Spreading the feast of the Charlotte Mason method of education through weekly podcasts. Join us for short discussions that provide information, examples, and encouragement to the homeschool parents putting CM's ideas into practice in their homes.
We are happy to announce that we have three NEW Teacher Training Videos available! These videos were professionally recorded and edited and include reading instruction, geography, and scheduling. See more details below.
These and all of our other Teacher Training Videos will be 20% off from Black Friday through Cyber Monday! Just use the code 2020TTV to get your discount.
Are you afraid to teach your child to read, or frustrated with your lack of success? This hour will address the practical steps to get started in the crucial responsibility of teaching our children to read. No child is alike in his tackling of this skill, no existing curriculum addresses all the variables, but Charlotte Mason’s way is straightforward and steady. Together we will conduct beginning reading lessons and then tackle all the questions you have about your own particular fears or difficulties that time will allow. (1-hour video)
Often we wonder if a Charlotte Mason curriculum is still relevant for children today, living in a multi-cultural, modern world. Yet, if we look closely at the subject of geography, we see that instead of focusing on our own country as we do when we begin teaching history, young children should be exposed to a wide knowledge of all countries to become acquainted with all cultures and climes–even those very different than his own. “Bet let him be at home in any single region; let him see, with the mind’s eye, the people at their work and at their play, the flowers and fruits in their seasons, sympathetically,” (1/275) Charlotte Mason tells us, and this knowledge widens and deepens throughout her curriculum. In this workshop, we walk through the principles and practices of geography teaching in Forms I through VI. (1-hour video)
Scheduling: A home schoolroom managed on sound principles by Nicole Williams
Charlotte Mason gave us very specific guidelines for how a homeschool family’s daily schedule should run, including morning lessons and afternoon occupations. But for some, the idea of creating and following a schedule can be daunting. Join Nicole as she shows you how Miss Mason’s plan allows for freedom and serenity in your day. (1-hour video)
Charlotte Mason’s short synopsis of the main points of her educational method is useful to homeschool and classroom teachers. This episode continues through this “synopsis,” moving beyond philosophical foundations to determining the curriculum and how implementing it is best accomplished.
Listen Now:
[13] 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.
[14] 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.
[15] 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.
“Under the phrase, ‘Education is a life,’ I have tried to show how necessary it is to sustain the intellectual life upon ideas, and as a corollary, that a school-book should be a medium for ideas and not merely a receptacle for facts. That normal children have a natural desire for, and a right admission to, all fitting knowledge, appears to me to be suggested by the phrase, ‘Education is the Science of Relations.’ These considerations clear the ground towards that of a curriculum.” (3/216)
The children had their opportunity, and they rose to it, as Miss Mason knew they would. Since then a hundred schools have shewn that in the Worker’s child, even in the child of the slums, are latent the powers and tastes of our own children. There is no need of other and simpler books for them. They will understand any book suitable to their age… And what was suitable was to be by no means easy, for Miss Mason asked much of them. It was her way. The books are hard. But the more she asked, the more the children gave. And, though they never saw her, there were thousands who loved her, because she understood them and knew what they wanted. She had treated them as persons. She had respected them. They were in some way conscious of her high and gentle courtesy. Their outraged pride was soothed . They were her children, equal members of her world -wide school . The badge of inferiority had gone. Their ability amazed their teachers, who had been brought up to think that as a class they were of inferior mentality; that they could do nothing without help, and would do nothing without something like compulsion . They were not prepared—we were none of us prepared—for Miss Mason’s epoch-making discovery, the “great avidity for knowledge in children of all ages and of every class ‘ ‘ for knowledge which is presented to them in more or less literary form. (In Memoriam, pp. 188-189)
“We spread an abundant and delicate feast in the programmes and each small guest assimilates what he can. The child of genius and imagination gets greatly more than his duller comrade but all sit down to the same feast and each one gets according to his needs and powers.” (6/183)
“Knowledge in these several kinds is due to the children; for there seems reason to believe that the limit to human intelligence coincides with the limit to human interest; that is, that a normal person of poor and narrow intelligence is so because the interests proper to him have not been called into play.” (3/324)
“It is a wide programme founded on the educational rights of man; wide, but we may not say it is impossible nor may we pick and choose and educate him in this direction but not in that. We may not even make choice between science and the ‘humanities.’ Our part it seems to me is to give a child a vital hold upon as many as possible of those wide relationships proper to him.” (6/157)
“…it is a mistake to suppose that the greater the number of ‘subjects’ the greater the scholar’s labour; the contrary is the case as the variety in itself affords refreshment.” (6/158)
“We cannot make any hard and fast rule-a big book or a little book, a book at first-hand or at second-hand; either may be right provided we have it in us to discern a living book, quick, and informed with the ideas proper to the subject of which it treats.” (3/178)
“It is not easy to sum up in a few short sentences those principles upon which the mind naturally acts and which I have tried to bring to bear upon a school curriculum. The fundamental idea is, that children are persons and are therefore moved by the same springs of conduct as their elders. Among these is the Desire of Knowledge, knowledge-hunger being natural to everybody…
“In the nature of things then the unspoken demand of children is for a wide and very varied curriculum; it is necessary that they should have some knowledge of the wide range of interests proper to them as human beings, and for no reasons of convenience or time limitations may we curtail their proper curriculum.
