Welcome to Litsy!

The word “orient” implies focus, rather than force. Teachers and leaders can show sympathy and spread the feast; but it is the individual person who grows, who learns, and who is finally able to work towards peace and justice, helping others to find their belonging places.

Utilitarian education does more than just ignore literature and history, art and music: it doesn‘t want them around at all. Nussbaum explains that: The arts ask the imagination to see the world in new ways, so they are not the reliable servants of any ideology. The first part of the sentence is a wonderful reason for teaching in all the ways we‘ve been talking about.

Martha C. Nussbaum, author of Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, says that factual knowledge and logic alone are not enough to create a healthy civilization; we require “the narrative imagination,” which includes an awareness of history. Without it, our over-confidence in technology threatens to turn us into “compliant machines.”

It all takes time. Time together. Time that most people don‘t have. Not time to chauffeur the kids to more structured activities, but to go out and look at things together; to have occasional surprises and adventures; to find shared interests; to store up special memories.

We need to teach our children to appreciate and take care of special toys (and make things for themselves or for others). Not everything should be easy; everyone needs to learn to do a job properly, even when nobody‘s looking. It doesn't hurt to learn to wait for things. But letting children know they‘re loved and safe isn‘t spoiling them.

The value is not in the narration, it is in the material. What is the right material for narration? It should concern “many things on which the mind of man reflects.” It should be in literary form.

However, fantasy-imagination is not all there is; we also need to train the moral imagination, the ability to see beyond ourselves, and use that power for change.

Charlotte Mason said that if she were asked about discipline-that-actually-means-punishment, she would say that punishment has a necessary time & place, like medicine. The trouble with punishment, Mason said, is that sometimes children rather enjoy it. They may even feel somewhat heroic about it if they take it stoically. And the threat of punishment, as many have noted, does not necessarily deter crime, & doesn't always rehabilitate the criminal.

What we can give is the idea to begin, and the support to continue, along with the practical tools children need. But we can‘t do the habits of attentiveness or the work of nature notebooking for them, any more than we can take over other people‘s spiritual disciplines. If there is no education but self-education, there is also no true discipline but self-discipline.

Nevertheless, [Mason] left the list open to the (assumed) educated and intelligent adult who should be able to make those choices and then allow the books to give the increase. What seems to matter most is whether a book has the power to awaken ideas, stir up curiosity, help children to look outside themselves and see the world in new ways.

Analysis, for Kingsley, meant a purely scientific way of examining things, & he represented it by someone who would “take to pieces everything he found, & find out how it was made.” Analysis concentrates on parts, like a doctor who examines your sore back but doesn‘t relate the ache to your overall health. Synthesis gives things a more whole-istic consideration; it doesn‘t mean something artificial, but putting together rather than pulling apart.

A Charlotte Mason education can and should have lots of hands-on, feet-on, five-sense activity. It should have maps & globes, marbles, dominoes, math beans, coins, paint boxes, games of tag, costumes, trips to the pond, singing, balloon rockets, socks to sort, boxes & sliding boards in the yard, clay & soap to sculpt. And even more importantly, it should present things in their own habitats: flowers, water, hills, earthworms and caterpillars.

"Charlotte Mason reminded us that we aim more at true character, which influences conduct, than at good conduct without true character."