Episode 206: Short Synopsis Points 13-15

Charlotte Mason’s short synopsis of the main points of her educational method is useful to homeschool and classroom teachers. This episode continues through this “synopsis,” moving beyond philosophical foundations to determining the curriculum and how implementing it is best accomplished.

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[13] In devising a SYLLABUS for a normal child, of whatever social class, three points must be considered:-
(a) He requires much knowledge, for the mind needs sufficient food as much as does the body.
(b) The knowledge should be various, for sameness in mental diet does not create appetite (i.e., curiosity).
(c) Knowledge should be communicated in well-chosen language, because his attention responds naturally to what is conveyed in literary form.

[14] As knowledge is not assimilated until it is reproduced, children should ‘tell back ‘ after a single reading or hearing: or should write on some part of what they have read.

[15] A single reading is insisted on, because children have naturally great power of attention; but this force is dissipated by the re-reading of passages, and also, by questioning, summarising, and the like.

Acting upon these and some other points in the behaviour of mind, we find that the educability of children is enormously greater than has hitherto been supposed, and is but little dependent on such circumstances as heredity and environment.

Nor is the accuracy of this statement limited to clever children or to children of the educated classes: thousands of children in Elementary Schools respond freely to this method, which is based on the behaviour of mind.

“Under the phrase, ‘Education is a life,’ I have tried to show how necessary it is to sustain the intellectual life upon ideas, and as a corollary, that a school-book should be a medium for ideas and not merely a receptacle for facts. That normal children have a natural desire for, and a right admission to, all fitting knowledge, appears to me to be suggested by the phrase, ‘Education is the Science of Relations.’ These considerations clear the ground towards that of a curriculum.” (3/216)

The children had their opportunity, and they rose to it, as Miss Mason knew they would. Since then a hundred schools have shewn that in the Worker’s child, even in the child of the slums, are latent the powers and tastes of our own children. There is no need of other and simpler books for them. They will understand any book suitable to their age… And what was suitable was to be by no means easy, for Miss Mason asked much of them. It was her way. The books are hard. But the more she asked, the more the children gave. And, though they never saw her, there were thousands who loved her, because she understood them and knew what they wanted. She had treated them as persons. She had respected them. They were in some way conscious of her high and gentle courtesy. Their outraged pride was soothed . They were her children, equal members of her world -wide school . The badge of inferiority had gone. Their ability amazed their teachers, who had been brought up to think that as a class they were of inferior mentality; that they could do nothing without help, and would do nothing without something like compulsion . They were not prepared—we were none of us prepared—for Miss Mason’s epoch-making discovery, the “great avidity for knowledge in children of all ages and of every class ‘ ‘ for knowledge which is presented to them in more or less literary form. (In Memoriam, pp. 188-189)

“We spread an abundant and delicate feast in the programmes and each small guest assimilates what he can. The child of genius and imagination gets greatly more than his duller comrade but all sit down to the same feast and each one gets according to his needs and powers.” (6/183)

“Knowledge in these several kinds is due to the children; for there seems reason to believe that the limit to human intelligence coincides with the limit to human interest; that is, that a normal person of poor and narrow intelligence is so because the interests proper to him have not been called into play.” (3/324)

“It is a wide programme founded on the educational rights of man; wide, but we may not say it is impossible nor may we pick and choose and educate him in this direction but not in that. We may not even make choice between science and the ‘humanities.’ Our part it seems to me is to give a child a vital hold upon as many as possible of those wide relationships proper to him.” (6/157)

“…it is a mistake to suppose that the greater the number of ‘subjects’ the greater the scholar’s labour; the contrary is the case as the variety in itself affords refreshment.” (6/158)

“We cannot make any hard and fast rule-a big book or a little book, a book at first-hand or at second-hand; either may be right provided we have it in us to discern a living book, quick, and informed with the ideas proper to the subject of which it treats.” (3/178)

“It is not easy to sum up in a few short sentences those principles upon which the mind naturally acts and which I have tried to bring to bear upon a school curriculum. The fundamental idea is, that children are persons and are therefore moved by the same springs of conduct as their elders. Among these is the Desire of Knowledge, knowledge-hunger being natural to everybody…

“In the nature of things then the unspoken demand of children is for a wide and very varied curriculum; it is necessary that they should have some knowledge of the wide range of interests proper to them as human beings, and for no reasons of convenience or time limitations may we curtail their proper curriculum.

“Perceiving the range of knowledge to which children as persons are entitled the questions are, how shall they be induced to take that knowledge, and what can the children of the people learn in the short time they are at school? We have discovered a working answer to these two conundrums. I say discovered, and not invented, for there is only one way of learning, and the intelligent persons who can talk well on many subjects and the expert in one learn in the one way, that is, they read to know. (6/13-14)

“Children no more come into the world without provision for dealing with knowledge than without provision for dealing with food. They bring with them not only that intellectual appetite, the desire of knowledge, but also an enormous, an unlimited power of attention to which the power of retention (memory) seems to be attached, as one digestive process succeeds another, until the final assimilation.” (6/14-15)

“Think of the time you save. You read your book once and you know it and go on to another —and there is no looking up at the end of term before the examinations, indeed this is not allowed.” (PR 33, p. 782-83, THE WORK AND AIMS OF THE P.U.S., By Miss O’Ferrall, ex-HOE)