“Perceiving the range of knowledge to which children as persons are entitled the questions are, how shall they be induced to take that knowledge, and what can the children of the people learn in the short time they are at school? We have discovered a working answer to these two conundrums. I say discovered, and not invented, for there is only one way of learning, and the intelligent persons who can talk well on many subjects and the expert in one learn in the one way, that is, they read to know. (6/13-14)
“Children no more come into the world without provision for dealing with knowledge than without provision for dealing with food. They bring with them not only that intellectual appetite, the desire of knowledge, but also an enormous, an unlimited power of attention to which the power of retention (memory) seems to be attached, as one digestive process succeeds another, until the final assimilation.” (6/14-15)
“Think of the time you save. You read your book once and you know it and go on to another —and there is no looking up at the end of term before the examinations, indeed this is not allowed.” (PR 33, p. 782-83, THE WORK AND AIMS OF THE P.U.S., By Miss O’Ferrall, ex-HOE)
“it is not a casual matter, a convenient, almost miraculous way of covering the ground, of getting children to know certainly and lastingly a surprising amount; all this is to the good, but it is something more, a root principle vital to education. In this way of learning the child comes to his own; he makes use of the authority which is in him in its highest function as a self-commanding, self-compelling, power. … But to make yourself attend, make yourself know, this indeed is to come into a king––all the more satisfying to children because they are so made that they revel in knowledge.” (6/76-77)
“I dwell on the single reading because,.. it is impossible to fix attention on that which we have heard before and know we shall hear again.” (6/261)
“This is a bad habit to get into; and we should do well to save our children by not giving them the vague expectation of second and third and tenth opportunities to do that which should have been done at first.” (3/179)
“…while we grown-up persons read and forget because we do not take the pains to know as we read, these young students have the powers of perfect recollection and just application because they have read with attention and concentration and have in every case reproduced what they have read in narration, or, the gist of some portion of it, in writing. (6/185)
“From this point it was not difficult to go on to the perception that, whether in taking or rejecting, the mind was functioning for its own nourishment; that the mind, in fact, requires sustenance––as does the body, in order that it increase and be strong; but because the mind is not to be measured or weighed but is spiritual, so its sustenance must be spiritual too, must, in fact, be ideas (in the Platonic sense of images). I soon perceived that children were well equipped to deal with ideas, and that explanations, questionings, amplifications, are unnecessary and wearisome. Children have a natural appetite for knowledge which is informed with thought. They bring imagination, judgment, and the various so-called ‘faculties’ to bear upon a new idea pretty much as the gastric juices act upon a food ration. This was illuminating but rather startling; the whole intellectual apparatus of the teacher, his power of vivid presentation, apt illustration, able summing up, subtle questioning, all these were hindrances and intervened between children and the right nutriment duly served; this, on the other hand, they received with the sort of avidity and simplicity with which a healthy child eats his dinner.” (6/10-11)
“The mind can know nothing save what it can produce in the form of an answer to a question put to the mind by itself.” I have failed to trace the saying to its source, but a conviction of its importance has been growing upon me during the last forty years. It tacitly prohibits questioning from without; (this does not, of course, affect the Socratic use of questioning for purposes of moral conviction); and it is necessary to intellectual certainty, to the act of knowing. For example, to secure a conversation or an incident, we ‘go over it in our minds’; that is, the mind puts itself through the process of self-questioning which I have indicated. This is what happens in the narrating of a passage read: each new consecutive incident or statement arrives because the mind asks itself,––”What next?” For this reason it is important that only one reading should be allowed; efforts to memorise weaken the power of attention, the proper activity of the mind; if it is desirable to ask questions in order to emphasize certain points, these should be asked after and not before, or during, the act of narration.” (6/16-17)
“…but what if the devitalisation we notice in so many of our young people, keen about games but dead to things of the mind, is due to the processes carried on in our schools, to our plausible and pleasant ways of picturing, eliciting, demonstrating, illustrating, summarising, doing all those things for children which they are born with the potency to do for themselves? No doubt we do give intellectual food, but too little of it; let us have courage and we shall be surprised, as we are now and then, at the amount of intellectual strong meat almost any child will take at a meal and digest at his leisure.” (6/237)
“…because we were wise enough to see that the mind functions for its own nourishment whether in rejecting or receiving, we changed our tactics, following, so we thought, the lead of the children. We did well, and therefore are prepared; if necessary, to do better. What, then, if our whole educational equipment, our illustrations, elucidations, questionings, our illimitable patience in getting a point into the children, were all based on the false assumption of the immature, which we take to connote the imperfect, incomplete minds of children? “I think I could understand, Mummy, if you did not explain quite so much,”––is this the inarticulate cry of the school child to-day? He really is capable of much more than he gets credit for, but we go the wrong way about getting his capable mind into action.
