Your chance for an AO MUG!!

Amy Boesl is our winner!! Amy, email us your mailing address and we'll send your mug and bag when our conference is over (we'll be sending in one order for our conference, so we will receive your mug and bag w/our conference order). Amblesideonline, using gmail is our email addy. thanks to all for participating! Watch this space, because we are having another giveaway very, very soon! http://amblesideonline.org/2016Conference/Conference2016.html

Above is the link to the AO Conference we're having in May- our 3rd conference in ten years, and the last conference we plan to have for at least three more years, maybe more. We're hip-deep in the planning bounce house excitedly and energetically working out details right now, and as exhausting as it all is, we are getting excited, too.

We have so many ideas for what we want to share with you all, and so little time.We are trying to offer a good mix of philosophy as well as practical hand-holding, sharing the why as well as the what, and speaking from our hearts about why we do what we do, and how you can implement CM's principles in your homeschool (or private school- we know we have teachers in private schools coming).

 One of the perks of being able to come to a conference, or just have a friend at a conference, is that up until now,  this has been the only way to get one of our special AO coffee mugs or totebags. These are so pretty- many people have wished they'd ordered two, or have asked us to consider shipping them out so people who can't come to the conference can also have them. They really are lovely, and while we wish everybody who wants one could own one,  we really can't redirect our time and energy from curriculum development and conference planning to shipping out coffee mugs.

However,  we have come up with an opportunity for one special reader to win a free mug and totebag and we promise to ship them out to you at our expense (but not until after the conference).
We're having a giveaway!
To present your name for consideration for our give-away, please share the above link to our conference page on social media- FB, Twitter, Instagram, your blog, a homeschooling group you're in, Tumbler- whatever and wherever is out there that you are comfortable sharing our conference link. Then come back here and tell us about it in the comments, leaving a link to your share in the comments.
 EACH time you share is one entry in a drawing for a free mug/totebag combo, shipping included. So if you share the conference link on Twitter, FB, and Instagram, you'd leave 3 comments, saying basically, "I shared the conference on Twitter!  (link here)."  Leave another comment for a fB share, and so forth.

The winner will be selected on Friday, or when we reach 100 shares, whichever comes first.  Should we reach 100 shares really quickly (like, by the end of today), we'll probably give away TWO mugs and TWO totes!

On Friday or when this post has 100 comments, I will select the lucky recipient of this week's giveaway by the randomly scientific process of printing out the comments, cutting them apart, tossing them in a bowl and having one of my deliciously adorable small grandchildren pull out one of the slips.

To Recap:

 Share the above link or this one on social media : http://preview.tinyurl.com/AOConferenceHeartofAO

Each social media platform mention is a separate chance to be picked for the giveaway- so copy and paste the link where you shared in the comments below, one per social media share.

Cross your fingers and hope we draw your name, and keep an eye on this space for the next pre-conference giveaway!!

P.S.  Yes, OF COURSE you can enter even if you can't come to the conference.

The modern place for older books

by Wendi Capehart

Why do we use old books?  We live in the 21st century after all!

In general, well written older books use richer vocabulary, more  complex sentence structure, and contain more ideas per page than  modern books. Recently written books, by contrast, use watered down language, weaker, less complex, sentence structures and if they have any meaningful ideas, they either sandwich them  between pages and pages of fluff, or they club the reader over the head with the message.

C. S. Lewis, in his introduction to Athanasius, advised that moderns needed to read more old books and fewer new books.  He explained:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. … To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

We can see the blind spots of previous generations, but it is harder to know our own.  Older books that we use have stood the test of time. They have  been read for generations and will be read for generations more.  It's too early to tell which of our currently published, modern crops of books will  still be communicating to readers outside of the culture and time  that produced them a hundred years from now.  Those who are contemporaries of the authors are the worst judges of that timeless quality, because we cannot step outside our own time, culture, and assumptions to see which are merely passing whims and which are timeless, not with any certainty, anyway.

The marginalizing of old books as though truth and beauty have expiration dates reflects modernity's disconnect with the past, something David McCullough addressed, pointing out:

Learning about history is an antidote to the hubris of the present, the idea that everything in our lives is the ultimate.Former President Harry S. Truman once remarked that the history we don’t know is the only new thing in the world. Picking up on a related theme, the late Daniel Boorstin, an eminent historian, Librarian of Congress, and friend of mine, wrote that planning for the future without a sense of the past is similar to planting cut flowers and hoping for the best. Today, the new generation of young Americans are like a field of cut flowers, by-and-large historically illiterate. This does not bode well for our future.

