Education is a discipline: to a point.

"That the discipline of the habits of the good life, both intellectual and moral, forms a good third of education, we all believe. The excess occurs when we imagine that certain qualities of character and conduct run out, a prepared product like carded wool, from this or that [i.e. from any one particular] educational machine, mathematics or classics, science or athletics; that is, when the notion of the development of the so-called faculties takes the place of the more physiologically true notion of the formation of intellectual habits." ~~ Charlotte Mason, "A Master Thought," School Education

We can make the educational mistake of thinking of and treating students as machines or as objects, as computers to be programmed or clay to be shaped.

But we can equally make the mistake of thinking of education itself as a sort of machine. If we put in the right ingredients, plug it in, crank it up, out comes the product, whatever flavour we want.

What, more explicitly, is this mistake that Charlotte Mason says we might be making? First, she says that a certain amount of discipline is obvious and necessary; fine, we agree. But when the belief creeps in that certain subjects are important because they create disciplined thinking, and when we think that the discipline of studying mathematics or science will strengthen not only those lagging parts of our brains but also the lagging parts of our character--there we have the big misconception.  Practicing the discipline of one subject area will not make you an overall good thinker, or a better person. It will not keep you from building a little cat door for the little cat and a big cat door for the big cat.

One night when Pa was greasing the traps he watched Black Susan come in, and he said:"There was once a man who had two cats, a big cat and a little cat." 

Laura and Mary ran to lean on his knees and hear the rest. 

"He had two cats," Pa repeated, "a big cat and a little cat. So he made a big cat-hole in his door for the big cat. And then he made a little cat-hole for the little cat." 

There Pa stopped.

"But why couldn't the little cat--”" Mary began. 

"Because the big cat wouldn't let it," Laura interrupted. 

"Laura, that is very rude. You must never interrupt," said Pa."But I see," he said, "that either one of you has more sense than the man who cut the two cat-holes in his door."

The Herbartian belief, in Charlotte Mason's day, was that certain studies would develop "the faculties." Mason argued that the human brain showed no evidence of such faculties, but that what neuroscientists were beginning to see was the physiological effect of mental habits. Neuroscience continues to advance today, and with fascinating results, for instance with stroke victims whose brains demonstrate an amazing ability to create new patterns and habits.

So as Mason says right after the passage that I quoted, there's sometimes a very fine distinction, but a very great difference in effect, between two types of thought and practice.  Like the right amount of yeast that raises a bowlful of dough, discipline is a necessary part of education.  But only in its proper proportion, used for its proper function.

(The pizza dough story is from The Daily Mail.)

Charlotte's Lean and Mean Curriculum (School Education)

Charlotte Mason frequently refers to the Parents' Review School curriculum as wide and generous, but, paradoxically, it achieves some of its power by what it does NOT include.  There is a certain spareness to its subjects and its presentation that may not have been as noticeable at the time, but in comparison to many educational plans now, seems like a streamlined racing bike set up against one of these.

As I said in the last post, both school administrators and homeschooling parents can still be frightened off by a lack of detailed instruction, especially for difficult or unfamiliar books.  But there seemed to be (at least) two reassurances in this area:  first, if you weren't up to choosing your own books in 1903, you could join the Parents' Union and take advantage of experienced teachers recommending books that had, often, been used successfully for many terms already. Second, if you had at least that much confidence in the books, and some awareness of the "Charlotte Mason" philosophy and methods, you could feel free, in most cases, to jump in and read.

In The Art of Reading, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch gives a wonderful lecture to his English Literature students about "Children's Reading." Here's an excerpt, and please notice that he follows both the careful choosing and to the just-go-ahead, don't-interrupt style of reading also favoured by the P.U.S.:

If, then, you consent with me thus far in theory, let us now drive at practice. You have (we will say) a class of thirty or forty in front of you. We will assume that they know their a—b, ab, can at least spell out their words. You will choose a passage for them, and you will not (if you are wise) choose a passage from Paradise Lost: your knowledge telling you that Paradise Lost was written, late in his life, by a great virtuoso, and older men (of whom I, sad to say, am one) assuring you that to taste the Milton of Paradise Lost a man must have passed his thirtieth year. You take the early Milton: you read out this, for instance, from L’Allegro:

	Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee
	Jest and youthful Jollity,
	Quips, and Cranks, and wanton wiles,
	Nods and Becks, and wreathed Smiles
	Such as hang on Hebe’s cheek,
	And love to live in dimple sleek;
	Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
	And Laughter holding both his sides….

