The Very Quotable Charlotte Mason

I've been reading A Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason. I've dipped in to this book many times before but this is the first time I've attempted to read it cover to cover. I'm finding it irresistible. It accompanies me to the beach, to soccer. I'd take it shopping if I could. She is at her feisty best in this one. An example on a carefully prepared "child environment": "We had thought that the terrible succession of blows inflicted by the War had changed all that; but, no; the errors of education still hold sway and we still have amongst us the better-than-my-neighbor folk, whose function, let us hope, is to administer the benefits of adversity to most of us. What if parents and teachers in their zeal misread the schedule of their duties, magnified their office unduly and encroached upon the personality of children? It is not an environment that these want, a set of artificial relations carefully constructed, but an atmosphere which nobody has been at pains to constitute." Well, no fear of a carefully maintained environment here!