Saturday, August 06, 2005

An Educational Manifesto - Part I

Excerpted from Charlotte Mason's Vol. 3 "School Education: Developing A Curriculum"
Originally published in 1925

"Studies serve for Delight, for Ornament, and for Ability"

Every child has a right of entry to several fields of knowledge.
Every normal child has an appetite for such knowledge.
This appetite or desire for knowledge is a sufficient stimulus for all school work, if the knowledge be fitly given.

There are four means of destroying the desire for knowledge:

(a) Too many oral lesons, which offer knowledge in a diluted form, and do not leave the child free to deal with it.
(b) Lectures, for which the teacher collects, arranges and illustrates matter from varous sources; these often offer knowledge in too condensed and ready prepared a form.
(c) Text-books compressed and re-compressed from the big book of the big man.
(d) The use of emulation and ambition as incentives to learning in place of the adequate desire for, and delight in knowledge.

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