On books, for Sarah

Sarah asked in a previous comment:

"Please forgive me if I'm missing something key--there have been so many wonderful posts and I haven't read them as slowly as I wanted to. But if I may ask for a little clarification, what is the difference between a 'living' book and a book that is considered a 'classic'? Or a book that is simply of high quality, but lacking true meat? What are the qualities we should look to when evaluating books for our children?

"I usually put an audiobook on when I am in the car with my children. I spent the half hour to my parents house listening the the Francis audiobooks and wondering if it qualified as 'twaddle' or not. Also, my children are 6, 4, and a toddler. We enjoy many books together in the evenings, including The Boxcar Children, My Father's Dragon, etc. Again, twaddle? Classics, but not living? I'd appreciate any clarification you might have to offer!"

OK...by "classic" I don't think you mean classical, right? In other words, something that is considered "classic literature" but not Herodotus? I don't know if there is one definitive list, although there are some children's classics that spring to mind, those that are usually included in sets of children's classic novels--the obvious ones, Heidi, Tom Sawyer, Robin Hood (in a literary version like Pyle's), Little Women, Alice in Wonderland, and the others of that type, along with fairy tales, Mother Goose, and some "classic" children's poetry like A Child's Garden of Verses. If we're talking about children's classics, of course a lot of the older ones weren't meant necessarily to be children's books, but were taken up by children anyway. And sometimes you wonder how certain books get put on a "children's classics" list--for instance, the much-maligned Great Illustrated Classics series (which I don't like either) includes abridged versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Pride and Prejudice, neither of which I consider of any great interest to children still at the Heidi stage. (Although I do remember one of my preschoolers taking a great interest in "That grumpy man" (Mr. Darcy) when we watched P&P years ago.) Anyway, in that sense I think a "classic" is just an excellent book that has stood the test of time, and one that's probably well known. Something that you're missing out on if you never get around to reading.

Living books? I think that comes out of Charlotte Mason's stand against textbooks that were all dry facts, tables, lists, reigns of one king after another without any interesting details. Originally the only antidote to those that she could think of, at least for history, was to go back as far as possible to the medieval chroniclers, who, she felt, at least intended to tell a good story. Later in her school programmes she did include more books that were written for children, but she still looked for writing that did not talk either down to them or over their heads. Often that would mean a book maybe on birds that had been written by someone who actually spent a lot of time watching birds and could tell you all the interesting things about them--not just which species have certain kinds of beaks, but what they do with those beaks. I think the idea of "living books" leaves a lot of room for undiscovered treasures and newer books, ones that may not be considered classics but that are interesting, useful, written with good literary style, and that give you the sort of details that will help you remember what's being taught--the "meat," as you said. They might be fiction, but don't have to be.

Does that answer the question?

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #16

[Update: this has been somewhat shortened from its original posting.]

I promised something slightly different today...so I have invited Charlotte Mason and some online friends to participate in an online discussion. Watch out, you may find yourself quoted.

Mama Squirrel: Miss Mason, there are some principles discussed at the end of Home Education that I had to skip over in my description of your methods. Could you please tell us about those?

Charlotte Mason: There are two secrets of moral and intellectual self management which should be offered to children; these we may call the Way of the Will and the Way of the Reason. The Way of the Will is that children should be taught to distinguish between 'I want' and 'I will.' They should be taught that the way to will effectively is to turn our thoughts from that which we desire but do not will; that the best way to turn our thoughts is to think of or do some quite different thing, entertaining or interesting; and that, after a little rest in this way, the will returns to its work with new vigour.

Mama Squirrel: So we are to will ourselves not to will something?

Charlotte Mason: No, the aim of diversion is to ease us for a time from will effort, that we may 'will' again with added power.

Mama Squirrel: So this is a method that we can give to children to use?

Charlotte Mason: No; in the first place, the Will is something that is developed as the children mature; before they are ready to use it fully, they must make more use of Habit. While the child has no character to speak of, but only natural disposition, who is to keep humming-tops out of a geography lesson, or a doll's sofa out of a French verb? And where is the harm? In this: not merely that the children are wasting time, though that is a pity; but that they are forming a habit of never focusing fully on anything, and reducing their own capacity for mental effort. The help, then, is not the will of the child but in the habit of attention, a habit to be cultivated even in the infant.

Second, the Way of the Will is not a tool of behavioural change such as hypnosis. The use of suggestion––even self suggestion––as an aid to the will, is to be condemned, as tending to stultify and stereotype character.

Mama Squirrel: I don’t quite understand that. You are saying that by repeating something like “I will not have another chocolate” or “No, I really don’t want to do that” even if you really do, you are misdirecting the power of the will by treating yourself like a robot?

Charlotte Mason: Yes. It is better to stop trying to force the will, to think of something different, and then to put it back to work after a short break.

Mama Squirrel: If something very systematic, on the order of self-hypnosis, would be more effective in teaching you to want something or to change a habit, why would it not be a better idea to use it? Perhaps it would be even less of an effort for us, if we could just have that little voice talking to our subconscious. Like those motivational tapes that say, “Yes, I really am a good housekeeper. I always wash dirty dishes whenever I see them. Dust bunnies make me cringe. I attack clutter viciously. I love housework.”

Charlotte Mason: It would seem that spontaneity is a condition of development, and that human nature needs the discipline of failure as well as of success.

Mama Squirrel: So if I changed my dusting habits through suggestion, then I might have a cleaner house but I would have not have developed my Will?

Charlotte Mason: Yes. This also applies more generally to education. A System is easier than a Method. A 'system of education' is an alluring fancy; more so, on some counts, than a method, because it is pledged to more definite calculable results. By means of a system certain developments may be brought about through the observance of given rules. It is so successful in achieving precise results, that it is no wonder there should be endless attempts to confine the whole field of education to the limits of a system.

Cindy: This exactness is so appealing. It gives us a feeling of accomplishment and success. It allows us to focus on classroom management rather than ideas. We use the tools of learning as weapons against our students. We don't give them the tools, we use the tools on them.

Charlotte Mason: If a human being were a machine, education could do no more for him than to set him in action in prescribed ways, and the work of the educator would be simply to adopt a good working system or set of systems.

Mama Squirrel: All right--what about the Way of the Reason?

Charlotte Mason: The Way of the Reason means that we should teach children not to 'lean' (too confidently) 'unto their own understanding,' because of the function of reason is, to give logical demonstration (a) of mathematical truth; and (b) of an initial idea, accepted by the will. In the former case reason is, perhaps, an infallible guide, but in the second it is not always a safe one, for whether that initial idea be right or wrong, reason will confirm it by irrefragable proofs.

Mama Squirrel: I find that easier to understand than the Way of the Will. Most people would probably agree that we can rationalize even our irrational beliefs and behaviour.

