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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
pg 178
Chapter 17- Sensations And Feelings: Parents Can Educate Their Children's Five
Senses
Common
Sense
Parents who don't know the theoretic knowledge behind the nutritional
values of various foods are usually still capable of nourishing their
children quite well. That's because they rely on what they call common
sense, and, generally, the result is better than if they had
scientifically analyzed and planned their family's diet. But common
sense usually rests on a foundation of scientific opinion, even if the
exact data has been forgotten. When scientific opinion becomes the
foundation of habit, it's even more valuable and works more simply than
when habit is formed on trial and error. In the same way, it's good to
be so familiar with what human nature does that we can act on our
knowledge without thinking about it, without even being conscious that
we know it. But if we don't have this kind of information stored in our
memory files, then we need to study it, even if we have to learn from
our own experiments. Most people assume that children's five senses,
feelings and emotions are matters that take care of themselves. In
fact, we tend to use the three terms synonymously without having a
clear
idea about what they mean. But, collectively, they cover a very
pg 179
important educational area. Although common sense, which is judgments
that are formed by inherited knowledge, often helps us to make wise
choices without quite realizing why, we could probably choose even more
wisely if we used logic.
Where
the Senses Originate
First, let's consider the subject of senses. We talk about sensations
of cold, or heat, or pain, and that's accurate. We also talk about
sensations of fear and pleasure, and that's not correct. Sensations
originate in impressions that are received by our senses--eyes, tongue,
nose, ears and the surface of our skin. These impressions are carried
by the sensory nerves. Some go to the spinal cord, and some go to the
lower region of the brain. We have many sensations that we never know
about. When we do become aware of sensations, it's because the nerve
fibers act like telegraph wires and send these impressions to the
conscious brain. This happens when we give our attention to any one of the
multitude of messages that the sensory nerves are carrying. The
physical anatomy of the senses is too complicated to mention here, but
it's fascinating. Probably the best introduction to it is Professor
Clifford's little book, Seeing and
Thinking (Macmillan). The senses are like the Five Gateways of
Knowledge, which is a title of another little book that many of us
remember from the past. Any intelligent person should be consciously
aware of the sensations he receives, and able to form accurate
judgments about them.
Sensations
Should be Treated With Objective Interest
We all understand that training the
pg 180
five senses is an important part of education. I need to make one
warning: right from the beginning, a child's sensations should be
treated as matters of objective, rather than subjective, interest. For
example, orange marmalade isn't interesting just because the child
thinks it's 'good,' whether he likes it is something that shouldn't be
dwelt on at
all. Marmalade is interesting because you can detect different flavors
in it,
and notice how the oil from the rind modifies it. We'll be able to
discuss this topic more later, but for now we'll just state that it's
useful when educating children to focus a child's attention outward on
the object he's sensing rather than on himself and how he feels about
it.
Object
Lessons Are No Longer Popular
The purpose of so-called object lessons is to help a child find out all
that he can about an object by carefully examining it so that he
experiences it with his various senses. General information about the
object is thrown in and retained because the child's senses have been
active in the exercise, and his interest has been stimulated. Object
lessons aren't as popular these days for two reasons. First, pitiful
fragments of the world are presented to the children. These fragments
lack much of the character of the object in its natural setting, and
can provide inadequate information, or even the wrong ideas. And,
secondly, object lessons are often used to introduce children to hard
words like opaque and translucent. These concepts won't become part of
their living thought until they pick them up incidentally when the need
arises. But just because this kind of teaching has been abused doesn't
mean that it doesn't have some use. No child grows up without some
object teaching every day, although it may be casual and incidental
rather than well-planned. The more thorough this object teaching is,
the more intelligent and observant the child will become. It's
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remarkable how few people are able to develop an intelligent curiosity
about even the most attractive objects, unless their interest is
stimulated from an outside source.
A
Baby's Object Lesson
We can learn a lot about how to teach object lessons from babies. Of
course, the baby is his own student, but he makes amazing progress. At
first, he doesn't see any difference between a real cow and a picture
of one. Big and little, far and near, hard and soft, hot and cold are
all the same to him. He thinks he can hold the moon in his hand, or
sit on top of the pond, or poke his finger into the flame of a
candle--not because he's foolish, but because he's utterly ignorant
about the nature of all the different things in this confusing world.
