The Series by Subject
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 with your local study group--but they are copyrighted to me, so please don't post or publish them without asking.
~L. N. Laurio
Fairy Tales and Myths
Volume 1, Home Education, pg 152-153
Stories About Normal Children vs. Tales of Imagination
Stories about Christmas holidays, or John and Emily, or the fun times, peculiarities and upright morality of children just like themselves, living in circumstances just like their own, leave nothing to the imagination. Children are so familiar with that kind of thing that it rarely occurs to them to play at the situations in any of those stories. They wouldn't even read it a second time. But they love tales of the imagination, people from other lands and other times, heroic adventures, death-defying escapes, wonderful fairy tales in which they can suspend reality and believe the impossible. Even when they know the story is impossible, they can surrender themselves to it and believe.
Imagination and Great Vision
Imaginary tales have more use than just amusing children. It would be tragic if future generations had no creative imagination. They would be less likely to conceive of great ideas and do heroic
deeds. It is only when we can let a person or cause fill us so much that even our own self-interest is pushed aside that we're able to make great sacrifices and do great things for that person or cause. Our novelists claim that there's nothing left to imagine, and that's why they just write about real things. But imagination is creative. It should see not only what's there, but what is possible and what is artistically suitable in a given circumstance.
Imagination Grows
Imagination doesn't come down from above fully developed, and plant itself into a mature mind like a man moving into an empty house. Like any other function of the mind, it starts as the merest seed of a power. It grows according to what nourishment it gets. Childhood, the age of wonder and faith, is its window of opportunity to grow. Children should know the delight of living in faraway lands, of being someone else living in a different time, a wonderful double life. They can experience this through books. Children's history and geography books should also cultivate their ability to imagine. If children don't imagine what it was like to live in the times they read about in history, or feel familiar with the places described in geography, then their lessons aren't doing their job. But even if their lessons serve their purpose, then the picture gallery of the child's mind will still be sparse if the child hasn't been introduced to imaginary worlds of fancy.
Volume 2, Parents and Children, pg 46-47
The Appeal of the Children
In this section, we've only mentioned the negative aspect of the parental role of Inspirer. For almost all parents, the innocence of a baby in its mother's arms makes a strong, irresistible appeal. 'Open the gates of righteousness to me so I can go in,' seems to be what the pure, unworldly child is saying. With every kiss from his mother, and every light from his father's eyes, he expresses a desire to be kept unstained from the world. But we're so quick to conclude that children can't understand spiritual things. We don't fully grasp the things of the Spirit ourselves, so how can the feeble intelligence of a child apprehend the highest mysteries of our existence? But we're wrong about this. As we age, we adults become more materialistic. But children live in the light of their young life. The spirit-world doesn't seem so mysterious to them. In fact, the spiritual fairy-world of parables and stories where anything is possible is their favorite place. Fairy tales are so treasured by children because their tender spirits clash with the hard, narrow limitations of reality--time, place and substance. They can't breathe freely in the material world. Imagine what the vision of God must be like for a child who's peering wistfully through the bars of the prison of reality. They don't envision a far-off God who's cold and abstract. For them, God is a warm, breathing, spiritual Presence Who watches his comings and his goings and stays with him as he sleeps. In God's presence, he recognizes protection and tenderness in darkness and danger, and he rushes towards God in the same way that a frightened child hides his face in his mother's skirt.
Volume 2, Parents and Children, pg 106-108
Fairy Tales and How to Use Them
It's encouraging to see that Felix Adler restores the use of fairy tales. He correctly says that a lot of the selfishness in the world isn't due to real heard-heartedness. It's due to a lack of imaginative ability. He adds, 'I believe that it's beneficial for a child to be able to take the wishes from his heart and project them onto an imaginary setting.'