Charlotte Mason: Children should be taught, as they become mature enough to understand such teaching, that the chief responsibility which rests on them as persons is the acceptance or rejection of initial ideas. To help them in this choice we should give them principles of conduct and a wide range of the knowledge fitted for them. This should save children from some of the loose thinking and heedless action which cause most of us to live at a lower level than we need.

Mama Squirrel: Some Christians reading this may feel that we are putting undue emphasis on our own abilities to reason and to will. Does that mean we are not depending on God to guide us or to make us willing to do certain things?

Charlotte Mason: We should allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual and 'spiritual' life of children; but should teach them that the divine Spirit has constant access to their spirits, and is their continual helper in all the interests, duties and joys of life.

Mama Squirrel: You mention duty…but you also speak of not encroaching on children. Aren’t we encroaching by imposing our demands on them, likely with the thought that they will be punished if they don’t obey us?

Charlotte Mason: The principles of authority on the one hand and obedience on the other are natural, necessary and fundamental...limited, of course, by the respect that is due to the child’s personality. The mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days; while she who lets their habits take care of themselves has a weary life of endless friction with the children. All day she is crying out, 'Do this!' and they do it not; 'Do that!' and they do the other. In fact it is less tiring for everyone when good habits are in place. The mother herself acquires the habit of training her children in a given habit, so that by-and-by it becomes, not only no trouble, but a pleasure to her.

More tomorrow.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #15

"One gets the impression that real poetry would be a distraction."--Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room, "Of Food and Education, Part III"

I am coming close to the end of my workshop notes, although we're only halfway through the month. That's all right--there are still more places we can go with this, although at that point in the actual workshop I was running out of time and the listeners were starting to get that spun look on their faces.

What I ended up talking about at the end was one of the really good things I remember from my sixth grade class. That was the year that "they" decided that our curriculum needed a boost of “culchah,” especially Canadian “culchah.” So every couple of weeks that year, the grade sixes had artists and musicians come to visit. Or we visited them. We walked downtown to a big church to hear a pipe organ, and got to see how it worked; the organist (reminiscent of Mr. Pipes) just happened to be one of the best around and a composer as well. We had someone show us Group of Seven paintings, and a commercial artist brought in his own work. A folk musician named Merrick Jarrett sang and danced his limberjack man for us. Besides getting us out of Environmental Studies for the afternoon, this "culchah" program turned out to be a real gift to us. It was one of the "realest" things we ever did in school. How else do you think I've remembered all that for thirty years?

By comparison, I barely remember what we did in science that year, or in math, although I did learn my times tables perfectly due to the fact that the teacher wouldn’t let us go out for recess until we had answered a sufficient number of questions. I remember reading one chapter of The Witch of Blackbird Pond (in a reader), and—oh yes—watching the obligatory “your changing body” film. So: one chapter from a novel, twelve times tables, a health lesson, and a handful of fine arts memories. Would the teacher be surprised to know which of those sixth-grade lessons are still clear, and how much of the rest has been forgotten?

What will our homeschooled children remember of their school years? Likely not the grammar books, and perhaps not even the geography lessons; “who remembers the scraps of knowledge?” Charlotte Mason asked (although she was not speaking particularly of her own methods). Cindy Rollins said once that if she had to choose between overemphasis on “basics” or “poetics,” she’d rather err towards “poetics,” because you can always catch up on grammar but it takes a lifetime to build an appreciation of art and literature.

Now, while the workshoppers are running for a coffee or the vendor hall, we have some time to go in a different direction. Those of you looking for a few more practical ideas, stay tuned.

A quick math dice game

Crayons and I have been playing this game (for two players) from Low-Cost, No-Cost Teaching Aids by Mary Ann Dasgupta. She calls it "Tables Dice." You could also play it to teach addition, but we're using it for times tables.

We use four dice, but you could play it with two. You shake two dice, then the other two (or shake two, remember the sum and shake them again). Multiply the sum of the first two dice by the sum of the second two. So you roll a 3 and a 4 with the first two dice, then a 5 and a 6 with the second two; you multiply 7 x 11 and get 77. The other person does the same thing. Whoever gets the greater product gets one point. Ten points wins the game.

Simple, frugal, and very good practice.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #14

"For people who want to do the "living books" thing that Susan Macaulay has popularized, here is the kindergarten program all worked out for them.""--Dr. Ruth Beechick, review of a preschool-K curriculum

I use some of Ruth Beechick's books in our homeschool, and she has many good, practical ideas, especially (perhaps ironically) in using real books to teach language skills. However, I also think this comment is typical of the general misunderstanding around Charlotte Mason and "living books" in particular. In both fiction and non-fiction, the term “living books” has been overused, abused and confused, to the point that almost any chapter book set in some other era is now considered quality historical fiction...and, in the review above, "classic" picture books also suddenly join the list. Some people may take offense at that, and please understand that I am not discouraging the reading of picture books in general--only saying that these were not "living books" in the way that Charlotte Mason used the word.

If we’re going to be faithful to Charlotte Mason’s literary standards, we need to understand that she wasn’t exaggerating when she talked about little children playing Robinson Crusoe, or a schoolboy spending his whole Easter break reading Southey’s poems. It wasn’t so strange that Anne of Green Gables and her friends chose to act out "The Lily Maid" in 1908. Authors like Scott, Pyle, Kipling, Bunyan, Defoe, Kingsley, even George Eliot, were just considered The Books That There Were. They were the standards of the time, and children in "literate" households grew up familiar with Those Books, along with the Bible. If you look at the books Charlotte Mason refers to in the second half of Ourselves, which is meant to be read by older high school students, there are casual references to George Eliot's novels and other books that most of us are lucky even to get around to reading in college. For her students, they were common currency.

Now there must have been hundreds or thousands of books published over the last century, and most of us have gotten much worse at reading and at making time for reading. We’re hesitant, like Joyce McGechan, to put this kind of meal in front of our children because we’re not even sure we’d want to eat it ourselves. We’re in an era where, in a lesson plan for fourth graders, it’s expected that you should define words like “average” and “develop” before reading a book to them—and the lesson plan I found that in is for a picture book.

So I’m very aware in saying this, that the verbal and cultural gap between CM’s students and ours can seem insurmountable. But the fact is that there’s very little being published now, especially for children, that has both the literary power and the idea power of the books from the earlier eras, so we will often find ourselves turning back to them, not exclusively, but as a solid foundation.

Remember this from the third post? "Despising children is not doing the good that we should do in loving them or teaching them, because we undervalue their intelligence, their value as persons, their capacity for good, or even their capacity for bad."

And why are we using these hard books again? Is it because children develop character by chewing on gristle?

"Let us imagine an author at his craft, say, Herman Melville while writing Moby Dick, or Jane Austen working on Pride and Prejudice. Now assuredly what these literary artists hoped above all else was that a century or two from their own time students in high schools would be using their great works not better to understand love or honor or revenge or nobility or happiness, but to “analyze how multiple themes or central ideas in a text interact, build on, and, in some cases, conflict with one another”; as well as to “analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).""--Terrence Moore, "Dressing up Standards, Dumbing Down Schools," quoted by the Deputy Headmistress

Children, if they’re exposed to rich language from an early age, even if we find ourselves stumbling through some of the books, will get it, and will want more. Remember the little girl at Bending the Twigs who threw a sentence about Cerberus into her grammar lesson?

