This is a third in a series of compilations of Charlotte Mason's writings and each one seems to get better for me. This one kept me saying "exactly!" the whole way through. Here are some of my favorite quotes.
"It is only as we recognise our limitations that our work becomes effective: when we see definitely what we are to do, what we can do, and we cannot do, we set to work with confidence and courage; we have an end in view, and we make our way intelligently toward that end, and a way to an end is method. It rests with parents not only to give their children birth into the life of intelligence and moral power, but to sustain the higher life which they have borne." pg 13
"We know that to form in his child right habits of thinking and behaving is a parent's chief duty, and that this can be done for every child definitely and within given limits of time. To nourish a child daily with loving, right, and noble ideas we believe to be the parent's next duty." pg 19
"We lay ourselves open to the spiritual impact of ideas, whether these be conveyed by the printed page, the human voice, or whether they reach us without visible sign." pg 21
"We as ourselves, 'Is there any fruitful idea underlying this or that study that the children are engaged in?" pg 21
"The education of the day, it is said, does not produce reading people. We are determined that the children shall love books, therefore we do not interpose ourselves between the bok and the child. We read him his Tanglewood Tales, and when he is a little older his Plutarch, not trying to break up or water down, but leaving the child's mind to deal with the matter as it can." pg 22
"To secure that adaptation and the expansion and activity of the person, along the lines of the relations most proper to him, is the work of education; to be accomplished by the two factors of ideas and habits. Every relation must be initiated by its own 'captain' idea, sustained upon fitting ideas; and wrought into the material substance of the person by its proper habits. This is the field before us." pg 34
"... a special literature for children is probably far less necessary than the book sellers would have us suppose. Out of any list of 'the hundred best books,' I believe that seventy-five would be well within the range of chilren of eight or nine." pg 35
"But let information hang upon a principle, be inspired by an idea, and it is taken with avidity and used in maing whatsoever in the spiritual nature stands for tissue in the physical." pg 46
"...there is no education but self-education…" pg 46
"He practices various handicrafts that he may know the feel of wood, clay, leather, and the joy of handling tools, that is, that he may establish a due relation with materials." pg 50
"It cannot be too often said that information is not education." pg 56
"We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests… Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking - the strain would be too great - but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest.". pg 57
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