CMP Review 2025-04-24

April 24, 2025

Charlotte Mason observes that there are two kinds of reading: (1) casual reading, and (2) reading to know.

Mason defines casual reading as “vague reading round a subject without the effort to know.” It “affords entertainment, and perhaps an occasional stimulus to thought.”

By contrast, when we read to know, “all the acts of generalization, analysis, comparison, judgment, and so on, the mind performs for itself.” If we doubt this, she says that we — parents and teachers — should try mentally narrating a chapter of Jane Austen or the Bible. “The degree of insight, the visualization, that comes with this sort of mental exercise is surprising.”

I believe both kinds of reading are available to us through all of life. In the Idyll Challenge, I recommend that parents and teachers read Mason’s own volumes to know. That’s why we discuss what we read, for “knowledge is not assimilated until it is reproduced.”

I was struck by the diagrams drawn by someone reading Parents and Children to know. This person did not wait for our monthly meeting to reproduce knowledge in a “form of vitality.” Rather, this person captured the “visualization that comes with this sort of mental exercise” on paper.

It is a reminder that Mason’s principles of learning apply to persons of all ages. Children are born persons. Parents and teachers are persons too.

@artmiddlekauff