THE LIVING PAGE
The practice of using these books is begun and buttressed by the atmosphere, discipline, and life of the school and teacher, but their content is clearly driven by the child and comprises a highly personal journey and retelling.—Laurie Bestvater
Laurie Bestvater’s book has been making the rounds online, and after reading glowing reports about ‘Charlotte Mason’s seventh volume,’ and reviewing sample pages that mention Wendell Berry, Gerard Hopkins and Rumer Godden, I finally purchased my own copy. The Living Page: Keeping Notebooks with Charlotte Mason now sits on the shelf between Treadwell’s First Reader and Kohn’s Punished by Rewards.
The educational methods of Charlotte Mason are grounded in a philosophy whose first principle is that ‘Children are born persons.’ Mason recognized that the function of even the youngest mind is far more complex than that of receiving and regurgitating prescribed data. She recognized that the child has individuality, curiosity, reasoning power, imagination, and believed that a true education allows expression of this whole person.
It is in this context that Mason uses narration instead of short-answer questions; blank notebooks rather than worksheets. All her methods are similarly, deliberately selected and developed in consequence of ideas about the nature of persons and of knowledge. Without that context, narration and notebooks become interesting but relative options—instead of the natural outworking of human nature encountering God in his handiwork.
Bestvater likewise begins her book with the theory undergirding the ancient practice of keeping notebooks. One might be tempted to skip ahead to the summary charts and topical guidelines; and Bestvater acknowledges that, like other beginners, she too wanted ‘the practice before the theory or even instead of the theory.’
Her book is a gentle invitation to step back from this hectic pace of product-orientation into ‘a pace set for life.’ She urges us to examine the reasons that elevate the practice to a means of spiritual grace and discipline.
This is indeed the foundational theme of all Bestvater’s book: that the notebook is an instrument—a medium of personal transformation—rather than a product. ‘[O]ur goal is not beautiful notebooks,’ she writes {one might say she warns}. She asks, ‘What if the emphasis is meant to be on the formative process—the growing person, rather than the artifact or achievement itself?’
What if notebooks are for ordering our affections, not our facts?—for moral education, not for intellectual saturation? What if notebooks are not for making pretty pages, but for making people who notice, think, love and care about the world and the people in it?
What if we replace that word notebooks with education?
Once we have the foundational theory in place, the practice makes sense, and guidelines take their proper places in our minds. Bestvater outlines and describes the ‘Three Pillars’: the Nature Journal, the Commonplace and the Book of Centuries, as well as notebooks, charts and timelines mentioned more briefly in Mason’s writings. When are they introduced? What is the purpose of each? How do they change with the development of the student? How can we set up our children for success, without usurping their own work in education?
The informational charts and student examples provided by Bestvater are not only useful in summarizing and visualizing the use of notebooks across the school years, but are themselves instructive—particularly to expectations of student ability, and of gradual implementation of the various forms.
Bestvater’s book is exceptional for gathering together and enlarging upon the clues found in Mason’s books, pamphlets, articles, letters and lectures. It may be for this reason that it suffers at times a certain lack of cohesion and concision, in both sentence structure and topic development.
My own stylistic preferences are likely at play when I criticize what seems to me a wistful compromise between Victorian and good modern English. Bestvater’s favorite words are evident by sometimes galling frequency—words like numinous, or the vague and seemingly personal use of posture {which was not listed in the glossary of other idiosyncratic terms that prickle the text}. The editing was good, despite typographical inconsistencies mainly in the charts.
That said, Bestvater’s book is without doubt a valuable addition to the literature on Mason’s educational method, and one I highly recommend. The forum of Ambleside Online is hosting a discussion of this book, beginning on May 29, which I urge you to join.
‘Even in the classroom, Mason asserts what Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan would notice a century later, that the “medium is the message.” If a person can only be built from within, what else but the freedom of a blank page transmits that confidence?’—Laurie Bestvater
• eye of the peacock feather in Pippin’s nature journal; a nature journal entry by yours truly; my narration notebook for Platero y yo; ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ by Yeats, in my poetry commonplace •
May 9, 2014