Letters to the Editor
THE CHARLOTTE MASON METHOD IN EDUCATION [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—It is really important that everybody who is interested in the intellectual training of the young should thoroughly grasp the fundamental ideas on which the Mason method is based. They are extremely simple but so true to nature and yet so generally ignored that there is no guarantee that any teacher, a child of our artificial social system, will grasp them without real trouble and experiment. Your interesting article on this subject needs a strengthening of the emphasis here and there.
Suppose we divide education into three compartments— moral, intellectual, and physical. It will be agreed by all who remember school life fifty years ago that an immense improve- ment has been wrought in the first and third of our divisions. But the warmest defenders of our public schools pull a long face when you press them about the intellectual training. There is one test and only one which should fix our estimate. What proportion of young people leave school desirous of continuing to learn for learning's sake, quite independently of examinations ?
Miss Mason was a woman of rare intuition and yet of philo- sophic turn. Observation of little children taught her that the conventional methods were all based on a palpable delusion.
If you ask any man of sense which of two conceptions of the human mind is true, he will at once choose the right one. If he is an ordinary teacher he will thereupon go straight off and teach as if the wrong principle were true and the right one a "baseless fabric of a vision." The true conception is that the mind is a marvellous and invisible organ which assimilates nourishment from outside, as the body assimilates food. The false conception is that a mind is a cask into which facts can be ingested, and that if they are selected with reasonable care they will be available to be produced, after an interval of uncertain duration, on an examination paper.
The two theories are almost wholly contradictory ; the first assumes an attitude of reverence towards a mystery. The second allows of rude profanation and violation of natural law. But I have not yet explained that in putting the first into practice we find a very important corollary. It is this : the mind can only assimilate information for which it is ready. Being ready means that it knows something, just a little will do, of the matter already. If it does not, Nature requires that the information be rejected for a time simply ignored—till the growing mind is ready. If it is not allowed to do this, the mind will be crammed, and mental indigestion supervenes. This indigestion is almost universal in England. It is found in all children above seven years of age or even younger, after they have begun to be taught. Ten years of ordinary school teaching sends 80 per cent. of our secondary school pupils out into the world with no love of learning for its own sake. That is because they have not been allowed to reject what they were not ready for. They have been steadily crammed.
Now consider the little boy before he is taught anything. What a lot he learns by seven years of age ! Every day from his earliest babyhood he learns something new about this most interesting world and the people in it, and what he learns he never forgets. That is because he takes in what he can, and ignores what he can't. Assimilation requires Rejection : and it needs also a third thing, Reproduction. Let a normal boy of five pick up something new about the garden pump or the tadpoles or the kitchen or hear a little more about Ulysses and the Cyclops, and he will eagerly tell it all to anyone who will listen. Then he has made it his own.
Now, in all our ordinary schools this method of learning is made quite impossible, because the second requirement Rejection is wholly . forbidden: Facts are ingested into the minds of the little ones whether there is a niche for them there or not. A sympathetic teacher will do his best to adapt what he says to the niches which he thinks may be ready : but obviously it is impossible to succeed with more than a few in a class. The majority will be crammed ; and the mis- chief getS -worse because of the examination ahead, and the
more eager the teacher is to produce good examination results, that is to say, to anticipate what questions will be set, dictate the answers, repeat them, hammer them in, so that they may be reproduced a few weeks later, verbally correct, no matter if they are understood or not. The results are deplorable.—! am, Sir, &c.,
E. LYTTELTON.
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