Stevie Kinzer’s Reviews > In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education > Status Update

“Rewards are very motivating, but if we excessively use rewards to motivate children to learn or to behave rightly, we are actually hindering their character development.”

“The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things- not merely industrious, but to love industry- not merely learned, but to love knowledge-not merely pure, but to love purity- not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.” Quote from The Crown of Wild Olive.

“Thou hast set my feet in a large room” …knowledge is not pictured as a house with different rooms, separated by walls and isolated by doors. We have one room - a room that is enlarged by every relationship with knowledge that we form.

“There’s a way of teaching that ‘leaves us cold.’ That would be the opposite of forming a relation. Knowledge can be utilitarian-useful-without creating any interest,wonder,or delight. Miss Mason made our guiding principal plain:‘Education should aim at giving knowledge touched with emotion’…our primary task as educators is to help children establish these warm relations with all kinds of knowledge.”

“ we cannot develop the best and most effective methods of teaching until we understand exactly what kind of person we are teaching. We are educating a mind - a soul - not a brain. “