"Of course, the most obvious means of quickening and holding the attention of children lies in the attractiveness of knowledge itself." (Charlotte Mason. Home Education. Vol. 1, pg. 145.)
From Home Education by Charlotte Mason
What is the natural consequence of work well and quickly done? Is it not the enjoyment of ample leisure?
Good marks should be given for conduct rather than cleverness - they should be in everybody’s reach: every child may get his mark for punctuality, order, attention, diligence, obedience, gentleness. As a matter of fact, marks of any sort, even for conduct, distract the attention of children from their proper work.
First, we put the habit of Attention, because the highest intellectual gifts depend for their value upon the measure which their owner has cultivated the habit of attention. Attention is the act by which the whole mental force is applied to the subject at hand. This act, of bringing the whole mind to bear, may be trained into a habit at the will of the parent or the teacher, who attracts and holds the child's attention by means of a sufficient motive.
Let him know what the real difficulty is, how it is the nature of his mind to be incessantly thinking, but how the thoughts, if left to themselves, will always run off from one thing to another, and that the struggle and the victory required of him is to fix his thoughts upon the task in hand. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the habit of attention.
It is to quote words of weight, “within the reach of everyone and should be made the primary object of all mental discipline”; for whatever natural gifts of the child, it is only in so far as the habit of attention is cultivated that he is able to make use of them.
The child who has done well gains some natural reward (like that ten minutes on the garden) which the child forfeits who had done less well; if the mother equalizes the two children she commits a serious wrong, not against the child who has done well, but against the defaulter, whom she deliberately encourages to repeat his shortcoming.
Randi Tatsch
Editor/Fourth Grade Teacher
