Day 25 Breathing

"Breath of God," Julie Veenstra

                                 (see also By the Way, Art of Standing Aside)
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“Method a Way to an End. ––Method implies two things––a way to an end, and a step-by-step progress in that way. Further, the following of a method implies an idea, a mental image, of the end or object to be arrived at. What do you propose that education shall effect in and for your child? Again, method is natural; easy, yielding, unobtrusive, simple as the ways of Nature herself; yet, watchful, careful, all pervading, all compelling. Method, with the end of education in view, presses the most unlikely matters into service to bring about that end; but with no more tiresome mechanism than the sun employs when it makes the winds to blow and the waters to flow only by shining. The parent who sees his way––that is, the exact force of method––to educate his child, will make use of every circumstance of the child's life almost without intention on his own part, so easy and spontaneous is a method of education based upon Natural Law. Does the child eat or drink, does he come, or go, or play––all the time he is being educated, though he is as little aware of it as he is of the act of breathing.”

 
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“The intellectual habits of the good life form themselves in the following out of the due curriculum in the right way. As we have already urged, there is but one right way, that is, children must do the work for themselves. They must read the given pages and tell what they have read, they must perform, that is, what we may call the act of knowing. We are all aware, alas, what a monstrous quantity of printed matter has gone into the dustbin of our memories, because we have failed to perform that quite natural and spontaneous 'act of knowing,' as easy to a child as breathing and, if we would believe it, comparatively easy to ourselves.”
 
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“Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet-
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”
   
                                                    ~ Tennyson
 
  
Examen: Am I finding education as natural as breathing?  What keeps me from the Master’s Method?

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Method a Way:  Charlotte M. Mason, Home Education, 1:8.
The intellectual habits: Charlotte M. Mason,  Towards a Philosophy of Education, 6:99.
Speak to Him:  Poetry Foundation, “The Higher Pantheism by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.”

​Day 25 Breathing meditation/100 Days copyright Laurie Bestvater 2025

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