I’m currently working my way throught the Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling series and as I do I need a place to organize my notes and ideas. What better place than my hardly used Blog! 
I will eventually have a full page here about narration but for now I’ll just do posts until I have accumulated enough and have time to organize them.
This Quote from CM has got to be the “light bulb” moment for why some people say they are struggling with CM. I wish I could have read that last year, it would have saved me a ton of grief. I’ll list both the Original and the Modern English version.
The reader will say with truth,––”I knew all this before and have always acted more or less on these principles”; and I can only point to the unusual results we obtain through adhering not ‘more or less,’ but strictly to the principles and practices I have indicated. I suppose the difficulties are of the sort that Lister had to contend with; every surgeon knew that his instruments and appurtenances should be kept clean, but the saving of millions of lives has resulted from the adoption of the great surgeon’s antiseptic treatment; that is from the substitution of exact principles scrupulously applied for the rather casual ‘more or less’ methods of earlier days. (Vol 6 pg 20)
Some readers might say, ‘I already knew all of this before and I’ve always acted more or less on these principles.’ All I can say is, the incredible results we’ve had didn’t come from adhering to these principles ‘more or less,’ but by following them strictly in practice. Joseph Lister must have had this same difficulty to contend with. Surgeons in his day knew that their instruments should be sterile, but it was only those who actually acted on that knowledge and sterilized their instruments each time with his chemical solution who saved millions of lives. That’s the difference between scrupulously following exact principles, and casually using them ‘more or less.’
