Words that hover above the page

by Anne White

Ideas are everywhere, in the words and, so to speak, behind the words, present because they are literally present and present even if they appear to be absent. A writer may despise the idea of zoos and communicate that hatred by writing a book about animals in the bush, never mentioning zoos, never alluding to zoos or dropping a hint about zoos. Because of the way the mind works, we get the message...If you picture a page of writing as three-dimensional, with the words hovering a half-inch or so above the paper, then you begin to see where the ideas are: behind the words, between the words, really everywhere. (Eric Maisel, Deep Writing)

In Jan Karon’s novel Out to Canaan, people in Mitford are feeling overworked and stressed by a variety of situations. Partway through the book, Father Tim invites his parishioners to a special evening church service, and as they recite the prayer of confession, we are given a glimpse of what is going on in their minds.

“Most merciful God,” Esther Bolick prayed aloud and in unison with the others from the Book of Common Prayer, “we confess that we have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed…” She felt the words enter her aching bones like balm.

“…by what we have done,” prayed Gene, “and by what we have left undone.”

“We have not loved You with our whole heart,” intoned Uncle Billy Watson…He found the words of the prayer beautiful. They made him feel hopeful and closer to the Lord, and maybe it was true that he hadn’t always done right by his neighbors, but he would try to do better, he would start before he hit the street this very night.

Now, setting questions of religious faith aside just for the moment, the point is that there is something going on here that transcends the levels of understanding, the social backgrounds and whatnot of the people praying. One big reason that this prayer speaks to Esther, Gene, Uncle Billy, and others I did not include here, is that the words, as Eric Maisel says, have dimensionality. The words, the sentences, are allowed to live, and to give life. There is enough space above them, between them, and underneath them, for each person to find green pastures and quiet waters. 

This is, in effect, the definition of a living book, and also of a living education. In Home Education, Charlotte Mason acknowledges that much good educational theory has been "conceived and perfected by large hearted educators to aid the many sided evolution of the living, growing, most complex human being"; it respects our own dimensionality (perhaps another way of saying "personhood").

The wind has painted fancies

on my wings.

Fancies...

Where was I?

O yes! Lord,

I had something to tell you:

Amen.

("The Prayer of the Butterfly" in Prayers from the Ark)

However, we tend to take such vital, free-fluttering ideas, and pin them down on collecting boards, labelling and cataloguing them, but ignoring the fact that they will never fly again. Charlotte says, "but what a miserable wooden system does it become in the hands of ignorant practitioners!...the observing of rules until the habit of doing certain things, of behaving in certain ways, is confirmed, and, therefore, the art is acquired––is so successful in achieving precise results, that it is no wonder there should be endless attempts to straiten the whole field of education to the limits of a system" (p. 9). 

These systems, these books, these artificially-generated things, are "precise" but also "straitened"; there is no room in them for us to move or breathe. I once wrote on our family blog:

... the stuff that gets used the least here is usually something produced specifically for the classroom...Case in point: a music-and-math resource book...which has such classic songs in it as this (sung to the tune of Three Blind Mice): "Let's make a people graph / Let's make a people graph / Of all our friends / In the classroom. / Boys stand over here. / Girls stand over there. / Then line up in two rows / So we can compare, / So we can compare." My daughter says she'd rather sing "Aiken Drum" any day.

Charlotte said the same thing:

The promoters of the kindergarten system have done much to introduce games of this, or rather of a more educational kind; but is it not a fact that the singing games of the kindergarten are apt to be somewhat inane? Also, it is doubtful how far the prettiest plays, learnt at school and from a teacher, will take hold of the children as do the games which have been passed on from hand to hand through an endless chain of children, and are not be found in the print-books at all. (Home Education, p. 82)

Near the end of Home Education, Charlotte discusses the religious training of young children, and she pulls no punches on what we might call un-dimensional teaching: 

There is no more fruitful source of what it is hardly too much to call infant infidelity than the unreal dead words which are poured upon children about the best things, with an artificial solemnity of tone and manner intended to make up for the want of living meaning in the words. Let the parent who only knows one thing from above teach his child that one; more will come to him by the time the child is ready for more. (pp. 346-347)

So, let the parent who knows no more than one prayer-book prayer, one or two good hymns by heart, a couple of folk songs, a favourite tale, and the names of one butterfly, two trees, or three wild flowers, share these things freely.  Let the ideas that are present take flight, and those that are absent also be noticed by their absence. God will surely bless such an education more than He will a whole heap of unreal dead-leaf words, though they be raked ever so neatly into piles. 

