It’s late September.Kids are firmly back in school; routines are established and reading lists set.
But what exactly is on the menu? The usual textbooks, which, if they’re in a government school, are often written by committee (with an agenda), range from uninspiring to outright woke.Or maybe most of your child’s school curriculum is delivered via lifeless and impersonal computer screens.But there is an alternative, a source whose advocacy first transformed the task of educating children over one hundred years ago.Virtually unknown to public school parents, the British 19th-century reformer Charlotte Mason (1842-1923) has long been the hero of modern homeschooling in America, and the movement’s best-kept secret weapon.WE GREW UP BEFORE SCREENS TOOK OVER.
OUR KIDS DESERVE THAT CHANCE TOOBut her ideas and theories are not just applicable to the home-schooling community.Parents and educators can greatly benefit from Mason’s ideas about children and reading, which are even more relevant today.Students who read the great books will find them far better than the dull stuff of textbooks.
(Ryan McVay/iStock)Creating a thirst for knowledge, and lifelong love of learning was Mason’s goal.If children developed an early hunger for ideas, she reasoned, it would sustain them through their lives.
Mason believed that in addition to the proper vitamins and nutrients needed to thrive, children require ideas to chew on, to properly grow.And the source of these ideas, she reasoned, was not typical textbooks.BEN CARSON, RILEY GAINES FIGHT SCRUBBING OF FAITH FROM KIDS' US HISTORY BOOKS FOR AMERICA'S 250THThat’s a perspective as true today as it was in Mason’s time.
Most if not all textbooks which children encounter in public schools are either bland by design, so as not to arouse controversy, or the opposite: brazenly geared to advance a woke agenda.Mason believed that the best resource for the ideas that will benefit children most came from a regular exposure to gre...