A sense of the past is not just a matter of knowing dates and events and being able to put them in order.  It's about coming into contact with some of the best minds of the previous centuries, not mere decades. It's about reading their ideas and stories in their words, getting a feel for   Truth, justice, mercy, faith, friendship, charity, loyalty, courage, these are ideas and traits that are timeless. 

While Mason did use some books which were newly published in her day, she relied more heavily on great books of the past.  In volume VI, she explains that the children read literature which was published in the same historical time period they are studying.  She mentions Milton, Pope, Sir Walter Scott, Goldsmith- and of course, they were not 'modern' in her day, either.

She explains:

 The object of children's literary studies is not to give them precise information as to who wrote what in the reign of whom?––but to give them a sense of the spaciousness of the days, not only of great Elizabeth, but of all those times of which poets, historians and the makers of tales, have left us living pictures. In such ways the children secure, not the sort of information which is of little cultural value, but wide spaces wherein imagination may take those holiday excursions deprived of which life is dreary; judgment, too, will turn over these folios of the mind and arrive at fairly just decisions about a given strike, the question of Poland, Indian Unrest. Every man is called upon to be a statesman seeing that every man and woman, too, has a share in the government of the country; but statesmanship requires imaginative conceptions, formed upon pretty wide reading and some familiarity with historical precedents.

It is not that her students never read modern books for literature, it's just that Mason did not see a need to emphasize them.  She wrote that sometimes the oldest students' studies touched on:

current literature in the occasional use of modern books; but young people who have been brought up on this sort of work may, we find, be trusted to keep themselves au fait with the best that is being produced in their own days.

It is also true that we at AO appreciate about older books is that they are in the public domain.  Now, many, many public domain books are still twaddle, so that alone won't qualify a book for AO.  But once we've found a really well written book we love it when it's also public domain.  This means they are available on line as etexts,  *and will remain available.* I can't tell you how frustrating, how  much gnashing of teeth it causes the Advisory when a book goes out  of print. When we put together the curriculum (and when we revise it), it was and is the result of truly, thousands of Mama-hours (these are worth  more than man-hours, right? Just Joking!) researching books. 

We  amazed our librarians with the number of books we checked out from the  library and put on interlibrary loan. When all else fails, we  actually, gulp, spend money on a book if we can't find it to review  it any other way. We scan excerpts of different books into our  computers and pass them on to each other to compare and contrast.  We look at the wording, the breadth and scope of coverage, the  illustrations (if any), topics covered (and just as important,  topics not covered), and then, after devoting months of our lives to  this project, we finally pick the best book of all those available  and proudly and gleefully share it with the world.  Then it goes out  of print and we all have to go on anti-depressants and receive hours  of pastoral counseling. Okay, that last part was an exaggeration.  We don't go on medication.  Seriously, though, the newer, in-print  books have a Very High turnover rate. They very quickly become  newer but now hard to find and out of print books, and thus, of no  use to us. 

Individual homeschoolers can use and benefit from those books, of  course. Some of them may actually be better than any given book we  have listed. But a book that may be perfect for your family (or  mine) is not perfect for AmblesideOnline if it's out of print but not online.

Here's are some reasons why out of print but not yet in public domain books are not  very useful to us:
 We want to share our vision of what a Charlotte  Mason education might look like put into practice, and at the same  time, we want to make that vision available to as many people as  possible who might want to benefit from it.

We specifically want to consider the unique situations and needs of  missionaries, military, and other expat families overseas, as well as parents and educators around the world who love their kids; single  parents; families without access to a decent library, a good  bookstore, or inexpensive shipping; families who travel often and so  cannot cart thousands of pounds of books around; and fellow  homeschoolers all over the world. We want to recreate a solid, sound, and beautiful rendition of  what a CM curriculum might look like today, and we want that version to also  work for all those different families I mentioned. The best way for  us to do that is to rely strongly on public domain works that can be  used as etexts, whenever we find etexts of excellent quality..

This is not the only way to implement Charlotte Mason's ideas and  principles. These are not the only books worth using. But these  are the books that best fit the criteria we set for ourselves at the  start of this project. We want to offer a model of what a real living book looks like.  We want to share a curriculum based on excellently written books, packed with informing ideas rather than twaddle and  barren facts, in living language that engages the mind (often with some effort required, which is also an important part of a CM education),   and so we have chosen what we believe to  be the cream of the crop from those books that are online or still  in print, and in some cases, worked hard to get that oop book available online, or convinced a publisher to republish. 

