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It seems like What? is one of the main questions we homeschool educators ask: What books should I use? What math curriculum should I choose? What courses or classes should we do this year? What outside activities should we add?
We spend a lot of time pondering the What as we pore over websites, ask for reviews from our friends, and research into the wee hours of the morning.
It’s easy to focus on the What, because that is tangible. We can see the What with our eyes, hold in our hands, and interact with it every day.
But as we have been learning as we look into Charlotte Mason’s questions for homeschool educators, it is equally important to ask Why? and How?
She must ask herself seriously, Why must the children learn at all? What should they learn? And, How should they learn it? If she take the trouble to find a definite and thoughtful answer to each of these three queries, she will be in a position to direct her children’s studies.
Home Education, p. 171
We looked at Why last week: Why must the children learn at all? And we confirmed that in a Charlotte Mason approach, children don’t just learn to know something—they don’t just cram a bunch of facts into their heads. Rather, they learn in order to grow as persons.
That, then, leads us to today’s question. What will help them to grow? What should children learn?
Ideas
Charlotte believed that the mind feeds on ideas; that is its proper food for growing.
The mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body.
A Philosophy of Education, p. 105
What’s the difference between ideas and mere information? If you followed the links from last time, you will have seen a couple of examples. But let me give you another one.
Let’s learn about the Great Fire of London. First, here are the first couple of paragraphs from an article in Britannica. It’s a great example of presenting mere facts and information.
Great Fire of London, (September 2–5, 1666), the worst fire in London’s history. It destroyed a large part of the City of London, including most of the civic buildings, old St. Paul’s Cathedral, 87 parish churches, and about 13,000 houses.
On Sunday, September 2, 1666, the fire began accidentally in the house of the king’s baker in Pudding Lane near London Bridge. A violent east wind encouraged the flames, which raged during the whole of Monday and part of Tuesday. On Wednesday the fire slackened; on Thursday it was extinguished, but on the evening of that day the flames again burst forth at The Temple. Some houses were at once blown up by gunpowder, and thus the fire was finally mastered.
Those of you who are used to classes that require you to memorize information were probably fidgety, wondering if you should be taking notes of the facts; for example, the date and the number of homes destroyed. But most likely, there was nothing there that touched your emotions or launched your imagination. It was just information.
A Living Book
Now let me read you the first couple of paragraphs from a world history book called Our Neighbors: Their Stories by Lorene Lambert. This is how its chapter on the Great Fire of London begins:
In the early hours of September 2, 1666, in a house in Pudding Lane in London, a man named Thomas Farriner was shaken from his bed by his manservant. Blinking in the darkness, his head still fuzzy with sleep, he realized why he had been awakened; from under his bedroom door, tendrils of gray smoke were seeping into the room. At once, he thought of the great stone oven in the room below, for Thomas Farriner was a baker, and the oven had been hot and full of fire all day. Of course, Thomas and his daughter had checked the oven that night to make sure it was cold, but perhaps, on this day, a spark or two remained.
Cautiously, he eased the door open, only to discover that his worst fears were true. The entire bakery down on the first floor was afire. He shouted for his daughter and for the housemaid, the only other living souls in the house. As they stumbled out of their rooms, still wrapped in their nightclothes, he led them to the bedroom window. The neighbor’s house was almost within reach across the way, so narrow was the cobbled lane below them. Hearts trembling with fear, Thomas Farriner and his daughter climbed out onto the window ledge and then leaped across to the safety of the neighbor’s roof. They shouted for the little maid to follow them, but she drew back, shaking her head, terrified of the long drop down to the street. She stayed in the house, even as it was burning.
By now the neighbors were all awake. They surrounded the bakery, their hands filled with buckets and long iron fire hooks. Desperately, they fought the fire, using the hooks to pull down the burning straw from the roof and flinging buckets of water on the flames. But after an hour of frantic labor, the fire still raged, and the nearby houses were beginning to burn as well. Something more would have to be done; someone shouted, Summon the Mayor! By then, overcome with the smoke and heat, the Farriners’ housemaid had perished. She was the first victim of the terrible tragedy that would come to be called the Great London Fire of 1666.
Do you see the difference? The second excerpt contains ideas, not just facts. It contains the idea of the confusion that accompanied the fire happening in the middle of the night. It conveys the idea of decisions that had to be made when the fire was discovered. It doesn’t just tell the name of the first victim; it paints the picture of what she was facing as she made the fatal choice to stay in the house. And that idea might lead to another: Would I have had the courage to jump to the neighbor’s roof? The story contains the idea of neighbors helping neighbors for a common cause. All of those living ideas were missing from the facts-only version. The facts are included in both. But the date and name of the fire is not the most important part of the story; it gives you no food for thought. It’s the ideas that feed the mind. The ideas are the important part of the story.
