I wish time travel was real. Except of course all the racism, classism, women being married off to the highest bidder, lack of medical care or knowledge, and the smell of horse plop that no doubt was everywhere. But other than *those major issues* I think it would be fun to travel back in time, and even more so – travel forward in time.
I wonder if Charlotte Mason could show up in 2024 and see what education looks like today with all the technologies we have, what would she say?
She would probably be blown away at how we can access a picture of almost anything at the click of a button. We can stream for free in a few seconds millions of hours of music. We can get the answer to almost anything we want to know with a quick Google query. We also now have technologies that can map the human brain, and we know far more about how the brain responds to certain stimuli than ever before. We know much more about how we learn, and we have access to so many teaching resources.
In his 2023 book, Writing for Impact, Bill Birchard outlines the brain science behind great writing. He answers the questions – what happens in our brains when we read great writing? And how can this knowledge of the reading brain improve our writing?
As I read his book, I wondered, could the same tactics be used to identify the best writing for children?
Charlotte Mason lived over a hundred years ago, yet I still see a lot of truth in what she wrote about education. As I read through Bill Birchard’s synopsis of the intersection between neuroscience, reading and writing, I noticed that a lot of what Charlotte Mason intuitively seemed to know about good writing for children has now been proven by science. In this blog post, I am going to take what Bill Birchard found as the 8 secrets for brain-engaged writing and apply it to Charlotte Mason’s intuition about what makes for good reading for children.
What are Living Books?
How did Charlotte Mason define living books, and how do Charlotte Mason educators define living books today?
“Why in the world should we not give children, while they are at school, the sort of books they can live upon; books alive with thought and feeling, and delight in knowledge, instead of the miserable cram-books on which they are starved?” Formation of Character, p. 291
- Charlotte Mason wanted kids to have books that were not dry-as-dust lists of facts – but books that sparked ideas, stirred emotions, and spoke to the child as an equal.
- Charlotte Mason said that living books were written in beautiful, specific language and not dumbed-down “twaddle” for the child.
- Charlotte Mason wanted children to learn from people passionate about the subject – so she chose books that were written by one author with an expertise or interest in the field, not books that were written by a committee at a textbook company.
- Charlotte Mason chose books for her students that were written in a conversational or narrative tone. When you read them, it feels as if they author is sitting right next to you, talking to you – and not standing at a lectern, talking at you.
Many years ago, when I was just learning about the Charlotte Mason method, I took this list of requirements for living books and I went to the library to see for myself if I could identify living books. I pulled several biographies about Charles Darwin off the shelves and I cracked the covers.
Many of them began, “Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire….” I felt my mind gracefully swinging shut. Boring. “Okay next”, I said, quickly closing the book.
And then I came upon one that began,
“No one ever said, “Don’t Touch!” in the house where Charles Darwin grew up. And there was so much to touch, because the Darwin household was a scramble of children, odd pets, and wonderful books.”
I kept reading.
“Charles’ mother, Susannah Darwin, raised fancy pigeons known for their beauty and tameness. Dr. Robert Darwin, Charles’ father, was an immense man who weighed 336 pounds. He would drive all over the countryside to visit his patients in a single-seat carriage stuffed with snacks. When he returned from a long day of house calls, his six children would swirl about the huge man like little moons orbiting Jupiter.”
Starts to paint a picture of Charles’ childhood, doesn’t it? Makes him seem kind of relatable, right?
This one was my second favourite Charles Darwin biography I read that day. It was called “One Beetle Too Many : the Extraordinary Adventures of Charles Darwin” by Kathryn Lasky.
My favourite began,
“Charles Darwin was too late. His life’s work had been wasted. The exploration of the black land and its mysteries, the years of research, the endless sifting of fact after fact now seemed to count for nothing.“
“What?!”, I thought. “How was his life’s work wasted? Surely it wasn’t wasted…his work changed everything…He has books written about him!” The author intrigued me by using dramatic irony – where the reader knows more than the character. For a moment, I knew more than Charles Darwin.
I continued reading,
It had been twenty-three years since Darwin, naturalist and future country gentleman, had started his great hunt for the truth. And he was sure he had found it. If only he had managed to finish the book he was writing! If only he had been less painstaking, less anxious to address every possible argument or objection – but it was too late to do things differently now. A rival had arrived at the truth as well: a rival who would soon tell the world what he had discovered. A rival who had, ironically, come to Darwin for friendship and help. As Darwin, stooped and grim-faced, plodded on his midday walk, he knew he was facing the greatest crisis of his life.”
