Planning

Clifton Suspension Bridge over Avon Gorge , North Somerset, England
Notice nothing holds it but the two points on land.

Planning School for 2010-2012.
Sometimes it feels like that bridge!

Just give me Living Books for all subjects,
including math!

Principles on which to select School-Books

I venture to propose one or two principles in the matter of school-books, and shall leave the far more difficult part, the application of those principles, to the reader. For example, I think we owe it to children to let them dig their knowledge, of whatever subject, for themselves out of the fit book; and this is for two reasons: What a child digs for is his own possession; what is poured into his ear, like the idle song of a pleasant singer, floats out as lightly as it came in, and is rarely assimilated. I do not mean to say that the lecture and the oral lesson are without their uses; but these uses are, to give impulse and to order knowledge; and not to convey knowledge, or to afford us that part of our education which comes of fit knowledge, fitly given.

Again, as I have already said, ideas must reach us directly from the mind of the thinker, and it is chiefly by means of the books they have written that we get into touch with the best minds. (page 177)

Volume 3: School Education. Chapter 16 (XVI)

"As I have said, knowledge, that is, roughly, ideas clothed upon with facts, is
the proper pabulum for mind. This food a child requires in large quantities and
in great variety. The wide syllabus I have in view is intended in every point to
meet some particular demand of the mind."
Charlotte Mason: A Philosophy of Education