And that’s what Charlotte Mason wanted us to give our children. She wanted us to feed their minds on ideas, not just dry facts. And ideas are not just found in words; they can be communicated through art and music and even math.
Now that you’ve had a taste of what we mean by giving our students ideas, not just mere information, let’s take a look at two more aspects of What our children should learn.
Variety and Nutritious
We’ve been comparing mind food to physical food that we eat for our bodies to grow. So let’s continue in that analogy. Our bodies need food to grow. But not just any food will do. The best type of diet to nurture good growth is one with a variety of nutritious foods.
There are the two key points: “variety” and “nutritious.” Both are important to growth, both physically and mentally.
A Generous and Varied Curriculum
Variety sustains the appetite. We could feed our children the same food at all the meals every day, but they would soon lose their natural appetites.
And it’s the same with our children’s minds. We could feed their minds with the same few school subjects every day every year, but they would soon lose their natural curiosity. Variety sustains their natural curiosity for knowledge.
We need to give our children a wide variety of ideas: not just language arts, science, social studies and math, but also literature, art, music, nature study, history, geography, handicrafts, poetry, Bible, and more. Charlotte called it a generous and varied curriculum. She said:
The mind feeds on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum.
A Philosophy of Education, xxix
In the nature of things then the unspoken demand of children is for a wide and very varied curriculum.
A Philosophy of Education, p. 14
Variety sustains and feeds our children’s natural curiosity for knowledge.
Ideas Worth Considering
But variety alone doesn’t guarantee a healthy meal. We could feed our children a variety of junk food every day, but they wouldn’t grow as well as they would on a variety of nutritious food. Good nutrition brings healthy, balanced growth.
And it’s the same with our children’s minds. We could feed them twaddle all day every day, but their minds wouldn’t grow as well as they would on good, loving, and noble ideas. Twaddle is like bubble gum to the mind. It is material that talks down to the student, assuming that they can’t understand a well-put sentence. That’s not what will help our children’s minds to grow.
Instead, we want to give them ideas that they can sink their mental teeth into. Ideas that will linger in their minds even after the lesson is over. Ideas that will nestle into their hearts and shape who they are becoming. And if ideas have the power to do that, we want to make sure those ideas that we give them are good ideas, noble ideas, loving ideas.
It reminds me of an old motto about good nutrition, “You are what you eat.” Physical food affects our physical health in so many ways. And the same is true for our children’s growing minds. Ideas are powerful. So we feed our children on ideas that we want to influence their character and shape them as persons. For that is what true education is, isn’t it? Teaching the whole person. Shaping who they are becoming.
A wide range of subjects. A variety of good, loving, noble ideas. We spread a feast of ideas for the children, just as we would spread a feast at a banquet hall. There are a variety of dishes of different kinds of food and different types of recipes, but each one is nutritious. Some children are going to be drawn toward certain foods more than others, and no one is going to eat everything on the table. But that’s all right. Our job is to provide a variety of nutritious mind-food. As Charlotte put it,
We spread an abundant and delicate feast in the programmes and each small guest assimilates what he can.
A Philosophy of Education, p. 183
Since we are keeping that natural curiosity and love of learning alive, we don’t have to worry about any child starving mentally. Each person can take away from the feast whatever ideas resonate with him or her, and their minds will be nourished because it’s all good.
That’s the What of a Charlotte Mason education. That’s what our children should learn.
So as you plan the What, be sure to give your children a wide range of subjects. Some home educators avoid the idea of a wide variety of subjects because they think it will be a burden and will make their days stretch out too long.
On the contrary, it is the variety that adds zest to your days, and the subjects that I mentioned—art, music, handicrafts, poetry, nature study—don’t take that long to do. In fact, each one can be done only once a week in about 15 minutes. These small touches provide a delightful change in the midst of each day’s work; they give your student an opportunity to use a different part of her brain. And that’s refreshing! It actually helps your student to pay better attention throughout the day, because her brain does not get over-fatigued.
Read our Subject by Subject series see how to do each of these short but delicious subjects that will help you spread a feast for your children, rather than a meager diet of the same food stuff every day. Spread a feast that will sustain your students’ natural curiosity and feed their minds on good, loving, noble ideas.
You can also take a look at the Simply Charlotte Mason curriculum. It will give you an open-and-go program for spreading an abundant feast for your whole family. It will tell you what books will give your child those good, loving, noble ideas, and which of that wide variety of subjects to do each day. It’s all planned out for you.
By the way, that book I read from, Our Neighbors: Their Stories, is used in the Simply Charlotte Mason curriculum.
Next time we’ll take a look at the third question we need to answer as home educators: How? How should our children learn? We’ve looked at why they should learn and what they should learn, but how do we do that? What methods will work best? That’s what we’ll talk about next time.
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