Day 63 Digest

Carl Larsson

“…a child's mind is no mere sac to hold ideas; but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a spiritual organism, with an appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet, with which it is prepared to deal, and which it can digest and assimilate as the body does foodstuffs.”

                                                   *

“Not until we have mastered, digested and made our own, that which has already been presented, is a new revelation offered to us.”

                                                   *

“The endless succession of story-books, scenes, shifting like a panorama before the child's vision, is a mental and moral dissipation; he gets nothing to grow upon, or is allowed no leisure to digest what he gets.”
 
                                                   *

“Children no more come into the world without provision for dealing with knowledge than without provision for dealing with food. They bring with them not only that intellectual appetite, the desire of knowledge, but also an enormous, an unlimited power of attention to which the power of retention (memory) seems to be attached, as one digestive process succeeds another, until the final assimilation.”

                                                   *

“No one need invite us to reason, compare, imagine; the mind, like the body, digests its proper food, and it must have the labour of digestion or it ceases to function.” 

                                                   *

“All powers of the mind which we call faculties have brought into play in dealing with the intellectual matter thus afforded; so we may not ask questions to help the child to reason, paint fancy pictures to help him to imagine, draw out moral lessons to quicken his conscience. These things take place as involuntarily as processes of digestion.”

                                                   *

“Now this (narration) is no parrot-exercise, but is the result of such an assimilation of the passage that it has become a part of the young scholar.”           
 
 
Examen: What am I trying to force feed?


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 ...a child’s mind: Charlotte M. Mason, Home Education, 1:preface.
Not until we:  Charlotte M. Mason, Ourselves, 4:87 Bk.II.
The endless succession:  Charlotte M. Mason, Formation of Character 5:216.
Children no more:  Charlotte M. Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 6:14–15.
No one need: 6:26.
All powers of: 6:173–74.
Now this is no: 6:272.

​Day 63 Digest meditation/100 days copyright Laurie Bestvater 2025