As the butterfly said...Amen.

Revisiting A Touch of the Infinite

 

by Anne White

In 2016, Megan Hoyt published a book especially for the C.M. community, titled A Touch of the Infinite: Studies in Music Appreciation with Charlotte Mason.  Mason’s own books recommend composer study, singing, ear training, and instrument lessons, but often in too-brief snippets. The original Parents’ Union School programmes refer to specific music books, or (later on) to detailed term notes published separately, but these have also been hard to access. Hoyt’s book fills in the gaps: it's a how-to, a what-to, but, even more importantly, a why-to.

A few years ago, I planned to use A Touch of the Infinite with a local study group, as a change from Mason’s own books. That particular study, unfortunately, was a bomb, for a couple of reasons: people had to buy copies of the book, which was a deterrent; our group was moving into a low period anyway; but the biggest one, I think, was that people assumed that a book About Teaching Music, even if it was About Charlotte Mason and Teaching Music, would have little to say about Everything Else. For many people, music seemed optional, something to think about once the math and reading were in hand (as we have been told so many times by so many homeschool experts). This was an unfortunate (and incorrect) assumption, as Hoyt points out:

There is beauty all around us and the possibility of experiencing great joy. But in our quest to fill our minds with tiny packets of news and sayings on social media, we have quickened the pace of thought and neglected to slow down long enough to examine meaning or notice the beauty that is so near. And if we are not noticing what our eyes can see, how will we notice what our ears should hear? (Chapter One: Our Reason For the Journey)

Recently I wondered, if I were bringing the book back to our group-study table, what might I do to bypass the objections? The everybody-has-to-buy-a-copy-of-the-book problem is one I can’t help with, unfortunately. But I think I would try to make it clearer that this is a book about Charlotte Mason, and the arts, and education, and life stuff, written by a longtime C.M. educator with a particular passion for music. 

I should not have been, but I was surprised (in a good way) to learn that each book Miss Mason chose for composer study and music education was littered with those same thoughts and principles she placed within her volumes: the importance of relationship, the value of ideas over dry facts, the use of story to engage a child’s mind with the subject at hand. (Introduction)

Talking about music, in a sense, is a doorway into the rest, just as a book about history, literature, or even mathematics could be, with the guidance of the right person.

God can use music in innumerable ways to get our attention. It inspires us, heals us, blinds us with its glory, tears at our despairing souls until we choose to seek Him, for nothing else will suffice. (Chapter One: Our Reason For the Journey)

On the practical side, A Touch of the Infinite is a handbook for the C.M. educator who wants to know more about ear training (it's important!), and composer study, and what sort of piano or violin lessons should be part of the curriculum. But it occurs to me that it would also be a very good follow-up to Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, which is the sort of teaching/parenting book that makes you want to open the world up a little more for your children, if only in a bit of rebellion: in time spent outdoors, in good books, in human relationships, and in things like art and music that used to be integrated into life.

This life is glorious, isn’t it? All of this—the entire universe of living ideas—belongs to every human being…The world is in desperate need of this universe of thoughts and things. We pine for them and fill our lives with busyness because they are missing. And most of us don’t even realize what it is we’re pining for. (Introduction to A Touch of the Infinite)

I don't know if or when our local group will get another chance to read Hoyt's book together. But in the meantime, I can at least recommend it for the bookshelves of those who want to look at Charlotte Mason's educational philosophy from the orchestra seats. 

Lovin', really livin'

Without it you ain't livin', boy

You're just gettin' up each day

And walkin' around

Your world is cryin' now, my friend

But give it love

And it will mend 

And teach you all the music

(Ian and Sylvia, "Lovin' Sound") 

As Many Begin the School Year

by Anne White

If you are familiar with the priest/poet Malcolm Guite, you may also have followed his You-tube study visits over the past few years. In one of the most recent, he read from the chapter “The Three Sleepers” from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Guite titled the video “At Aslan’s Table,” referring to the way that the scene and certain objects described in it mirror those of older legends and even Scripture. In this passage, a group of  travellers land on an island and are invited to feast from a well-spread table.

