Read deep to think well
Developing a philosophy of education--bit by bit, or post by post
I have established that reading is the primary means through which students should acquire knowledge. The next step is to assess what students have gained from reading, and to push students to think more deeply about what they have read. This gets at the second point I introduced in developing my philosophy of education:
Help young people develop the skills required to think well (i.e., process information and communicate effectively), which can be done by reading a lot and using the Socratic method to process what they have read and effectively communicate their thoughts.
Sometimes, reading should be done for the sake of enjoyment, with any knowledge acquired being a by-product of such reading endeavors. As I have written before, imaginative literature is meant to be enjoyed, first and foremost; however, there are ways to assess how deeply a child has read without interfering with enjoyment, similar to the ways to assess deep reading and knowledge acquisition gleaned from non-fiction works. After reading fiction or nonfiction, students can articulate their thoughts about the story or the wisdom being imparted through two methods (I added one not mentioned in the bullet point above): oral response to questions, which Charlotte Mason refers to as narration, and the Socratic method.