Charlotte Mason asks every mother, "Why must the children learn at all? What should they learn? And, How should they learn it?" (p.171) She continues and answers these questions...
Why: "We learn that we may know," (p172), "in order that ideas may be freely sown in the fruitful soil of [our] mind." (p173)
"...that the children's lessons...should exercise the several powers of their minds, should furnish them with fruitful ideas." (p177)
What: "...that the children's lessons should provide material for their mental growth...should afford them knowledge, really valuable for its own sake, accurate, and interesting, of the kind that the child may recall as a man with profit and pleasure." (p.177)
How: "That the claims of the schoolroom should not be allowed to encroach on the child's right to long hours daily for exercise and investigation.
...That the child should be taken daily, if possible, to scenes––moor or meadow, park, common, or shore––where he may find new things to examine, and so add to his store of real knowledge.
...That play, vigorous healthful play, is, in its turn, fully as important as lessons, as regards both bodily health and brain-power.
...That the happiness of the child is the condition of his progress; that his lessons should be joyous." (p177-178)
"Our first care should be to preserve the individuality, to give play to the personality, of children." (p.186)
"...education is a life as well as a discipline." (p.192)
To be a teacher as follows: "a person of fine sanity and wholesomeness, trusting to her personal initiative, and aware from the first that her work was to liberate the personality of her little pupil and by no means to superimpose her own." (p.195)