperaments change.
To grow the affection of love, we must feed the mind, body, and soul of the student. Giving them their daily bread grows them from babes to men. The same is true for education. Though they are “born-persons”, if you give them their daily bread, their love will grow and their humanity will flourish in the fullest sense of the word.
But what does education have to do with justice as an affection? Its effect is not as clear, but may go deeper. When a student is given a volume of Shakespeare, several things occur, not only referring to the physical copy placed into their hand. They are just things: the student is given a copy of one of the best pieces of English ever written, it gives a duty to the student for how they should love their neighbor, and it respects the past.
Justice is cultivated not only by the student learning what is right and wrong, but by giving them what is rightfully theirs. Shakespeare is their heritage and the heritage of the language they speak. By unlocking these doors the student is given their rightful claim of sonship. They may go off and squander it, only to find themselves eating from a pig trough, but the fact still remains that it was just to give them the title in which their name was inscribed.
It is also a training of justice in the mind, body, and soul of the student for the benefit of the teacher. Ms. Mason gives an example in that “he learns that ‘my duty towards my neighbour’ is ‘to keep my hands from picking and stealing’”.2 When a standard and nutritious education is given we are loving our neighbors who take on the task of training up the student. Education for the student is not only a lifestyle, but a duty. It is their duty to not squander what they have been given, and to act justly with love towards everyone.
Justice in a classical education trains the student to give the due honor to the history of the West. It trains the student to honor their father and their mother. It trains the student to become defenders of the past and preservers of the future. The justice is being done to the memory which seeks to be carried on the backs of their sons out of the enflamed city.
There is no greater responsibility than to love the right things rightly, and to justly give justice to whom it is due.
Page 58. Charlotte Mason’s Home Education Series. Volume 6, Philosophy of Education.
Page 61. Ibid.