AmblesideOnline's Patio Chats:
14. Self -Education: the Only Education, for the Win!
Last week, we closed by saying, "narrating is your child's work, not yours." We're going to think about that this week. Why is it so important that the child not be told what to tell back?
Because of this very CM idea: the only education is self-education. Have you ever sat through a lecture and all you got out of it was words, words, words -- until you forced yourself to pay attention and make your mind latch onto what was being said? Words can come at you 'til the cows come home, but they don't benefit you until your own mind decides to receive them and work with them. Until then, it's all just words.
Your child is a person, same as you (remember that from weeks and weeks ago?) and the effect of being lectured at or bombarded with facts has the same affect on him as it does on you -- it's just words, words, words. Narrating forces him to pay attention to those words, make sense of them, ruminate on them, work with them, filter them, and find the words to tell them back with his own personal touch.
Do you see what happened there? His mind chewed on those words as if they were food, digested them, and they were assimilated into his very person: he learned! And it only happened when his very own mind did that work. His education can only happen when his own mind gets involved. Charlotte Mason was right: the only real education is SELF-education.
"Teaching, lecturing, dramatizing, no matter how brilliant or coherent, does no good until the student becomes an active participant and goes to work on it in his mind. In other words, self-education is the only possible education." [from Charlotte Mason's Vol. 6 pg 240]