But on the table itself there was set out such a banquet as had never been seen, not even when Peter the High King kept his court at Cair Paravel. There were turkeys and geese and peacocks, there were boars’ heads and sides of venison, there were pies shaped like ships under full sail…there were nuts and grapes, pineapples and peaches, pomegranates and melons and tomatoes. There were flagons of gold and silver and curiously-wrought glass; and the smell of the fruit and the wine blew towards them like a promise of all happiness.

However, wary from previous experiences with Turkish Delight and other nasty enchanted things, they hold back. It is the chivalrous and swashbuckling mouse Reepicheep who takes the leap of faith.

…the Mouse, standing on the table, held up a golden cup between its tiny paws and said, “Lady, I pledge you.” Then it fell to on cold peacock, and in a short while everyone else followed its example. All were very hungry and the meal, if not quite what you wanted for a very early breakfast, was excellent as a very late supper.

Lucy (we all know Lucy, don’t we?) asks their hostess (whose name we don’t yet know) why the place is called “Aslan’s table.” “It is set here by his bidding,” said the girl, “for those who come so far.”

Sometimes food, even in Narnia, is just good food.

We may approach the educational table with some of that same nervousness. Are we even supposed to be here? The food looks good, though not what we’re used to; but, on the other hand, those three hairy men sleeping around the table might throw up some red flags. (Later it turns out that their enchanted state had nothing to do with the food.) The sane, sensible, cautious adults may hang back, wondering what they’ve gotten themselves and their children into. We are invited, our children are invited, and yet we hesitate.  This does not look like food from the children’s menu. The peaches and grapes should be okay, but cold peacock?

I cannot possibly describe my bewildered, fascinated disbelief when the first batch of books arrived. Of them all, 'Plutarch's Lives' hit me hardest. Those long, measured periods in difficult language! Alison, at eleven, would not understand a word! How on earth was Robin going to assimilate 'Mankind in the Making' and 'The Spangled Heavens'? What was Charles going to make of 'Pilgrim's Progress'? ("To Prosper in Good Life and Good Literature" by Joyce McGechan, in The Parents’ Review, January 1967)

Even those who have been here before may feel a bit of hesitation, an uncertainty over these new-again pomegranates and pies shaped like ships. But we nevertheless light the candles, bake the back-to-school cookies, and raise our cups of tea.

We bashed--and that is the only verb that describes our progress in those early days--through the text-books, got the gist of them by determined attention, and miraculously found ourselves enjoying every minute. Narrations were wobbly affairs, half inarticulate, half incorporating remembered phrases from the reading. Parsing and Analysis they found absorbing and rewarding. French and Latin were fun. After all, languages were words, weren't they? A sudden word-hunger seemed to grip them all; and a new world had opened up. When, at morning prayers, they sang: 'Praise for the singing! Praise for the morning! / Praise for them springing / Fresh from the Word!' their eyes shone. They were not thanking God as a dutiful routine, but joyfully. (Joyce McGechan, same)

We come by invitation, "for those who come so far." Languages are words, and food is food. We eat and drink by God’s provision, and under his protection. And we pray that this small leap of faith will bring others to the table as well.

Hearts and Zucchini

   by

JoAnn Hallum

It's a new school year and I have seen all the printables and wooden blocks, the panic and the purchases, the general clamor to figure out how to home educate your kid.

A child is a human, and humans have brains, but they also have souls. They have things that interest them, and usually it’s an inconvenient interest. There are often piles of rocks stuffed into pockets and once I had a child who developed an obsession with collecting milk cartons. Three-year-olds are especially wild in their interests. But go ahead. Sit them down. Show them the letter A. We might as well all be bored together. We need to feed the cogs of the global economy, isn’t that why you were born!?

I am reading the Princess and the Goblin to my 8-year-old. Maybe you haven’t read it but you should know, for safety’s sake, the only way to keep Goblins away is to sing silly songs. A poetic chant. A laugh in the face of reason. The data monsters are real, they have come to the surface. They promise you knowledge but you’ll only get information.

You will have a head full of facts while you drown in reality.