But how should we handle these Märchen? [Märchen is German for fairy tales.] How should we utilize them to suit our special purpose? My first suggestion is this: Tell the story, rather than giving it to the child to read. As the child listens to the tale, he'll look up with wide eyes at the person telling the story. The newness in him will recognize and thrill to the touch of an earlier race of mankind.' In other words, Adler feels that traditions should be passed on orally, and he's right. This is an important point. His second suggestion is just as important. He writes, 'Don't take the moral plum out of the fairy tale pudding. Let the child experience and enjoy the whole, complete package. Treat the moral aspect casually. Go ahead and emphasize it, but act as if it's incidental. Pick it as you'd pick a wildflower along the highway.'
Adler's third suggestion is to eliminate from the stories anything that's only superstitious, or a remnant of ancient spiritism, or anything morally offensive. Related to this, he discusses the controversial question of how much we should expose children to the existence of evil in the world.
'My own opinion,' he says, 'is that, when children are around, we should only speak of the kinds of lesser evil that they already know about. On these grounds, that would eliminate stories about cruel stepmothers, unnatural fathers, and such. Even so, most of us would probably make an exception for Cinderella, and its charming German ballet version, Aschenbrödel. I also tend to think that fairy tales lose their spirit and charm when they're specially adapted for children. Wordsworth is right when he says that exposure to evil presented within the glamour of a fairy tale is useful to shield children from painful, damaging shocks in real life.
Fables
Mr. Adler writes that fables should be used for moral teaching in the second stage, about the time the child is old enough to leave the nursery [preschool?] We've all grown up on Aesop's Fables. Stories such as 'The Dog in the Manger,' 'King Log,' and 'The Frog and the Stork' are so familiar to us that they've become part of the fabric of society's thought. But it's interesting to remember that these stories are even older than Aesop himself and most of them originated in Asia. We should remember where these fables came from because we need to use a little discretion when we decide which to use for conveying moral concepts to our children.
Mr. Adler would reject fables such as 'The Oak and the Reed,' 'The Brass and the Clay Pot,' and 'The Kite and the Wolf' because they teach Asian subservience and fear. But British nature is too proud to bow before anyone or submit to any circumstance, so those life lessons learned by the eastern culture might be especially helpful to English children. Besides, some of the most charming fables would have to go if we started removing any that seemed influenced by eastern wisdom. The fables that Felix Adler especially recommends are those that portray virtue as something admirable, and evil as something to avoid, such as 'The Stag and the Fawn' that teaches about cowardice, 'The Peacock and the Crane' that teaches about vanity, and 'The Dog and the Shadow' that teaches about greed.
Volume 2, Parents and Children, pg 210-211
5. Deceptions Caused by Imagination and Play Because of a Malnourished Imagination: Lessons in Telling the Truth
I saw little Madison at the park one day. She didn't look my way and I didn't recognize who she was playing with. I was preoccupied with the friend I was with, and I didn't think that Madison even noticed me. But, after she went home, she told her mother that I had hugged her and asked specific questions about how her family was doing! What could her motive have been? There was no motive. Her actively imaginative little mind had played over the little dialog that would likely have taken place if we had exchanged greetings, and that seemed so real to her that it obscured the reality. To Madison, what she had imagined seemed to be real. She probably didn't even remember what actually happened. This sort of lapse in spoken truth is very common in imaginative children. It requires prompt attention and treatment, but not the kind of treatment that a hasty and righteous parent might tend to adopt. In this situation, there's no need for moral indignation. It's not the child who is to blame, but the parents. Most likely, the child's ravenous imagination isn't satisfied daily with enough mental nourishment--fairy tales when the child is young, and adventures later. We can believe that children arrive 'trailing clouds of glory' from a place where all things are possible and any wonderful thing might happen. Our pathetic grown-up limitations of time, space and laws of matter are inconceivable annoyances to them that trap their free souls like wild birds locked in a cage. If we refuse to give the child outlets into the world of fancy where anything is possible, then their imagination, like Ariel, the delicate sprite, will still work, trying to express imagination within the narrow confines of our mundane tasks. Thus every bit of our mundane lives will be played over with a thousand different variations that are bound to be more vivid and interesting than the dull reality of what actually happened.