A leisurely education means having the freedom (time, space, opportunity) to discover what makes us fully human.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #13 (Updated)

As far as textbooks go, there are textbooks and then there are textbooks. Some of the books that Charlotte Mason called living books, especially ones she used for high school, look a lot like textbooks. And there are certainly subjects that are most efficiently taught with some kind of a textbook, like geometry or Latin or grammar. Just watch out for the ones that are obviously produced by textbook committees, the dumbed-down books or the ones that try to cover way too many topics without any real sequence. Some textbooks are toaster pastries, some are gruel; look for something that’s nourishing but still appetizing.

Look for science, history and geography materials that are fairly consecutive, that build on knowledge rather than presenting choppy bits and pieces, and that give you a chance to get really into a time, place or topic. Anything that can get you all excited about the walls of an old fort, a statue in a museum, or what’s going to come out of a chrysalis, is probably good material. Anything that leads to children asking more good questions on their own, like “what’s fire?” is probably good material.

You want children to be able to make connections, see how things fit into each other, see how familiar things can be compared with less familiar ones—to find reasons to care about what they’re learning, and make it their own. At the beginning of Home Education, Charlotte Mason talks about actual meals, and offers the advice that you shouldn’t always serve exactly the same thing for every breakfast or every lunch—that every meal should have at least some little surprise. A good lesson is like that—if the children always know exactly what to expect, they may not mind it too much, but if there’s the possibility of some new, unexpected thing, that’s even better. But the cool thing (the leisurely thing) for parents it that we do not have to set these discoveries up, or hammer the morals home; the children will make their own connections, and sometimes draw out points that we never even thought of. More leisure for us. More for them, because they’re not being hammered.

CM-RELATED UPDATE: Hard thoughts on the issue of education without understanding (or, as C.S. Lewis and Cindy have it, creating "men without chests"): today's post at The Common Room). And check out this quote from the same article the DHM is referencing:

"The secret was breathtakingly simple. The way to teach literacy for the twenty-first century turns out to be the same way it has been done in the last thirty centuries of civilization: to hire the brightest and best-educated teachers (usually not those coming out of a school of education considered “certified”), to put in their hands the best works of literature and history and philosophy, to invite young people to have a conversation about what it means to be a human being [emphasis mine], and to require those students to work hard and demonstrate good character while doing so. When all the Mickey-Mouse language of plot graphs and “standards” is abandoned, it’s just you and some students talking about love, hate, war, peace, liberty, slavery, happiness, life, and death. And the students know when you’re faking it.

"Oh, and it helps to throw in a little Latin."

Cruise Question: Love of learning through planning and purpose

This week's question: "How do you instill a love of learning in your child?" (Click on the ship to see more responses--they will be posted on Tuesday.)

Thoughts as I repost this: "How do you instill a love of learning in your child?" Seems that's all I've been posting about lately. But as we get to the end of an enjoyable school day which included, among other things, a field trip to the back yard for violet and crow observation; an impromptu game of Twenty Questions in response to a geography lesson about Kinds Of Things; several pages of Kim; a spelling lesson where we learned that the "friendly vowel suffix" has a bad habit of running off with the consonant from the first syllable (causing us to have to double the consonant to protect the short vowel); and an imitation of the Hairstyling Skills Competition using Barbie beauty heads...some of which "educational activities" were planned, and some of which weren't...I think we're getting closer to actually FINDING that pot-of-loving-learning-gold that sometimes seems the elusive prize for getting through many days of math drills and history lessons on dead kings. Anyway, the girls' school day is done but they're now making stationery in the kitchen (their idea), using coffee to age the paper, giving me a few minutes here to browse for "love of learning" in past posts--and this almost five-year-old post is what I came up with.


Repost from 2005: A Response to Laura D. Bush

There’s an article online that's been reprinted here and there, called “It’s Not About School,” by Laura D. Bush. Since I first read it, a couple of points from the article have been bothering me and, at the risk of seeming rude or maybe out of date (the article is five ten years old), I would like to address them.

Overall, I think Mrs. Bush does have something important to say: that the “heart of homeschooling is in the home we build for our children.” As someone who started homeschooling with Susan Schaeffer Macaulay’s For the Children’s Sake fresh in my mind, I agree very much with that point! And I would like very much to think that any family that reads together, that talks about important things (including how those things fit into God’s world) around the dinner table, and that learns to wonder and find out about what that big bug is or how things work, is going to be a learning family no matter what curriculum is chosen; maybe even no matter what school the children attend. I notice, for instance, that theologian Francis Schaeffer’s children (including Susan) and grandchildren were not exclusively homeschooled, although some Christians insist that homeschooling is the only Scriptural choice parents can make.

However, I have to take exception to her criticism that much talk of “books and lesson plans, classical homeschooling and unit studies....obscures the heart of homeschooling” and becomes just an enjoyable hobby of “playing school.” When Mr. Fixit reads the Wheels section of the paper and posts to a station wagon e-group, I don’t call it “playing car”; he enjoys cars, but he’s also taking care of our transportation needs. I enjoy talking about homeschooling and childrens’ books, but I’m also taking care of my family’s school needs. I am the one trying to read between the lines in product reviews, going to workshops, and joining online math groups. I don’t plan everything we do from scratch, but I am responsible for choosing which plan we will follow, which books we will study, and figuring out our longterm academic goals.

If I didn’t do those things and told my children that because the heart of homeschooling is a loving home, I’m not going to spend any extra time working out what we’ll study next school year, they would (rightly) look at me as if I had two heads. Homeschooling is no more just a hobby for them than it is for me; it is how they spend a good part of their days; it means, to some extent, their futures; and it is important that they understand how seriously I do take that responsibility.

To be fair to Mrs. Bush, I don’t think that her purpose in writing was to discourage anyone from comparing curriculum or enjoying “shop talk.” (Even the Proverbs 31 woman considered a field before she bought it.) However, she does tend to wander into the rather romantic ideal that a supportive, literate household will automatically produce educated children. She states that “no child in a home with books and magazines and the welcoming lap of a reading adult will fail to learn to read”; actually, I know at least one child in exactly such a household who has had great difficulty with reading. “No child in a healthy home will fail to learn all the arithmetic he or she needs to succeed as an adult.” Unschoolers may agree with that idea, but for most children (including mine), regular math work is necessary in addition to all the “teachable moments” and real-life learning we’ve made use of. (Cutting pies into fractions goes only so far.) “Homes full of love for one another, love of learning, interest in and concern for the world will almost surely produce well-educated young people, regardless of the methods or materials we choose to use in our homeschool.” Sewing a dress or cooking a meal using wrong methods and poor materials will result in failure, regardless of the good intentions of the sewer or cook; why should the teaching of children be viewed differently?

