Next week is Thanksgiving. Our immediate family, four generations (30 individuals), will gather and every family will bring more than one dish. It will be a fabulous feast. In the next six weeks this same family will celebrate four birthdays and three more Christian holidays. We feast at all of them. In between those family events will be holiday parties and celebrations of many other kinds. At every single one, I guarantee there will be food. That is a lot of eating.
Charlotte Mason, as we all know, used food and feasting as a metaphor for education. This is altogether appropriate in many ways. Our mind craves ideas the way our body craves food, she said. There is never a day when both ideas and food are not essential to our person. No one else can think for us or eat for us. Each takes what he can when he can and how he can. Food and ideas shape who we become. This is the basic understanding of our children’s education.
No doubt, the flavors of the foods in each of our homes over the holidays will have some similarities and many distinctives. Each family has its personality. Each one has its own unique atmosphere. Miss Mason considered the atmosphere—the people, circumstances, and ideas surrounding each child, as one of the three main instruments of our child’s education. They take in all of life as naturally as they breathe. We can shape the atmosphere that surrounds them to some extent. Much of it, though, is incidental and accidental. Life shapes each of us differently, even the individuals within the very same family with very similar circumstances.
Just as food comes into our home for our consumption, in this method of education, so should books. So must books. Books are full of the ideas that our minds consume. They are the core of this education. Every child should have many kinds of books by many authors and about many things. Every child must. The shaping of each life comes from all directions.
Believe it or not, this has to do with the gift giving season as much as with their curriculum. The books, in fact, may be the most important gifts given in this season. We never know which ideas from which books will affect the shaping of the lives that absorb them and are absorbed by them. Those ideas outlast all the toys and clothes and treats they receive.
Christmas is the season for reading special books as a family. It is the season for buying special books for everyone we know. I used to toss used books I came across throughout the year into a hidden box and wrap the whole big thing up on Christmas and just let the children pick and choose from it what they would. I give new books or used books to each grandchild every single year. I was astonished the other day that one of my teenaged grandchildren could list off every single book I had given her for all the Christmases of her life! Truthfully, I also have vivid memories of particular books given to me on different childhood Christmases.
Just as with their lesson books, the children may or may not remember the books, much less the content of those books, but there is no doubt whatever that each has shaped and will shape their life. This is well worth considering along with all your other memory-making hopes and dreams for this coming season. They may outgrow or forget specific books, but all they take in will feed them. Just as it is the season for eating all things rich and wonderful, please put generous quantities of rich and delicious books in their way this season. These may be the only gifts that last. Their value far exceeds any price tag.
I came across this quote by American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Apparently, people asked him the same question you and I are often asked: “Which are the most important books in your life.” He answered: “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
I felt tremendous relief in reading this comment, not because Emerson is so influential in my life, but because he must be a friend according to C. S. Lewis’s understanding of friendship. “What, you too?” Our friends are those people we instinctively recognize who think as we do. We meet some of them at odd times and places, and many of them in the books we read. When I read this quote I instantly agreed. I read all the time. I read so much that if I don’t write the titles down, I cannot recall what I have read. Often I look at my list and struggle to remember much about that title. Yet, each was engaged with at some level and my mind gained something from each one, some nutrient, vitamin, mineral or nugget that has shaped and reshaped me. Over the course of a life, this is a lot of intake. I can remember the Thanksgiving menu of yesterday, but cannot remember what I ate a month ago today. Nevertheless, every single bite has gone into my body and been used by it—some bites more helpfully than others.
This is why Mason did not make book lists of essential books for a child’s mind diet. She described categories of books as more worthy than twaddle for his mind and character. It is interesting that in one her most commonly quoted passages, “It is not how much the child knows, but how much he cares, and about how many orders of things does he care,” that she was comparing physical intake (you may lead a horse to water”), with the unimaginable quantity and variety of books that exist to feed the mind of a student and contribute to his caring. “And all the time we have books, books teeming with ideas fresh from the minds of thinkers upon every subject to which we can wish to introduce children.”