Stevie Kinzer’s Reviews > The Living Page: Keeping Notebooks With Charlotte Mason > Status Update

“What a welcome companion is he who can distinguish between songs that differ in the vespers of the birds!”

“The notebooks keep us from becoming gluttonous consumers of Glory. There will be more tomorrow, like manna.”

“There is an intimate relationship between imagination and empathy. How can I see what you are suffering if I cannot imagine your conditions and your pain? If empathy is one of the distinctives of human beings…an education for humans cannot afford to downplay the role of creativity and imagination.”

“The question is not - how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education - but how much does he care?…what if education wasn’t first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?”

“In our eagerness for the beauty we see revealed in Mason’s view of education, we can forget that many of these layers are built up over years, not weeks or months.”

“In becoming Keepers we are compelled to pay close attention to the relationships and details all around us…The blank page is our invitation to the banquet — and all of its courses.”

“With the use of notebooks, we come to see that Mason’s equation is always : the written word or true-life thing + imagination = personal re-creation. We learn not to get in between, in the way of, the real life, primary source, or great author and the child’s response.”

“Though we are often moving too fast to notice it, there is in each of us a profound need to be still, to be alone, to reflect, to meditate, to contemplate, to wait to reach a kind of bone-deep honesty with our own souls…slowing down allows us to pay attention.”

“They were very ordinary things that we recorded, but it was to me a magic I would be infected by all my life…through it I could recall all the feelings, sights, & smells of those days. I was encouraged to notice and somehow newly awake to the preciousness of time & the import of each daily incarnational encounter with Glory.”

“What if the emphasis is meant to be on the formative process — the growing person who feasts upon and then shares the Great Ideas in creating the art, rather than the artifact or achievement itself?”