More Tea in the Jar

by Anne White

This morning I saw an online video where someone cut up the contents of four boxes of herbal teabags, and put the tea leaves in a jar. Short version: it was a pretty skimpy amount. The video creator also showed a much fuller jar of tea leaves that had been bought in bulk, for the same price as the four boxes. So, by that account, we can have a large jar of tea, bought without packaging waste; or we can have a small jar of tea, plus a pile of garbage, for three times the price. Pretty much a no-brainer, isn’t it?

Charlotte Mason said that her principles of education “tend in the working to simplification, economy, and discipline.” (School Education, p. 214)  Perhaps we could think of them as more tea in the jar, with less wasted effort and financial cost.

Now, we do need to be careful here that we don’t measure education with a calculator or a stopwatch. Karen Glass has mentioned the benefits of eating a real apple, pointing out that with all its stem and core and seeds and soft spots, it is still superior in many ways to any kind of more efficient apple pill or powder we could create. For instance, perhaps—just perhaps—the tea that comes in those tea bags is so superior to the bulk stuff that we don’t mind paying more money for a smaller jar.

However...what if the bulk tea turns out to be more flavourful, more calming, or whatever more we wanted it to accomplish? Well, then we’d probably be even more annoyed when we viewed that pile of empty tea bags and the large receipt for what we paid.

But we might find ourselves telling others about our great discovery. 

And then…inviting them for a cup of tea.