Comparing Textbooks to Living Books

Textbooks

Living Books

“Miserable” (1/171, 1/264)

“…he would be better employed in watching the progress of a fly across the window-pane” (1/272)

“Frankly dry and uninteresting” (3/243)

Creates “associations of delight” (3/77)

Have a “’cut and dried’ formula” (1/264)

“carefully desiccated, drained of the least suspicion of an idea” (6/105)

“And all the time we have books, books teeming with ideas fresh from the minds of thinkers upon every subject to which we can wish to introduce children.” (3/171)

“Dry Bones of Fact” (3/124)

“mere compendiums of facts” (3/171)

“dry facts and figures” (1/272, 6/105)

“which enumerate facts and details” (3/243)

“Fact clothed upon with living flesh, breathed into by the vital spirit of quickening ideas”

Speaking of literary science books she said, “the principles which underlie science are at the same time so simple, so profound and so far-reaching that the due setting forth of these provokes what is almost an emotional response” (6/218-19)

“the mind refuses to know anything except what reaches it in more or less literary form…persons can ‘get up’ the driest of pulverised text-books and enough mathematics for some public examination; but these attainments do not appear to touch the region of mind.” (6/256)

“…boys and girls ‘Cram to pass but not to know; they do pass but they don’t know.’” (6/57)

When speaking of Holden’s book, The Sciences, Miss. Mason said, “Its main object is to help the child to understand the material world about him. … to awaken the imagination; to convey useful knowledge; to open the doors toward wisdom … to stimulate observation and to excite a living and lasting interest in the world…” (1/267)

“there is nothing scrappy and nothing hurried in the treatment of any topic…” (1/266)

“we believe intellectual spoon-meat to be the only food for what we are pleased to call ‘little minds.’” Charlotte Mason says this thinking is to “undervalue children.” (3/171)

Living books “address children as, before all things, reasonable, intelligent, and responsible persons.” (3/172)

“there is not a word to be said in their favour” (1/281)

“Let him, on the contrary, linger pleasantly over the history of a single man, a short period, until he thinks the thoughts of that man, is at home in the ways of that period.” (1/280)

because they don’t allow the child to establish relations with great minds & various minds. (3/66)

living books put our children in touch with great minds, passionate about their field of study. By giving them these kinds of books, we are “practicing standing aside” which CM calls the “fine art of education”. (3/67)

She particularly chides textbooks that are “moral or religious in tone” as they “warp the judgment of the child, filling him with crude notions, narrow prejudices (1/280 & appendix) 

“But what of reason, judgment, imagination, discrimination, …? These take care of themselves and play as naturally and involuntarily upon the knowledge we receive with attention and fix by narration as do the digestive organs upon duly masticated food-stuff for the body. We must feed the mind as the body fitly and freely; and the less we meddle with the digestive processes in the one as in the other the more healthy the life we shall sustain.” (6/259)

When CM lists the 4 means of destroying the desire for knowledge in School Education, she includes as her third point: “textbooks compressed and decompressed from the big book of the big man.” (3/213)

Knowledge is one of the “primary springs of action in every human being.” (2/219)

When she lists the 6 causes of failure to intellectual education in the School Education, she again includes textbooks.

“I think we are safe in saying that there is no educational value in either sort of text-book.” (3/243)

“The Children’s Magna Carta.––My plea is, … that they shall be introduced to no subject whatever through compendiums, abstracts, or selections; that the young people shall learn what history is, what literature is, what life is, from the living books of those who know.” (3/247)

“A teacher objected the other day that it was difficult to teach from Freeman’s Old English History, because there were so many stories; not perceiving that the stories were the living history, while all the rest was dead.” (1/124)

“Books intended to promote interest in science must differ completely from laboratory guides, textbooks, or works of reference. They should aim at exalting the scientific spirit which leads men to devote their lives to the advancement of natural knowledge, and at showing how the human race eventually reaps the benefit of such research. Inspiration rather than information should be the keynote; and the execution should awaken in the reader not only appreciation of the scientific method of study and spirit of self sacrifice, but also a desire to emulate the desires of men whose labors have brought the knowledge of nature to its present position.” (Some Wonders of Matter by John Edward Mercer, preface, assigned in PNEU Form 4 and 5)

“For 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; there are no organs for the assimilation of the one more than of the other.” (6/105)

“For example, I think we owe it to children to let them dig their knowledge, of whatever subject, for themselves out of the fit book; and this for two reasons: What a child digs for is his own possession; what is poured into his ear, like the idle song of a pleasant singer, floats out as lightly as it came in, and is rarely assimilated.” (3/178)

“…somehow, people have grown too humble and teachable to think for themselves.” (5/145)

“This chance is, however, wasted upon young people who read to learn up facts towards an examination. The lectures we hear, the books we read, are of no use to us, except as they make us think.” (4-1/182)

“Such teaching as enwraps a child’s mind in folds of many words that his thought is unable to penetrate, which gives him rules and definitions, and tables, in lieu of ideas––this is teaching which excludes and renders impossible the divine co-operation.” (2/274)

“Books must be Living–– …Give him living thought in this kind, and you make possible the co-operation of the living Teacher. The child’s progress is by leaps and bounds, and you wonder why.” (2/278)