Charlotte Mason on Curiosity and the Desire for Knowledge

The Desire of Knowledge.––I have left till last the Desire which truly is to the Mind as Hunger is to the Body, that is, the Desire of Knowledge. Everybody wants to know, but some people wish to know things worthy, and others, things unworthy. The Desire of unworthy knowledge is commonly called Curiosity. ‘Where did you buy it?’ ‘How much did it cost?’ ‘What did she say?’ ‘Who was there?’ ‘Why are they not on good terms?’ and so on, are the sort of questions that Curiosity asks. It seems harmless enough to satisfy oneself with scraps of news about this notable person and the other, a murderer or a millionaire, a statesman or a soldier, a great lady or a dancing-girl––Curiosity is agape for news about any or all of them. Curiosity is eager, too, to know and to tell the latest news about wireless telegraphy, motor cars, and what not. The real, and not spurious, Desire for knowledge would lead a person from the marvels of wireless telegraphy to some serious study of electricity; but Curiosity is satisfied to know something about a matter, and not really to know it.

Curiosity and the Desire of Knowledge.––Just as sweets and tarts satisfy Hunger, while they do very little to sustain life, so Curiosity satisfies the mind with the tit-bits it gathers, and the person who allows himself to be curious has no Desire for real knowledge. This is a pitiable misfortune, because every human being has a natural Desire to explore those realms open to intellect of which I have already spoken. Upon the knowledge of these great matters––History, Literature, Nature, Science, Art––the Mind feeds and grows. It assimilates such knowledge as the body assimilates food, and the person becomes what is called magnanimous, that is, a person of great mind, wide interests, incapable of occupying himself much about petty, personal matters. What a pity to lose sight of such a possibility for the sake of miserable scraps of information about persons and things that have little connection with one another and little connection with ourselves!

Charlotte Mason – Ourselves, pp. 77-78 (emphasis mine)

When I first read this passage from Ourselves in 2018, it stuck with me, bubbling up in my mind in various ways and applying itself to different aspects of my life. At the time, I was slowly making my way through the book during my morning liturgy, and these readings often have this effect on me, but not as strongly as these particular words did.

In the Charlotte Mason world, there is a significant emphasis on a desire for knowledge, not only for our children but also for ourselves. We consume living books and take in living ideas to better ourselves and widen our views of the world, allowing us to truly become the magnanimous person she describes above. And when we take in this knowledge, it is not just memorized facts and figures and dates, but real knowledge that becomes part of us. Something that leads us naturally to different subjects and topics, as in her example of wireless telegraphy. We make this knowledge our own not because it’s required or anyone is expecting it of us or to impress others, but because it interests us and we want it to be part of ourselves.

Many blog posts and pages on the internet have been written on the topics of Mother Culture as well as “scholé,” and I think many Charlotte Mason mothers do at least attempt to include these practices in their own routines. We look for various ways to add culture or knowledge to our lives: reading books (three at a time!), visiting museums, experiencing fine art and music (firsthand, if possible), going on nature walks, learning more about the natural world, etc. And in this way, we grow and hopefully become closer to the people we hope to be.

There is certainly nothing wrong with any of this part, and, in fact, this is yet another aspect of the Charlotte Mason philosophy that I truly love. The ideas that mothers are also born persons, that they should “learn to do for themselves what they do for their children,” and the concept that bettering ourselves is for the sake of our children and not something superfluous to motherhood, are not popular ideas in this day and age, even in other parts of the homeschooling world.

However, the desire for knowledge for its own sake was only half of what she discussed in this passage. The other part mentioned “curiosity,” which she suggests might not, in practice, actually be a good thing.

I honestly never thought of curiosity as a bad thing before reading this passage. A Mr. Rogers episode from 2000 exists in which King Friday bans curiosity in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, and a few of the local citizens (as well as those from neighboring places) actually get a tad snarky (as snarky as it gets on that show, anyway) about it. Mr. Rogers adds his commentary directly to viewers about the concept of curiosity and how it’s GOOD to be curious! Keep your curiosity alive! And admittedly, the disagreement between Ms. Mason and Mr. Rogers about the benefit of being curious is probably more semantics than anything else. Still, I thought this was a good example of how we generally think of curiosity as a Good Thing!