Now is the time for poems. Now is the time to grow hearts and zucchini. Now is the time to read the books that kept us human for so long. There are enough computers. We need more harvest mice scampering by. We need more gardens with thistle and dock. We need the charms of the old words to keep the goblins away.

There was a time when people knew the world was full of forests, but they didn’t care enough about the trees to keep them. The Limberlost swamps are gone. We used to know about bread, and how to make it, but now we can find it easily, in its mummified form. We have lost our way, with pure knowledge, fake bread, and a lack of love. The cure is in the books, it’s in the words, it’s in the silly rhyme you learned in ancient times on a knee.

Beware! If you find knowledge, you will fall in love and everyone will think you are crazy for getting emotional about Charles Dickens. But the Goblins won’t get you, and you will have gotten an education. You will care, and you will know the lyrics to the songs that will carry us through. One, two, hit and hew!

This post is written by guest blogger JoAnn Hallum, a mom of four boys who homeschools them using AmblesideOnline. JoAnn writes on her Substack at JoAnn’s Substack | Collections | Substack

Equipping the Power

by Anne White

Charlotte’s primary-level students narrated a little at a time, to fully develop their powers of attention and their skill in telling back.

“[Attention] is the power of bending such powers as one has to the work in hand; it is a key to success within the reach of every one, but the skill to turn it comes of training.” (Formation of Character, p. 95)

They used the same stories for “telling back” as they did for other subjects, from mythology, fairy tales, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Bible; and they told about “how we know the world is round and a great deal besides; for all their work lends itself to oral composition and the power of such composition is innate in children and is not the result of instruction” (Philosophy, p. 191). Does that contradict what Charlotte said in Formation of Character? No, it is the attention, or the listening ear, that must be trained; but the power to tell (aside from a few basic instructions in what is expected) is a natural one.

The junior grades “wrote their little essays themselves.” “Little” seems to refer only to length, because oh my, the reading list... “We could do anything with books like those,” said an unnamed headmaster. Charlotte scolded him for missing the point, but I think he was at least half right: the ability to narrate well, and to turn that skill into written composition, does begin with the choice of books. Some writers can start from a point inside their heads, without any outside reference, but for most of us, that’s as hard as being handed a brush and told to paint, without having anything to look at. “Compose something,” my piano teacher once commanded, when I was about ten. But since I knew very little about listening to music, much less about creating it, the result was worthless, a waste of time. I knew my way around the piano keyboard, but I had no musical ideas, nothing to write music about; I did not understand even how to begin with the “major lines,” much less work out the details. And she never asked me to do that again. Why, similarly, do teachers ask children to shape composition bricks, but refuse to give them the right mud for the task, never mind straw?

"For right thinking is by no means a matter of self-expression. Right thought flows upon the stimulus of an idea, and ideas are stored as we have seen in books and pictures and the lives of men and nations; these instruct the conscience and stimulate the will, and man or child ‘chooses.’" (Philosophy, p. 130)

Excerpted from Ideas Freely Sown: The Matter and Method of Charlotte Mason, by Anne E. White

Networking

by Anne White

Education theorists talk about the recognition, strategic, and affective networks of the brain. The recognition network is how you process information, including your receptive skills. The strategic network is how you respond to information and express what you have learned. The third is the affective network, which has to do with how you personally engage with what you’re learning.

What are the most important things you can think of in a Charlotte Mason education? “Living ideas?” We get some of these seeds of inspiration from books or from oral teaching, but they are also a part of our everyday explorations. So for that, we access the recognition network. “Narration?” Probably the strategic network. “Children are born persons.” What does it mean for us to remember that grownups are born persons too? We listen to each other; we acknowledge that we have different points of view; but we try to work together to achieve shared goals and build community. You could say that that requires all three of our neural networks.

“Masterly inactivity?” This relates closely to “born persons,” by allowing learners to make their own connections and take responsibility for their own learning. One of my education textbooks says that the affective network determines “whether or not an individual finds what is being taught to be important, interesting, and worthy of attention or action.” In other words, “does he care?”

What about “Education is the science of relations?” The relationships we build with the world, and with others are also building us; and we don’t stop building just because our children no longer need us to do math with them. Again, I think, all the networks.

