Michele Quigley

August 14, 2007

I was talking to a friend recently about our plans to really make it a great nature study year. She has similar plans and her excitement rivals mine.

We began discussing ideas and books and I told her about a book I had reviewed recently that claims to use the Charlotte Mason approach . . . except that it doesn’t – not really.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s lovely book and if you want everything laid out for you it’s ideal. But nature study as Charlotte Mason defined it means getting out there and observing nature as it is. Not as a textbook dictates, but as it happens.

Keeping a nature journal means recording your observations and experiences in nature over time. And those experiences can’t be predicted, they have to be allowed to happen.

A textbook can’t take into consideration the particular climate or landscape you live in and it won’t give you enough information to be sufficient for in depth study. Only living books – lots of them – can do that. All this isn’t to say that a textbook of this nature (no pun intended) isn’t useful. I’m sure it is – I just don’t think it’s necessary.

After years of practically applying her philosophy Charlotte Mason wrote “Of Natural Science, too, we have to learn that the way into the secrets of nature is not through the barbed wire entanglements of science as she is taught but through field work or other immediate channel, illustrated and illuminated by books of literary value.”

One mom argued that she can’t possibly know all these things so she needed the textbook. I don’t know all these things either but where I will learn it (and indeed if I am requiring it of my children should I not at least make the effort myself to learn it?) isn’t in a textbook but by firsthand experience [field work] and the help of references [field guides and living books] .

Yes it takes time and effort. Yes it can be frustrating. In fact it took the better part of an hour yesterday to identify a particular tree we were wondering about. But identify it we did and I am confident in time we will improve our skill in this area.

Copyright © 2007 Michele Quigley