“I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.”
—Socrates
“There is no education but self-education and only as the young student works with his own mind is anything effected.”
—Charlotte Mason
Two great teachers of the past agree that a child’s mind is no bucket. We cannot shovel in whatever information we please and call that “learning.”
So how can we get children to think, to work with their own minds, to build their own relationships with knowledge?
I try to answer that question, at least for math, in my new book Charlotte Mason’s Living Math, which is now available exclusively on my Playful Math Store.
As I was finishing up the final bits of indexing and formatting the book for publication, I continued to tweak the manuscript. This ability to tinker endlessly is both a benefit and curse of indie publishing. For example, I added four new pages to explain my quibble with Socrates.
You see, Socratic questions are very much a case of “Do what I say, not what I do.”


