FIRST BOOKS
Guard the nursery; let nothing in that has not the true literary flavor; let the children grow up on a few books read over and over.—C.M. Mason
Because a Charlotte Mason education is so strongly associated with wide reading of literature, Mason’s recommendations about books for young children may be surprising.
‘Away with books and “reading to”—for the first five or six years of life,’ she declared. ‘The endless succession of story-books, scenes shifting like a panorama before the child’s vision, is a mental and moral dissipation; he gets nothing to grow upon, or is allowed no leisure to digest what he gets.’
{This Victorian argument against storybooks is today a popular argument against television. It reminds me of Neil Postman’s polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death, which addresses not only the cultural shift to image-based communication, but the much earlier shift to writing-based communication.}
Mason described a contemporary phenomenon of ‘scrappy’ reading and ‘small reading power,’ embodied by pulp fiction sold in railway stations. ‘The mischief,’ she said, ‘begins in the nursery,’ with ‘pretty books nicely broken up in talk or short paragraphs.’
Mason warned that the succession of such literature is endless. ‘Pretty books’ prepare us for easy readers and light novels, and ‘we have no time for books of intelligent fibre.’
If you want your child to read Scott and Kipling, ‘they must be educated up to it. Some children, by right of descent, take to books as ducks to the water; but delight in a fine thought, well set, does not come by nature.’
The preparation for books, however, was not lesser books, but rich life experience that prepared children to enjoy the best books from the start.
{WHY WAIT FOR BOOKS?}
Mason’s advice seems counterintuitive in a time when the expert consensus is so much the opposite. Today, family and friends read aloud to a mother’s pregnant belly; toddlers chew on board books; and four year-olds are taught to analyze ‘The Itsy-Bitsy Spider’ in order to identify ‘protagonist, conflict and resolution.’ Why would a parent deliberately delay or limit books, when early and frequent introduction is touted everywhere as essential to successful reading?
Mason’s concern was to provide ‘mental nourishment’ proper to the young child’s developmental stage.
‘A great deal has been said lately about the danger of overpressure, of requiring too much mental work from a child of tender years,” she wrote, in what we might consider much gentler days. ‘The danger exists; but lies, not in giving the child too much, but in giving him the wrong thing to do, the sort of work for which the present state of his mental development does not fit him.’
‘The child,’ she wrote of those younger than six, ‘gets knowledge by means of his senses.’ Mason advocated many free hours in nature, and assured mothers that ‘the child is at his lessons, and is learning all about it at a rate utterly surprising to the physiologist.’ {I recommend Joh Holt’s book How Children Learn for fresh insight into education.}
•Mason’s idea was that the best books connect the reader’s mind to the defining thoughts of past and present ages. But the emphasis in the tender first years was that the child should form his own extensive relationships with the world of his own experience, using his five senses.
•The emphasis in these years was to be many free hours out-of-doors. ‘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 growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it spent for the most part out in the fresh air. And this, not for the gain of bodily health alone—body and soul, heart and mind, are nourished with food convenient for them when the children are let alone.’
•The intellectual sustenance of young children is things rather than words. ‘Watch a child standing at gaze at some sight new to him... and you will see he is as naturally occupied as is a babe at the breast; he is, in fact, taking in the intellectual food which the working faculty of his brain at this period requires.’
•The child’s task now is to store up personal experience. ‘And this is the process the child should continue for the first few years of his life. Now is the storing time which should be spent in laying up images of things familiar. By-and-by he will have to conceive of things he has never seen: how can he do it except by comparison with things he has seen and knows? By-and-by he will be called upon to reflect, understand, reason: what material will he have, unless he has a magazine of facts to go upon?’
•Expression follows experience. Words follow things. ‘We older people, partly because of our maturer intellect, partly because of our defective education [!], get most of our knowledge through the medium of words. We set the child to learn in the same way, and find him dull and slow. Why? Because it is only a few words in common use that he associates a definite meaning... But set him face to face with a thing and he is twenty times as quick as you are in knowledge about it... With his knowledge of things, his vocabulary grows; for it is a law of the mind that what we know, we struggle to express. This fact accounts for many of the apparently aimless questions of children; they are in quest, not of knowledge, but of words to express the knowledge they have.’
Mason did not intend that parents should actively discourage young children from using books or learning to read; rather, she desired that parents recognize and allow time for valuable nature education preceding books.