It’s true that God’s people can have widely varying needs in education, and some families may find they need to supplement their very full “real life” with only small amounts of “school.” Others will need to spend much more time and energy providing learning opportunities for their children. My concern is that, while we can agree with the “heart of homeschooling” philosophy and don’t put prideful over-emphasis on academic achivement, we risk creating a reverse tendency to sneer at method and structure, as if they are somehow less than spiritual. (I think that reflects the same spiritual tension that causes some people to view savings accounts and insurance as prudent, and others to say they show lack of faith in God’s provision.) The “love of learning” Mrs. Bush describes does not happen, for most of us, without at least some deliberate plan and purpose.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #12

The last part of Home Education is about the role that our wills and our reason should have, and how we teach that to our children; but I think it’s more practical at this point to ask a fourth question on education: What should we use? Or to put it another way, "what shall we then buy?"

There was an idea going around awhile back that it didn’t matter at all what you used, that any curriculum could be used in a CM style, and so you had people trying to use basal readers for narration, and so on, usually with a lot of frustration. It was like serving popsicles with forks and knives and calling it dinner--it just didn't work. There is a lot of flexibility in Charlotte Mason, and there is no one perfect, comprehensive booklist (or schedule) that is going to be suitable for every family in every circumstance; but it is important to choose quality books and other resources that will meet the objectives of a leisurely education. Just as it matters what children eat, it does matter what mind food we provide, what books we read, what music we play, what kinds of craft materials we choose. So how do you know what to use?

This is where the booklists from Ambleside Online and other CM websites (like Simply Charlotte Mason, Mater Amabilis and so on) can be very useful. You don't have to start right from scratch; you can look at what other CM homeschoolers recommend, see which classics are still being used, and get a sense of what newer materials seem to fit. Even then you need to be discerning, but when the same material comes up repeatedly, that’s probably a good sign that it’s worth checking out.

Let’s start with the very obvious, what not to use. We can rule out a large portion of most public school teacher catalogues, including "Guided Reading Beach Balls." "Great Graph Art Around the Year." "Picture Sorting for Phonemic Awareness." And "40 Wonderful Blend and Digraph Poems." We don't want study guides that are just long lists of questions to answer and definitions to copy. And unit studies loaded with fill-in-the-blank reproducibles, colouring pages, and word searches. Actually a lot of commercial unit studies can be crossed out, unless they’re limited, say, to correlating history and literature, and maybe tied to appropriate music or art of the particular era. Charlotte Mason used that tying-together approach in her teaching, but she didn’t think of that as unit studies, more just a correlation of things that naturally went together. It was when teachers started trying to get too clever and drag in all the subject areas that she had a problem, especially when the topic chosen was something insubstantial like apples; or even a better topic like Robinson Crusoe, that would just make the kids hate the book by the time you’d done Robinson Crusoe math, Robinson Crusoe songs, Robinson Crusoe copywork, Robinson Crusoe geography, Robinson Crusoe recipes and so on.

It’s kind of like when my mom first got a wok back in the ‘80’s and enthusiastically started stir-frying things. First she made stir-fried chicken and that was fine, then she made stir-fried beef and that was good too, but by the time she got to stir-fried hot dogs, we had had just about enough stir-fried anything for a long time. Easy to overdo.

More do's and don't tomorrow.

Terrible Lizard, by Deborah Cadbury (book review)

I had mentioned that I was reading Terrible Lizard, but hadn't posted much about what I learned or whether it was a good book.

Yes, it is an excellent book. In fact, I would say that if you want to understand where Charlotte Mason and her PNEU cohorts were coming from in their views of the natural world, this is essential reading. It covers the whole digging-up-dinosaurs-in-Britain story from Mary Anning's discoveries around 1810 to the huge shift in thinking fifty years later. It connects geology and anatomy...and, more exactly, geologists and anatomists...with the race to identify, name, and take credit for the new/old creatures. The story starts with a poverty-stricken girl digging up bones, and an aspiring geologist puzzling over a tooth that just had to belong to an herbivore but didn't fit any known category of creature. It peaks with an 1850's dinner party inside a model Iguanodon. It ends with people looking towards the established heads of science, those who had always come up with Biblically-acceptable answers, to respond to Darwin and Huxley...and those same sources of knowledge and faith finally throwing up their hands.

Actually Darwin and Huxley play only a small part in this story--they were the rebels who took over from the previous generation of geologists. Geology was a sort of gentleman's science in the first half of the nineteenth century; if you wanted to be taken seriously, you had to be a member of the Geological Society. The pre-Darwin British geologists were careful to present their findings in a God-inspired, Biblical context; some of them, like William Buckland, held high positions in the Church of England; few of them agreed with "evolution," but they were finding themselves believing less and less in a literal six days of creation, in a worldwide deluge, and in a world that was only a few thousand years old. The stories they read in the rocks and the bones seemed to show without any question that the large creatures must have existed in a time before man--perhaps in a whole other time that God had also created.

And then the evolutionists came along and took even that away.

"When he met Darwin in December 1859, [Richard]Owen praised him for his original ideas on the formation of species. Owen did not accept that Man was a transmuted ape, but in the Origin Darwin had only hinted at Man's relationship with apes. He was eager to build bridges with the famous anatomist, and it is possible that Owen may have imagined that there was some common ground between them: each step in Darwin's evolution could still be planned by God."--Cadbury, page 307

But it didn't work out that way.

"[In 1860, Thomas Huxley] discussed Man's relationship to the apes, highlighting similarities. Owen was furious; had always sought to show that Man was zoologically distinct from the animals. Those seeking to reconcile the findings of science with their belief in the Bible faced a terrible dilemma. How could the 'monkey theory' fit with Creation in Genesis? Owen was the obvious scientific leader who could surely be relied upon to expose the flaws in Darwin's thinking....[but] Owen could no longer shelter behind the ambiguous language he had used for so long....Even though Owen was not a Creationist the sides became polarised, with Darwin and his supporters, 'the Devil's Disciples' Huxley and Hooker, standing in opposition to Owen, who was trying to uphold traditional values....One by one, Owen's cherished notions on the dinosaurs were seen to fall apart."--Cadbury, pages 307-317

There are other fascinating people in this story--Gideon Mantell, the doctor and geologist who puzzled over the herbivore's tooth; Charles Lyell, who had a strong influence in moving scientific beliefs away from having to agree with the Bible; Georges Cuvier. And Mary Anning, who never got enough credit or enough compensation.

