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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 214
An Educational Manifesto
'Lessons
should be enjoyable; they should enhance the individual and give him
the ability he needs for life.'
Every child has a right to be exposed to several fields
of knowledge.
Every normal child has a natural appetite for this kind of knowledge.
This appetite, or natural desire, is all a child needs to motivate him
to do his lessons, if the knowledge is presented properly.
The desire to learn is destroyed in four ways:
(1) Too much talking at the child, offering
diluted knowledge without giving the child time and space to reflect
and digest that knowledge.
(2) Lectures that are assembled, arranged and
illustrated from different sources by the teacher. These usually offer
knowledge that's so condensed and well-prepared that the child doesn't
need to think about it, and doesn't assimilate it.
(3) Textbooks that are compressed and filtered
and recompressed until they bear little of the original living
ideas from the mind they started with.
(4) The use of competition and desire for
achievement as motives to do lessons, instead of the natural hunger and
love for knowledge that are all a child needs to learn.
Children learn best from real, tangible things, and
books. Tangible things include:
a. Natural structures for physical activity
like climbing, swimming, walking, etc.
b. Resources for working and building with,
such as wood, leather or clay.
c. Natural objects in their native habitat,
like birds, plants, creeks, and stones.
d. Works of art.
e. Scientific instruments.
Most people acknowledge the need for tangible things in
learning, as in hands-on education, but fewer people recognize that
intellectual education has to come from books.
Every student six years old and up should enjoy studying their own books from each of their
subjects, and their books should represent a pretty wide curriculum.
Children between the ages of six to eight will need to have most of
their books read aloud to them.
This approach has been used with successful results for the past twelve
years in many home schoolrooms and some other schools.
By freely using books, the mechanical difficulties of education -
reading, spelling, composition, etc. - disappear, and lessons become
'enjoyable; able to enhance the individual and give him the ability he
needs for life.'
We believe that these principles can work in all schools, both
elementary and high school, and they can make education more
simplified, cheaper, and more disciplined.
a paraphrase of Charlotte Mason's
Educational Manifesto
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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