This—and Mason’s suggestion that the first reading ‘lesson’ be given on a birthday—suggests much to the child of the mystery, excitement, and privilege of reading. Books become a treasure that the child must learn to read before he can enjoy.
{INSTEAD OF BOOKS}
Perhaps Mason loses something by introducing her point in the negative. ‘Away with books and reading to!’ she writes, and we are shocked to contemplate a childhood without—nursery rhymes, fairytales, and picture-books.
Again, Mason did not mean that children should be entirely denied books, even picture-books. Rather, the focus was shifted from ‘the story read’ to ‘the story told.’ Mason called storytelling the mother’s milk before the stronger meat of books. While books mediate a symbolic communication between one mind and another, oral storytelling is a very physical and personal experience involving speech, eye contact, gestures, sound, and relationship.
•Storytelling in these years is to be mostly oral. ‘Every father and mother should have a repertoire of stories—a dozen will do, beautifully told.’ {Good sources include the Bible, history, folktales, fairytales, Classical myths, and even Shakespeare.}
•Storytelling means a few good stories the child can grow on. ‘Here is [an] advantage of the story told over the story read. Lightly come, lightly go, is the rule of the latter. But if you have to make a study of your story, if you mean to appropriate it as bread of life for your children, why, you select with the caution of the merchantman seeking the goodly pearls.’
•Storytelling is direct communication from parent to child. ‘[I]n the story read, the parent is no more than the middleman; but the story told is food as directly and deliberately given as milk from the mother’s breast. Wise parents, whose children sit with big eyes pondering the oft-told tale, could tell us about this.’
{A FEW BOOKS}
Quantity, however, too often hides a paucity of substance—many books with diluted stories, paltry thoughts, weak expressions, and shoddy illustrations. And there is a law of diminishing returns, as well: if we have many good books in too rapid succession, we get less good from them. Books should not be another frenetic addition to modern life; here is a place that should be filled with repose and delight, with time to assimilate stories and thoughts of worth.
When a very small selection must be made, it is made with great deliberation and care. The books must be rich and beautiful if they are to wear well through many readings.—metaphysically and also materially. Choosing only a few books means you can spend money on choice volumes, like this Folio Society edition of The Wind in the Willows. I think fine craftsmanship communicates something of the value of reading.
{BIBLE}
★Bible, King James Version
•The Doré Bible Illustrations, Gustave Doré
{NURSERY RHYMES / POETRY}
•Collected Poems and Rhymes, Walter de la Mare
★Lavender’s Blue, ed. Harold Jones (or Calla Edition of The Big Book of Nursery Rhymes, ed. Walter Jerrold)
{FAIRYTALES/ FOLKLORE/ MYTHS}
These are well-written collections of fairytales, folklore, and Classic myths. You might choose one or two for reading aloud; better yet, use these as resources if you need to reminded of the stories before retelling orally.
★American Tall Tales, Mary Pope Osborne
•Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson
★Mother Goose Tales, Charles Perrault
•Tanglewood Tales, A Wonder Book, Nathaniel Hawthorne
{PICTURE-BOOKS}
These are excellently-written children’s books with beautiful illustrations. (Don’t forget so-called ‘adult’ books—i.e. coffee-table books of art, architecture, gardening—which might do much to inform the aesthetic interest of young children.)
The list is meant to be exemplary, neither complete nor authoritative. Also, I would not omit good chapter books like Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham or Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Jane Gray.)
•The Alphabet Room, Sarah Pinto (or A Little Alphabet Book, Trina S. Hyman)
•Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire
•Blueberries for Sal; Burt Dow, Deep Water Man; Lentil; Make Way for Ducklings, Robert McCloskey
•Built to Last, Ship, The Way Things Work, David MacCaulay
•Chanticleer and the Fox, Barbara Cooney
•The Complete Peter Rabbit Tales, Beatrix Potter
•The Kitchen Knight, Rapunzel, Saint George and the Dragon, The Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Swan Lake, Trina S. Hyman
•Over in the Meadow, Ezra Keats
•Pagoo, Seabird, The Tree in the Trail, Holling C. Holling
•Poppy’s Babies, The Secret Staircase, Jill Barklem
•The Selfish Giant, Thumbeline, illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger
•Whitefoot, Wendell Berry
•Winnie-the-Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne
• detail from cover art by William Blake for his book of poems for children, Songs of Innocence •
May 30, 2013