We share this freely, and we try to keep costs down because we believe in Miss Mason's vision of 'Education for all.'

Some Christmas Thoughts from Charlotte Mason

Excerpted from Parents and Children, abridged and edited by Karen Glass

It takes the presence of children to help us to realise the idea of the Eternal Child. The Dayspring is with the children, and we think their thoughts and are glad in their joy; and every mother knows out of her own heart's fulness what the Birth at Bethlehem means. Those of us who have not children catch echoes. We hear the wondrous story read in church, the church-bells echo it, and our hearts are meek and mild, glad and gay, loving and tender, as those of little children; but, alas, only for the little while occupied by the passing thought. Too soon the dreariness of daily living settles down upon us again, and we become a little impatient, do we not, of the Christmas demand of joyousness.

But it is not so where there are children. The old, old story has all its first freshness as we tell it to the eager listeners; as we listen to it ourselves with their vivid interest it becomes as real and fresh to us as it is to them. What a mystery it is! Does not every mother who holds a babe in her arms feel with tremulous awe that, that deep saying is true for her also, 'The same is my mother'? [Matt 12:50; Mark 3:35]

In [the little child] is the light and life of Christ; and every birth is a message of salvation, and a reminder that we, too, must humble ourselves and become as little children. This is, perhaps, the real secret of the world's progress––that every babe comes into the world with an evangel, which witnesses of necessity to his parents' hearts. That we, too, are children, the children of God, that He would have us be as children, is the message that the newborn child never fails to bear, however little we heed, or however soon we forget. The note of childhood is, before all things, humility. An old and saintly writer has a luminous thought on this subject of humility.

'There never was nor ever will be, but one humility in the whole world, and that is the humility of Christ, which never any man, since the fall of Adam has the least degree of but from Christ. Humility is one, in the same sense and truth that Christ is one, the Mediator is one, Redemption is one . . . There are not two Lambs of God that take away the sins of the world. But if there was any humility besides that of Christ, there would be something else besides him that could take away the sins of the world.' [William Law.]

Our common notion of humility is inaccurate. We regard it as a relative quality. We humble ourselves to this one and that, bow to the prince and lord it over the peasant. This is why the grace of humility does not commend itself even to ourselves in our most sincere moods, but this misconception confuses our thought on an important subject. For humility is absolute, not relative. It is by no means a taking of our place among our fellows according to a given scale, some being above us by many grades and others as far below. There is no reference to above or below in the humble soul, which is equally humble before an infant, a primrose, a worm, a beggar, a prince.

Humility does not think much or little of itself; it does not think of itself at all. It is a negative rather than a positive quality, being an absence of self-consciousness rather than the presence of any distinctive virtue. The person who is unaware of himself is capable of all lowly service, of all suffering for others, of bright cheerfulness under all the small crosses and worries of everyday life.

The Christian religion is, in its very nature, objective. It offers for our worship, reverence, service, adoration and delight, a Divine Person, the Desire of the world. Simplicity, happiness and expansion come from the outpouring of a human heart upon that which is altogether worthy. But we mistake our own needs, are occupied with our own falls and our own repentances, our manifold states of consciousness. Our religion is subjective first, and after that, so far as we are able, objective. The order should rather be objective first and after that, so far as we have any time or care to think about ourselves, subjective.

Now, the tendency of children is to be altogether objective, not at all subjective, and perhaps that is why they are said to be first in the kingdom of heaven. This philosophic distinction is not one which we can put aside as having no bearing on everyday life. It strikes the keynote for the training of children. In proportion as our training tends to develop the subjective principle, it tends to place our children on a lower level of purpose, character, and usefulness throughout their lives; while so far as we develop the objective principle, with which the children are born, we make them capable of love, service, heroism, worship.

This kind cometh forth only by prayer, but it is well to clear our thoughts and know definitely what we desire for our children, because only so can we work intelligently towards the fulfilment of our desire.

During each coming festival of the Eternal Child, may parents ponder how best to keep their own children in the blessed child-estate, recollecting that the humility which Christ commends in the children is what may be described, philosophically, as the objective principle as opposed to the subjective, and that, in proportion as a child becomes self-regardful in any function of his being, he loses the grace of humility. This is the broad principle; the practical application will need constant watchfulness and constant efforts, especially in holiday seasons, to keep friends and visitors from showing their love for the children in any way that shall tend to develop self-consciousness.

