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Charlotte Mason in Modern English
Charlotte Mason's ideas are too important not to be understood and implemented in the 21st century, but her Victorian style of writing sometimes prevents parents from attempting to read her books. This is an imperfect attempt to make Charlotte's words accessible to modern parents. You may read these, print them out, share them freely--but they are copyrighted to me, so please don't post or publish them without asking.
~L. N. Laurio
This chapter appears in a Parents Review article.
pg 164
Chapter
15 - School Books and How They Bring About Education
Line
Upon Line
'School books' isn't a new topic, and everything I'm going to say here
is what I've already written in other volumes. But we aren't like the
men of Athens who got together regularly because they wanted to hear or
share something exciting and new. I'm sure you won't mind hearing the
same thing again.
An
Incident in the Lives of School Girls
In Frederika Bremer's 1837 novel, The
Neighbors, she writes with some spirit about an incident that
happened to some school girls. It may be a bit autobiographical. This
segment taken from the book is long, but I think it will be
appreciated. It illustrates my point better than any simple arguments I
could make.
The heroine says, 'I was sixteen at the time. Fortunately, since I had
a restless character, my right
pg 165
shoulder started to stick out. Gymnastics were the popular way to treat
all kinds of physical defects, so my parents decided to let me try
gymnastics. I was clothed in pantaloons with colored trim, a green
Bonjour coat, and a little bonnet with a pink ribbon. When I first
showed up, there was a group of thirty to forty other girls wearing the
same outfit I had on. They were happily swarming all over a large
public room, over ropes, ladders and poles. It was a strange, new thing
for me to see. I stayed in the background the first day, and my
governess taught me how to do a backbend and some arm and leg
exercises. The second day, I made friends with some of the girls. The
third day, I matched them on the ropes and ladders, and by the second
week, I was the leader of the second class and was encouraging the
others to try all kinds of new tricks.
'At that time, I was studying Greek history in my school lessons. Even
during gymnastics, my imagination was filled with Greek heroes and
their heroic deeds. So I suggested to my group that we should take on
ancient Greek men's names and that we should refuse to answer to any
other name during gymnastics. We took on such names as Agamemnon and
Epaminondas. I chose the name Orestes, and I called my best friend in
the class Pylades. There was a tall, thin girl with a Finnish accent
that I didn't like, mostly because of her disrespect for me and my
ideas, and she didn't care who knew it . . . this resulted in some
quarrels.
'I loved Greek history, but I also loved Swedish history. I idolized
Charles XII, and I often entertained the other girls with stories about
his deeds until my own soul
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was glowing with enthusiasm. Like a bucket of cold water, Darius (the
tall girl whose real name was Britsa) came into the midst of us one day
and asserted that Czar Peter I was a much greater man than Charles XII.
I reacted to her challenge with blind zeal and concealed rage. She
stated her case, bringing forth various arguments with coolness and
skill
to support her opinion. When I refuted her arguments and thought I had
won the victory and proved my hero the better man, she kept throwing
Bender and Pultawa in my way. [Charles
XII of Sweden and Czar Peter were enemies in the Great Northern War of
the early 1700's. Charles lost a battle at Pultawa/Poltava, in the
Ukraine, and fled to Bender, in the Ottoman Empire. That loss marked
the end of the Swedish Empire, and the rise of Peter's Russia.]
Oh, Pultawa! Pultawa! Many tears have been shed over your bloody
battlefield, but none were more bitter than the ones I shed later in
secret because, just like Charles XII, it proved to be my defeat, too.
She kept adding fuel until I finally cried out, 'I demand
satisfaction!' Darius only laughed and said, 'Bravo! Bravo!' I
exclaimed, 'You have insulted me disgracefully. I request that you
apologize in front of the class and acknowledge that Charles XII is a
better man than Czar Peter I, or else I'll fight you, unless you're a
coward who has no honor!' Britsa Kaijsa blushed, but she said with
detestable coolness, 'Apologize? I think not. I wouldn't dream of it.
You want to fight? Fine, I have no objection. Where shall we fight, and
with what? With pins?' 'With swords, if you're not afraid, and right
here. We can meet here half an hour before everyone else gets here.
