Today her work is undergoing a revival in home school circles. For Charlotte Mason, education was not a list of skills or facts to be mastered. Education was an atmosphere, a discipline, a life. I think most of us would agree with her that education is a life process which is not confined to the classroom. In the Charlotte Mason method, whole books and first-hand sources are used whenever possible, rather than textbooks.
Textbooks tend to be crammed with facts and information, at the expense of human emotion.
This is deadening to the imagination of the child. Children, she thought, should read the best books, not graded readers or textbook comprehension paragraphs. Educators think they are doing children a favor by taking scissors to cut out pages of the best books. Children deserve to have more than just a nodding acquaintance with the best authors. A child gains knowledge through his own work digging out facts and information.