But for me the most interesting aspect of the book--aside from the actual dinosaur discoveries--was the clear presentation of how Creationist Christianity was suddenly left in the lurch. I don't have good answers for that even now. I don't know if I could have handled this book twenty years ago, or if I would have wanted to read anything at all where the "good guys" didn't believe that it all happened exactly as the Bible said. Today Christians who don't want to "leave their brains at the door" are being offered Creationist research to consider that was not available then. I'd like to believe all the young-earth-creationist material, because the fact that God made us in his image--really made us--is as central to our beliefs as it was to Buckland and Owen. However, I did not grow up with the idea that men and dinosaurs co-existed, so I have as hard a time trying to fit that all together as they did their piles of bones. I'm trying to keep an open mind on both sides.

Anyway--a very good read, very worthwhile especially for high school students. There are only two places I could see that you might want to have them skip over--an early adventure of Owen's involving body parts, and some other graphic material on page 270.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #11

"We bashed, and that is the only verb that describes our progress in those early days, through the text-books, got the gist of them by determined attention, and miraculously found ourselves enjoying every minute."--Joyce McGechan in The Parents Review, 1967

You might also say, “You just don’t know my kids.” (Well, you don’t know my kids either. Or maybe you do. In any case, mightn't it be the least "CM-ish" ones who benefit most from a leisurely education that lets them be who they are?) “You’re kidding—Shakespeare?” "All this habit stuff is getting me all mixed up." “This all sounds kind of sweet and idealistic, but this is the 21st century. I think we’d better stick to something safer that we can explain to the in-laws.”

That’s up to you, but I would recommend, before you totally bag the idea of CM, to have a look at "To Prosper in Good Life and Good Literature," an article from the Charlotte Mason periodical The Parents Review, by Joyce McGechan, which appeared in 1967. Joyce McGechan was a parent in Africa (she didn't specify which country) who wrote about her experiences using Charlotte Mason's correspondence school with her children. (The PNEU correspondence school was still operating in the 1960’s). Just to whet your appetite, here’s a bit of what she wrote:

"Although a trained teacher, I knew nothing of Charlotte Mason's methods. I ordered 'Home and School Education' and read it with interest; but I must confess to some scepticism.

"'Children have no natural appetite for twaddle,' she had written in the chapter on Aspects of Intellectual Training.

"'Huh!' thought I. 'Haven't they though?'

"I underlined that sweeping statement; and in my mind I classified it along with a few odd ones I had heard at college'Children are not naughty,' and the rest. Experience had fast taught me that children are downright wicked unless they are kept so busy and interested that they have no time to think up any fresh devilment. I cannot possibly describe my bewildered, fascinated disbelief when the first batch of books arrived. Of them all, 'Plutarch's Lives' hit me hardest. Those long, measured periods in difficult language! Alison, at eleven, would not understand a word! How on earth was Robin going to assimilate 'Mankind in the Making' and 'The Spangled Heavens'? What was Charles going to make of 'Pilgrim's Progress'?”

To find out what Charles did make of it, and the rest of the story, you’ll have to read the rest of the article on the Ambleside Online website. Just be assured that we have all had our own Alisons and Charles (or would that be Charleses)...or, even more to the point, we have felt more like Alison and Charles ourselves while easing into this. Just remember what Lynn said: "ceasing from anxiety and merely utilitarian preoccupations so that one can contemplate higher things, those pursuits without which we cannot be fully human."

(As I typed this high-minded conclusion, Crayons just came in to ask if she could give her Barbies a bath. Is that enough to dispel any illusions? But she did voluntarily start reading Tom Sawyer this week. Things even out.)

The Month with CM will take a break over Sunday and will post again on Monday.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #10

"It is interesting how disconcerting this idea of leisure is."--Cindy Rollins, "In Which I Implore you to Exert Yourself"

Since we’re talking about a leisurely education, does that mean that there’s anything wrong with work, or that children don’t learn well by being taught to work hard at their lessons, or by thinking through a difficult problem?

No, not at all; actually, diligence is one of the good habits Charlotte Mason valued. But the danger in this is that children, especially girls, may work hard at their studies because they want to please you or even because they know that God wants them to be diligent and get their work done; but they can do all that without finding any excitement and enjoyment in learning for its own sake, just as they can obediently swallow medicine without particularly enjoying it.

Cindy posted awhile ago on Josef Pieper’s book Leisure, the Basis of Culture, and she wondered if there was a distinction between work for work’s sake, and work for wonder’s sake. She said, I think paraphrasing Pieper, that there are things that are meant to be wonderful, as in, full of wonder; there are things that can only be useful by their wonder, that are not meant to be valued mainly for their practical uses. Christians tend to distrust forms of art, including literature, that don’t have a directly practical use, for instance, music that isn’t useful for worship services, or stories without an obvious moral lesson, or art that can’t be either hung in the sanctuary or put on a coffee mug. In a large part of the Christian world, we get a little tense around that disconcerting Mary-wonder idea. It's safer to focus on the Martha-practical.

So it's natural to feel nervous that if you take up a form of homeschooling that doesn’t require an hour of math each day, and doesn’t give you a lot of worksheets to file away in case anybody asks if you really are doing school, and might actually let you get done in enough time that you can all go out and explore outdoors together…something in us might tend to mistrust this, and think that the children must not be doing enough work.

It's natural...but it's not necessarily true.

What's for dinner? Pizza. It's not hard.

Pizza is supposed to be complicated. At least that's what it always seems like to me--because all the best-ever recipes swear that you're going to get something exactly like restaurant pizza, which isn't even really possible unless you've got a mighty hot oven and a pizza stone and all that. Or at least unless you're very ambitious.

But is it okay to just have "pretty good" or "very good" pizza without it having to be international-pizza-competition quality? Sure. You don't have to have a Pampered Anything. You can even have an uneven oven like ours, and store-brand mozzarella cheese, and the simplest possible sauce (thinned-down tomato paste with a sprinkle of dried basil and oregano). And you know what, you can still make pretty good pizza that saves you a phone call and the best part of twenty bucks. (That's what two mediums with delivery go for here.)

This is what we had for dinner:

Two pizzas, made with 2 lbs. of bread-machine pizza dough, the above-mentioned cheese and sauce, a little piece of pepperoni, a bit of deli ham, a few mushrooms, and canned pineapple tidbits. The Squirrelings did most of the putting together. We have no strange magic for the baking--we just put them in at 425 degrees, which is probably hotter than that in the top and at the back of the oven, so I switched them partway through. Bake till somewhat brown on the edges. Let cool a few minutes before slicing.

Soup, made with 4 cups of chicken stock, 2 cups of water, 1/2 cup green lentils simmered in the stock/water, then some cooked rice, leftover chopped potato, and frozen mixed vegetables added and cooked until it was soup. You know it's soup when it stops looking like a potful of water with vegetables and lentils floating in it.

Ponytails' special Pineapple-Juice-Gingerale-Orange drink, made partly with the drained pineapple juice.

Giant chocolate cookies, made from an on-sale chocolate cake mix+egg/oil/water, with a cupful of oatmeal mixed in. (Everybody's seen that recipe, right?) And grapes.

