Education and a Feast of Ideas

There is a helpful metaphor in the Charlotte Mason philosophy which she invokes often, the "feast of ideas," that the mind feeds on ideas as the body on food. If we want our children's bodies to be healthy, we offer them a wide variety of foods, if we want their minds and spirits to be nurtured? We must offer them a wide variety of ideas! For this reason, outdoor play and Nature study have a crucial part to play in a Charlotte Mason education. Nature brings us into constant contact with God's creation and a vast multitude of living ideas. Charlotte was an advocate for Art. She was an advocate for foreign language! But she was also an advocate for a wide selection of Living Books. You can search for a definition of Living Book on YouTube and come up with some good content if this is your first acquaintance with the term. I like to ask myself, "is this a story that has appealed to the human imagination for generations?" this criteria becomes problematic when it runs up against newer literature, and there are many other helpful criteria out there to test newer literature against. For me, I tend to get tired of sorting through junk so I mostly stick with older books that have been tried and found true.

 I love Charlotte's feast metaphor because I think that people tend to play it comfortable and stick with their favorites when it comes to ideas. Branching out can feel uncomfortable, but when we realize that we can actually starve our own and our children's imaginations by staying indoors, not viewing lovely art, and hearing the same ideas over and over again, we can begin to realize that the Real Danger is that a child grow up with little to no relationship to the world he was born in, and that is nothing short of a travesty. For full disclosure: I have gone overboard with this lifestyle when it comes to keeping good literature around our house. I read one time that the gauge of a person's literacy was directly correlated with how many books their parents kept in the house during their childhood;(1) right then and there the fate of our home took a mighty turn. What I am trying to say is that we barely fit into our house next to all the books. When our house isn't picked up we trip over books instead of toys. This is completely intentional and is inspired by the idea of the feast. I don't want to stick to a single author or even simply to stories that I am naturally drawn to. John Bunyan, for all his merits, would starve the imagination if his was the only literature that one had access to, and you could replace his name with any author and the rule applies. 

 Consider a small personal story to illustrate this point: I have been reading my great-grandmother's memoir recently (passed down to me from my grandmother) and she has this to say about the awakening of her imagination,

 "I had learned to read before I went to school. In an abandoned dugout I found a dogeared edition of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy stories and a worse one of Grimms fairy tales and it opened to me a door into another world. It has never been shut since, but continues to take me to the different parts of the world and into the minds of others. I recommend them above many other mediums as an enlarger of the mind."

First of all, what a story! You can imagine her, exploring the abandoned dugout; thinking about the family who had to leave; searching for any left behind evidences of what kind of people they were. The fact that she was reading these stories before she even started school is quite impressive. I have a copy of Grimms and it is not light stuff. My great-grandmother experienced first hand the way that these stories enlarged her mind. I believe that they must have in some way at the same time enlarged her imagination. The power of the Grimm brothers is that they were not so much story writers as they were story collectors. The many hundreds of stories that they wrote down were from oral traditions without any known author to attribute the stories to. So, if you had a collection of the Grimms stories, you had access to a wide variety of ideas, authors, and ways of thinking. The Grimms were writing in a deeply Christian tradition, but they were not "Christianizing" the stories, they were using their considerable education, their skill with language, and their literary prowess to preserve the most beloved tales from their culture. When adults read these stories, almost invariably, they are scared away because they just seem so weird. Children have none of these hesitations. Every story lands on fertile soil. In order for the soil of my heart to accept stories from a different culture than my own, I have to renew it daily. I have found that the stories that strike me as "weird" tend to stick with me the longest  if I allow myself to broaden my thoughts and ideas and to think of these stories in terms of allegory and metaphor instead of reading them only literally. The children hold both together much more easily and they are better than I am at recognizing the patterns and metaphors. I am excited to learn from them as they grow up on rich ideas that I am accessing for the first time as an adult. I am grateful to have been raised on bible stories, the richest and most powerful stories that exist, but I also see the merit in bringing the stories of the ages since bible times alongside of the bible. Reading fairy tales has helped me recognize truths and themes in the bible that I don't think I would have ever seen without them. As I connect the ideas, from time past to now, my imagination is regenerated and renewed. My hope for our home school is to facilitate the feast of good ideas in as many ways as I can faithfully serve them up. I know that I do not face a battle between good ideas and no ideas for ideas will grow in the soil of the mind; the battle is between good ideas and bad ideas. And we will face temptations and bad ideas in our lives so let's nourish ourselves with the antidote for those bad ideas and temptations with a feast of nutritious truths, stories, and ideas. 

(1) https://www.jcfs.org/blog/importance-having-books-your-home#:~:text=The%20study%20also%20showed%20that,having%20parents%20who%20have%20a