One of the things that  researchers are getting better at all the time is admitting how complex our brains are when it comes to learning. Back in the era when doctors started doing lobotomies, they thought it was a genius idea because they had perfectly mapped out (they thought) how the different parts of the brain were supposed to work and what they were supposed to do, and they didn’t see how one little change could affect the other functions. But we now know that it’s very hard to draw a permanent you-are-here map of what connects with what. Things change around, and functions are shared. The limbic system of the brain used to be associated with emotions, but neuroscientists now see it as more of a very complex communications center, and it’s responsible for a great deal of learning and memory. What that means for us is that if we engage with information in a way that stimulates us emotionally, for instance through a story, we are more likely to retain it.

Excerpt from Ideas Freely Sown: The Matter and Method of Charlotte Mason, by Anne E. White (to be published soon)

Speaking as a caterpillar

by Anne White

And the Caterpillar talked all the rest of her life to her relations of the time when she should be a Butterfly. 

But none of them believed her. She nevertheless had learnt the Lark's lesson of faith, and when she was going into her chrysalis grave, she said–"I shall be a Butterfly some day!"
But her relations thought her head was wandering, and they said, "Poor thing!"
And when she was a Butterfly, and was going to die again, she said–
"I have known many wonders–I have faith–I can trust even now for what shall come next!"
(Margaret Gatty,  "A Lesson of Faith" in Parables from Nature

Last weekend I had the chance to speak to a group of CM people about vision...having a vision for education, for families, for the future. It was only later that I made the connection with the subtitle of Minds More Awake: The Vision of Charlotte Mason. But it all comes from the same place. Having just sat through a dramatization of "A Lesson of Faith," it was almost impossible anyway not to be thinking along those lines.

There's one point in the story that I had never considered much: that of the cabbage leaf itself.

"New, news, glorious news, friend Caterpillar!" sang the Lark; "... I will tell you what these little creatures are to eat"–and the Lark nodded his beak towards the eggs. "What do you think it is to be? Guess!"

"Dew, and the honey out of flowers, I am afraid," sighed the Caterpillar.
"No such thing, old lady! Something simpler than that. Something that you can get at quite easily."
"I can get at nothing quite easily but cabbage-leaves," murmured the Caterpillar, in distress.
"Excellent! my good friend," cried the Lark exultingly; "you have found it out. You are to feed them with cabbage-leaves."

One of the other speakers at the retreat described what happened when their church-planting ministry decided to drop fancy Bible study materials and focus on the book itself. Something that they could get at quite easily. She described the power of this approach not only on the mission field, but, shockingly, back in Canada as well. Charlotte Mason mentioned a "smoke and water feast"; Mrs. Gatty spoke of dew and nectar, but it's the same thing: we worry over what we can't provide, when the cabbage leaves are all around us.

Some day I'll be a butterfly. For the time being, I'm a caterpillar. I need to be in relationship with my cabbage-leaf universe, and to nourish others from the stuff that is right under our noses sensory receptors.

It is glorious news.

Pray for the children to prosper in good life and good literature- Dean Colet

by Wendi Capehart

Why is that book in the curriculum?

This was a legitimate question asked recently in the forum (please visit!). Homeschooling moms by default are involved moms, and they care about their children's education.  They want to know why.

So it's not the first time we've seen some variation of this question. In this case, it was specifically referring to a year 7 literature selection: Watership Down, by Richard Adams.

 I was a little loathe to answer (I explain why below), but I stepped in and made the attempt.  My reply was off the cuff and hastily written.  While I had been reluctant to answer, once I got started, I got excited about it and got a little carried away.  Our moderators seemed to like it and they asked me to share.   So what follows is my (somewhat) edited reply:

 Because we said so. (cheesy grin)   No?

Because David Hicks said so, which is closer to the truth.
David Hicks included Watership Down in his curriculum list in the book Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education and with his gracious and generous permission we relied heavily on his suggestions for the upper years.

 But that answer is like many origins theories- it doesn't answer the question of biogenesis- why did David Hicks include it in his list in the first place? Why did my college room-mate tell me her teacher-mother required all her 8th grade students to read it and she was shocked that I had never even heard of it, since it was one of the greatest children's books ever? Why is it still in print after all these years? Why?

There are reasons.  However, we on the Advisory  are getting older and I know I am forgetting more and more details these days.  It's many years now since I last read it and we discussed where and how to add it to our year 7.  In fact,  I had to look up Watership Down at Wikipedia to remind myself of some of the details so I could explain.