My reading mind was hooked. Rivalry? Competition? One man about to lose everything he’s worked so hard on because he didn’t do it fast enough? Did Charles Darwin and I share crippling perfectionism and paralyzing insecurity? The thought of it made me want to cry.
This book was “Charles Darwin, Visionary Behind the Theory of Evolution” by Anna Sproule. It written for a slightly older juvenile audience and it completely captivated me. It wasn’t just another dry biography that portrayed someone two-dimensionally. Darwin’s life, his motivations, his thoughts, his struggles were written about in such a way that I felt like I was his good friend. I read all 60 pages in one sitting. And I left the library, my mind whirring, eager to find more literary gems.
New Tech looking at our Ancient Brains
How does what Charlotte Mason said about living books over 100 years ago translate to what we now know (thanks to current technologies) about how our brains read?
Bill Birchard didn’t set out writing his book attempting to answer this question – I don’t think he’d ever even heard of Charlotte Mason. And yet, his scientific findings point exactly to what Charlotte Mason wrote about over one hundred years ago.
Great Writing is Simple
Scientific studies confirm that our brains process cleaner, simpler writing best. That’s no surprise. Complex prose takes longer to mentally process. Readers need longer to read these passages. It is harder to read. With children, who are new readers, this is particularly relevant.
HOWEVER this doesn’t mean that the prose has to be bland. It also doesn’t mean that simple writing can’t convey complex material.
Great Writing is Specific
The reading brain actually does better with specific language. Your brain is able to retrieve sensory data (hearing, seeing, smelling, touching, tasting, moving) about thousands of words in a mere hundred milliseconds. When I read a specific concrete word, I connect it to a sensory experience in my life.
When scientists put participants in an fMRI machine and gave them specific, tangible nouns, like train and mantle – the planning and skilled-action regions of the brain fired up. Whereas with intangible words like “repeat”, fools”, “mirror-image”, there was less firing in the brain (p. 47, Writing for Impact).
Charlotte Mason wrote that “education is the science of relations”, meaning that what we can connect to something we already know, we will remember. It is the relationships between all the different things that we know that is the true structure behind learning. Connecting words to sensory experiences is part of the science of relations, and now we know it is evident in the way the planning and skilled-action regions of our brains work.
Children don’t need simplified dumbed-down language or books that talk down to them. Even early-reader books can be filled with easy-to-read specific words that tell an engaging story.
Beloved children’s author E.B. White wrote,
“Some writers for children deliberately avoid using words they think a child doesn’t know. This emasculates the prose and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention. I’m lucky again: my own vocabulary is small, compared to most writers, and I tend to use the short words. So it’s no problem for me to write for children. We have a lot in common.”
—E. B. White, in the Paris Review (1969).
Great Writing is Surprising
Surprise! Our brains love a good surprise, especially in reading. When our brains come across any new stimuli, the reward-circuit neurons fire up and ask “Is this important? Do I care about this? Do I want to know about it?”. If your brain says yes, you get a surge of motivation to pay attention to the surprise and explore more. Our brains are wired to be curious and crave exploration. Where would we be as a species without this feature? We want to learn, we want to find out what’s around the corner, we want to know what’s coming next in the story. We can’t help it. We get a dopamine rush as we learn and we build up pleasure from anticipation. Surprise pushes our reading brains onto the next sentence, and the next.
Great Writing is Stirring
We humans are social and emotional creatures. We love a story and we also connect better to one that stirs up emotions. The scientific research suggests that we actually process words that refer to an emotion (positive or negative) faster than non-emotional words.
Bill Birchard writes,
“Ordinarily, if you listen to someone read a list of words, you need a moment to orient your attention to each one. You invariably miss a few because of what scientists dub the “attentional blink.” That’s when you hit an attentional limit. You can digest only so much so fast. ..But there’s an exception to the blink: When the word is emotionally significant. you then do not experience the blink. You do notice the word. It doesn’t matter if the emotion is positive or negative. So strong is the neural power of emotion that it’s hard to ignore it. Emotion grabs you by the collar.” (Bill Birchard, Writing for Impact, p.79)
I almost cried reading a biography of Charles Darwin. That story was so memorable, I’ve thought about it for years. It sparked my imagination. I could picture myself as a friend in the room with Charles Darwin, watching him pace back and forth, fretting about the consequences of publishing his work.