And the created incident is more likely to remain in the child's mind than what really happened when he's asked to tell what happened. What's the cure? Allow the child to enter in, live abundantly and joyfully in the kingdom of make-believe. Let him imagine that every canyon is populated with fairies, and every island is peopled with Robinson Crusoe. Let him imagine that every bird and animal has human interests, which he'll share as soon as his fairy godmother arrives and is introduced. Let's rejoice and be happy that all things seem possible to children. We should recognize that, because of this condition they're in, they're more fit to receive. believe and understand the things of God's kingdom in a way that we, unfortunately, can't. The age of faith is a prime time for sowing belief, and was undoubtedly designed in God's scheme of things especially to provide parents with a time to make their children familiar with spiritual things before exposure to the world makes them more concerned about materialistic things.
Yet, at the same time, the more imaginative a child is, the more he needs the boundaries of the make-believe kingdom defined, and the more he needs to be held to exact truthfulness in everything concerning the limited world where the grown-ups live. It's simply a matter of careful education. He needs daily practice at giving exact statements, without any unpleasantness or righteous indignation from his mother about misstatements. A child who conveys a long message with accuracy, who tells you what Mrs. Brown said and no more, or who tells what happened at Hayden's party without adding any embellishments should receive warm, loving encouragement. Every day provides opportunity for at least a dozen little lessons in accuracy. Gradually, the more precise beauty of truth will dawn upon the child whose soul is already blessed with the gift of fancy.
Volume 3, School Education Education, pg 183-185
We Manage Too Much of Children's Lives
I don't think we allow life and normal circumstances to just naturally occur in children's lives. We control too much, as if we were shielding little lambs from the wind. We shelter them from knowledge about pain, sin, need, suffering, disease, death and other hazards in ordinary life. I'm not saying we should expose children's tender souls to distress with careless abandon, but we should recognize that life has a calling for them, as much as it does for us. Nature provides them with a subtle protection, as subtle as the scent of a violet, that screens them from traumatic shocks. Some parents won't even read their children fairy tales because they're afraid that they'll expose the children to the ugly facts of life too suddenly. It's worthwhile for us to consider Wordsworth's experience. I don't think we make use of two very useful treasures that we as parents and teachers could be using. Those treasures are the autobiographies of two great philosophers--William Wordsworth and John Ruskin.
Fairy Tales Act as a Screen and Shelter
Wordsworth tells us that, shortly after he started school at Hawkshead, the body of a suicide victim was found in Esthwaite Lake. It was a ghastly incident, but we can take comfort when we see how children are protected from shock. Wordsworth, the little boy, was there, and saw it all:
'Yet, as young as I was, not even nine years old,
No depressing fear possessed me, because, in my mind,
I had seen such sights before among silvery streams
Of fairyland in the romantic forests.
The memory of my imaginings covered the real tragedy
With an ornament of perfect grace.
It gave the incident a dignity, a smoothness, like the works
Of Greek art, or the purest poetry.'
It's reassuring to hear a child who went through it say that such a terrible scene was kept separate from him by an atmosphere of poetry, and a veil woven from fairy tales by his own fanciful imagination.
That doesn't mean that we should take unnecessary risks. We should use a calm, matter-of-fact tone when we talk about fires, car wrecks or other terrors. For some children, the thought of Joseph being in the pit is scary, and even many of us adults can't handle a horrifying tale in the news or literature. The only thing I'm suggesting is that we treat children naturally and let them have their fair share in experiencing life as it really is. We shouldn't allow too much caution, or let our own panic dictate the way we deal with them.
Volume 4, Ourselves, pg 10 (Book II)
Children get moral concepts from the fairy tales they love, in the same way that grown ups get it from novels and poems.