     It's a struggle for me to explain our reasons sometimes.  I don't feel capable of giving the answers the books and the askers deserve- partly that's my own personal frustration with myself and my own inability to explain things adequately. It's hard for me to put my ideas about the books into words sometimes.

 Also, I cannot be succinct. This is all me, a deep flaw. I am reluctant to start because I don't know when I'll end.

But the biggest reason it's hard to explain?   It's  the books. The more-than-merely-good books,  the living books- they are amazing. While with some programs you can say, "This book is listed because it is about a family living in Japan and we study Japan this term. This book is listed because it is about peanuts and we study George Washington Carver this term. This book is about a family in the Civil War, and that's where we are in history... etc."

It's tidy, neat, simple-  and you will have said pretty much all there is to say about the reason to read those books.

With living books? You cannot pigeonhole true living books like that. 

They are not one-note songs. I'm getting excited now, skip with me through a daisy field of badly mixed metaphors here (and analogies, and similes). The living books are nuanced orchestra pieces. They are dishes at a king's banquet, richly flavored with layers and layers of aromatic goodness, spiced and seasoned throughout with ideas about at least fifty different things.

So perhaps I can tell you the big things that stand out about a particularl book, but sometimes that is like pulling one thread out of a tapestry and telling you that is the most important thing. It's not- all the threads work together. There may be thirty yards of green thread and only 2 yards of white in that tapestry (I'm making up the numbers), but if you left out the white, you lose some key details that are part of the larger picture.

It's like asking somebody to pick out the most important ingredient in a fine pico de gallo, a perfect roll of sushi- the end result is greater than the sum of the parts. 

 All living books have many, many living ideas, and I don't know which one will mean the most to your children or you- and neither do they, right now. The things they can narrate right now are good and wonderful, but they will also have feelings, resonating chords in the heart that they aren't even aware of yet- ten years from now they may think- 'this reminds me of what Fiver said in Watership Down (this, btw, pretty much never happens with twaddle or one note song stories).

 I can say that Watership Down is about... epics, about worldbuilding, about thinking 'what if' thoughts, seeing the world through a completely foreign point of view in a way that will also (I hope) some day give a student the idea that, 'you know what? I eat with a fork and a knife, but eating with chopsticks is not so weird- there are reasons why different cultures might develop different customs and stories and courtesies...'

Maybe he won't even be able to put it into words. Maybe he won't even know that the first little nudging of that idea was from stories he read in first grade, and then the idea picked up a little emphasis and moved forward and gained speed with another story he read in year 4, and that idea was reshaped and given wheels with Watership Down, and then.... another book added another gentle layer on another layer.

 Or I could say Watership Down is in the curriculum because of what it teaches about governments, leadership, statecraft, freedom and tyranny- perhaps this child reader will notice the different forms of government the rabbits meet in different warrens, the advantages and disadvantages of each of them.  Perhaps your child will absorb some of the statecraft of one of the rabbit leaders, or think big thoughts about politics. Or perhaps he will just notice the problem with the lack of does and how the rabbits try to solve that issue, and maybe he will make connections with the Sabin women story in Plutarch, or the population problems in China thanks to her one-child policy.

 It might be that he (or she, I'm old-fashioned and still use 'he' as a gender neutral pronoun) will note the character of the different rabbits and how that relates to the things they do, their successes, strengths, weaknesses, and failures. Perhaps he will connect to Hazel and want to be a leader like him, or maybe this child will recognize Hazel's traits in another leader and throw his support to that candidate who most resembles Hazel, or maybe he will connect to Blackberry- withinnovative mind with a bent toward discovery beyond his fellows.  Maybe this child will just learn something about recognizing when friendship extended is not truely friendship at all, as the rabbits learned from Cowslip's warren.

I could say we have included Watership Down because it will help children understand anthropology, the study of customs, culture, peoples, and politics. Maybe the hints of those topics, rustling through the pages beneath the obvious parts of the plot, will whisper in your child's ears and he will discover an interest in those topics as he grows up, he will be able to make connections in ways he might not otherwise have been able to do if he had never met the various rabbits, read their stories, songs, poetry, and beliefs in WD.

