“It may be that the souls of all children are waiting for the call of knowledge to awaken them to delightful living.”
- Charlotte M. Mason, A Philosophy of Education
Who was Charlotte Mason?
Charlotte Mason (1842 - 1923) was a British educator, trainer, author, and lecturer who invested herself into improving the quality of education in England. English children in the 1800’s were educated according to a social class resulting in limited education to children of lower class.
During Charlotte Mason’s early career, she cultivated her own vision for “a liberal education for all,” using a unique methodology. This developing method included a generously broad curriculum for children of all ages, regardless of social standing. Charlotte Mason spent many years teaching children and thinking about how to design a model of education that fit what she knew to be true (children are born persons - able to soak in ideas and knowledge, not “empty vessels” to be filled with facts.)
Charlotte rejected the idea that the meaning of education was to fit children for a career or prepare them for exams. Instead, she viewed education as a way of life and insisted that children, as bearers of the divine image deserved the very best in literature, art, music, contemporary science, and mathematics as well as an intimate knowledge of nature through tangible contact with creation.
At age 50, Charlotte Mason moved to Ambleside in the Lake District of Northern England and established the House of Education, a training school for governesses as well as others who may work in close contact with children. She worked from 1892 until her death in 1923 and her passion + mission was to educate parents, as the primary educators of their children, through lectures and what came to be her six volume book series titled “The Original Home Schooling Series.” Charlotte developed a broad, liberal curriculum that was used in home schools belonging to the Parents’ National Education Union and in the various Parents’ Union Schools across the United Kingdom and British Empire. Her House of Education and accompanying Practicing School are not part of the University of Cumbria.
Her work carried on well after her death and the PNEU existed into the 1960s and in 1984, Susan Schaeffer Macaulay sparked a renewed interest in Charlotte’s ideas, especially in America, through her book “For the Children’s Sake.” Since then, Mason’s work has been brought into many schools and homeschools all over the world.
The Method
“In the first place, we have no system of education. We hold that great things, such as nature, life, education, are ‘cabined, cribbed, confined,’ in proportion as they are systematised. We have a method of education, it is true, but method is no more than a way to an end, and is free, yielding, adaptive as Nature herself. Method has a few comprehensive laws according to which details shape themselves, as one naturally shapes one’s behaviour to the acknowledged law that fire burns. System, on the contrary, has an infinity of rules and instructions as to what you are to do and how you are to do it. Method in education follows Nature humbly; stands aside and gives her fair play.”
Charlotte Masons teaching results in self-learned, self-motivated, and self-disciplined children. It was a simple yet profound method and is a lifestyle that continues long after formal schooling has ended.
She includes methods specific to certain subjects in her curriculum, the following is foundational:
“But we, believing that the normal child has powers of mind which fit him to deal with all knowledge proper to him, give him a full and generous curriculum; taking care only that all knowledge offered him is vital, that is, that facts are not presented without their informing ideas.”
Living Ideas - Charlotte was firm in the thought that a child should have first-hand exposure to great and noble ideas through ‘living books’ and through the masterpieces of great artists, composers and poets, and direct experience with the natural world. Living books are usually written by one author who has a passion for the subject, rather than a committee that has been hired to put something together. They are usually written in what Charlotte called a “literary style.” Listen for a narrative or a conversational tone. It will sound like someone telling you a story or chatting with you in everyday language across the kitchen table. Living books touch your emotions and fire your imagination, making the idea more memorable. You can usually picture in your mind’s eye what is happening as you read, and you begin to feel a personal connection with the person or animal or event that you’re reading about. Most importantly, a living book will contain living ideas, not just dry facts. Ideas that help shape who you are becoming as a person. Ideas that feed your imagination and spark other ideas of your own.
“This relation of habit to human life––as the rails on which it runs to a locomotive––is perhaps the most suggestive and helpful to the educator; for just as it is on the whole easier for the locomotive to pursue its way on the rails than to take a disastrous run off them, so it is easier for the child to follow lines of habit carefully laid down than to run off these lines at his peril.”
Habit Training - Charlotte Mason believed that habit training was a powerful tool in helping children take charge of their own education (self-education). She believed that all matters relating to the children and their upbringing were important, but replacing poor habits in our children with valuable ones through patient, painstaking, and loving training and correction is one of the primary roles we must be about in our homes. She encouraged the child tp learn the habits of attention, perfect execution, imagining, remembering, self control, obedience, truthfulness, an even temper, neatness, kindness, order, respect, recall, punctuation, fortitude, courage, caution, gentleness, and cleanliness, among others. As parents, we are wise when we see the value in these habits. Our daily and hour-by-hour will produce children who are ready and able to manage their own bodies and accept the responsibilities laid upon them by their parents as they continue to grow and mature.
“Narrating is not the work of a parrot, but of absorbing into oneself the beautiful thought from the book, making it one's own and then giving it forth again with just that little touch that comes from one's own mind.”
Narration - Narration is the act by which ideas are assimilated into knowledge. It requires the power of attention to attend to the ideas from the reading and synthesize and organize the material in his mind. When a child narrates he is the telling back what has been read by the student in his own words. Narrations can be executed in a number of ways. Oral, written, drawn, acted out, or expressed in a number of creative ways.
