|   CM SERIES HOME   |   CONCISE SUMMARIES   |   PARAPHRASED IN MODERN ENGLISH   |



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


Appendix

Discussion Questions

BOOK I

Chapter 1 - The Country of Mansoul

No Questions

Chapter 2 - The Perils Of Mansoul

1. Who is to blame for these perils?
2. What kind of danger does laziness pose to Mansoul?
3. What causes fires in Mansoul?
4. What causes plague, flood, and famine?
5. What happens when there's dissent?
6. What makes darkness chill and soak Mansoul?
7. Can it be prevented?
8. What conditions are needed for things to go well in Mansoul?

Chapter 3 - The Government of Mansoul

1. Why is being born like inheriting a huge, beautiful estate?
2. What or who governs Mansoul ?
3. Name some of the officers of state.
4. Name the four Houses where these officers sit.
5. Are these different parts of a person?

PART I - The House Of The Body

Chapter 1 - The Assistants Of The Body: Hunger

1. What is the work of the appetites?
2. When does an appetite become harmful?
3. How does hunger behave?
4. What's the difference between between hunger and gluttony?
5. How can gluttony to be avoided?

Chapter 2 - The Assistants Of The Body: Thirst

1. Why do we get thirsty? What is the drink that thirst likes?
2. What are some effects of drunkenness?
3. Why do some people abstain from even tasting alcohol?

Chapter 3 - The Assistants Of The Body: Restlessness and Rest

1. What is the purpose of restlessness?
2. How can it be harmful?
3. Explain how rest and work should alternate.
4. When does rest turn into Sloth?

Chapter 4 - Assistants of the Body: Chastity

1. How can we control our appetites?
2. How is Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil a good way to illustrate chastity?
3. What does 'Blessed are the pure in heart' mean regarding chastity?
4. What is a heroic reason to stay pure?
5. Where does slavery to our appetites begin?
6. How do we rule our thoughts?

Chapter 5 - The Attendants Of The Body: The Five Senses

1. What are the two reasons that we need to watch our senses?
2. What are the uses, and what is the danger of the sense of taste?
3. Explain how we don't always get the most use or pleasure from our sense of smell.
4. How can we practice using our sense of smell?
5. What kind of information does the sense of touch give us?
6. Explain by the 'touch of the blind,' a 'kind touch,' etc., how the sense of touch can be cultivated.
7. What kind of practice helps to develop the sense of touch?
8. Why is it good to have little things to put up with?
9. Explain how sight brings half our joy.
10. How can we learn to see more?
11. What kind of joy and what knowledge should we get from our sense of hearing?
12. How can we develop a hearing ear for music?

PART II - The House of the Mind

Chapter 1 - Ourselves

1. Explain how speaking of 'ourselves' is like saying 'the sun rises.'
2. Self-reverence depends on what?
3. Explain why we need self-knowledge before we can have self-reverence.
4. Explain why we need to know ourselves before we can control ourselves.

Chapter 2 - My Lord Intellect

1. What is the Intellect's purpose?
2. How is science is a vast and joyous region?
3. How does imagination help in the region of science?
4. Compare history to old movies.
5. How does history make our world seem bigger?
6. How are we making history?
7. Explain why imagination is necessary for us to appreciate history.
8. What part of our intellect usually goes along to mathematics?
9. What makes mathematics so satisfying?
10. Why do we need to learn about philosophy?
11. What are some of the advantages of literature?
12. What parts of the intellect need to join in our visits to the kingdom of literature?
13. Give three ways to test literature.
14. What are some of the purposes of the Beauty sense?
15. How can we tell the difference between art and imitation art?
16. How can we encourage our intellect to continue growing?
17. What are some things that extinguish our intellect?

Chapter 3 - The Demons Of The Intellect

1. What effect does laziness have on our intellectual life?
2. Why shouldn't we stay in one field of thought?
3. Describe your idea of a magnanimous mind.

Chapter 4 - My Lord Chief Explorer, Imagination

1. What is our imagination for?
2. How does cultivating our imagination help us?
3. What two areas does Imagination need to stay away from?
4. What can we do to keep our Imagination from focusing on Self?
5. What kinds imaginings do we need to avoid?
6. How can we keep things from harming our imagination?

Chapter 5 - The Beauty Sense

1. How does exclusiveness tempt people who enjoy beauty?
2. Where is the person who gives himself up to Beauty mistaken?
3. Explain how the Beauty Sense opens a paradise of pleasure.