I'll bring the swords. Pylades will be my second, and you can choose
your own second.' . . . So, the next morning, I entered the large, open
room and found my enemy already there with her second. Darius and I
saluted one another proudly
pg 167
and coolly. I let her have first choice of the swords. She took one and
flourished it around with some skill, as if she was used to handling
one. I began to have visions of myself in my imagination with a sword
in my heart . . . Darius cried out, 'Czar Peter was a great man!' 'Down
with him! Long live Charles XII!' I cried, bursting into a furious
rage. I positioned myself in an attitude of defense, and so did Darius
. . . our swords clashed one against the other. The next moment, I was
disarmed and thrown on the ground. Darius stood over me, and I thought
my last hour had arrived. But I was surprised when my enemy threw down
her sword, grabbed my hand to help me up, and cheerfully said, 'Okay,
now you've had satisfaction. Let's be good friends again. You're one
brave person!' Just at that moment, a tremendous noise was heard at the
door, and the fencing instructor and three other teachers rushed in. At
that point, I passed out.'
I hope none of you are like naughty children who enjoy the thrill of
the
story but miss the moral. What follows is actually the moral of this
fascinating tale.
How
Did the Girls Get Their Enthusiasm?
What was it in their school lessons that so excited these Swedish
girls? There is no hint that their zeal came from anything but school
reading. It could only have come from their books. Oral lessons for
young children and class lectures for older students hadn't been
invented in the early 1700's. We use books in our school rooms,
too--but we never hear this kind of wild enthusiasm and uncontrolled
passion over events recorded in history books, or dry
pg 168
facts in science textbooks. Those Swedish girls must have used a
different kind of book, and it's in our best interest to find out what
kind. It would be hard to find records of them, so we'll have to look
for clues from the girls themselves. We can't go to them and ask
directly, but if we can figure out what they were, we'd be able to make
a pretty good guess at what fired their souls.
What
Kind of Book Sustains the Life of Thought?
All we can tell from the story is that they were intelligent girls who
were probably raised by intelligent parents. But that's enough for our
purposes. The next question is, What kind of book will work its way
into the mind of an intelligent child with enough force to change the
child's thinking? We don't need to ask what the child likes--girls
often like twaddly goody-goody stories, and boys tend to enjoy
thrilling tales of adventure. We're all capable of being drawn to
mental junk food of a poor quality because it's stimulating and
exciting. This kind of mental candy is fine when our brains need the
rest of an arm chair, but our spiritual minds need a more sustaining
diet, whether we're boys or girls or grown-ups. When I say spiritual, I
mean our souls as opposed to our physical bodies. We could just as
easily use a phrase like thought-life, or the part of us that feels, or
the life of the soul.
It's interesting how every question, no matter how superficial it
seems, leads us to foundational principles. Even the simple question,
What kind of school books should our children use? leads us right to
one of the two main principles that are foundational to educational
thought.
Publishers'
Text-Books
I think
pg 169
that spiritual life, in the sense I just mentioned, is only maintained
on one kind of diet--a diet of ideas. Ideas are the living fruit of
living minds. If we ask any publisher for a catalog of their school
books, we'll find that the general nature of school books is that
they're drained dry of any living thought. It may have some thinker's
name on it, but then it's usually an abridgment of an abridged edition.
All that's left for the unfortunate student is the bare dusty bones of
the subject with all the warm flesh, living color, breath of life and
movement sanitized away. Nothing is left except what Oliver Wendell
Holmes calls, 'the mere brute fact.'
It can't be said too often that information isn't the same as
education. A student might answer an exam question correctly about the
location of the Seychelles and the Comoto Islands without ever being
nourished by the fact that they lay in a specific longitude and
latitude--those are merely dry facts. But if he could follow whaler
Frank Bullen in The Cruise of the
Cachelot, then the mere names of the islands would excite the
little mental receptors, showing that real knowledge has taken place.
The
Reason for Oral Teaching
Intelligent teachers know how dry and dull text-books are, so they
resort to oral lessons that are designed not to be 'bookish.' But
living ideas can only come from living minds. Occasionally a vital
spark is flashed from the teacher to the student. But this only happens
when the subject is one that the teacher has personally given some
original thought to. In most cases, the oral lesson, or, with older
students, the more advanced lecture, consists of information that the
teacher picked up from various books, and that information is relayed
to the student in language that's a bit academic, or rather
pg 170
common, or dumbed down. Even a gifted teacher isn't likely to have a
living interest and, therefore, original thought, about a wide variety
of subjects.
Limitations
of Teachers
We want to place the children in front of open doors that lead to lots
of different fields of learning and delight, and every one should offer
the child some fresh, invigorating thoughts. We can't expect schools to
have a staff of a dozen master-minded geniuses. Even if they did, and
students were taught by all of them, it would be to their disadvantage.