Go on: just read it to them. They won’t know who Hebe was, but you can tell them later. The metre is taking hold of them (in my experience the metre of L’Allegro can be relied upon to grip children) and anyway they can see ‘Laughter holding both his sides’: they recognise it as if they saw the picture. Go on steadily...

So if Charlotte's curriculum is generous but not weighed down, what does it not include?  As already seen, verbose instructions to either the teacher or the students. Word-by-word scripts to follow.  Complicated methods of evaluation. But also, without constant dependence on readers and textbooks that include chapter questions and end-of-unit tests, there is a lightening of the expectation to teach the book rather than the child (Ruth Beechick's phrase).  If it's there to be used, you can feel very guilty about not using it. You paid for the program, you want your money's worth.

Last year I looked (briefly) at a contemporary grade 7 language-arts-and-literature textbook, which was basically a reader but with assignments included.  I kind of liked some of the assignments, but this is where I got stuck: if we spent all year working through those relatively few poems, short stories, and pieces of non-fiction writing, when would we have time to get through the Shakespeare play, the novels, and the rest that I expected would make up the meat of our grade 7 literature course?  So here's the crux: which approach is "leaner and meaner?"  Cutting down what the students get to read to a few poems and stories (and not particularly amazing ones), and a couple of newspaper articles?  Or cutting out the weight of the assigned projects, the chapter questions and so on, and just spending that time reading and narrating?

I guess it depends on whether you define "lean and mean" as skimpy and lacking, or as classic and powerful.

So, a curriculum? What does Mrs. Krabappel think? (School Education)

 "The curriculum which should give children their due falls into some six or eight groups--Religion, Philosophy (?) (question mark is hers), History, Languages, Mathematics, Science, Art, Physical Exercises, and Manual Crafts." ~~ Charlotte Mason, School Education (1903)

This seems like kind of a funny list, or at least one that has some strange gaps in it, especially after all Charlotte's talk about education based on books.  Where are Literature, Writing, Grammar, Geography, and so on?   They're in there--these are just broad headings.

Bible, is, obviously, Bible; but it's not clear what she meant just here by Philosophy (with the question mark), since there isn't any discussion of it.  History, in this era, included Plutarch.Under Language she mentions English grammar and literature, although if you look in the included sample programme, literature selections for the term are included under history.  She then discusses "Practical Instruction," with comments on Science (meaning mostly natural history, and that includes the books they were reading in that area); and finally Drawing and Picture Talks.

But if you really want to know what they were doing in the different subjects, at all the different levels, you have to read the Appendices.  The specific subjects for Form or Class III are Bible Lessons and Recitations (Poetry and Bible passages); English Grammar, French, German, and Latin; Italian (optional) English, French, and Ancient History (Plutarch's Lives); Singing (French, English and German); Writing, Dictation, Drill; Drawing in Brush and Charcoal; Natural History (included a book on animals), Botany (practical work and readings from two or three books on plants), Physiology (one book), Geography; Arithmetic; Geometry, and Reading (books from Geography, English history, French history, and "tales" (not explained here)). Literature, including Scott's poems in this term, is included under History, but the examination question seems to expect knowledge of Scott's novels, and it isn't clear how this was to be covered. Composition is not taught as a subject, because "no considerable writer was ever taught the art of 'composition.'"  "Writing" meant copywork.  "Dictation" was given from a book not scheduled elsewhere, Growth and Greatness of our World-wide Empire.  There are some "work" (craft) suggestions at the end of the programme.

And if you're at all familiar with Charlotte Mason's methods, you can fill in a lot of what is not specifically listed there--narration, nature notebooks and so on.

Actually, what we do ourselves isn't too far off from that, if you subtract the multiple languages and Drill.  But I'm trying not so much to compare this to our own family's middle school work as to think about how that would fit into one of those overblown government curriculum descriptions, or with certain other conceptions of education.  Assume that we have up-to-date, excellent books in all those areas, so we are hypothetically eliminating the problem of "Victorian books."  Who can you imagine objecting?

