vol 3 pg 214
Charlotte Mason discusses this Manifesto in a Parents Review article from 1903, online here.
"Studies serve for Delight, for Ornament, and for Ability."
Every child has a right of entry to several fields of knowledge.
Every normal child has an appetite for such knowledge.
This appetite or desire for knowledge is a sufficient stimulus for all
school work, if the knowledge be fitly given.
There are four means of destroying the desire for knowledge:––
(a) Too
many oral lessons, which offer knowledge in a diluted form, and do not
leave the child free to deal with it.
(b)
Lectures, for which the teacher collects, arranges, and illustrates
matter from various sources; these often offer knowledge in too
condensed and ready prepared a form.
(c)
Text-books compressed and recompressed from the big book of the big man.
(d) The use
of emulation and ambition as incentives to learning in place of the
adequate desire for, and delight in, knowledge.
Children can be most fitly educated on Things and Books.
Things, e.g.––
i. Natural
obstacles for physical contention, climbing, swimming, walking, etc.
ii.
Material to work in––wood, leather, clay, etc.
iii.
Natural objects in situ––birds, plants, streams, stones, etc,
iv. Objects
of art.
v.
Scientific apparatus, etc.
The value of this education by Things is receiving wide recognition, but intellectual education to be derived from Books is still for the most part to seek.
Every scholar of six years old and upwards should study with 'delight' his own, living, books on every subject in a pretty wide curriculum. Children between six and eight must for the most part have their books read to them.
This plan has been tried with happy results for the last twelve years in many home schoolrooms, and some other schools.
By means of the free use of books the mechanical difficulties of education––reading, spelling, composition, etc.––disappear, and studies prove themselves to be 'for delight, for ornament, and for ability.'
There is reason to believe that these principles are workable in all
schools, Elementary and Secondary; that they tend in the working to
simplification, economy, and discipline.
(read this
Manifesto paraphrased in modern English)