“You want the child to remember? Then secure his whole attention,” Home Education. (Vol. 1, p. 156) Her definition of attention is summarized as “the whole mental force is applied to the subject in hand. This act, of bringing the whole mind to bear, may be trained into a habit at the will of the parent or teacher, who attracts and holds the child’s attention by means of a sufficient motive.” (p. 145)
Short and Varied Lessons - Charlotte Mason was the number one advocate for short and varied lessons. The lessons for younger students should not exceed twenty minutes and the lessons for those students who are older begin to become progressively longer based on their personal span of attention. Varied lessons allow for the teacher to hold the interest of the child and use different brain functions in order to avoid exhausting the child and allow for the child to absorb the curriculum.
The Philosophy
To fully understand the philosophy of Charlotte Mason, it would be best to read her written works. She gave us a starting point by offering us a short synopsis in volume 6 of The Original Homeschooling Series: A Philosophy of Education.
Children are born persons.
Although children are born with a sin nature, they are neither all bad, nor all good. Children from all walks of life and backgrounds may make choices for good or evil.
The concepts of authority and obedience are true for all people whether they accept it or not. Submission to authority is necessary for any society or group or family to run smoothly.
Authority is not a license to abuse children, or to play upon their emotions or other desires, and adults are not free to limit a child's education or use fear, love, power of suggestion, or their own influence over a child to make a child learn.
The only means a teacher may use to educate children are the child's natural environment, the training of good habits and exposure to living ideas and concepts. This is what CM's motto "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life" means.
When we say that "education is an atmosphere," we do not mean that a child should be isolated in what may be called a 'child-environment' especially adapted and prepared, but that we should take into account the educational value of his natural home atmosphere, both as regards persons and things, and should let him live freely among his proper conditions. It stultifies a child to bring down his world to the child's level.
"Education is a discipline" means that we train a child to have good habits and self-control.
In saying that "education is a life," the need of intellectual and moral as well as of physical sustenance is implied. The mind feeds on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum.
The child's mind is not a blank slate, or a bucket to be filled. It is a living thing and needs knowledge to grow. As the stomach was designed to digest food, the mind is designed to digest knowledge and needs no special training or exercises to make it ready to learn.
Such a doctrine as e.g. the Herbartian, that the mind is a receptacle, lays the stress of education (the preparation of knowledge in enticing morsels duly ordered) upon the teacher. Children taught on this principle are in danger of receiving much teaching with little knowledge; and the teacher's axiom is ,'what a child learns matters less than how he learns it.'
Instead, we believe that childrens' minds are capable of digesting real knowledge, so we provide a rich, generous curriculum that exposes children to many interesting, living ideas and concepts.
"Education is the Science of Relations"; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books, for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of--
"Those first-born affinities
"That fit our new existence to existing things."In devising a SYLLABUS for a normal child, of whatever social class, three points must be considered:
(a) He requires much knowledge, for the mind needs sufficient food as much as does the body.
(b) The knowledge should be various, for sameness in mental diet does not create appetite (i.e., curiosity)
(c) Knowledge should be communicated in well-chosen language, because his attention responds naturally to what is conveyed in literary form.As knowledge is not assimilated until it is reproduced, children should 'tell back' after a single reading or hearing: or should write on some part of what they have read.
A single reading is insisted on, because children have naturally great power of attention; but this force is dissipated by the re-reading of passages, and also, by questioning, summarising. and the like.
Acting upon these and some other points in the behaviour of mind, we find that the educability of children is enormously greater than has hitherto been supposed, and is but little dependent on such circumstances as heredity and environment.
Nor is the accuracy of this statement limited to clever children or to children of the educated classes: thousands of children in Elementary Schools respond freely to this method, which is based on the behaviour of mind.Children have two guides to help them in their moral and intellectual growth - "the way of the will," and "the way of reason."
The way of the will: Children should be taught, (a) to distinguish between 'I want' and 'I will.' (b) That the way to will effectively is to turn our thoughts from that which we desire but do not will. (c) That the best way to turn our thoughts is to think of or do some quite different thing, entertaining or interesting. (d) That after a little rest in this way, the will returns to its work with new vigour. (This adjunct of the will is familiar to us as diversion, whose office it is to ease us for a time from will effort, that we may 'will' again with added power. The use of suggestion as an aid to the will is to be deprecated, as tending to stultify and stereotype character, It would seem that spontaneity is a condition of development, and that human nature needs the discipline of failure as well as of success.)
The way of reason: We teach children, too, not to 'lean (too confidently) to their own understanding'; because the function of reason is to give logical demonstration (a) of mathematical truth, (b) of an initial idea, accepted by the will. In the former case, reason is, practically, an infallible guide, but in the latter, it is not always a safe one; for, whether that idea be right or wrong, reason will confirm it by irrefragable proofs.
Knowing that reason is not to be trusted as the final authority in forming opinions, children must learn that their greatest responsibility is choosing which ideas to accept or reject. Good habits of behavior and lots of knowledge will provide the discipline and experience to help them do this.
We teach children that all truths are God's truths, and that secular subjects are just as divine as religious ones. Children don't go back and forth between two worlds when they focus on God and then their school subjects; there is unity among both because both are of God and, whatever children study or do, God is always with them.