Favourite low-cost/no-cost homeschool stuff

These are some of my current favourites:

1. Paper-plate skip counting wheels. I first saw the idea in the Miquon First Grade Diary when Ponytails was in the first grade...so these paper plates are six or seven years old, but still going strong. Very simple--each number has its own plate, with a series of numerals markered around the rim. The 2 plate goes 2, 4, 6, 8, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 0. The 3 plate goes 3, 6, 9, 2, 5, 8, 1, 4, 7, 0. (That's the most complicated one.) The 4 plate goes 4, 8, 2, 6, 0, then again. The 5 plate just has 5's and 0's on it. And so on. Do you see how it works? You count around the plate, and each number you say will have the same final digit as the next numeral on the plate.

2. "Topical" Bible sword drills. [2019: link is broken] My kids particularly like the Animals version. (Warning: some of the words don't match up if you use newer Bible translations.)

3. Beaver Ed's card quiz games, sold at Dollarama. We have the Nature and the Dinosaurs games, and think they're as good as the more expensive versions.

4. This study guide to Tom Sawyer. We don't use a lot of literature study guides, but this one has some helpful ideas.

5. Leslie Laurio's updated Ourselves. (The Common Room family also likes this.)

6. Homemade handwriting sheets. I am using our Barchowsky disk, but you can find other sites to make your own. Who needs workbooks?

7. Index cards--good for all kinds of things. Ponytails and Mr. Fixit are using them along with Christian Kids Explore Chemistry, to keep track of all the elements Ponytails has learned. (They also made Atomic Cookies--see a similar photo at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.)

8. Books from the local supermarket's dollar bin--you just never know what's going to show up there. Recently we've found Magic Treehouse notepads, The Courage of Helen Keller, Madeleine L'Engle's The 24 Days Before Christmas, a Mitford book, and several other Scholastic and Troll biographies.

9. The weekly how-to posts at The Common Room.

10. Julie Gilbert's Planned Spontaneity e-book. A different kind of homeschool planner! (The home page is here.)

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #9

In our moral as in our intellectual education, we work too entirely upon narrow utilitarian lines: we want the impulse of profounder conceptions.--Charlotte Mason, preface to Ourselves

Rather than talk about how you do every school subject CM style...because you can get a lot of that information on places like the Ambleside Online FAQ page...I am going to pull some quotes from Home Education, and I’d like you to note the most-repeated words and themes, so that you can see how Charlotte Mason's ideas are really interchangeable from subject to subject. Remember that these are from descriptions of lessons for children under nine (the focus of Home Education), so there isn’t a lot here about Latin or other typical subjects for older ones. School Education (Volume 3) and Philosophy of Education (Volume 6) have more about teaching older students.

“Children’s lessons should provide material for their mental growth, should exercise the several powers of their minds, should furnish them with fruitful ideas, and should afford them knowledge, really valuable for its own sake, accurate, and interesting, of the kind that the child may recall as a man with profit and pleasure.”

From page 221, on learning to read: "He has considerable power to attack new words with familiar combinations; what is more, he has achieved; he has courage to attack all ‘learning,’ and has a sense that delightful results are quite within reach. Moreover, he learns to read in a way that affords him some moral training. There is no stumbling, no hesitation from the first, but bright attention and perfect achievement."

From page 254, on arithmetic: "The chief value of arithmetic, like that of the higher mathematics, lies in the training it affords to the reasoning powers, and in the habits of insight, readiness, accuracy, intellectual truthfulness it engenders. There is no one subject in which good teaching effects more, as there is none in which slovenly teaching has more mischievous results….The child perceives what rules he must apply to get the required information. He is interested; the work goes on briskly: the sum is done in no time, and is probably right, because the attention of the child is concentrated on his work…. Carefully graduated teaching and daily mental effort on the child’s part at this early stage may be the means of developing real mathematical power, and will certainly promote the habits of concentration and effort of mind."

From page 267, a quote from Edward Holden's The Sciences: "....to awaken the imagination; to convey useful knowledge; to open the doors towards wisdom. Its special aim is to stimulate observation and to excite a living and lasting interest in the world that lies about us."

From page 249, on Bible lessons: "But let the imaginations of children be stored with the pictures, their minds nourished upon the words…and they will come to look out upon a wide horizon within which persons and events take shape in their due place and in due proportion."

From page 272, on geography: "The peculiar value of geography lies in its fitness to nourish the mind with ideas, and to furnish the imagination with pictures….[Its educational value] is the developing of power, the furnishing of the mind….the child’s geography lesson should furnish just the sort of information which grown-up people care to possess."

From page 279: [History too] is a subject which should be to the child an inexhaustible storehouse of ideas, should enrich the chambers of his House Beautiful with a thousand tableaux…

A wide horizon, full of persons and events taking shape...to open, to awaken, to furnish, to stimulate, to excite, to exercise...to nourish.

Again I'll post that definition of leisure:

Having the freedom (time, space, opportunity) to discover what makes you fully human.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #8

Now all that we have said about habits and so on is really important and key to understanding Charlotte Mason, but in all this we’re still missing something basic, and this is one of the most important things to teach: the love of learning. “How much does he care?” Charlotte Mason asked.

Here are some easy ways to kill someone’s love of learning:

1. Never give kids anything more interesting than technical exercises and drills.

2. Don’t let them think their work is really important (John Taylor Gatto)

3. or that whether they do it well really matters.

4. Compare them with each other frequently

5. Make them go over all their mistakes, and confuse them by letting them see wrong sums and spellings as much as the correct ones.

So how do we encourage that love of learning? How do we bring the children into our schola, and make them want to come back for more?

Charlotte Mason said that we want to motivate children to continue learning by allowing them to see the learning landscape or “vista” before them, an opportunity spread out but not discouragingly vast. They need to get the sense that they are getting somewhere, that they are able to solve problems and think through answers, and that they want to know more and do more.

“In other words, he learns as his elders elect to learn for themselves, though they rarely allow the children to tread in paths so pleasant.” Ouch?

Yes! It Matters!

Can Children's Poetry Matter? by J. Patrick Lewis

(Hat tip to Farm School. Check out her list of poetry resources at the end of the post.)

A Month with Charlotte Mason #7: Get a Life

Training your memory is not just a trick for winning baby-shower games, but a habit of mind, taught carefully from a young age. The power of observation is not a unique gift, but a trained power, developed and strengthened with constant use. Along with training in obedience and attention, it makes up a large part of CM’s early-years curriculum. How did Charlotte Mason’s older students get so much done in a school day that ended early and didn’t require homework? They had trained their brains to pay attention the first time, bringing their whole minds to bear on something, visualizing the historical scene or the spelling word, repeating it back, and also retaining it because the next lesson would follow from that one, linking back to the last. The brainwork here was the student’s; he was taught that he could do it, starting small and working up. Charlotte Mason said, “Give an instant’s undivided attention to anything whatsoever, and that thing will be remembered.”