 Perhaps the children will make connections between this story and the story of Abraham, told by God to leave everything and almost he had known in Ur, and journey to a new land and make his home there. Perhaps the reader will one day be called to become something of a gypsy himself- a missionary, a member of the military, a travel writer.

Perhaps he will find in this story a germ of an idea about what life is like for refugees, the struggles they face, and the home they miss and the one they hope to create. Maybe nothing greater will come of that but that he will be sympathetic toward refugees in general, and pray for them when he reads their stories in the news- and he will never realize that reading Watership Down is what first lit that little flame, created an affinity, if you will.

 Perhaps your student will discover he wants to be a fiction writer, creating a world like the author of Watership Down did, using animals as characters, or it will be the writing style that strikes the bell in his heart, or it will be something else I haven't even thought to mention.

 Interwoven into all this richness are true facts about real rabbits, real-life experiences the author had in a battle in the Netherlands in WW2, and stories he told to his little girls to amuse them on car trips. Maybe something there will connect with your reader.

I haven't even touched half the veins of ideas a child could mine from this book.

 It can be this way because Watership Down is a living book, in good company with Beowulf, The Lord of the Rings, The Oddysey, and other epics. Living books are written in interesting, complex language with challenging ideas, and excellent characterization and plotting.  They defy easy categorization. Watership Down is richly endowed with many, many living ideas, too many to list, and so it is difficult to label it with one 'cause' for including it in the curriculum. Like a Charlotte Mason education, it is full of wide and generous ideas.

 We could say that about any of our literature selections.

Ironically, or serendipitously, or providentially, or because this is the thing about connections, about the great ideas, about literature, a day or two after I wrote the above explanation for Watership Down, Auxiliary member Naomi shared this link with me.  you should read it all, but here's what caught my attention:

"But it is in the schools that perhaps the deepest confusion exists about the purposes of children’s literature. This year my husband and I attended several open houses at top“ranked private schools. At some of these events, tables for each grade were set up with frequently used materials, books read, and work produced. Very few of the classic children’s books were in evidence. Instead, the children were reading books chosen not because they were beautifully written or had stood the test of time, but because of their relationship to “appropriate” subject matter. In the lower grades at least, books were seldom understood as literature; they were merely aids to teaching social studies." 

There is a time and a place for books that are aids for teaching specific subjects. But literature is a worthy cause on its own merits, because good literature is a treasure trove of good ideas.

Literature as Moral Instruction

Some Advisory Progeny sort through
a few family books. 

You may have noticed, and perhaps wondered why, AO does not use any of those popular reprinted Victorian morality tales which are specifically geared toward the teaching of 'character.'  It is not because we are not concerned with the development of good character in our children.  Rather, it is because we believe that the little books and studies which purport to 'teach' character are misguided, at best, and usually poorly written. In her third volume, Miss Mason refers to such books as twaddle:

What manner of Book sustains the Life of Thought?––The story discloses no more than that they were intelligent girls, probably the children of intelligent parents. But that is enough for our purpose. The question resolves itself into––What manner of book will find its way with upheaving effect into the mind of an intelligent boy or girl? We need not ask what the girl or boy likes. She very often likes the twaddle of goody-goody story books, (emphasis mine, WC) he likes condiments, highly-spiced tales of adventure. We are all capable of liking mental food of a poor quality and a titillating nature; and possibly such food is good for us when our minds are in need of an elbow-chair; but our spiritual life is sustained on other stuff, whether we be boys or girls, men or women. By spiritual I mean that which is not corporeal; and which, for convenience sake, we call by various names––the life of thought, the life of feeling, the life of the soul.

I would put character development under this 'life of the soul.' How could we define that further?  Could we say it is the growth of both an instructed, informed conscience, combined with habits of right action?  The habits we can discuss later. For this post, we will focus on how we instruct the conscience.  The Bible, of course, is the best instructor of all.   Real, living books also serve very well for lessons in what we would call 'character development.'

Miss Mason explains why:

The instructed conscience knows that Temperance, Chastity, Fortitude, Prudence must rule in the House of Body. But how is the conscience to become instructed? Life brings us many lessons––when we see others do well, conscience approves and learns; when others do ill, conscience condemns. But we want a wider range of knowledge than the life about us affords, and books are our best teachers. There is no nice shade of conduct which is not described or exemplified in the vast treasure-house of literature. (emphasis mine, WC) History and biography are full of instruction in righteousness; but what is properly called literature, that is, poetry, essays, the drama, and novels, is perhaps the most useful for our moral instruction, because the authors bring their insight to bear in a way they would hesitate to employ when writing about actual persons. Autobiographies, again, often lift the veil, for the writer may make free with himself.

