Charlotte Mason said, “out-of-door nature-study lays the foundation for science.” (3/281) But have you ever wondered how that works?

To explain, I must start by clearing up a scientific myth — the ‘scientific method’ that you learned in school is ordinarily not used by scientists at all. The multi-step list seems to have started innocently enough when in 1945 a man named Keeslar prepared a paper with a list of things associated with scientific research. He submitted the list to research scientists and the items that were highly ranked were put in a logical order and made part of a final list of elements associated with the investigation of scientific problems. Textbook writers adopted this list as the description of how science is done and the “scientific method” was born. But scientists don’t usually conduct their research in the order outlined in the scientific method. They sometimes use it as an outline to write up their findings, but some people even take offense to this practice. (McComas) 

The scientific method then is a disjointed group of things a scientist does, just as a textbook is a somewhat disjointed list of things a student should learn in a particular field of science. Neither takes into account the natural way people learn or make discoveries in science. Charlotte Mason, on the other hand, always took into account the natural way people learn. She had an intuitive sense of the way a child would best learn a subject, but more importantly,  the way a child would best come to care about a subject. Continue reading →