In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet and growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it for the most part spent out in the fresh air.
Interpretation
A mother's primary responsibility is to provide her children with a peaceful environment that encourages natural growth and exploration.
Charlotte Mason emphasizes the importance of a nurturing and calm atmosphere for children, suggesting that their early years should be spent mainly outdoors, allowing them to absorb knowledge and nature passively. During a time of societal and educational pressure, she advocates for the necessity of a serene environment for children's development, arguing that such an environment fosters their emotional and intellectual growth.
In practice
In a parenting seminar discussing early childhood development.
Therefore, teaching, talk and tale, however lucid or fascinating, effect nothing until self-activity be set up; that is, self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature.
As for literature – to introduce children to literature is to install them in a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast exquisitely served. But they must learn to know literature by being familiar with it from the very first. A child's intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find.
The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.
Let children alone... the education of habit is successful in so far as it enables the mother to let her children alone, not teasing them with perpetual commands and directions - a running fire of Do and Don’t ; but letting them go their own way and grow, having first secured that they will go the right way and grow to fruitful purpose.
We have never been so rich in books. But there has never been a generation when there is so much twaddle in print for children.
We talk of lost ideals, but perhaps they are not lost, only changed; when our ideal for ourselves and for our children becomes limited to prosperity and comfort, we get these, very likely, for ourselves and for them, but we get no more.
I believe in the power of ideas, I believe in the power of books, but you have to give them time.
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
Children are excellent observers, and will often perceive your slightest defects. In general, those who govern children, forgive nothing in them, but everything in themselves
If present trends continue, our country may soon find itself far behind many other nations in both science and technology nations where, if you inform strangers that you are a mathematician, they respond with admiration and not by telling you how much they hated math in school, and how they sure could use you to balance their checkbooks.
For quiet, solitary and observant children create their own world and live in it, nourishing their imaginations on the material at hand.
My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
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