Life Should Be All Living: More Wisdom From an Old School Marm

Here are more gems from Charlotte Mason's Education series (some are paraphrased):

*The happiness of the child is the condition of her progress. Her lessons should be joyous and occasions of friction in the schoolroom are greatly to be deprecated.
*Never be inside when you can be outside. Spend most of the first six years of life outside.
*Vigorous, healthy play is fully as important as lessons as regards both bodily health and brainpower.
*Life should be all living and not merely a tedious passing of time. We should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest.
*The question is not how much the youth knows when he has finished his education but how much does he care and about how many orders of things does he care? How full is the life he has before him?
*Give children living books, not textbooks.
*Our error is that we must act as [the child's] showman to the universe and that there is no community between child and universe except such as we choose to set up.
*No education seems to be worth the name which has not made children at home in the world of books.
*(About narration:)Questions (from an outside source) are an intrusion and a bore. Questions are an impertinence which we all resent. The mind can know nothing except what it can express in the form of an answer to a question put by the mind to itself.
*Utilitarian education (the type which prepares a person for employment-the aim of public school systems) is profoundly immoral in that it defrauds a child of the associations which should give
him intellectual atmosphere.
*There is no education but self education. Our duty is to give children mind-stuff, and both quality and quantity are essential. Mind-stuff is acquired from books. The best thought the world possesses is stored in books.
*People are naturally divided into those who read and think and those who do not. The business of schools is to see that all their scholars shall belong to the former.
*Knowledge is not instruction, information, scholarship, a well-stored memory. It is passed, like the light of a torch, from mind to mind, and the flame can be kindled at original minds only. Thought breeds thought.
*Where science does not teach a child to wonder and admire, it has perhaps no educational value.
*The method of education is natural, easy, yielding, unobtrusive, simple as the ways of Nature herself; yet watchful, careful, all-pervading, all compelling. the parent who sees her way to educate her child will make use of every circumstance of the child's life almost without intention on her own part, so easy and spontaneous is a method of education based upon Natural Law.
*The child, though under supervision, should be left much to himself.
*The art of standing aside to let a child develop the relations proper to him is the fine art of education.
*The claims of the schoolroom should not be allowed to encroach on the child's right to long hours daily for exercise and investigation.
*If possible children should be taken daily to scenes-moor or meadow, park or shore- where he may find new things to examine and so to add to his store of real knowledge.