My thought is that the educational establishment we have in North America would take a long time to accept a term programme that simply says, for Physiology, "Read and narrate this book."

It doesn't seem like enough work for the teacher; it sounds like Mrs. Krabappel gets to put her feet up even more than she already does. It doesn't provide enough work for the curriculum writers and packagers.  It's not specific or extensive enough.  There aren't enough reproducibles. There isn't enough accountability.

But what if they did?  What if they tried it?  What if the confused kid in Bart's class actually learned something?

In the end it isn't about teaching, teachers, administrators, or textbook committees.  It's about learning. It's about the students.

Theodore shouted, 'Hey, Mrs. Collins, that's cool.  Everything links into something else, doesn't it?'  Marva beamed.  'Now you've got it.  Every scholar, every writer, every thinker learned from those who came before.  You are all becoming so erudite, we are going to have to dub you MGM--'Mentally Gifted Minors.'" ~~ Marva Collins' Way

How to fail at teaching--and it's more work to fail (School Education)

At the end of School Education, Charlotte Mason does talk very specifically about what a curriculum based on her "educational manifesto"--she jokingly refers to it as the Children's Magna Carta--would look like.  Or what it did look like in 1903, twelve years after the Parents' National Educational Union had begun to offer a formal curriculum.  I tend to think of this time in the P.U.S. as sort of its adolescence, if childhood was the beginning period in the 1890's, and maturity was sometime in the teens through the time of Mason's death in 1923.  Middle age?--the still-going-strong nineteen-twenties, thirties, forties, probably till after the war.   Declining years would be the time of increasing school standardization, changing culture, and other things that seemed to de-popularize PNEU methods, at least for a while.

But anyway, what she's describing here is not too far off from the format of the term programmes I'm more familiar with, those of the 1920's and early 1930's.  There are some book differences, especially in subjects like mathematics and grammar, and some of the subjects aren't as fleshed-out here as they were later on, but the overall shape of the curriculum had been pretty much set by this time.  In fact, she suggests that the PNEU had now been "beta-tested" enough in private homes to be recommended to classroom teachers.

Buried in those notes just before the end of the book, she gives a list of six causes of failure in education.

a)  Too many oral lessons.
b)  Too many lectures.
c)  Too many "text-books."
d)  Focusing on any intellectual motivation other than the desire of knowledge, e.g. prizes, liking the teacher
e)  Too many gadgets, manipulatives and models
f)  Too many "Readers."

Four out of those six items on the list are basically the same thing: read books, real books.  Isn't that a relief for teachers?  Maybe not such good news for textbook publishers, but doesn't that actually take the pressure off the rest of us?

You do not have to know everything. You do not have to spend hours Googling information and activities to teach the circulatory system or the Elizabethan stage. You do not need to buy out the teacher's store, or have every science kit in the homeschool catalogue. You do not need a rack of expensive teaching posters, or a boxful of stickers. You do not have to depend either on your own superior knowledge, or on the availability of the latest technology.  It seems to me that you'd have to put more effort and money into these less productive activities, than you would in simply offering a generous serving of books, sauced with some real things and other "affinities."  It's less burdensome to do what's more productive....to let the students dig for themselves.

(photo found here)

For some reason that reminds me of one of John Holt's books*, where he had bought a Polaroid camera and decided, on the spur of the moment, to unbox it and try it out right there in the classroom. Here's a package, here's what's in it, here's the camera, here's the instruction booklet, let's try it out together. What's this for? What if we try that?  Can I do it too?  This may sound like it's getting away from Charlotte's emphasis on books and natural objects, but here's my point:  this activity came out of something real.  It did not take John Holt hours to plan.  It did not come with worksheets or a quiz afterwards.  It did not come in a package marked "Afternoon with a Polaroid Camera: Oral Communication and Technology Objectives."   It wasn't a lecture, it wasn't even an oral lesson--it was an experience with a real thing that grownups were using. Yes, the kids enjoyed it partly because they liked John Holt, but what they really wanted to know was what was in the box and how it worked.