Ms. Mason, though, offers us a different view and suggests that curiosity really only serves to “satisfy” our minds with the “tit-bits it gathers.” That is, a little information here, a little information there, but nothing of real depth. Nothing that we take in or make part of ourselves, and often, ideas and information that don’t serve to make us better people.

I thought this passage was especially pertinent in this day and age. Several years ago, when I was serving website owners as a Virtual Assistant, I read a blog post filled with tips on how to increase your blog readership! and draw people to your site! and make your posts more relevant and compelling! etc. One of the tips was to keep your posts to just around 500 words and definitely no more because people nowadays don’t have the attention span or the time to read anything much longer than that. It also suggested that paragraphs should be kept short and remember to add lots of pictures. And, of course, create really good Pinterest images with intriguing titles that make people want to read more (or what can sometimes be considered “click-bait”).

If a website advertises that it can help you grow your own audience and gives advice like this, I think it’s very telling about where we are as a society. Apparently, we need things summarized and flashy to hold our attention. We read a few paragraphs in a blog post or news article about a given topic that we may find interesting, and then, in some cases, develop opinions or consider ourselves experts on the subject because so-and-so wrote something about it, and we read what they wrote. This even goes as far as developing opinions without getting past the headline. Case in point: this post was shared on the NPR Facebook page ten years ago, with many more comments than likes. Because of the myriad choices we have for media intake, which for many of us primarily consists of social media, there are so many topics on which we can become “experts.”

But are we really? When we read a little here and a little there and merely dip our toes in a topic mentioned on one of our favorite media outlets, are we really gaining, or even genuinely desiring, knowledge of that topic? Or are we just grasping at “tit-bits” and trying to make them into real knowledge? Are we sacrificing true and personal knowledge of a topic “for the sake of miserable scraps of information about persons and things that have little connection with one another and little connection with ourselves”?

I think this concept extends to other aspects of social media as well, not only to the articles and blog posts that are shared before an opinion is formed but also to how we interact with people.

According to TrueList, the number of people on an average Facebook friends list is 338. I know many of these are probably not people we would necessarily call “friends,” but more acquaintances, work associates, high school/college friends, or random contacts that have been made over the years. Even with that wider net in mind, however, that number is awfully high for an average person. I’ve heard so many people (myself included) defend their Facebook use as a means to keep in touch with friends with whom they would lose contact otherwise, and, again, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But I think this medium of friendship maintenance also allows for many “curious” friendships rather than “knowledge” friendships. We can scroll through a friend’s wall and see pictures of their latest vacation, their lunch, and their smiles all around, without really knowing what’s truly going on in their lives. In their hearts. In their minds. What they’re struggling with. What they’re thankful for. And often, we don’t have a real desire to know. We’re content with the “scraps” we see as we scroll by and assume that offers a good summarization of the whole person. We’re “keeping in touch”…..but not really.

Obviously, we can’t maintain a true “knowledge” friendship with every person we meet in our lives or who we may have added to our friends list, but it does make me sometimes wonder what I might be missing by relying on a medium like Facebook to maintain a friendship with someone, when, to be honest, there really isn’t much of a true friendship there at all.

None of this is a reprimand to anyone or demand that we all get off Facebook right now! It’s more a pondering. I often speculate about what Ms. Mason’s view of the world in which we live now in comparison to her own would be, and I wonder what she would think about all this social media stuff. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, etc. Would she have a Facebook account with a vast friends list filled with former students and PNEU members? Would she post pictures of Ambleside or her latest nature journal entry on Instagram (confession: I really hope she would… 🙂 )? Would she be on social media at all because there’s too much Sir Walter Scott to read?

I think this passage definitely deserves more pondering and could possibly even be used as a litmus test for my future internet reading.

(Sidenote: This post is nearly 1800 words long. If you made it to the end, I applaud you. 🙂 )

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