Chapter 6 - My Lord Chief Attorney-General, Reason

1. How is reason like an advocate?
2. Follow the paths of reasoning that can bring any two people to different conclusions.
3. Trace a possible path of reasoning of a good man.
4. Show the part reason plays in good works and great inventions.
5. What is meant by common sense?
6. Try to imagine the train of reasoning of the man who made the first wheelbarrow.
7. Why have some people put Reason on a pedestal?
8. Explain why equally good, sensible people sometimers come to opposite conclusions.
9. How does this prove that reason can bring us to wrong conclusions?
10. Show how an error of thought can lead to crime.
11. Why is reason almost infallible in math?
12. Explain how we're entrusted to use the power of reasoning for good purposes.
13. Explain how reason justifies whatever notions have been accepted by the will.
14. Why are there different schools of philosophy?
15. What kind of reasoning practice should children have?

Chapter 7 - Managers of the Revenue, The Desires (Part 1)

1. Compare the work that the desires do with the work the appetites do.
2. How does the desire for approval help us?
3. Explain how vanity can do harm in our lives.
4. Explain how the desires for infamy and of fame come from the same source.
5. What does the desire to excel do in someone like a hockeyplayer?
6. How does this desire help him?
7. How can the desire to excel be bad in education?
8. What's the danger of wanting to excel at unworthy things?
9. How does the desire for wealth help mankind?
10. What are the risks of the desire for wealth?
11. How can we avoid the desire to have worthless things?
12. How can the desire for power be useful?
13. What are the dangers of desiring power?
14. How are 'managing' kinds of people harmful to those around them?

Chapter 8 - Managers of the Revenue, The Desires (Part 2)

1. Explain how the desire for community works in most people.
2. What benefit to the mind comes from other people?
3. But on what conditions?
4. Explain how the company of any good person is a useful opportunity.
5. What are two reasons why the love of company can be harmful?
6. How do we lose out by refusing to spend time with anyone who's different from us?
7. Which of the desires is to the mind what hunger is to the body?
8. What's the difference between the desire for knowledge, and idle curiosity?
9. Explain how the mind needs knowledge about great matters to feed on and grows.
10. Explain how the love for knowledge can be extinguished by a desire to excel.
11. How do grades influence our desire for knowledge?
12. When we know that all normal people have the same intellectual abilities that we do, how should that influence us?
13. Explain how the duty of managing our thoughts comes from our possession of these intellectual abilities.

PART III - The House of Heart

Lords Of The Heart: I. Love

Chapter 1 - The Ways Of Love

1. What are the two kinds of love?
2. Mention some of the ways in which love is shown.
3. Do we know how much love is possible for a human being?
4. Why is self-love necessary?
5. When is love false love?
6. Describe another kind of false love.
7. Name four tests that help us recognize real love.
8. What is the Apostle's rule about love?
9. What are love's opposite feelings?
10. Why do we sometimes feel those things?
11. What is the one part of the Lord's Prayer that has a condition attached to it?

Chapter 2 - Love's Lords In Waiting: Pity

1. Explain how pity is in every heart.
2. Name a few knights and ladies of pity.
3. Explain how idle sympathy is a snare.
4. Name a few reasons why people feel sorry for themselves.
5. How is this habit dangerous?
6. What are two ways of defending ourselves from this danger?

Chapter 3 - Love's Lords In Waiting: Goodwill

1. What does goodwill help us to do.
2. What makes it possible to sincerely like any person?
3. Explain a person is more than their faults.
4. How will recognizing that fact influence us?
5. What's the difference between goodwill and good-nature?
6. What are the characteristics of a person who has goodwill?
7. Name six enemies of goodwill, and tell what they do.

Chapter 4 - Love's Lords In Waiting: Sympathy

1. Explain how sympathy for one person helps us to understand other people.
2. How should this fact influence the way we deal with people that we think are on a different intellectual level?
3. How do poets, painters, and other artists raise the rest of the world?
4. Our sympathy is only helpful when what happens?
5. What are the results of imitation empathy?
6. Explain how tact is a way of showing empathy.
7. Explain how self-occupation destroys empathy.
8. What are the active and the passive forms of Ego?

Chapter 5 - Love's Lords In Waiting: Thoughtfulness

1. What does thoughtfulness do for others?
2. Discuss the kindness of courtesy.
3. Explain how there can be no kindness without singlemindedness.
4. Discuss a current method that's supposed to help children be thoughtful.
5. What is the most generous kind of thoughtfulness of all?
6. Explain how the opposite behaviour is one of the main reasons for unhappiness in the world.

