In the Gospels we find a code of education summed up in three commandments: take heed that ye offend not––despise not––hinder not––one of these little ones.
Charlotte Mason evokes several principles in her call for children to serve: Service is a deliberate work; service widens one’s sympathy; and service involves self-sacrifice.
While there are many aspects to maturity, there is none as important as the nature of one’s relationship with God.
Education is the science of relations, relations with saints and sinners, the past and the present, earth and sky, art and craft, work and leisure. Still, there is more. Nothing matters so much in the making of a man or woman as his/her relationship with God.
For Ambleside students in the home and school classroom, the handwork lesson is a time of rest, contemplation, joy and accomplishment. Emphasis is placed on the skill to be learned rather than the project to be produced.
When Charlotte Mason discussed the spiritual life in relationship to ideas, she identified spiritual life as the life of thought, of feeling, of the soul, of that which is not physical. This very human life needs food, and “this life is sustained upon only one manner of diet: the diet of ideas — the living progeny of living minds.” She uses this framework—the spiritual life is sustained only by a diet of ideas—to answer the perennial question, “What manner of schoolbooks should our boys and girls use?”
We are creatures of desire. Every day we want, wish, crave, fancy and yearn for a multitude of diverse things in a multitude of diverse ways.
