Mother Culure & Self-education

Step by Step...

It's been nearly four years since we first started using Ambleside Online, which was also when I began to read the Original Charlotte Mason Home Education series. Up until then if I started a book, I'd generally finish it before I'd start another. 

I began to notice how well my children were retaining with what they'd read over a period of months so I decided to try it for myself, although the idea didn't appeal to me at all.

So four years later I think I can say I've gone to the other extreme - I'm almost embarrassed to say that I'm still reading a book I started two years ago. 

I've been enjoying the Back to the Classics Challenge that I started at the beginning of the year. The challenge is divided into categories which has helped me choose books I might not otherwise have read. I'm also continuing with the Classics Club Challenge which is over five years.

These are the books I'm in the process of reading (and keeping):

Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks - nearly finished! I wrote a little about this book here and I'll write some more when I've finished.

Madame Curie by Eve Curie (the two year saga) - it was interesting to read in the book above that Oliver Sacks read this book and loved it when he was ten years old. He had the pleasure of meeting the author, Madame Curie's daughter, in her old age.

 My messy Commonplace...

Knowledge of the Holy by A.W.Tozer - Tozer is direct and no nonsense. This is another of my slow reads.

The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act if worship has taken place...

Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they themselves are idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voscamp - I didn't think I'd like this book but by the end of the first few chapters I was sucked in. Suffering, pain, joy, gratitude...I keep getting hit with beautiful thoughts. The writing is a grammar jungle but I love the heart of what she is sharing - and I needed to hear it.  Some quotes that I loved:

Joy and pain, they are but two arteries of the one heart that pumps through all of those who don't numb themselves to really living.

On observing a hummingbird:

Her long bill swills back July sun transfigured into nectar.

I watch her, become her, drink the sweet right out of now.

Beauty? Beauty requires no justification, no explanation; it simply is and transcends.

The weight of God's Glory, not illusory or ephemeral, but daily and everywhere, punctuates earth's lid and heaven falls through the holes.

Do I believe in a God who rouses Himself just now and then to spill a bit of benevolence on haemorrhaging humanity?

The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis - I usually find Lewis very readable but this has been hard going for me. I'm taking it paragraph by paragraph and I'm still having to re-read sections. 

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie - pure pleasure. I sat up later than normal last night to finish it.

The Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason - I've been reading this for about 9 months and have written about it here & here and probably in other places as well. It's good.

Read Alouds

Ourselves by Charlotte Mason

I Can Jump Puddles by Alan Marshall - an Australian classic which we finished today.

Listening to:

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen - a re-read but it's not my favourite Austen. I just discovered Jane Austen's phrase which Charlotte Mason appropriated, 'warming the imagination.' I'd been wondering where in Jane Austen's writing it came from and I obviously didn't catch it when I read the book awhile back.

On the present occasion she addressed herself chiefly to Miss Crawford and Fanny, but there was no comparison in the willingness of their attention; for Miss Crawford, who had seen scores of great houses, and cared for none of them, had only the appearance of civilly listening, while Fanny, to whom everything was almost as interesting as it was new, attended with unaffected earnestness to all that Mrs. Rushworth could relate of the family in former times, its rise and grandeur, regal visits and loyal efforts, delighted to connect anything with history already known, or warm her imagination with scenes of the past.

Nature's Role in the Disposition of the Mind

I've been reading aloud the Australian classic, I Can Jump Puddles by Alan Marshall, the story of a young boy who contracted polio in the early 1900's when an epidemic swept through Victoria.

Alan had been taken to hospital to have surgery on his lower body. He was encased in a plaster cast but there were some nasty complications and he was in misery from the constant pain he suffered.

One day his dad, desperate to cheer him, came to visit with a little new pup hidden beneath his jumper. He tucked the little dog into bed with Alan while the other patients kept a watch to warn of approaching nursing staff. It was a brief moment of contact with the world outside, but Alan soaked up the warmth of the little creature snuggled up beside him, and the sweetness of that filled him with strength and hope.