The above quote is taken from Leslie Noelani's Modern English version of Ourselves, Miss Mason's fourth volume.

On pages 50 and 51 of volume 6, Miss Mason explains how well the children are able to extract the morals from the biographies they read:

The way children make their own the examples offered to them is amazing. No child would forget the characterization of Charles IX as 'feeble and violent,' nor fail to take to himself a lesson in self-control. We may not point the moral; that is the work proper for children themselves and they do it without fail. The comparative difficulty of the subject does not affect them. A teacher writes (of children of eleven),––"They cannot have enough of Publicola and there are always groans when the lesson comes to an end."

A while ago I read the above passages to my children (grown and nearly grown), and asked them if any of the books we'd read came to mind immediately.  One of my daughters said we'd think she was weird, but Winnie The Pooh and Shakespeare's Sonnets came to mind almost immediately. I also remembered another time when we had a lesson on gossip at church.  One of our daughters had been reading A Tale of Two Cities, by Dickens (she was about 11 at the time). She told me the lesson, which used the verse about how the tongue is as a roaring fire reminded her of the darkest days of the French Revolution, when a careless remark could get your neighbor arrested, and a malicious remark could have him beheaded. Another of my children spent a good deal of profitable time pondering over the lessons about false friends which she gleaned from reading Dickens' Oliver Twist.

Children are able to handle much stronger stuff than we give them credit for, too.  This is another reason those 'goody goody storybooks' Miss Mason spoke of often miss the mark. As a small child away from home for the first time, another of our daughters requested of her grandmother that a 'comforting story' to be read to her from the Bible. The grandmother asked for a suggestion, and my young daughter (about 8) asked for the story of.... Jezebel!  That is not the story most of us would choose, is it?  I pondered over that for a while and then realized that what comforted that small child of 8 was the meaty and firm knowledge that the wicked did not prosper forever.  Left to my own devices, I would have made another choice for a 'comforting' story.

The goody goody storybooks Miss Mason would not use in her own classrooms seek to create a sort of a recipe, or formula, for character development rather than deal holistically with the child as a whole person who is nourished not by morality tales, but by living ideas in literary form.

 As Charlotte mason wrote in her sixth volume:

Education is a life. That life is sustained on ideas. Ideas are of spiritual origin, and God has made us so that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another, whether by word of mouth, written page, Scripture word, musical symphony; but we must sustain a child's inner life with ideas as we sustain his body with food. Probably he will reject nine-tenths of the ideas we offer, as he makes use of only a small proportion of his bodily food, rejecting the rest. He is an eclectic; he may choose this or that; our business is to supply him with due abundance and variety and his to take what he needs. Urgency on our part annoys him. He resists forcible feeding and loathes predigested food (emphasis mine. WC). What suits him best is pabulum presented in the indirect literary form which Our Lord adopts in those wonderful parables whose quality is that they cannot be forgotten though, while every detail of the story is remembered, its application may pass and leave no trace. We, too, must take this risk. We may offer children as their sustenance the Lysander of Plutarch, an object lesson, we think, shewing what a statesman or a citizen should avoid: but, who knows, the child may take to Lysander and think his 'cute' ways estimable! Again, we take the risk, as did our Lord in that puzzling parable of the Unjust Steward. One other caution; it seems to be necessary to present ideas with a great deal of padding, as they reach us in a novel or poem or history book written with literary power. A child cannot in mind or body live upon tabloids however scientifically prepared; out of a whole big book he may not get more than half a dozen of those ideas upon which his spirit thrives; and they come in unexpected places and unrecognised forms, so that no grown person is capable of making such extracts from Scott or Dickens or Milton, as will certainly give him nourishment. It is a case of, “In the morning sow thy seed and in the evening withhold not thine hand for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that."

I suspect that most, if not all, of the Victorian style morality tales count as 'predigested food.'
 Feed the children's minds, and their 'characters'  upon living books, of which the Bible is chief.