Other living books have also stirred up emotions in me. Sometimes I’ve felt awestruck by the information I’ve learned. Other times I’ve felt inspired to take action and make a change. Other times I’ve felt like I need to hug the book I just finished I loved it so much.
Charlotte Mason wrote,
“Imagination does not stir at the suggestion of the feeble, much-diluted stuff that is too often put into children’s hands” (Vol. 1, p. 294).
Great Writing is Seductive (as in keeps you in suspense…)
Great writers ask questions that get our minds wondering. We delight in the thrill of waiting for the punchline of the joke or the answer to their question. The question might not even ever be answered, just considered. The thrill of anticipation keeps us engaged. Scientists call this “anticipatory utility” – and our brains flood with dopamine and natural opiods. We like to look forward to things. If we didn’t, how would we have survived and thrived as a species on this earth? We’ve been cultivating crops and waiting for hard work to pay off later for most of our evolutionary history. Our brains do well when we wait. Similarly, our brains like writing that is seductive.
Bill Birchard writes,
“The prospect of finding out more fires up the reader’s caudate nucleus, a curled peapod over the top of the reward circuit. That then drives the delivery of rewards—even before the payoff.” (Bill Birchard, Writing For Impact Workbook, p. 25)
Building anticipation also helps with memory. We remember a lot better the stories that we had to anticipate and wait for. I know I’ve experienced this with my own memory.
Maybe it’s because I was younger with a spongier, more absorbent brain, but I remember clearly the story arc of my favourite tv show that came out every Thursday night for four seasons: The OC. I remember the general storylines of each season, when certain characters entered or left the story, and how the show ended. I watched it once a week, anticipating next week’s episode for an entire week. And I remember the show well.
In contrast, I’ve binge watched four seasons of a show on Netflix only a few months ago, and I couldn’t tell you what happened in the overall story arc. I can’t remember what happened in each season, or even specific episodes. When I’ve rewatched the show, it’s almost like a brand new show I’ve never seen. My memory has not captured the essence of the story nearly as well when I binged watched it without any breaks of anticipation. Has this happened to you?
One hundred years ago, Charlotte Mason assigned only a few pages of reading from each book per day to her students. She left students wanting more and wondering what would happen next. She used this same “anticipatory utility” to teach and retain. Charlotte Mason chose living books with anticipation baked into them.
Great Writing is Smart
Give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information” (Charlotte Mason, Home Education, p. 174)
Charlotte Mason cared about introducing children to big (smart) ideas for their minds to chew on, to muddle over, to think about. She did not believe teachers should be the showmen of the universe, spoon-feeding children in a flashy, entertaining way – but more of a guide, someone who wonders alongside, and lets the child puzzle over their questions until they find the answer themselves. Putting two and two together yourself is the “Science of Relations”, and it is where the real connections of understanding happen. When you make a natural connection to something else, you internalize it, understand it in your own way, and remember it.
Bill Birchard’s discoveries in how our brains work when we read and make connections proves this “Science of Relations” that Mason wrote about so long ago.
“The brain is quick to travel pathways to make routine connections. At the same time, though, it doesn’t confine itself to those well-worn paths. It tries to make new dim and distant connections. When the search for the dim and distant gets the upper hand during “coarse” processing, the brain works once-disparate material into new wholes. The pop of an aha results.” (Writing For Impact, p.124)
In writing about similar “Aha!” moments, Charlotte wrote,
A child should be brought up to have relations of force with earth and water, should run and ride, swim and skate, lift and carry; should know texture, and work in material; should know by name, and where and how they live at any rate, the things of the earth about him, its birds and beasts and creeping things, its herbs and trees; should be in touch with the literature, art and thought of the past and the present. I do not mean that he should know all these things; but he should feel, when he reads of it in the newspapers, the thrill which stirred the Cretan peasants when the frescoes in the palace of King Minos were disclosed to the labour of their spades. He should feel the thrill, not from mere contiguity, but because he has with the past the relationship of living pulsing thought.Home Education, p. 161
In this passage, Charlotte Mason is saying that introducing children to all sorts of things in this world and reading on many topics gives them a broad foundation for making connections and having insights. This entire blog post is only possible because of all of the other things I read and knew about before I read Writing for Impact. It is an exercise in the Science of Relations and when I first read Bill’s book, I had a major Aha! moment as I pieced together what I knew about living books. Making these connections and writing about them has helped me internalize what both authors said about great writing.