This, of humility, is not only a counsel of perfection, but is, perhaps, the highest counsel of perfection and when we put it to parents, we offer it to those for whom no endeavour is too difficult, no aim too lofty; to those who are doing the most to advance the Kingdom of Christ.

(Read the unedited chapter here.)

What I learned from a tree ornament

by Anne White

November is my annual crafting, making, planning for holidays month. As I was putting ideas together, I saw these patchwork tree ornaments linked from Sew Mama Sew's Handmade Holidays, and thought they didn't look too difficult.

Wrong.

Photo below: the almost-finished disastrous first attempt. If it doesn't look that awful, that's just because the photo's a bit blurred.

I put that pattern aside for a week or so while I worked on other things. Then I made a second try.

Sewing these ornaments made me think of several Charlotte Mason principles.

1.  In many parts of life, hit-or-miss is good enough. In this case, it didn't work well. The first time around, I thought I would save time by folding rectangles in half and then snipping across (to make squares), and eyeballing the seam allowances. The second time, I cut paper patterns for each required piece, and marked the patterns with quarter-inch seam allowances as well. No more missing tree points and crooked borders. Everything lined up the way it was supposed to. Should I have been surprised?

But it's not just about practicing attention and accuracy. It's about commitment to the method. It would have been easy to say the pattern was not right or too hard, just because my first try didn't work. I didn't become that much better a sewer in one week. What made the difference? Having faith in the image that was presented, and following all the instructions.

2.  Just because something's free doesn't mean it's the best choice. For the first ornaments, I used a scrap of red holiday-print fabric for the borders, and another green and red print for the backing fabric. (I was very limited in what I had to use, but I thought it should be red because the original was red.) The print turned out to be too scattered for the small area, and the backing fabric didn't match very well. The second time, I had been to the store and picked up a quarter-yard of brown print with tiny hearts, for both borders and backing. It looks much nicer, even though it wasn't sold as a "Christmas" fabric.

3. But it's okay to mix new and vintage materials. The white sections in both sets of ornaments are a scrap of old white percale sheet, the last remaining piece after using it for other projects over a couple of years (it was a really big sheet). I found that the percale had an interesting quirk: any holes made in the fabric, such as needle marks made in the wrong place, were very noticeable and couldn't be smoothed over. It was a strong encouragement to do it right the first time.

4. Iron, iron, iron. Kind of like narrate, narrate, narrate.

5. New challenges are how you grow, and just because a first attempt at a new book doesn't go well, it doesn't mean that you or your students are failures, or that the book is bad. In this case, I'm glad I came across that new fabric that inspired me to try again. I learned from the first failures. (But don't expect me to hang them on the Christmas tree as an object lesson.)

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.

I Dare You (Charlotte Mason is powerful, Part IV)

by Anne White

Part I is here
Part II is here
Part III is here

"'You got to be kidding,' he said...'You want both sides of the paper for homework?' His voice cracked in disbelief midway through the question...Marva said, 'When your mother gives you dinner, do you want only half a chop?'" (Marva Collins' Way)

Charlotte Mason used the word "stultifies" to describe the well-meant attempt to bring the world down to a child's level, to make everything easy, controlled, regular, and predictable. She said that by doing this, we underestimate, degrade, even steal from the children in our care.

David V. Hicks,  in Norms and Nobility, contrasts two piano teachers he knew as a child.  His friend's teacher had young students memorize Mozart pieces.  His own teacher, more in touch with how modern children were supposed to learn, used graded exercises and fun, hands-on activities.  He says that his friend, who initially balked and struggled, was nevertheless playing Chopin and other difficult composers within a few years, while he himself never got beyond a simple arrangement of "The Lone Ranger." (Head First?, posted here in 2013)

This statement flies in the face of all we know, all we have been told over the past century-plus about learning and teaching. Particularly all we were ever told by the Herbartians. The cloud of classical witnesses, on the other hand, may be looking on knowingly.

We can't expect students to learn everything about everything, or even something about everything. But they can learn the things that matter about things that matter. This does not mean we allow them to overspecialize, or to go as far as Sherlock Holmes in selectivity:

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." (A Study in Scarlet)

And the way, it seems, to let them learn the things that matter, is to allow them to balk and struggle a bit, as (for instance) many of our children did at first when studying Plutarch's Lives, or Charles Kingsley's books, or Parables from Nature. We give them something tough--not completely unchewable or unpalatable, but more solid than they are used to--and we bring them into the ages-old circle of listeners; we make them part of the "membership." Those who are allowed only to approach by baby steps, it seems, are the ones who will find themselves locked out, powerless.* How will they "increase their power of observation" if nothing demands to be looked at? How can they learn to reason without hearing reason? How can they develop what Martha Nussbaum calls "daring imagination" if they are never given that dare?

