Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Toodle-oo to Twaddle

I've started reading Charlotte Mason's series on educating children. I don't see us become a CM school but I will certainly be adopting some of her philosophies. At the top of the list, no more twaddle.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, twaddle refers to books with little literary or teaching value. She does not accept the idea that it doesn't matter what they are reading as long as they are reading and neither do I. But, value is entirely subjective and where I see value in, say, Madonna's series, "The English Roses", others might not.

By any measure, I have a lot of twaddle. I have a lot of living books, classics and contemporary books with value too, but I have a lot of twaddle. In the next two weeks I'm hoping to purge our home of these and gradually (or not so gradually if you ask the person handling the finances in our home, no names) replace them with books of worth.

This only applies to the kids, by the way, I'm keeping the Phillipa Gregory books.

3 Comments:

Vivian said...

I'd be very interested in how, practically, you perform this purging and replacing process. What would you consider twaddle? What do you do with the books? What do you replace them with?

Yes, value is very subjective, especially comes to books.

Unknown said...

I'm with Vivian. How do you decide what to purge and what to replace? I can hardly part with any of my books, even the ones I haven't read in 10 years. So " Silly Sally" is out?

Brittney said...

Oh I am doing the same thing! We will have to share some of the treasures we discover with each other as we get new books. The only problem I am running into is dh (major literature guy) is going to take some convincing to allow the boys to read translations of great classics written for youngins. I don't think my boys are ready to learn Old English to read Beowulf!

Brittney