But he works hard! He bangs his spoon to see if makes a sound. He sucks
it to see what it tastes like. He fumbles and feels it all over and
discovers whether it's hard or soft, hot or cold, rough or smooth. He
stares at it as intently as only an infant can so that he can
internalize the way it looks. By the time he sees it again, it's like
an old friend that he can't wait to see because now he's learned how
much joy there is in a spoon. This goes on for a couple of years until
the baby has acquired enough knowledge about the world to conduct
himself in a dignified, rational way.
Nature's
Lessons
That's the way nature teaches. For the first five or six years of his
life, everything, especially things that move, is an object of
intelligent curiosity. A street or a field is a panorama of delight.
The neighbor's dog, the garbage truck, a man with a lawn mower are all
vividly fascinating. He has a thousand
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questions to ask. He wants to know about everything. In fact, he has an
unlimited appetite for knowledge. But we soon fix that. We
keep him busy with books instead of things,
and we arouse other desires within the child instead of allowing his
own craving for knowledge to motivate him to learn. And the result is
an unobservant man (and an even more unobservant woman) who can't tell
the difference between an elm, a poplar and a lime tree--and misses out
on a lot of the joy of life. By the way, why doesn't a baby intently
exercise his sense of smell? When he's taught to smell a flower, he
screws up his little nose, but he isn't really smelling, he's just
striking a pose. He doesn't act out natural experiments to see
whether things have a strong smell, yet each of his other senses bring
him so much enjoyment. Undoubtedly his little nose is unconsciously
busy with incoming smells, but is his inactivity with the sense of
smell a hereditary failure? Maybe all of us allow ourselves to go
through life with unresponsive nostrils. If this is the case, then this
is something that mothers should consider. They're the ones who should
bring up their children from a young age to perceive smells as well as
involuntarily receiving them in a vague, random way.
Educating
the Senses
There are two things we need to be concerned with when it comes to
educating the senses. We need to help the child to educate himself
using the same methods that Nature uses, and we need to be careful that
our 'formal education' doesn't crowd out and replace nature's methods.
Object lessons should be casual and unplanned. In this, the home has
a big advantage over the school. It's almost impossible for schools to
give anything but pre-planned lessons, but at home, this kind of lesson
can be done when the subject comes up. If a child finds a wonderful,
beautiful paper wasp's nest attached to a larch twig, he can have his
object lesson right
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there on the spot from his mother or father. The gray color, the round
shape, the cup-and-ball way it's arranged, the papery texture, the size
of it, what it feels like, whether it has a smell, how light it is, the
fact that it doesn't feel cold--the child discovers these and fifty
other facts all by himself, or with the help of a brief word here and
there to direct his attention to a particular detail. One doesn't find
a wasp's nest every day, but a lot can be learned from any common
object that comes the child's way. In fact, the more common, the
better--a piece of bread, a lump of coal, a sponge.
Advantages
of Home Teaching
At home, it's not necessary to do a comprehensive observation of every
object. One quality might be focused on with one object, another
quality in something else. When we eat bread and milk, we notice that
bread absorbs, and we carry this bit of data to other things we're
familiar with that we know are also absorbent. That leads us to try and
see if those things are more or less absorbent than the bread. This is
very important. An unobservant person will say that an object is light
and assume that he's said all there is to say. But an observant person,
although he may say the same thing, has a relative scale in his mind.
His judgment has more value because, in his mind, he compares the
object with other things that are also light.
Positive
and Comparative Terms
It's important for children to recognize that words like high, sweet,
bitter, long, short, and pleasant are 'comparative' [relative] terms, while words like
square, round, black, and white are 'positive' [absolute] terms that aren't
relative to how they compare with other objects.
pg 184
Indiscriminate
Use of Labels
Being careful in this regard will result in better moral and
intellectual development. Half of the conflicts in the world arise from
an indiscriminate use of labels. [But
children can be encouraged to
learn better.] A child might be asked at dinner, 'Would you say
that
your bread is light, or heavy?' The child would probably say,
'Pretty light.' 'Yes, but we can only say that a thing is light after
we've compared it with other things. What is bread light compared
with?' 'A rock, a brick, a piece of cheese or butter the same size as
the bread.' 'And what is it heavy compared with?' 'A piece of angel
food cake, a sponge, a piece of cork, or cotton,' and so on. 'How much
do you think it weighs?' 'An ounce,' or, 'an ounce and a half.' 'Let's
weigh it after dinner. Here, take an extra piece and hold on to it.'