Chapter 6 - Love's Lords In Waiting: Magnanimity

1. Explain how gracious impulses are common to everyone.
2. Explain how generosity has no patience for base smart alecks and suspicious 'wisdom.'
3. Explain how generosity is costly but has its own reward.
4. Explain how a generous person's concerns are fairly divided.
5. Name a few false ideas that restrain generosity.
6. What rule of life does a generous person follow?

Chapter 7 - Love's Lords In Waiting: Gratitude

1. Why does gratitude give us pleasure?
2. How do we sometimes miss the joy of being grateful?
3. When a person receives a small kindness, what are the two ways he can respond?
4. Why does a grateful heart always give a full return ?
5. How can we escape the shame of ingratitude?
6. Do we owe gratitude only to those who are present and living?

Chapter 8 - Love's Lords In Waiting: Courage

1. Explain how we all have the courage to attack.
2. What are the demons that suppress courage?
3. Explain how we all have the courage to endure.
4. Explain how panic, anxiety, and shameful fear are possible for any of us.
5. Explain how knowing that we have all the courage we'll ever need can help us to be calm.
6. Explain how we can have the courage to deal with our circumstances, and how that helps us not to be anxious.
7. Explain the problem of not having the courage to stick to our opinions.
8. How can we be sure that our opinions are truly our own?
9. Discuss the courage of being open.
10. How much should we hold back?
11. Explain our duty to give kind, gentle correction.
12. Explain why it takes courage to confess.
13. What limits should we put on our confessions?
14. How does the courage of confidence help us?
15. Explain how intellectual panic results in many failures.
16. What is your understanding of the courage to seize opportunity?

Chapter 9 - Love's Lords In Waiting: Loyalty

1. Why should our young years be devoted to loyalty and chivalry?
2. What is the test of loyalty?
3. Explain how our loyalties are already determined for us.
4. What are your thoughts about loyalty to our king?
5. What are your thoughts about loyalty to our own people?
6. What do you think about people who prefer to be loyal to foreign kings or countries?
7. Explain how public opinion is responsible for anarchy.
8. What does loyalty to our country demand of us?
9. What is required from us in order to be ready for these demands?
10. What are some ways that we can serve our country?
11. Why is loyalty to a chief the secret of  'dignified obedience and proud submission?'
12. What are some ways that we show loyalty to personal ties?
13. How is a mind that's constant the essence of all loyalties?
14. Are all of our loyalties due for life?
15. When we need to break ties with a boss or someone we take care of, how should the break be made?
16. Why does loyalty needs to be thorough?
17. What kind of loyalty do we owe to our principles?
18. What are loyalty's enemies?

Chapter 10 - Love's Lords In Waiting: Humility

1. Why is the pride of life the worst of men's stumbling blocks?.
2. What two kinds of humility do we have?
3. How do we devalue humility?
4. Why is humility an unpopular Christian trait?
5. Explain how exalting ourselves makes us prone to resentful attitudes.
6. How is humility the same as simplicity?
7. What makes us fall from humility?
8. Why shouldn't we try to be humble?

Chapter 11 - Love's Lords In Waiting: Cheerfulness

1. Why is there no excuse for not being cheerful?
2. Explain how joy can flow even in sorrow and pain.
3. Explain how cheerfulness can be contagious.
4. Explain how joy can be a continual fountain.
5, Why, then, are some people dragging, pale, dull and weary?
6. Explain how gladness is a duty.

Lords Of The Heart: II. Justice

Chapter 12 - Justice is Universal

1. Explain why we must know the functions of love and justice.
2. Why does everyone understand when something isn't fair?
3. How do we exhibit fairness (a) in what we say, (b) in our thoughts, (c) in what we do?
4. In what kinds of ways do we need to be fair and just with others?
5. How do we know what we owe to others regarding justice?
6. What knowledge can encourage us as we try to be fair to all people?
7. When it comes to our own rights, what are we owed?

Chapter 13 - Justice To Others

1. How do we begin to understand our duty to be just and fair to others?
2. Explain why thinking fairly requires knowledge and consideration.
3. How does ungentleness cause someone else to be physically hurt?
4. How is courtesy a matter of justice?
5. Explain why we shouldn't think bad things about other people.
6. Explain the way we show fairness to the character of others.
7. Which of Justice's servants helps us to be fair to the character of others?
8. How does prejudice interfere with justice?
9. Explain how we owe respect to all people.
10. What defect in ourselves interferes with our ability to show respect?
11. Explain how respect needs to be balanced by discernment.
12. How does appreciation show justice?
13. Why is depreciation unjust?

