Browsing Tag

Charles Dickens

Books & Reading
Keeping Christmas with Charles Dickens

Almost every Christmas season, I read Dickens’ famous Christmas tale aloud to my children. It is remarkable to me that small children often love this story. Because I perceived it as a ghost story, I expected my children to be fearful at the first reading, but instead they accepted it as a unique way that Scrooge “learned his lesson” and they rejoiced to find Scrooge a changed man in the morning. I know there are many portrayals of this work. I remember Continue Reading…
December 13, 2013
Books & Reading, Educational Philosophy
Possibility, Not Heredity

In Start Here, we spend some time on Charlotte Mason’s second principle of education, which is her most controversial (in Protestant circles, at least): [Children] are not born either good or bad, but with possibilities for good and for evil. I am going to skip over some of the difficulties of interpreting this principle, having already discussed it before. Once, when I sent out an email preparing a book group for discussion of this principle, I included this disclaimer note: In Continue Reading…
June 4, 2013
Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

The children and I {E., Neighbor M., A., and Q.} finished up reading Dickens’ Christmas classic, A Christmas Carol, again this year. It is always remarkable to me that children love this story. Because I perceive it as a ghost story, I expected the children to be fearful, but instead they accept it as a unique way that Scrooge “learned his lesson” and they rejoice to find Scrooge a changed man in the morning. I know there are many portrayals of Continue Reading…
December 22, 2009
Birth Control as an Idea: Margaret Sanger Meets Charles Dickens

We {my oldest and I} are having a grand time reading through Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for the first time. We are reading a few pages each day, just enough to give us something to chew on for the day. I was shocked to see a 19th-century refutation of Margaret Sanger’s philosophy nestled in its innocent pages. Given that it precedes Sanger by almost a century, I can only conclude that no idea is really new, not even if it more Continue Reading…
December 11, 2008