What the student needs from his teachers is moral and mental
discipline, encouragement, and direction. All in all, it's better for
the student if his training is managed by one wise teacher instead of
being passed from one teacher to another for different subjects.
Our
Goal in Education is To Give a Full Life
Now we begin to realize what it is that we need. Children require so
much from us. We owe it to them to spark their interest in a lot of
different things. 'You have set me in a wide, spacious place' should be
the delighted expression of every intelligent soul. Life should be full
of
living. It shouldn't be spent merely passing time doing tedious
activities. I don't mean that life should be nothing but doing, or
nothing but feeling, or nothing but thinking. That would be too
intense. When I say that life should be full of living, I mean that
we should be in touch and able to relate with some genuine interest no
matter where we are, what we hear, or what we see. This kind of
interest isn't something we give to children. In fact, we'd prefer that
children never say that they've learned botany or chemistry or
conchology or geology or astronomy, or whatever. The question isn't how
much a student knows after he's completed his education, but how much
he cares, and how many categories
pg 171
of things he cares about. How wide and spacious is the place he's been
set in? And, so, how full is the life he has in his future? It's true
that you can bring a horse to water but you can't make him drink. The
problem is that we're not even bringing the 'horse' to water. We give
him pathetic little text-books that are nothing but outlines of dry
facts, and the student is supposed to memorize them and spit them back
out when it's exam time. Or else we give him assorted facts that have
been diluted in talks prepared by his teacher that might still have a
spark or two of living thought hiding somewhere in the mixture. And
yet, all this time, we have a treasure of books that are swarming with
ideas fresh from the minds of brilliant thinkers in every subject we'd
want to expose children to.
We
Don't Appreciate Children
The truth is, we don't appreciate children. We've heard the concept so
often lately that an infant is nothing but a huge oyster who gradually
develops into a wonderful, moral intellectual adult, that we've come to
think that the only food that's appropriate for children's 'little
minds' is intellectual spoon-feedings. It means nothing to us that
William Morris read his first Waverley
novel when he was only four years old, and he finished the entire
series by the time he was seven. It didn't do him any harm--in fact, he
lived and prospered, unlike John Evelyn's son Richard, who died three
days after his fifth birthday, which makes us wonder when we read that
he 'had a passion for Greek, could translate English into Latin and
Latin into English easily. He had a natural talent for mathematics and
knew different propositions of Euclid by heart.' I'm quoting young
pg 172
Richard (one could hardly call such an experienced child Little
Ritchie!) as a warning, not an example to aspire to, Macauley seems to
have started life as a great reader. There's a cute story about how
Hannah More paid a visit to his parents when he was four years old. He
came forward with the most charming hospitality and said, 'if you'll be
good enough to come in, I'll bring you a glass of spirits.' He
explained afterwards that 'Robinson Crusoe often had some!'
Children
of the Previous Generation
We can dismiss these children as exceptionally gifted. But I mention
them to remind us that our grandparents recognized that children were
reasonable beings, people who had minds and consciences like they did,
but who needed their guidance and control since they didn't yet have
knowledge or experience. Look at the strange antique children's books
that have been passed down to us. They treated children, first and
foremost, as reasonable, intelligent and responsible people. This is
what distinguished family life in previous generations. As soon as the
baby was aware of his surroundings, he was expected to be morally and
intellectually responsible.
Children
as They Are
Children haven't changed. They're still the same as they were
then--more acutely intelligent, more keenly logical, more alert to
observe, quicker in moral sensitivity, more abounding in love and faith
and hope--in fact, they're just like us in every way, only more so. Yet they're totally
ignorant of the world and what's in it, and of us and the way we are,
and, most of all, how to manage and channel and express the limitless
possibilities that they're born with.
Our
Job is to Give Enlivening Ideas
We know that the brain is where habit originates, and that
pg 173
behavior and character are both the result of whatever habits we
develop. We also know that an inspiring idea sparks a new habit of
thought, and, therefore, a new habit of life. We recognize that
education's great work is to inspire children with enlivening ideas in
every area of life, every category of knowledge, every subject we think
about, and to deliberately help children to develop the habits of good
living that come from inspiring ideas. In attempting this important
task, we seek and have the promise of receiving the help of God's
Spirit. We recognize His Spirit in a sense that's new to our modern way
of thinking--we recognize Him as the Supreme Educator, teaching humans
things that men have labeled as secular, as much as He teaches them
things that are considered religious.
Paraphrased by L. N. Laurio
Please direct any comments or questions to me by emailing me at cmseries-owner at yahoogroups dot com.
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