KC Podcast - Episode 117: Passing the Baton

On Reading Broadly

Some words from Charlotte Mason on why we should read and learn broadly, and aim at being well-educated generalists rather than narrow specialists.

“In matters of the mind again, Habit is a good servant but a bad master. Specialisation, the fetish at the end of the last century, is to be deprecated because it is at our peril that we remain too long in any one field of thought. We may not, for example, allow the affairs and interests of daily life to deprive the mind of its proper range of interests and occupations. It is even possible for a person to go into any one of the great fields of thought and to work therein with delight until he become incapable of finding his way into any other such field. We know how Darwin lost himself in science until he could not read poetry, find pleasure in pictures, think upon things divine; he was unable to turn his mind out of the course in which it had run for most of his life. In the great (and ungoverned) age of the Renaissance, the time when great things were done, great pictures painted, great buildings raised, great discoveries made, the same man was a painter, an architect, a goldsmith and a master of much knowledge besides; and all that he did he did well, all that he knew was part of his daily thought and enjoyment.”

-from A Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason, pp. 53-54

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