“it is not a casual matter, a convenient, almost miraculous way of covering the ground, of getting children to know certainly and lastingly a surprising amount; all this is to the good, but it is something more, a root principle vital to education. In this way of learning the child comes to his own; he makes use of the authority which is in him in its highest function as a self-commanding, self-compelling, power. … But to make yourself attend, make yourself know, this indeed is to come into a king––all the more satisfying to children because they are so made that they revel in knowledge.” (6/76-77)

“I dwell on the single reading because,.. it is impossible to fix attention on that which we have heard before and know we shall hear again.” (6/261)

“This is a bad habit to get into; and we should do well to save our children by not giving them the vague expectation of second and third and tenth opportunities to do that which should have been done at first.” (3/179)

“…while we grown-up persons read and forget because we do not take the pains to know as we read, these young students have the powers of perfect recollection and just application because they have read with attention and concentration and have in every case reproduced what they have read in narration, or, the gist of some portion of it, in writing. (6/185)

“From this point it was not difficult to go on to the perception that, whether in taking or rejecting, the mind was functioning for its own nourishment; that the mind, in fact, requires sustenance––as does the body, in order that it increase and be strong; but because the mind is not to be measured or weighed but is spiritual, so its sustenance must be spiritual too, must, in fact, be ideas (in the Platonic sense of images). I soon perceived that children were well equipped to deal with ideas, and that explanations, questionings, amplifications, are unnecessary and wearisome. Children have a natural appetite for knowledge which is informed with thought. They bring imagination, judgment, and the various so-called ‘faculties’ to bear upon a new idea pretty much as the gastric juices act upon a food ration. This was illuminating but rather startling; the whole intellectual apparatus of the teacher, his power of vivid presentation, apt illustration, able summing up, subtle questioning, all these were hindrances and intervened between children and the right nutriment duly served; this, on the other hand, they received with the sort of avidity and simplicity with which a healthy child eats his dinner.” (6/10-11)

“The mind can know nothing save what it can produce in the form of an answer to a question put to the mind by itself.” I have failed to trace the saying to its source, but a conviction of its importance has been growing upon me during the last forty years. It tacitly prohibits questioning from without; (this does not, of course, affect the Socratic use of questioning for purposes of moral conviction); and it is necessary to intellectual certainty, to the act of knowing. For example, to secure a conversation or an incident, we ‘go over it in our minds’; that is, the mind puts itself through the process of self-questioning which I have indicated. This is what happens in the narrating of a passage read: each new consecutive incident or statement arrives because the mind asks itself,––”What next?” For this reason it is important that only one reading should be allowed; efforts to memorise weaken the power of attention, the proper activity of the mind; if it is desirable to ask questions in order to emphasize certain points, these should be asked after and not before, or during, the act of narration.” (6/16-17)

“…but what if the devitalisation we notice in so many of our young people, keen about games but dead to things of the mind, is due to the processes carried on in our schools, to our plausible and pleasant ways of picturing, eliciting, demonstrating, illustrating, summarising, doing all those things for children which they are born with the potency to do for themselves? No doubt we do give intellectual food, but too little of it; let us have courage and we shall be surprised, as we are now and then, at the amount of intellectual strong meat almost any child will take at a meal and digest at his leisure.” (6/237)

“…because we were wise enough to see that the mind functions for its own nourishment whether in rejecting or receiving, we changed our tactics, following, so we thought, the lead of the children. We did well, and therefore are prepared; if necessary, to do better. What, then, if our whole educational equipment, our illustrations, elucidations, questionings, our illimitable patience in getting a point into the children, were all based on the false assumption of the immature, which we take to connote the imperfect, incomplete minds of children? “I think I could understand, Mummy, if you did not explain quite so much,”––is this the inarticulate cry of the school child to-day? He really is capable of much more than he gets credit for, but we go the wrong way about getting his capable mind into action.

“But the teacher is not moved by arrogance but by a desire to be serviceable. He believes that children cannot understand well-written books and that he must make of himself a bridge between the pupil and the real teacher, the man who has written the book. Now we have proved that children, even children of the slums, are able to understand any book suitable for their age: that is, children of eight or nine will grasp a chapter in Pilgrim’s Progress at a single reading; children of fourteen, one of Lamb’s Essays or a chapter in Eöthen, boys and girls of seventeen will ‘tell’ Lycidas. Given a book of literary quality suitable to their age and children will know how to deal with it without elucidation. Of course they will not be able to answer questions because questions are an impertinence which we all resent, but they will tell you the whole thing with little touches of individual personality in the narrative.” (6/260)

“Now comes the question of how to teach the lessons. In the P.U.S. the teacher is not there to thrust second-hand knowledge into the heads of the children. It is her duty to open the doors in many different directions through which the children may walk in the pursuit of knowledge whilst she is there to guide and direct as occasion requires. She does as little as possible herself. ‘What a nice easy job.’ I think I hear you say. But when you come to try it you find that after all it is so much easier to do the sum your self than to keep yourself in the background and to give just exactly that right amount of direction which will enable Tommy to do it for himself.” (PR 33, p. 782-83, THE WORK AND AIMS OF THE P.U.S., By Miss O’Ferrall, ex-HOE)