Chapter 14 - Truth: Justice In Word

1. What is one of the ways we can discern truth?
2. Describe Botticelli's painting 'Calumny.'
3. What does the painting teach us?
4. How did Wesley say is the difference between lying and slandering?
5. What was envy considered in the Middle Ages?
6. What is the danger of hearing and reading Slander?
7. What has happened to the fanatic?
8. How does Francis Bacon describe 'the sovereign good'?

Chapter 15 - Spoken Truth

1. What is accuracy?
2. Explain why we shouldn't qualify what we say.
3. Why isn't painstaking meticulous detail the same as accuracy?
4. Why is exaggeration wrong as well as foolish?
5. Why is it not truthful draw generalizations from only one or two experiences?
6. What are the temptations of telling a good story?
7. Tell the difference between essential and accidental truth.
8. Show the value of fiction regarding essential and accidental truth.
9. How does fiction affect our passions, and even our religion?
10. Distinguish accidental and essential truth in some Bible stories.
11. Which of the two is more important, and why?

Chapter 16 - Some Causes Of Lying

1. What kind of lies are told to make a person's friends think less of him?
2. Discuss cowardly lies.
3. Explain how the habit of being too reserved to share things is related to the falsehood of concealing truth.
4. What's wrong with boastful lies?
5. What's the harm with adventurous lies?
6. Explain why we need to be truthful even with our opponents.
7. What four attendants serve Truth?

Chapter 17 - Integrity: Justice In Action

1. Explain how a 'Go easy' policy is dishonest.
2. By what standard is every person's work judged?
3. How are we all paid workers?
4. Explain how integrity grows slowly.
5. Why is 'Do The Next Thing' a part of integrity?
6. Why is doing the most important thing a part of integrity?
7. Why is finishing what we've begun a part of integrity?
8. Explain how drifters and dawdlers lack integrity.
9. Explain how people who steal time lacks integrity.
10. Why is it important to be honest in the use of resources?
11. How does this principle apply to small debts?
12. How does this principle apply to bargain shopping?
13. How does this principle apply to the way we treat our neighbours' property?

Chapter 18 - Opinions: Justice In Thought

1. Give examples of opinions that are worthless for three different reasons.
2. What kind of opinion is worth having?
3. Why do we need to have opinions at all?
4. What's the difference between a faddist and a reformer?
5. List a few things that we need to form opinions about.
6. Why should we work to to form opinions about books?
7. What sort of books are of lasting value to us, and why?
8. Give six things to remember about forming opinions.

Chapter 19 - Principles: Justice In Our Motives

1. Why are our principles called 'principles'?
2. Explain how principles cany be bad or good.
3. How can we tell the difference between bad and good principles?
4. Our principles rule everything we do. What is important about choosing our principles?

Chapter 20 - Justice To Ourselves: Self-Control

1. What is our duty towards our own bodies?
2. What are some ways of being excessive?
3. Explain how soberness includes more than not drinking.
4. What tendency leads to the four paths to personal destruction?
5. What happens to friends at the parting of the ways?
6. Why does the alcohol drink?
7. What is the alcoholic's fate?
8. In what sense may we say that God puts us on our honor when it comes to self-indulgence?
9. How is excitement a kind of intoxication?
10. Explain how gluttony is as disgusting as drunkenness.
11. Discuss how interests in life safeguard us against bad habits.
12. What is a common symptom of laziness, and what is the cure?
13. Of the four paths to ruin, which one is the worst?
14. What caution and what command should help to safeguard us?

PART IV - Careers

1. What do people want to be the kind of work they end up doing?
2. How is it possible to prepare for our calling when we don't even know yet what it will be?
3. How can we get the habit of being useful?
4. How does the rule about habit help us or hurt us?
5. A specific calling comes to each of us. What must we do to prepare ourselves for it?





Previous Page | Contents




Paraphrased by L. N. Laurio
Please direct any comments or questions to me by emailing me at cmseries-owner at yahoogroups dot com.



|   CM SERIES HOME   |   CONCISE SUMMARIES   |   PARAPHRASED IN MODERN ENGLISH   |