Later the day came when he could be wheeled outside:

As we passed through the door leading to the garden, the fresh, open air and the sunshine poured itself over me in one immense torrent. I rose to meet it, sitting upright in my chair, facing the blue and the sparkle and the gentle push of the air against my face, like a diver rising from the sea.

For three months I had not seen a cloud or felt the sun upon me. Now they were returned to me, newly created, perfected, radiant with qualities they never possessed before.

I was struck with the power of Alan's words. He was seeing things in a whole new way after a long separation. A common bird's call was a gift to him. Even the grains of gravel upon which his chair rested took on a beauty and their 'strange little hills and hollows' were delightful to him.

Sometimes it can be hard for a mother to get outside. There's washing to get done, dinner to be made, maths to be corrected, the bathroom's a mess, there are other more important things that need to be done...

Nature...gives us certain dispositions of mind which we can get from no other source, and it is through these right dispositions that we get life into focus, as it were; learn to distinguish between small matters and great, to see that we ourselves are not of very great importance, that the world is wide, that things are sweet...

 Ourselves, Book II by Charlotte Mason

I usually try to get out and have a good walk a few mornings a week but I haven't been sleeping well and it hasn't happened for about two weeks. My motivation for walking was mostly fitness, but I've been aware that the omission has affected the disposition of my mind more than it has affected my body. 

It's not the walking I need so much, although that is beneficial. It is the contact with the natural world that helps me to get my life into focus and helps me to distinguish between the great and the small.

Yesterday I sat in the sunshine for two hours reading and writing in my commonplace book while my children were having swimming lessons and later played with friends. I felt like Alan on that day he described above,

I hung my head and closed my eyes and the sun wrapped itself around me like arms.

Linking up at Stronghaven for A Mother's Feast
https://stronghaven.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/a-mothers-feast-april-2015/

Co-operating with the Divine Teacher

Alpine Flowers, Mt Kosciusko

Some thoughts on atmosphere & relationship...

I'm taking Oswald Chambers out of his initial context here, but this quote from his book My Utmost for His Highest meshes with what I've been reading in Charlotte Mason's book, Parents and Children, especially Chapter 5:

The main thing about Christianity is not the work we do, but the relationship we maintain and the atmosphere produced by that relationship. That is all God asks us to look after, and it is the one thing that is being continually assailed.

It's easy to put all our work into the 'doing' of education and to forget or disregard the importance of 'relationship' - with our child and with the Divine Teacher.

And without the relationship we don't have the atmosphere that is vital part of the whole:

Education is an atmosphere, a discipline and a life.

Chambers says that relationship is the area where we find ourselves constantly assailed.

To assail:

To attack with a view to overcome, by motives applied to the passions 

To overthrow

I generally know when I'm being assailed.

I become aware that I've made decisions without first pausing in my spirit.

I've made a decision based on my passions or feelings or a sense of urgency.

For me this isn't usually in the big decisions. I'll talk those through with my husband.

It's all the small ones that add up over time.

Charlotte Mason's words on co-operating with the Divine Teacher are encouraging but at the same time sobering:

Our co-operation appears to be the indispensable condition of all the divine workings. We recognise this in what we call spiritual things, meaning the things that have to do more especially with our approaches to God; but the new thing to us is, that grammar, for example, may be taught in such a way as to invite and obtain the co-operation of the Divine Teacher, or in such a way as to exclude His illuminating presence from the schoolroom.

Part of that co-operation involves keeping our relationship with God, and the atmosphere it produces, not just intact but vigorous and healthy.

It is wonderfully empowering, not to mention reassuring, to know that God instructs my child.

He knows my child's innermost being.

He is familiar with all his/her ways.

'God doth Instruct.'––In the things of science, in the things of art, in the things of practical everyday life, his God doth instruct him and doth teach him, her God doth instruct her and doth teach her. Let this be the mother's key to the whole of the education of each boy and each girl; not of her children; the Divine Spirit does not work with nouns of multitude, but with each single child.

Let the mother visualise the thought as an illuminated scroll about her newborn child, and let her never contemplate any kind of instruction for her child, except under the sense of the divine co-operation.