The Four Tests to Be Applied to Lessons Charlotte Mason gave these tests to be applied to the subjects in which children are instructed: • Provide material for their mental growth. • Exercise the several powers of their minds. • Furnish them with fruitful ideas (rather than bushels of information).23 • Afford them knowledge, really valuable for its own sake, accurate, and interesting, of the kind that the child may recall as a man with profit and pleasure (emphasis mine).24 If these commonsense principles were applied in schools today, rather than those prescribed by a bureaucracy interested
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