This is what narration is—visualizing, remembering, and telling back either orally or in writing. It is not parroting, or "getting up a lesson" as Laura Ingalls used to do for her mother; it is retelling with understanding. Narration can be written, oral, or done as a combination with a child who is just starting to tell back in writing; and it can be done right after hearing or reading something, or slightly delayed like hearing a story on Friday and then being asked to write a narration on Monday (we have read that this was done in PNEU schools after a Shakespeare reading, later in the 20th century, and we can guess that it was also done that way in earlier years); or it can be done after a bit of time has gone by such as in term exams.

Back to the educational instruments, the three allowable and effective tools for teaching: the last one is the presentation of living ideas. "Give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information." Do I need to say more than that about it? That's all, but that's all.

And if all that habit training and visualizing sound too bewildering and overwhelming when all you’re looking for is what to do for reading and math and how to keep the littler ones out of mischief, Charlotte Mason has some encouragement:

Wise letting alone is the chief thing asked of them…every mother has in Nature an all-sufficient handmaid, who arranges for due work and due rest of mind, muscles, and senses.

These ideas are supposed to free us from some of the anxiety we naturally feel about having all this responsibility for our children’s upbringing and education. You have given them some skills, they have more of their own; let them use them. Parents are not to butt in on play but allow children, as much as possible, to get wet sometimes, dirty, tired, maybe even injured—taking a reasonable risk, but allowing them to grow. The leisurely part of CM is, partly, being able to back off.

“…..A little guiding, a little restraining, much reverent watching, Nature asks of us; but beyond that, it is the wisdom of parents to leave children as much as may be to Nature, and ‘to a higher Power than Nature itself.”

"Nature will look after [a child] and give him promptings of desire to know many things; and somebody must tell as he wants to know; and to do many things, and somebody should be handy just to put him in the way; and to be many things, naughty and good, and somebody should give direction…The busy mother says she has no leisure to be that somebody, and the child will run wild and get into bad habits; but we must not make a fetish of habit; education is a life as well as a discipline."

In other words: CM = Get a Life.

Here is a checklist for leisurely homeschooling—yes, that means You: the philosophy of leisure and the need for an un-anxious, positive atmosphere applies to the teacher too.

If you’re coercing or yelling or threatening, you’re probably doing it wrong.
If you’re spending too much time marking workbooks or cutting things out for the children to paste, you’re doing it wrong.
If you keep switching math curriculums, trying to find the perfect one, you’re probably doing it wrong.
If you’re explaining too much...
If you’re worrying that your kids haven’t mastered sentence diagramming by grade 2...
If you’re pushing your kids to narrate in front of Grandma...
If you never get out of the children’s room at the library...
If you’re worrying too much about this checklist…you’re probably doing it wrong.

In the next post, we'll talk about doing it right.

Review Crew Cruise Question: On Choices, burnout, and violets

This week's question: "Burnout--how do you handle it? Avoid it?" (Click on the ship to see more responses--they will be posted on Tuesday.)

And in the morning it's manna hotcakes.
We snack on manna all day.
And they sure had a winner last night for dinner,
flaming manna soufflé--Keith Green

On the weekend we went out for dinner with Grandpa Squirrel, to a diner-style restaurant we like. The food and the service are good. The wall decor is amusing (lots of diner-era movie pictures).The only problem with this place is its mind-bogglingly long menu. What are you going to have? Fish and chips, pasta, pizza, pasta-plus-pizza, burgers, sandwiches, all-day breakfast? Soup or salad with that? Fries or baked potato? Mama Squirrel went into can't-decide mode, so when The Apprentice asked for a chicken wrap, she just said, "I'll have the same." Fortunately, it turned out to be a good choice. But wrapping your brain around all those choices seems to be a too-common experience in our culture, and it can actually keep you from choosing at all. We have posted about this very thing before.

The Toronto Star posted a review yesterday (by Jennifer Hunter) of a new book by Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing. Iyengar talks about the same issues and describes experiments such as "the jam test"--a grocery store experiment where people overwhelmed by too many flavours turned out to be less likely to buy any of them at all. I've seen the same thing happen at the homeschool conference vendor hall, where the sheer number of books, DVDs, posters and toys makes people either freeze up, or go crazy buying things they don't need. Or the number of people telling you to try this math curriculum, that method, this subject, that program, becomes just another invitation for brain meltdown.

I'm experiencing a slight dose of this myself today, on a gorgeous warm Easter Monday that, besides an attack on Mount Laundry, requires some time spent organizing our spring term. If you can get burned out by boredom (manna waffles) or by overwhelming demands, you can also be attacked with similar symptoms when the choices seem too many. Especially when the weather's nice and the last thing you want to do is go through all those free downloads.

But maybe there's something there I missed...and the DHM is using that Numbers Long Ago book, so maybe I should look at that again...and I just got that 40-page Worksheets Directory, maybe there's something in there we could use. Oh nuts--I'd rather sit on the back deck and finish Terrible Lizard.

Okay...regroup. First of all, our general schedule has been working pretty well. Although I might like a slightly neater weekly table of subjects; and although Charlotte Mason might like it better if Crayons didn't do all her math, spelling and handwriting all in a bunch (or if she didn't do "spelling" at all, but that's another story); I have to admit that if it's working and the work is getting done, we're probably halfway there.

What do I want to see change this term? More outdoor nature; more picture study and music (we've been very lax on that this year), more geography, and more independent literature for Ponytails. More independent Bible reading, since we've finished the year's stories-to-read-together. More Roots and Fruits word roots, since we let that drop in the fall and the Squirrelings keep asking me when we're going to add more prefixes to our lonely little list on the kitchen wall. More habit training, which sounds like rather nasty medicine but which is nonethless beneficial.

Goals: to get Crayons to a particular point in third grade Math Mammoth, and to get Ponytails past decimals and through a bit of algebra. To read Kim and Great Expectations out loud, and more poetry. To get done Easy Grammar Plus through the Verbs chapter. To get done everybody's assigned history for the term. To finish a few other things that we started--no big choices involved there. To keep everything within the idea of leisurely. (You never thought it was so much work to be leisurely?)

Nice things I'd like to fit in:

*A short unit on inventions with Crayons, using some of the chapters from Story of Inventions which is part of her Year 3 work, and since we were asked to try out an inventors game for the Review Crew.
*Marmee Dear's Sugar 'n' Spice Unit Study, just because it looks useful and interesting
*Gardening books
*Spring Nature Study, from Type Lessons for Primary Teachers
*Nature study on the violets that are everywhere on our lawn
*Tables in Word 2003 by Leanne Beitel (how to create tables--very useful)
*Charlotte Mason's Ourselves

Some of those are obviously more important than others--but violets don't last long. We have to keep the priorities straight.

So am I done? Can I go read my book now?

Oh--I still have to get all that stuff in order for tomorrow, don't I? And put the things in the right workboxes. Okay, so I'm not quite there yet...

but I'm not burned out.

