Charlotte Mason aka Living Books
Charlotte Mason, a turn of century British educator. Miss Mason was appalled by several tendencies she noticed in modern education. (1) The tendency to treat children as containers to be filled with predigested information instead of as human beings. (2) The tendency to break down knowledge into thousands of isolated bits of information to be fed into “container” children. (3) The tendency to engineer artificial learning experiences. She believed in what she called “twaddle”-worthless, inferior teaching material. She considered education a failure when it produced children able to “do harder sums and read harder books” who lacked “moral and real-life situations, and given ample time to play and create.
Mason’s approach to academics was to teach basic reading, writing, and math skills, then exposes children to the best sources of knowledge for all other subjects. This meant giving children experiences like nature walks. Observing and collecting wildlife; visiting art museums; and reading real books with “living ideas.” She called such books “living books” because they made the subject “come alive” unlike textbooks that tend to be dry and dull and assume the reader cannot think for him/herself.
Websites about Charlotte Mason:
Simply Charlotte Mason
Charlotte Mason Research and Supply Co.
Ambleside
Charlotte Mason Education
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