Living books have smart ideas and connect us as readers to experiences we may have had. Take this passage for example from Air is All Around You by Franklyn M. Branley
“Air is all around you. There is air down in a deep valley. There is air around a high mountain. Wherever you go, there is air. Cars and houses are filled with it. So are barns, sheds, doghouses, and birdhouses. Cups are full of it. So are bowls, pots and glasses that we drink out of. That’s hard to believe because you can’t see the air, or smell it. You can’t feel it either, except when it’s moving. Or when you spin around.”
Branley introduces a new concept – that air IS all around and he connects it to something that we already know. We’ve been in valleys, we live in houses, we’ve held a cup in our hands, we’ve spun around in the garden. But maybe we’ve never considered that air is actually around us at all times. I know I hadn’t. Writing it in this way helps forge a connection in the reader between the known and the new.
Great Writing is Social
I love reading non-fiction. I used to hate it. I found it dull and too removed from my life. Then I discovered how to identify living books and I found the “social” nonfiction authors who put themselves into their writing. When I read, I feel like I’m chatting with a friend about a topic they care about.
Before reading Robin Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, I literally never thought about moss or about the medicinal qualities of plants. I could barely identify poison oak and I didn’t know the difference between moss and lichen. If I had read a dry plant guide on the subject, I probably still wouldn’t know.
Instead, as I read, I felt like I was walking next to Robin on her land.
“The plant’s purpose can be read through its place. I remember this when I’m tromping through the woods and mistakenly grab a vine of poison ivy to haul myself up a steep bank. I look immediately for its companion. Remarkable in its fidelity, jewelweed is growing in the same moist soil as the poison ivy. I crush the succulent stem between my palms with a satisfying crunch and a rush of juice, and wipe the antidote all over my hands. It detoxifies the poison ivy and prevents the rash from ever developing.” – Robin Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, p. 106
This information could have been written as: “Jewelweed grows near poison oak and its stem carries an antidote to the rash of poison ivy.” But how much better and more memorable is Robin Kimmerer’s way of telling?
Living books are often written in a first person or second person narrative – situating the author in the telling and/or speaking directly to the reader. Studies show that personalizing the text – having the author speak directly to “you” in the second person narrative improves retention of the material and also motivates the reader to continue reading. Even the driest of topics (and I read an entire book about the discoveries of an ant researcher, not to mention a whole book about moss) can be easy, engaging reads when the author writes in a casual, personable, relatable tone.
Research done by Richard Paxton at the University of Wisconsin supports this. He showed that when writing was written in a more personable 2nd person “you” point-of-view instead of a standard he/they approach of a textbook, students remembered far more of the content and were able to write 34 percent more in related essays. (Writing for Impact, p.146)
Great Writing is Story-Driven
Living books tell a story. Fictional stories have a plot, characters, and a setting. Sadly, many fictional stories published for children these days are missing all of these story elements and rather resemble speeches that make parents feel good about buying books for their children, rather than actual stories for children. Often these books are about intangible topics like inclusion and diversity. Living books can be about intangible concepts too – except they show it through the plot or character traits. It is a rare author who can make a lecture engaging.
Nonfiction living books also tell a story. First, they are usually written in a narrative style – not like an encyclopedia of facts. The best ones teach through story or placing the child inside the narrative.
Modern brain science supports what we already know – that we humans are story-tellers and we have been passing along information from generation to generation through story for thousands of years. Our brains are wired for it. When we hear a story, many different circuits in our brains light up into a complex default network. This network helps us stay engaged, feel pleasure, and remember what we are reading. It is hard to remember facts when they are listed out for us on cue cards – but when they become part of a story, we remember. This is why many mnemonic devices for memory involve telling a story.
Concluding Thoughts
If you’re still with me after this magnum opus of a blog post that is almost a university paper, thank you. I will sum up with this:
Emily Kiser, podcast host of the Charlotte Mason podcast, A Delectable Education has a handy anagram for identifying living books. She says they are/have:
Literary Power
Ideas
Virtuous
Inspiring
Narrative
Generational
After reading Bill Birchard’s book about the neuroscience of great writing, I would also argue that living books are: simple, specific, surprising, seductive (in an anticipatory way), smart (ideas), social (conversational), and story-driven.
What are the best books you’ve ever read? Would you say they are living books? Do they follow Bill’s analysis of what constitutes great writing?
As always, this post contains some Amazon affiliate links. I receive a small commission if you purchase through my links. Thank you for supporting my blog.
I highly recommend Writing for Impact by Bill Birchard if you want to improve your writing, or you want to learn more about how to find great writing.
Warmly,
-Heather