Charlotte repeats her point on page 247, the last page of the main text:  "that the young people shall learn what history is, what literature is, what life is, from the living books of those who know."  Yes, she says, many of the best schools did use books, but, in her opinion, not enough of them, and they didn't make full use of them.  So she adds appendices to show "how a wide curriculum and the use of many books work in the Parents' Review School."**

*Holt's book What Do I Do Monday? has some fantastic ideas for getting kids engaged with concepts such as size, speed, and strength, using "real" measurement tools.

**What the Parents' Union School was called at that time.

(For related posts, click on the Volume Three label below.)

Ruskin and Wordsworth go under Charlotte's microscope (School Education)

Did you ever read an autobiography and wish you could have lived in that person's family? Or not, as the case may be?

In the last several chapters of School Education, Charlotte Mason gives a sort of bucket list of the things that children need, the relationships (intimacies, affinities) they need to form; she's been over this ground earlier in the book.  She then spends a number of pages setting up her list against the childhood memories of William Wordsworth and John Ruskin, from Wordsworth's Prelude and Ruskin's Praeterita.  As a little postscript, she includes Wordsworth's advice on prigs.

That's it, that's what all that poetry and quoting is about.  Ruskin wanted to ride a pony, a real pony, just ride it outdoors and imagine he was really going somewhere and doing something; he thought afterwards that that might have made him a bit less of a wuss.

His parents signed him up for indoor riding lessons, but those were a failure, maybe because his heart wasn't in it.  He also spent a lot of time by himself, and he didn't have anybody to take him on nature walks and tell him the names of things, so he settled for collecting pebbles.

Wordsworth, on the other hand, spent most of his time with his friends, skating and swimming and stealing birds' nests. (What Charlotte calls Dynamic Relations.)

They both had books that fascinated them; they both had more-or-less similar opportunities to see art and experience a few of the other things on the list. Wordsworth appears to have had a more balanced, less neurotic upbringing than Ruskin, but in the end they both achieved greatness, contributed to the world.

Charlotte's final point: Ruskin and Wordsworth were each intelligent enough to overcome childhood difficulties, to make the most of what they had.  Even Ruskin's pebbles were the beginning of a lifelong interest in geology. But what if Ruskin hadn't had so many disappointments, had had more time to just play outdoors, make friends, have a few more of those affinities in place? What more could he have become? We'll never know.

And all that sounds like a recipe for pure parental guilt, especially if we can't send our children to kindergarten in the woods.  As Charlotte says in her first volume, a quick daily march around the square won't do either.  So what can one do if one doesn't live in a nature-friendly area or one doesn't have sympathetic neighbours or one has babies and toddlers, or illness, or blizzards?

The answer is, the best one can.  After all, knowing what children need is what opens our eyes to opportunities.

Using School Books, Part Four: Hammering the point home

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Let's take a history book, says Charlotte Mason.  Or it could be a science book, or a story of travel, or an essay of Bacon's, but let's use a history book as our example.

Let's really use it.  Let's narrate it, yes, but as we go on we may find there are other equally valid ways to use school books. Maybe we don't have to have older students constantly narrating in the usual sense, if they're also learning to question and analyze what they see and read.

Let's "analyse a chapter." Not just observe and tell back, but, since we have bigger students now, they're allowed to look at the underpinnings, how things are put together, how writers work and how thinkers think. Mortimer J. Adler spends quite a bit of time on analysis in How to Read a Book.  Can the students pick out and line up the points of an argument?  Can they take a chapter and make up subheadings for the different sections?  Can they discuss how a character's character drove the plot (or the historical events)?  Can they see how one event caused another?  On getting to the point in Ivanhoe where the castle lies in ruins and several people are dead, does it occur to the students that the whole mess was caused by De Bracy's mischievous kidnapping plot, and more than that, by his lack of Will?  And who is the real villain of the story?--Brian de Bois Guilbert, because of his own defects of character; or the master of the Templars, who uses even Brian to further his own agenda?  But these questions are not necessarily to be asked by the teacher and responded to (in a double-spaced paragraph with a topic sentence and conclusion) by the student.  The student should be learning to ask the questions for him/herself.

"Let the pupil write for himself half a dozen questions which cover the passage studied; he need not write the answers if he be taught that the mind can know nothing but what it can produce in the form of an answer to a question put by the mind to itself."

