At one of our ADE at Home conferences, I gave a brief meditation on sowing and reaping. Just as “the feast” is a great analogy for the Charlotte Mason curriculum, gardening is also apt, especially as relates to the teacher. Remember Miss Mason’s reference to Ecclesiastes, “In the morning sow your seed, and in the evening do not withhold your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, either this or that, or whether both alike will be good.” (Eccl. 11:6) We sow living book seeds in faith, not knowing how or when the harvest will come.

I hope that no one takes offense to my borrowing another picture from Scripture which illustrates the feast, and one subject in particular, a subject that causes great anxiety if the number of questions we receive indicates anything. It is the picture Jesus gives in John 15 of himself as the vine, we as the branches, and that fruitfulness comes from remaining in and taking nourishment from the vine. Simply, we produce according to the source from which we receive.

This should give you a hint for the quiz question below. If you ever attended any of Emily and my seminars on Charlotte Mason in the old days when such things still happened, you already know the answer.

Question: What is the core of the method in a Charlotte Mason education?

Answer: Living books and narration.

Are you sure? We know that the mind lives on living ideas, that living ideas primarily are sown in the literary form, and the mind digests, or processes, those ideas by practicing narration. Telling ourselves about what we have read helps us to retain information, expands our mind, builds knowledge, contributes to wisdom, and produces more in future than the original narration shows.

If we agree on these points, I will proceed to the anxiety- producing topic of composition.

Some of you may be relaxing now because you know this subject does not appear in the programs until form III. Others of you are already feeling butterflies because you have to face this subject soon. Or, perhaps you have been trying for a while and are doubting you are teaching this well, or, doubting that Miss Mason really knew what she was talking about.

First, there is only one thing you need to be successful to bear fruit in composition.  There is one thing your child needs to be a success in composition, any kind, any time, for any purpose: books. More exactly, I mean the reading of books is what is key. The books are the vine your child needs to draw from in order to produce good fruit in writing.

And if you are in your first week of school, you have already begun. You are reading excellent books and your child is learning to narrate. You are having your first composition lessons. The art of ordering information and expressing it in your own words with your unique voice is the skill of composition.

You have read in Home Education that there are no composition lessons. This is literally quite true. This is because composition is natural to any child, she says, who is given the due use of—truly, truly:  books. It is not the penmanship, transcription, dictation, vocabulary, and grammar that make a writer. Naturally, those are helpful skills to achieve for anyone who wants to communicate clearly. We cannot afford to lose track of the purpose of composition—to communicate clearly to some audience in writing. Our mistake is in thinking that composition is learning a certain form and style. 

This is where the genius of Miss Mason’s insistence on allowing the child’s development to dictate what is taught truly astounds me afresh every time I consider it. Think about how your child learned to talk. How did it happen? He had a mouth and tongue and pharynx and lungs at birth. These are essential for speech. But, more important for speaking is that all-important organ of the ear. He had ears to hear. Without hearing the language, no one can learn to speak it. This is why we do not require newborns to say “mama” the first day of life. They need time to hear all that is being said around them and to them and about them for months and months, and they need months and months of close observation of the world and interaction with it. They need to understand what is being communicated before they begin to communicate in a way others can understand. Naturally, the first syllables produced, which we all are convinced mean “dad” or “help” or “more” or “I love you,” are not meaningful words. After a year or so, the few words they do say, no matter how inarticulately, get more meaning across. Sentences help when they start expressing themselves in them. The point is, by the time they are a few years old, they are able to lucidly tell stories about anything they have seen or heard. We know what they know, what they have been thinking. Oh my, don’t we know! They never stop interpreting their world to us. I used to beg my children to give mommy’s ears a rest, they were so tired of hearing chatter all day long. I should have been more grateful that they were thinking and had lots to tell me about.

This ability to tell, that children naturally exhibit, is their true skill in composition, not their penmanship or spelling. Thus, Miss Mason used that telling in every subject where a book was read. “Narration,” is not on the timetable because it happens multiple times a day. They are learning to communicate and the books give them something to say.