And the process of weighing the bread is a fun project. The ability to
tell what things weigh is a skill worth developing. The other day I
heard of a man who had to try and guess the weight of a humongous cake.
He considered it and said it weighed eighteen pounds fourteen ounces.
And he was exactly right! All other things being equal, the man who can
make this accurate judgment gains more respect than
the vague person who guessed that the cake might weigh ten pounds.
Judging
Weight
Letters, boxes, an apple or orange, a vegetable core, or fifty other
things in the course of a day can provide opportunities for this kind
of object teaching. I'm talking about the practice of determining
judgments about the relative and absolute weight of things by how they
feel against our muscles when we pick them up. Little by little,
children can be trained to understand that the relative weights of
objects depend on their relative
pg 185
density, and to understand the fact that we have a standard measure of
weight.
Judging
Size
In the same way, children should learn to estimate the size of objects
by looking at them. How high is that candlestick? How long and wide is
that picture-frame? etc, verifying their guesses. What's the
circumference of that bowl? of the face of the clock? of the flower
pot? How tall is this person, or that person? How tall are the vehicles
of the different people they know? Divide a sheet of paper accurately
into half, then thirds, then quarters without a ruler. Try to lay a
walking stick so that it's exactly at right angles with another one.
Notice when a picture, curtain or something else isn't hanging quite
perpendicular. These sorts of exercises will develop what's called a
correct, or true, eye in children.
Discriminating
Sounds
A quick, discriminating ear is something else that doesn't come by
nature. Or, if it does, it's usually lost. How many different sounds
can you distinguish when it suddenly gets quiet outside? Let the child
name them in order from the quietest to the loudest. Let him try to
notice different bird notes, both bird calls and songs. Let him try to
listen for four or five distinct sounds that a brook makes as it flows.
Develop
accuracy in distinguishing footsteps and voices. Have them practice
telling the direction that a sound is coming from with their eyes
closed, or which way footsteps are moving. Try to tell the difference
between different vehicles driving by only from their sound--such as a
truck, van, or sports car. Music is unquestionably the best way to
train this kind of ear culture. Mrs. Curwen's book 'Child Pianist'
provides carefully graduated exercises of this kind for the parent.
Even if a child never becomes a performer, acquiring a cultivated and
correct ear is a big part of music education.
pg 186
Discriminating
Smells
We don't attach enough importance to discriminating smells, whether to
protect our health, or for our own pleasure. Half the people we know
have noses that can't detect the difference between the atmosphere of a
large, spacious (supposedly airy) room whose windows are never open,
and a room that's ventilated regularly with fresh outside air. Yet our
health depends to a great extent on being sensitive enough to perceive
how pure the atmosphere is. The smells that indicate diphtheria or
typhoid are noticeable, even if only slightly, and a person whose nose
has been
trained to detect even the slightest trace of harmful particles in
food, clothing, or the home, can protect himself from disease.
Also, our nose is quicker than our other senses to let in--
'sweet sensations
That are felt in the blood and along the heart.'
Those sensations add a lot to our general happiness because they merge
with our bodily joy by making links of association. We're constantly
hearing or saying things like, 'I can never smell wild baby's breath
without being reminded of--' but we don't stop to realize what a debt
we owe to the flower's scent for this joy (or sorrow, if the memory is
a sad one) for the memory of the pleasant influences around us when
we pick the flower, and possibly the more personal memory of an
experience we were having that we now associate with that flower. Every
new smell we experience is a warning, or a source of pleasure or
interest that we can relive every time we re-encounter that smell.
We're familiar with far too few of springtime's smells. Just this
spring I discovered two unusually delightful new smells that
pg 187
I'd never experienced before--the scent of young larch twigs, which
resemble the type and strength of scent as the flower of a syringe [tree?], and the pleasant, musky
aroma of boxwood. Children can be trained to close their eyes when they
come into a room and try to guess what's in the room simply by smell.