“But the teacher is not moved by arrogance but by a desire to be serviceable. He believes that children cannot understand well-written books and that he must make of himself a bridge between the pupil and the real teacher, the man who has written the book. Now we have proved that children, even children of the slums, are able to understand any book suitable for their age: that is, children of eight or nine will grasp a chapter in Pilgrim’s Progress at a single reading; children of fourteen, one of Lamb’s Essays or a chapter in Eöthen, boys and girls of seventeen will ‘tell’ Lycidas. Given a book of literary quality suitable to their age and children will know how to deal with it without elucidation. Of course they will not be able to answer questions because questions are an impertinence which we all resent, but they will tell you the whole thing with little touches of individual personality in the narrative.” (6/260)
“Now comes the question of how to teach the lessons. In the P.U.S. the teacher is not there to thrust second-hand knowledge into the heads of the children. It is her duty to open the doors in many different directions through which the children may walk in the pursuit of knowledge whilst she is there to guide and direct as occasion requires. She does as little as possible herself. ‘What a nice easy job.’ I think I hear you say. But when you come to try it you find that after all it is so much easier to do the sum your self than to keep yourself in the background and to give just exactly that right amount of direction which will enable Tommy to do it for himself.” (PR 33, p. 782-83, THE WORK AND AIMS OF THE P.U.S., By Miss O’Ferrall, ex-HOE)
Charlotte Mason’s training college was unique, but it was not all study and offers some scope for imagination to today’s homeschool families implementing her method. This episode discusses the Scale How evenings that were part of the community life of her college to offer information and inspiration for how such social gatherings could round out a delightful education.
Listen Now:
“It is the custom at the House of Education for one or another student to read an appreciation of some favourite author or composer, or a paper on some other subject in which she is interested, illustrated b}’ extracts or compositions read or performed by some of those present. The information is of course gathered from various sources. We venture to think that this should be a pleasant custom in families; so a series will be published month by month, in order to familiarise our readers with the plan. Even the younger members of a family would enjoy taking part in the readings.—Ed.”
Charlotte Mason distilled her philosophy into some succinctly stated principles, and the homeschool or classroom teacher does well to underpin their efforts by considering the philosophy that drives the teaching. Today’s episode addresses principles 9-12, the specifics of what we believe about the mind, how it learns, and what the teacher must not do to impose on the natural development of a child in acquiring knowledge.
Listen Now:
[9] We hold that the child’s mind is no mere sac to hold ideas; but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a spiritual organism, with an appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet, with which it is prepared to deal ; and which it can digest and assimilate as the body does foodstuffs.
[10] 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.”
[11] 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. Out of this conception comes our principle that,-
[12] “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.”
“Herbart’s psychology is extraordinarily gratifying and attractive to teachers who are, like other people, eager to magnify their office; and here is a scheme which shows how every child is a new creation as he comes forth from the hands of his teacher. The teacher learns how to do it; he has but to draw together a mass of those ideas which themselves will combine in the mind into which they effect an entrance, and, behold, the thing is done: the teacher has done it; he has selected. the ideas, shewn the correlation of each with the other and the work is complete! The ideas establish themselves, the most potent rule and gather force, and if these be good, the man is made.” (6/114)
“…as we have seen, the world is being educated, that it is found wanting. Herbart begins to account for man minus what I have called the person. (Person is used in the common-sense, everyday acceptance of the word.) He allows a soul, but he says, “The soul has no capacity nor faculty whatever either to receive or to produce anything. It has originally neither ideas nor feelings nor desires. It knows nothing of itself and nothing of other things…” (3/58-60)
“Kaspar Hauser’s story and our common experience go to prove that the labour we spend on developing the ‘faculties,’ or in cultivating the senses, is largely thrown away. Nature has no need of our endeavours in these directions. Under the most adverse conceivable conditions she can work wonders if let alone.” (3/74)
“…we have not to develop the person; he is there already, with, possibly, every power that will serve him in his passage through life.” (3/75)
“We no longer ask ourselves whether it is better to learn a few subjects ‘thoroughly,’ so we say, or to get a ‘smattering’ of many. These questions are beside the mark.” (3/75)
“…there seems good reason to believe that the limit to human intelligence arises largely from the limit to human interests, that is, from the failure to establish personal relations on a wide scale with the persons who make up humanity,––relations of love, duty, responsibility, and, above all, of interest, living interest, with the near and the far-off, in time and in place. … [she continued] I think we should have a great educational revolution once we ceased to regard ourselves as assortments of so-called faculties and realised ourselves as persons whose great business it is to get in touch with other persons of all sorts and conditions, of all countries and climes, of all times, past and present.” (3/82-83)