Volume 5, Formation of Character, pg 86-87 [about helping a child who tells lies]
'I understand that if we both make it a point to freely and generously forgive every one of her little mistakes on the condition that she admits them, we might cure her of the lying she does out of fear of being punished. But the problem is, I don't think she recognizes the difference between truth and fiction anymore. She'll continue to fabricate purely inventive things that happened, and the lies will continue. She still won't be able to be trusted.'
''Purely inventive'--that's just it. Don't you see? Hannah is full of creative imagination. She imagines all kinds of scenes that evolve in her mind. All the different things that might have happened seem so real to her that she's bewildered and hardly able to distinguish which event actually happened, and which came from her imagination. It's useless to agonize over this as a moral fault. It's not a lack of morals, it's a lack of mental balance. Her mind is fine, but her creative energy runs away with her. She imagines what might have happened more clearly than what actually happened. I'll bet she loves fairy tales, doesn't she?'
'Well, to be honest, I assumed they'd only encourage her fabrications, so I've pretty much limited her to purely factual books.'
'I suspect that's a mistake. An assertive imagination like Hannah's needs its proper nourishment. Let her have her daily rations. She should hear 'The Babes in the Wood,' 'The Little Match-Girl,' 'The Snow-Maiden,' stories and legends that are loosely based on historic fact, and, most important of all, stories from the Bible. She should have whatever she can replay in her mind over and over, but not unimaginative twaddle about children just like her doing the kinds of things she does, whether they're funny or serious. She needs exposure to the larger world beyond her routine life where anything is possible and beautiful things are always happening. If you give her this kind of mental food that she needs so much, then her mind will be so full of mental images that she won't be tempted to make up exciting versions of what happens in her routine, everyday life.'
My husband laughed. 'My dear Emma, maybe you'd better let us do the best we can to fix the problem; your idea is too wild! Your way would only encourage her! 'Behold, here comes that dreamer!' Imagine sending my daughter into the world labelled as a dreamer!'
'That's an inaccurate quote for this situation. I haven't finished. I truly believe that starving Hannah's imagination will do some damage to her. But, at the same time, you're right about the need to diligently cultivate accurate knowledge and a love for truth. What is truth but plain, simple fact as it actually exists? I believe that Hannah's fabrications are the result of her lack of being able to perceive fact because her mind is so preoccupied.'
Volume 6, Philosophy of Education, pg 36
Who can measure the limits of a child's thoughts? His constant questions about God and speculations about Jesus are more than idle curiosity. They are symptoms of a God-hunger that we're all born with. He may be able to comprehend as much about the infinite and the unseen as we complacent adults. Is it possible that our ways confine him, and that he needs fairy tales as a joyful escape to places where all things are possible? We hear that children have no imaginations and that they need to see and touch and taste to know. Infants devote themselves to learning the different properties of things by touching, pulling, tearing, throwing and tasting. But when children are older, they need only a glance to size up new things, even things that have complicated structures. Life is a continual progress for children. They don't go over and over the same things, they love to move on to new things.
Volume 6, Philosophy of Education, pg 338-339
We're at a fork in the road. Our most recent educational expert, someone who knows and loves children [Montessori?], is recommending that we discard stories and history tales that appeal to the imagination. She charges us to let children learn through use of things, and her charm and tenderness in telling us may blind us to the desolation of her message. We recognize traces of Rousseau and his book Emile in her teaching. Emile was a self-sufficient person who wasn't supposed to know anything about the past. He would see no visions, and be constrained under no authority. But the human nature of real children is stronger than some eighteenth century philosopher's theories that continue to be spread. Anyone who has ever told a child a fairy tale has seen the natural appetite for literature, and it's our job to provide that literature for them. Is it so hard to believe that words are more than food? And if we believe that, shouldn't we rise up and insist that children not be deprived of the abundant spiritual diet of words that they need?