Publisher's Synopsis
Over time, what captures the attention creates the person as full of character. Charlotte Maria Shaw Mason's insight that inspiring the child to attend to the narration of literature, then to recall it as fully as possible, offers an engaging and effective means to train the attention. An attention trained to absorb that which enhances the flourishing of the human person with knowledge, which is moral and emotional as much as conceptual and imaginative, is of the utmost importance in today's world. This monograph argues that attention is the latest aspect of human existence to be commodified as 'clickbait' within a political and economic system that monetises everything within its power. Mason's Principle 20 speaks of 'duties and joys'. For the person to be full of character is to understand that the attention is trained with a wholesome balance of duty and joy, and ultimately the human person is shaped by attention to that which she called the Divine Spirit, which transcends human understanding