And oh yes, a P.S. from Charlotte:  what do the teachers do?

"The teacher's part is, in the first place, to see what is to be done, to look over the work of the day in advance and see what mental discipline, as well as what vital knowledge, this and that lesson afford; and then to set such questions and such tasks as shall give full scope to his pupils' mental activity."  We are responsible for making sure that the students have lots of opportunity to engage (that favourite new word of educationalists) with the material--that they have to think.

And then when the bell rings, or our homeschool equivalent?  Do the students then run off into the sunshine and throw off what belongs to school time and the teacher?  If that's what happens, something has gone wrong.  The lessons are to inspire life and conduct, or, as Charlotte Mason says elsewhere, they are to instruct our consciences, to teach us how to live. She also points out (in Ourselves) that consciences are kittle cattle--capricious, unpredictable, and able to sniff out a lecture and stuff up their ears (so to speak) in rebellion. It is not a case even of "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down"--that's twaddle. We are not looking for medicine at all, or even energy drinks, but solid food.  And we need to beware of sacrificing the "soul of books" to the demands of Analysis.

"Let us not in such wise impoverish our lives and the lives of our children; for, to quote the golden words of Milton: 'Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was, whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. As good almost kill a man, as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a good reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself––kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.'" ~~ Charlotte Mason, School Education

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."  
.

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 One

This month's Charlotte Mason blog carnivals are based on her Volume 3, Chapter 16, How to Use School Books.  The first one was posted yesterday at I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes Unto the Hills, but there will be another on the same chapter in two weeks.  So I'm going to work through that topic too, over the next few posts.

Point One:  Charlotte says that first we should have "cleared our minds as to the end we have in view." 

In some cases, discussion could stop right there while we work that one out.  Do we know where we're going?  What's it all about?  But she assumes that, having read and given thought to the previous fifteen chapters, we're good to go.

Point Two: "We ask ourselves––'Is there any fruitful idea underlying this or that study that the children are engaged in?'" The key word here is "idea."  "Some great thought of life."  We are looking for subjects and studies that encourage the development of intellectual habit and "muscle," but (she says about three times here), it's not about "faculties," it's about "persons" and relationships.  Making connections.  Discovering "other minds."

Mr. Fixit and I were watching Foyle's War the other night, and there was a scene in which a character named Willis is being interviewed for a position with the secret service.  The department head turns Willis down because he didn't go to the right schools, but Foyle remarks, "I understand we're looking for people who are astute, with an ability to see the other person's point of view."  (Later in the episode, Willis has the opportunity to prove Foyle right.)   

That's the definition of "education" that this chapter is taking.  You cannot make wise judgments if you do not have the imagination to see that there can be more than one side to an issue.  And you cannot develop that imagination without wide experience, both real-life and through the medium of books (even if it's just Jemima Puddleduck). It is not even, always, an imagination that allows only pleasant, sympathetic, optimistic views of people and their motives.  For fictional detectives like DCS Foyle, Brother Cadfael, and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, it's imagination that allows them to try to think like the criminal and (usually) solve the case.

But, assuming that we're not applying to MI5, what kind of goals do we have for ourselves and for our children?  According to the next paragraph, we need to care about being:

responsive and wise,
humble and reverent,
recognising the duties and the joys of the full human life.

Charlotte optimistically adds, " I suppose every life is moulded upon [that] ideal."

In her upcoming book, Karen Glass points out that classical education teaches that moral or right thinking must lead to action.  It's not enough just to be imagining ideals and recognizing duties; a verb is implied there. In the Foyle episode, Willis shows exactly what he is made of by risking his own life to rescue someone else. Conversely, Charlotte Mason mentions (years later, after the war) that she is disappointed in the way that "education" seems to fail so many:

"If we ask in perplexity, why do so many men and women seem incapable of generous impulse, of reasoned patriotism, of seeing beyond the circle of their own interests, is not the answer, that men are enabled for such things by education? These are the marks of educated persons; and when millions of men who should be the backbone of the country seem to be dead to public claims, we have to ask,––Why then are not these persons educated, and what have we given them in lieu of education?" ~~ Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education

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.