For the Children’s Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay - Read Along #1

A book that was lived first and then written

Granite Island, Victor Harbor, South Australia

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Some background on the author:

In 1948, when she was seven years old, Susan Schaeffer Macaulay moved from the USA to post-war Europe with her family. Her parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, had left their secure life in St Louis, and arrived in war damaged Europe not really knowing what God wanted them to do or where the money for them to live on would come from. The Schaeffers saw the physical scars of the bombing and the severe conditions people were living under as far as food and shelter were concerned, but they saw beyond the outward destruction to the philosophical and theological damage; “bombs’’ which had torn up and scattered faith and orderly thinking. *

Settling in Switzerland, the Schaeffers began the L’Abri Community. L’Abri is the French word for ‘shelter’ and this community which functioned as a family, reached out to people from all walks of life and from many different countries and helped them in their search for truth and reality.

Susan grew up in this relational atmosphere of open hospitality and a rich home culture. Due to illness, she learnt at home during her high school years. When she married, she and her husband, Ranald, served at L’Abri with her parents and later established a L’Abri home in London.

Introduction

For the Children’s Sake takes the accuracy of the Christian view of the world for granted, but there are many ideas that can be put into practice by those who are not Christians. This book is a practical, balanced and human view of what education and life is all about. 

The author devotes a good part of her book to the work of Charlotte Mason, (1842-1923) an English Educator who spent 40 years of her life establishing a philosophy of education and putting it into practice. She had taught children and established a training college for future teachers; her ideas were put into writing and six volumes called, The Original Homeschooling Series, were published. Mason’s work was known internationally and materials from her schools were sent to families in the British dominions for use by governesses and others in teaching positions. The universal nature of Charlotte Mason’s ideas mean that they can be applied at home, in different kinds of schools, an orphanage in Africa, an Indian village, an inner-city school or a day-care centre.

As the Macaulays discovered Charlotte Mason’s writings in their search for educational options in the United Kingdom, they rightly wondered why her work, which had been prominent and respected in the field of education for so many years, had largely been forgotten. One reason was that the Christian worldview that had predominated in her time had become unpopular.

In the 1960’s “Progressive’’ education became the trend and developed more fully as teacher training shifted from an apprentice-style classroom model to a lecture-based course in colleges. The new liberal ideas rejected the constraints of a framework based on knowledge and moral behaviour and the ideas spread into primary schools in the USA and Britain.

Susan was a young parent in the 1960’s and 1970’s and witnessed the changes brought about by these new ideas:

• Primary school teachers were discouraged from using any structured teaching

• Textbooks and ‘’quiet’’ lessons were out

• The teaching of phonics and times tables were thought to be out of date

• Classes were open plan

Chapter 1

It was in London, as their first child was approaching school age that the Macaulays began their search for the best educational approach for her.

They wanted the best, but what was the best?

They visited schools and were discouraged by the overcrowded, noisy classrooms. They tried to figure out guidelines in education but couldn’t find a practical overview of the subject.

When our eldest child was about two we began to be asked about what school we’d send her to. At the back of my mind I was thinking that I didn’t want to send her to school. There were a number of reasons for this. A big one was that I’d seen the results of some of the schools in our area and they were not good – bad behaviour, poor academic outcomes and lack of respect generally.

I asked the State Department of Education for an outline of what a child at a Kindergarten level would be learning and was sent pages of gibberish, which left me none the wiser.

In Chapter 1 the author asks,

What is Education? What should we aim for when thinking about education?

The Macaulays found the best they could at the time & it went well until they moved. The new school and the programme of learning didn’t fit their child. Like many parents, they realised something was badly wrong & they desperately needed to do something about it. They took her out of the school, read books and played in the garden. But the Education Inspector told them it wasn’t satisfactory, that she needed to be in school. They didn’t realise then that he was wrong.

When we first began to seriously consider teaching our children ourselves instead of sending them to school, our state government was very anti-home education. You were required to register with them for permission to teach at home but if permission wasn’t granted there was no right of appeal. So, when the time came, we just didn’t apply and made sure we put in the work so that our children would get a quality education.

When I first read For the Children’s Sake back in 1988, I thought, “This is what I want my children’s education to look like!” I lived off the vision the book gave me for years before I ever had access to much else. I understood the why of what to teach; once you have that foundation in place you can then build even with minimal resources.

Education extends to all of life.

Since For the Children’s Sake’s publication in 1984, the educational landscape has changed considerably. She wrote then that, ‘’School is only one of the influences in a child’s life.’’

However, over time more and more areas of life have been placed under the banner of the educational establishment: sex education, manners, basic hygiene, good habits, beliefs; areas that were traditionally imparted through the home culture. So these are things we seriously have to consider.

Who should decide what a child learns? What is appropriate, beneficial or even necessary?

Parents need to evaluate their priorities…What is really important? The sacred career? Educational institutions make poor substitute mothers, fathers and homes.

Alongside the observation that T.V (or any type of screen time for that matter) becomes a sedative which interferes with active play, reading, talking, sharing, etc. Macaulay highlights something important,

Planned activities crowd out personal growth and creativity.

I’ve noticed that this is something that afflicts home educators as well. Often in a bid to ‘make up’ for the social stimulation that a school provides, we resort to running around from activity to activity, filling a child’s day. Some families don’t ‘home’ school because they’re never home. There are now so many groups for families whose children are not in school that you can do multiple planned activities every day.

Boredom isn’t a bad thing for a child to feel. When I was growing up we learnt very quickly not to say we were bored - my mum would always find some work for us to do if we did. It was an impetus for us to go outside and get creative.

This chapter ends with this comment:

Much of what follows goes mostly goes against daily pattern of most lives.

Sometimes we have to swim against the current. Are we willing to do that “for the children’s sake?’’

In Conclusion

For the Children’s Sake helped to bring Charlotte Mason’s ideas back for our times. Her principles may be applied to different generations of children wherever they are in the world. 

You may have read quotations from Charlotte Mason’s books and thought her ideas a bit too antiquated for today. You may have seen lists of the books she used and thought that your children would never want to read them. However, as Macaulay points out,

‘Education is an adventure that has to do with central themes, not the particular packages a given generation puts into them…don’t throw out the ideas along with the materials.’

Resources

*L’Abri by Frances Schaeffer

When Children Love to Learn - Elaine Cooper, General Editor

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