As with every subject in the curriculum, it is crucial to ask that simple and all important question, “why.”  Ask yourself.  Why do your children need to learn to write? The answer is the same as why it was crucial for them to learn to talk. Communication. Composition lessons are not for the purpose of honing spelling skills, though that may happen. Neither are they for ascertaining grammar comprehension, though that too is readily apparent. Neither are they to help them learn how to write a five-point essay, poetry, editorials, or term papers. Just as anyone who can speak can learn to make a statement or ask a question or recite a poem or say a prayer by imitation and practice and modeling, anyone can learn to write in any required form or style. In an unrelated area, if you know how to drive, you can adjust to a truck or a bus with a little practice. A driving instructor does not need to give you time behind the wheel of every drivable vehicle. But you do have to have a place to go, a point to knowing how to drive. Spelling and penmanship are not the goal. The kind of composition needed is determined by the purpose for writing it.

Does this help explain Miss Mason’s rationale for no specific composition instructions, exercises, outlines, prompts or formulaic programs to entice them to put pen to paper and why she denounced such tactics? Lessons in composition did not exist any more than we give our baby daily lessons in speech.

Narration is more than just the learning of knowledge, then, but the opportunity for our children to grow in ordering their thoughts and expressing themselves in ever more clear and concise language. The written narration is the first step in putting thoughts to paper. The lack of words in their first written narrations is no indication of the lack of thought, but the lack of skill in transferring thought to pen.

This brings me back to the genius of Miss Mason. Or, more accurately, the kindness of Miss Mason. To write what we think requires thinking. To write about something silly, or on a topic with which we have little familiarity is torture and just plain boring. That is why she waited until children had had years of reading and heads full of things to write about before assigning themes for them to write on. Up to that point, they can practice with someone else’s thoughts and ideas from the material they have just read through narration.

To return to the picture of the vine and the fruit it produces, fruit grows on the branch that is drawing nutrition from the vine. Miss Mason said no one is really thinking unless they are reading. This is why the core of her method is reading and narration. We read to absorb nutrition for the mind to feed upon, and we tell what we are thinking as we narrate.

But, no vine produces luscious fruit unless its soil is fertile. No child will write without many books. Many. All kinds—history and mythology and poetry and biography and nature lore and geography and fairy tales and allegories and mysteries and geology and art and travel and essays and plays and novels—and all kinds of other genres. And he must read dozens of these on all these subjects and more. The more he reads and narrates, the more he will have to say when he has the skill of putting words on paper. No child who has been brought up in silence, or perfunctory commands only, will have enough vocabulary to tell others anything in detail. Vocabulary is absorbed by listening, by listening to books, idea-rich books, and the more kinds of books by the most authors possible will enrich the soil of his mental storehouse of words exponentially.

Beyond the words, taking in the hundreds of forms and styles others have used to communicate will fertilize the storehouse they will raid when needed in writing. True writers usually admit that they do not know what they have been thinking until they start to write out their thoughts. Each author is a unique person and, hence, has his own unique “voice.” We all know the voices of dozens of family, friends, and famous people automatically. No two voices are alike. If you read widely, you will recognize the voice of C. S. Lewis when you read it, or Charles Dickens, or Laura Wilder or Jane Austen, or J. K. Rowling. Each of them has a different style and voice.

Your children’s voices each sound differently. You did not know what each would sound like until they began to talk. Neither did they. As they grow, their voices change and mature. So will their voice in writing. I beg you to keep the fake voice teachers of curriculum instruction in composition use away from them. The only way to learn how to write in their own voice is to allow them to talk, on paper, from their own ideas. Fertilize their minds by ensuring they read quantities of varieties of books. Allow their writing personalities to develop. Even if the most they will ever write is a business request or a thank you note, it will reflect their personality.

I beg you to get them reading. Encourage them. Read to them, read together, make time for them to read. There will never be a more advantageous time in their lives to develop this habit than these school years. Never go through a day without reading books, and that means many books. And read beyond the lesson books, to many other books. It is fruitful. You reap what you sow.

There is only one thing your children will need to write excellent compositions: reading excellent books.