Using School Books, Part Three

Part One is here. Part Two is here.

Charlotte Mason never wanted to give too-pat answers about anything.  By her ambivalence here about listing particular books, she unintentionally fostered a long-standing gulf between those who say that "Charlotte Mason refused to list particular books for children so there is no such thing as a Charlotte Mason curriculum," and those who point to the fact that she did indeed spearhead a complete curriculum, with a long list of books, some of which is included in this same volume under the heading of work suitable for a twelve-year-old.

But in general, in the sense that she is meaning here, she leaves the choice of school books open to the (assumed) educated and intelligent adult who should be able to make those choices. Even in those days, though, one imagines the quick reaction--"Make it easier for us! Give us some examples!"  She insists that "we cannot make any hard and fast rule––a big book or a little book, a book at first-hand or at second-hand; either may be right provided we have it in us to discern a living book, quick [meaning full of life, not speedy], and informed with the ideas proper to the subject of which it treats."

She wants us to look for books that, like the Bible stories read to De Quincey, have the power of "giving impulse and stirring emotion." What seems to matter is whether a book has the power to awaken ideas, stir up children's curiosity, help them to look outside themselves and see the world in new ways. "The ideas it holds must each make that sudden, delightful impact upon their minds, must cause that intellectual stir, which mark the inception of an idea."  
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So our pile of good books is something like a mine full of many kinds of treasures, although we can't always be sure which ones are going to be wanted or picked up at any time.  And the work of mining them is what each student has to do for him or herself.  Here is where Charlotte does get specific, because it is clear that this "labour of thought" is a complex task. She wants the books to be used in such a way that the students can "dig their knowledge, of whatever subject, for themselves out of the fit book." "He must generalise, classify, infer, judge, visualise, discriminate, labour in one way or another, with that capable mind of his, until the substance of his book is assimilated or rejected, according as he shall determine; for the determination rests with him and not with his teacher."  The "single, careful reading," here described as "which the pupil should do in silence," although we know that some books were also read aloud, is key, as is requiring the child "to narrate its contents after a single attentive reading."

If you can read attentively, you should be able to give the main points of a description.  You should be able to tell a series of events in the right sequence.  You should be able to explain how someone argued a point.  You are a reporter!  You are a lawyer!  You are a historian!  You are a Scout studying first aid, and what you are reading and remembering about snake bites or burns will save someone's life.  You are a business person and if you miss something in a report--or fail to report it yourself--you could lose a lot of money or get fired.  You are, potentially, the mayor or the governor or the president, and if you can't make sense of the reports on a situation, and communicate those points to your people, you are going to put everyone in danger or, again, cost them lots of money and trouble. Or you just might not get re-elected.

To engage with the book (or, as Adler puts it, to play ball with the author, learning to catch what he throws); to pay close enough attention to verbally map out a, b, and c for someone else, and to do it "intelligently," is a power which even adult scholars "labour to acquire."  This is true literacy; this, Charlotte Mason says, separates readers from non-readers.

Part Four will finish the chapter.

Using School Books, Part Two...this wasn't what we were expecting?

Part One is here.

I just finished re-watching Disney's Frozen with Dollygirl.  If you haven't heard and seen it multiple times by now, one of the supporting characters is a snowman named Olaf, who "hasn't had much experience with heat" but who sings a song about all the things he's looking forward to in summer.  At the end of the song, one of the watching humans mutters, "I'm going to tell him," and the other replies, "Don't you dare."  It is a cheerful song, but of course it has implications of the snowman's expected eventual end, and of the increasing perils of the human characters as well.

And on the next page of School Education, chapter 16, we have a quotation from writer Thomas de Quincey, something about his early memories of hearing Bible stories and thinking of hot weather and Palm Sunday.  Charlotte Mason, perhaps because she thought we would already know it or perhaps because it wasn't part of her point, has given it to us without much context. But the rest of the story is readily available in De Quincey's Autographic Sketches.  He is remembering the sudden death of his sister, when they were both children. He is told that she has died, and creeps into her room, wanting to see her once more, but the bed has been moved and all he can see is an open window: "through which the sun of midsummer, at midday, was showering down torrents of splendor. The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, the blue depths seemed the express types of infinity; and it was not possible for eye to behold, or for heart to conceive, any symbols more pathetic of life and the glory of life."

He then explains why, then and afterwards, he made such personal connections between summer and sunshine, mortality and death, and this is the quotation about early Bible impressions that CM includes, that through the "younger nurse's" comments on the Bible stories, the impression he had gotten of Palestine, and Jerusalem in particular, was that it seemed to be a place of everlasting summer, but a summer particularly connected with death (because of the death of Christ). He seemed to think of death before resurrection, saying, "There [in Jerusalem] it was, indeed, that the human had risen on wings from the grave; but, for that reason, there also it was that the divine had been swallowed up by the abyss; the lesser star could not rise before the greater should submit to eclipse. Summer, therefore, had connected itself with death, not merely as a mode of antagonism, but also as a phenomenon brought into intricate relations with death by scriptural scenery and events." (italics mine)

Now obviously De Quincey was a more than usually perceptive and sensitive child.  But what is Charlotte Mason's point in including this story, which in its briefer form implies there is some value in reading the Bible to young children, but which, put in context, gives us a possibility of an even deeper sense of life (and perhaps death) given through those early impressions, and the gift of that understanding when death became real?  Clearly this is one of those places where, "if only we were wise," we would draw back from tampering or commenting on the stories as much as we often do; and at the same time, she seems to imply that we dare not deny our children the opportunity to hear them, and to know them deeply.

Olaf the snowman enjoys his dreams of summer, but he also recognizes his own fragility (he keeps breaking apart and getting put back together), and he sees the mortality of the humans around him--he tries to keep Princess Anna from freezing, and tells her that "some people are worth melting for."  Can we learn as much from a Disney supermovie as we can from Genesis?  No, although it might be worth thinking about the fact that such stories may be the only source of discussion material that some children have.  But we have the opportunity to give our children something much, much richer and more mysterious--a sense of eternity that must be given, as for little Thomas De Quincey, with reverence, and without much explanation and comment.

     But who shall parcel out

His intellect by geometric rules,

Split like a province into round and square?

Who knows the individual hour in which

His habits were first sown even as a seed?

Who that shall point as with a wand, and say

'This portion of the river of my mind

Came from yon fountain'? (William Wordsworth, Prelude II 243–249)

To be continued in Part Three.