Photos: Mr. Fixit

A Month with Charlotte Mason #6

So that left only three valid, allowable educational instruments or tools—the Atmosphere of Environment, the Discipline of Habit, and the Presentation of Living Ideas.” This is sometimes cut down to “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” Let’s go through those.

I’ll touch on environment just briefly to say that Charlotte Mason thought that homes were great places to learn simply because they weren’t too perfect and packaged. Most of you know the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room. In recent months she and her family have become more and more involved in the lives of two little boys they know, to the point that the boys’ mother has taken the older one out of kindergarten so that the Headmistress can homeschool him when he stays at The Common Room house, which is out in the country with assorted livestock, creeks and woods to explore, and a variety of humans, related and unrelated, coming and going. In the process of all this, the Headmistress exchanged some emails with the kindergarten teacher, who thought that the little boy would really be missing out on something if he didn’t attend school, because the teachers at their school had "high quality literacy training," had “students reading at their perfect instructional level," and even offered "a leveled book room of books that the reading teachers use to match to the specific needs of the students." (Besides worrying about all the usual socialization stuff.) Since then the Headmistress has posted several times about the wide variety of things both boys are doing, too many to mention here, but including the books she reads to them out of the approximately 8,000 they own. Which place sounds like a better environment for learning? What kind of atmosphere do you want your own children to learn in? Can working only at a "perfect instructional level" actually be detrimental?

Second, on habits and discipline: When you think of habits, you might think first of moral things like not being greedy, or manners like saying please, or helpful things like cleaning up your own mess or turning the lights out. But it's not just about getting them to brush their teeth. Those things are all included in habit training, but there are also habits of the mind that are just as important, such as observation and attention. Charlotte Mason said that the formation of habits IS education, and that Education is the formation of habits.

When we teach strong habits of body and mind, we give our children the leisure—the freedom from anxiety—not to have to constantly worry about what to do next, whether they are going to come when they’re called or not, whether they are going to work attentively at their lessons or dawdle or get distracted, whether they are going to tell the truth or not. As adults, we have, we hope, developed stronger wills that enable us to simply tell ourselves to get back to work or do what we don’t want to do; children, according to Charlotte Mason, don’t always have that power, so it is important to begin with the discipline of habits, and work on developing the will gradually. She said, “The habits of the child produce the character of the man.”

If you read Home Education, you’ll find that Charlotte Mason spends a fair amount of time at the beginning talking about keeping children’s brains healthy and growing by giving them lots of fresh air and outdoor time; and her point is that since you’re out there anyway, you have the opportunity to train them in habits of observation of whatever is around them—plants, animals, landscapes, weather, stars, light, shadows, water, dirt, snow, and encouraging them in their abilities to describe, accurately and in detail, whatever they see. (Or whatever they observe, with any or all of their five senses. I still remember Coffeemamma's Schmoo showing the rest of her family that particular maples had their own smell--or was it taste?)

CM is thought of as a books-based, literary curriculum, and that is true; but I think it is just as much a SEEING curriculum, both in what is literally seen and what is visualized when listening to a geography lesson, when studying spelling words, or in picture study, when children look carefully at a painting for several minutes, and then try to describe it in as much detail as they can from memory. She believed that the act of visualizing something was the key to holding it in the long-term memory. You had to create a mental picture of something yourself, but too much given, too many visuals cluttering up the lesson, would actually limit that process, giving your brain less to work on by itself. I think that relates to our phrase “doesn’t leave much to the imagination.” That’s what Charlotte Mason did want to do—leave lots to the imagination.

A Month with Charlotte Mason #5: Only Three Tools

...and studying the subjects we do cover with books, Real Books—with Real Things as well, but largely with Real Books, inspiring real ideas and real questions, modeling real vocabulary, awakening real curiosity, offering real mind-food.

Real Things are important. A Charlotte Mason education can and should have lots of hands-on, feet-on, five-senses activity. It should have maps and globes, dominoes and math beans, coins, CDs, paint boxes, animals, games of tag, costumes and sets, physical exercises, field trips, singing, building, household skills, outdoor play, clay, magnifying glasses, caterpillars, shells, even tea parties.

But the one indispensable factor is books—lots of books, and the right kind of books, a rich, varied, generous serving that makes them want more. And using those books in a way that makes use of all the habits and skills, intelligence and imagination, powers of attention and observation, that are already in our children and that are being built up by the training we have been giving them.

We want whole books, and real books—not cut apart, rewritten, and sugar coated, but with their ideas intact. Even the more difficult books can be a vital part of the children’s education, without our worrying too much about whether they’re totally understood by 21st-century children.

Recently I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which is about a wartime book club and how each person in the group formed a relationship with one author or another in his or her own way, just by reading that person’s book, whether it was an ancient Roman or a 19th-century essayist. They were just plain people, some with more education than others, but they heard those voices speaking into their own minds, without anybody else telling them what they should think about the books; and they understood them, argued with them, loved or hated them. The books fed them, in the midst of a literal time of famine.

In the children’s classic Understood Betsy, the main character is surprised, during her first day in a country school, to be not only allowed but expected to read more than a line at a time out loud--just as she is surprised, in another scene, to be invited to drink all the milk she wants. The teacher tests her further by having her read “Barbara Frietchie,” and all the other children stop their work to listen (and are not scolded for listening). That evening as Betsy recounts her day to the supposedly ignorant old “Putney cousins” with whom she has come to stay, they suggest that she read to them from one of the books on their shelf: Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Their mutual enjoyment of “The Stag at Eve” creates the first real bond between Betsy and her new family.

Third--we're still talking about the three questions parents should ask themselves--how should the students learn? Charlotte Mason wrote about her early days of teaching, which she said were often frustrating because each year the children seemed able to do harder sums, and read harder books, but they did not really grow, in the sense of having minds more awake, or in gaining moral power to overcome problems like habitual lying or dawdling at lessons. She wanted to help them more, but wasn’t sure how. Over many years of experience teaching children, and then training teachers herself, several ideas seemed to come together for her.

She knew of many things that certainly might change behaviour, but most of them were not allowable if you started out by viewing each child as a person made in God’s image, who “must not be encroached upon whether by the direct use of fear or love, suggestion or influence, or by undue play upon any one natural desire,” like competition for marks. In other words, fear could certainly affect someone's behaviour; but that wasn't a route she wanted to take. The personal influence of a strong teacher could definitely change someone's behaviour, and probably for the better in some respects; but what would happen when that teacher was gone and the student did not know how to think for himself? None of these options were respectful of a young human being's moral rights. (Hm, so much for accusations of homeschool brainwashing.)

So that left only three valid, allowable instruments or tools that an educator could use to go beyond the "horse in a mill" school routine of endless recitations and sums. Those three were:

"the Atmosphere of Environment,
the Discipline of Habit,
and the Presentation of Living Ideas.”

This is sometimes cut down to “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” I'll go through those in the next post.

A Month With Charlotte Mason will be taking a break for the holidays this weekend.