Our desire is not to abuse children (as someone said, "suffer, little children"). Nobody wants to see their child in tears over a book (although several, reportedly, have wept over the Battle of Hastings). But as serious sports coaches know that there will be no success without tough training, we count it as abuse of adult power if we do not allow them the chance to join the conversation.

"'I am not going to give up on you. I am not going to let you give up on yourself. If you sit there leaning against this wall all day, you are going to end up leaning on something or someone all your life. And all that brilliance bottled up inside you will go to waste...' Marva's highest aim as a teacher was to endow her students with the will to learn for themselves." (Marva Collins' Way)

* (Those studying Charlotte Mason's volumes may want to look at her story of the Grenfell twins in the Supplementary section of Philosophy of Education.)

Charlotte Mason is powerful (Part III)

by Anne White

Part I is here

Part II is here

In the book Marva Collins' Way, the first chapter begins with a description of the first day of school in Mrs. Collins' class, about forty years ago. She did not begin the school year with a game; she began with the words "The first thing we are going to do in here, children, is an awful lot of believing in ourselves." Then she handed out copies of Emerson's "Self-Reliance."

Now we may not all be great fans of Emerson, or think that his essays are an essential part of the second grade curriculum; but Marva Collins had a point. She also had something in common with Charlotte Mason, who insisted that true education was self-education. Self-reliance, strengthening the will, thinking independently (while still recognizing responsibility and duty); knowing that "I can": these were essential goals of a CM education.

Look at some of the goals given in the Notes of Lessons:

To train the pupils to think independently and to cultivate their constructive powers. 

To make the children think, by setting them questions which they cannot answer merely from their book

To increase the children's power of rapid mental work

To increase their power of reasoning and attention

To increase their power of observation

To exercise their reasoning powers

To increase their powers of narration & imagination

To increase their power of reflection by encouraging them to trace the Latin origin of words in our own language

To assist the cultivation of the pupils' mental habits [powers] of attention, promptness, and accuracy

To teach the girls self-reliance (through physical exercise)

To make the children use their common sense by giving approximate answers

To draw out their originality by letting them make designs for themselves.

To give the children exercise in judging various lengths and in drawing straight lines

To give practice in the choosing and laying on of colour 

To get the pupils to arrive at the rules by the investigation of examples

To improve E's reading [so he can do more for himself]

To enlarge his vocabulary [see above]

To increase the girls' knowledge of [the literary subject, Latin grammar, etc.]

To facilitate their translation [i.e. to give them more power in this]

To stimulate interest in algebra by showing how easily many problems may be solved.[i.e. showing them that they can solve problems]

To give the pupils an interest in Latin translation, and help them to attack it in the right way [similar to the previous goal] 

To give training to the ear

To draw from the children all that they have observed for themselves about [some aspect of nature] 

To give a greater appreciation of beauty

To help to train their hands in firmness and deftness

To teach him to use his fingers more easily, and be neater in his work

To enable the children to copy a basket by looking at it 

To establish relations with the past

To connect the past with the present.

To connect the lesson with the history they are doing.

To help the children look upon the separate battles as parts of one campaign

To help them to connect all the facts they know about [a historical figure]

To show how closely literature and history are linked together and how the one influences the other

To increase the girls' love of good literature [and their power to access it]

To inspire them with a desire to study zoology on their own account, both in books and from life

To paint berries.

There is much we could discuss about these, but much of it comes down to this: we want children to be able to. And to know that they are able to.

There are two children's books by Rumer Godden...at least two...that relate to these ideas: The Fairy Doll, and Miss Happiness and Miss Flower. Both books deal with children who feel that they can't do things, don't fit in. Elizabeth in The Fairy Doll and Nona in Miss Happiness come out of their "stuck places" through acts of doing: making a fairy house out of a bicycle basket, building a house for two Japanese dolls. Elizabeth, in particular, suddenly sees "I can's" everywhere: she can suddenly remember her arithmetic, she learns to ride her bicycle, she stops being the child who holds everyone else up.

Even to know that you can paint berries...or make a fairy house...is a place to start.

This series will be completed in Part IV.

You might also enjoy: Head First, first posted here in 2013.