They should try to distinguish the different scents that are let loose
after a rain shower:
'Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with
perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it.
*
* *
'The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation,
it is odorless,
It is for my mouth for ever, I am in love with it.
* *
*
'The sniff of green leaves, and dry leaves, and of the shore, and
dark-colored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn.'
Perhaps Walt Whitman has done more than any other poet to express the
pleasure that can be found in odors. This is one area where we could do
so much more. We haven't even explored a fraction of the amount of
smell that we've done with sound and color.
Discriminating
Flavors
Flavor also offers lots of opportunity for delicate discrimination. At
first glance, it seems like it would be impossible to teach a child to
cultivate the sense of taste without turning him into a gourmet. But
the truth is, the strong flavors that stimulate the taste buds destroy
the ability to differentiate flavors. A young child who lives on milky
foods probably appreciates flavors in a way that someone who eats out a
lot could never appreciate, even when he has a meal prepared by a
four-star chef. Still,
it's preferable for the child to focus on taste as a matter of interest
rather than
pg 188
as a sensory pleasure. It's more beneficial for him to make an effort
to discern a flavor with his eyes shut instead of being allowed to
think or say that foods are 'good' or 'yucky.' That kind of pickiness
shouldn't be tolerated. It isn't good to force a child to eat something
he doesn't like, since that will only make him dislike that particular
food for the rest of his life. But he should be reproved for a lack of
self-control and courage when he expresses a dislike for a healthy
food. That's likely to have a lasting effect on his character.
Sensory
Training
We've barely even touched on the kinds of object lessons for the
various
senses that should be part of every day incidental family life. We tend
to think of Native Americans Indians as uneducated people. But, on the
contrary, they are highly educated in the way of being able to
discriminate sensory impressions and know how to respond to them. Their
ability in this area is bewildering to any book-learned European. It
would be good for parents to educate their children along these same
'Red Indian' lines for at least the first six years. In addition to the
few suggestions we've already given, a child should be able to
distinguish colors and shades of color, relative degrees of heat in
materials such as cloth, wood, iron, marble, and ice and know how to
use a thermometer, be able to sort items in order of their hardness,
and have a cultivated eye and feel for textures. He should be able to
get as much information from an object after a few minutes studying its
form, color, texture, size, weight, qualities, parts and
characteristics as if he'd read many pages out of a book. We're
approaching this issue from the perspective of the child's senses
instead of from the perspective of the object to be studied because we
have an idea
pg 189
for some occasional test exercises whose specific purpose is to
cultivate the various senses. Being acquainted with Nature and objects
from nature is another subject entirely and is handled in a completely
different way. A boy observing a beetle doesn't consciously determine
to apply all of his senses to observing the beetle. He lets the beetle
take the initiative and he reverently follows his lead. Still, a boy
who's accustomed to doing some daily sensory exercises will learn a lot
more from his observation of the beetle than a boy who hasn't had that
kind of training.
Sensory
Exercises
With specific object lessons, information about the object is exhausted
by each of the senses in turn, and every atom of information that can
be had will be extracted from it. Incidental exercises are different.
It's a good idea to make this kind of lesson a game. Pass the object
around--perhaps a piece of bread. Let each child tell something he
discovers about it by touching it. Pass it around again and have each
child tell what he learns about its smell, then taste, then sight.
Children are innovative with this kind of game, and it provides an
opportunity to introduce them to new words such as fragile, or elastic,
when they honestly ask for help to find a word to express a property
they've just discovered. This game helps children to learn to think
with exactitude, to distinguish between words like fragile and brittle.
Any common knowledge they gain from this exercise will stay with them
forever. Another good game that could be played at a birthday party is
to arrange a hundred objects on a table when the children are out of
sight. Bring the little group into the room and give them three minutes
to look around the table. Then, after they've left the room, have them
go into a corner and write or tell the
pg 190
names of as many objects as they can remember. Some children will
easily get fifty or sixty.
Without a doubt, the best and most joy-giving sensory experience comes
from a warm familiarity with the world of nature, but the kinds of
exercises we've suggested will help the sensory perceptions to be more
acute, and children love the games. The five senses should be developed
to be worthy ministers to the child's subjective consciousness. That's
an important consideration to keep in mind.
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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