“Therefore we do not feel it is lawful in the early days of a child’s life to select certain subjects for his education to the exclusion of others; … but we endeavour that he shall have relations of pleasure and intimacy established with as many as possible of the interests proper to him; not learning a slight or incomplete smattering about this or that subject, but plunging into vital knowledge, with a great field before him which in all his life he will not be able to explore. In this conception we get that ‘touch of emotion’ which vivifies knowledge, for it is probable that we feel only as we are brought into our proper vital relations.” (3/223)
“…they can only be elevated by ideas which act upon the imagination and act upon the character and influence the soul, and it is the function of all good teachers to bring those ideas before them.” (Charlotte Mason quoting Mr. Fisher, 6/126)
“As I have said elsewhere, the ideas required for the sustenance of children are to be found mainly in books of literary quality; given these the mind does for itself the sorting, arranging, selecting, rejecting, classifying, which Herbart leaves to the struggle of the promiscuous ideas which manage to cross the threshold.” (6/117)
“… we want to ensure that the children are gaining knowledge, not merely acquiring information, for the difference between the two is fundamental. Information might be described as the record of facts, whether in books or the mind of the individual, and it may be received rather passively and without much effort; whereas knowledge implies the result of the voluntary action of the mind to the material presented to it. It is something vital and personal, and presupposes an increase of intellectual aptitude in new directions and, as knowledge is never stationary, a new point of departure.” (Downton, PR 47, p. 334)
“Method implies two things-a way to an end, and step-by-step progress in that way…” (1/8)
“…asked itself what end it had in view…What is education after all? The answer came in the phrase–Education is the Science of Relations.” (Education as the Science of Relations, PR 13, p. 485)
“What we are concerned with is the fact that we personally have relations with all that there is in the present, all that there has been in the past and all that there will be in the future–with all above us and all about us–and that fulness of living, expansion, expressions and serviceableness for each of us, depend upon how far we apprehend these relationships and how many of them we lay hold of.” (PR 13, p. 485)
“It is our chief business to give him a chance to make the largest possible number of these attachments valid.” (PR 13, p. 486)
“The five relations which it is necessary for children to establish are:–[1]Their relations with God, of prayer, praise, love and duty; [2] their moral relations with their fellow-creatures, including history, literature, duties of a citizen, etc.; [3] their relations with Nature and the world around them; [4] their relations with the earth, including all sorts of bodily exercises; [5] their relations with materials, in handicrafts, etc.” (PR 16, pp. 61-64)
“A small English boy of nine living in Japan, [who] remarked, — ‘Isn’t it fun, Mother, learning all these things? Everything seems to fit into something else.’” But, she points out, “The boy had not found out the whole secret; everything fitted into something within himself.” (6/156-157)
“Everyone comes into the world capable of forming relations; some have greater affinities in one direction than others, and while one child will receive one class of ideas, and assimilate it quickly, another will choose another class altogether.” (Owen, PR 16, p. 61)
“Our deadly error is to suppose that we are his showman to the universe; and, not only so, but that there is no community at all between child and universe unless such as we choose to set up.” (3/188)
“…we, for our part,” Miss Mason tells us, “have two chief concerns–first, to put him in the way of forming these relations by presenting the right idea at the right time, and by forming the right habit upon the right idea; and, secondly, by not getting in the way and so preventing the establishment of the very relations we see to form.” (3/66)
“It is her duty to open the doors in many different directions through which the children may walk in the pursuit of knowledge whilst she is there to guide and direct as occasion requires.” (O’Farrell, PR 33, p. 782)
“Establishing proper relations is necessary for ‘fullness of life and joy in living.’” (3/75)
“We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. ‘Thou hast set my feet in a large room,’ should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time…that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. We cannot give the children these interests…The question is not,-how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education-but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?” (3/170-171)
“…the one positive precept [given to parents by Christ]… is ‘feed’ (which should be rendered ‘ pasture ‘) my lambs,’ place them in the midst of abundant food.” (6/81)
“It is a wide programme founded on the educational right of man; wide, but we may not say it is impossible nor may we pick and choose and educate him in this direction but not in that. We may not even make choice between science and the ‘humanities.’ Our part it seems to me is to give a child a vital hold upon as many as possible of those wide relationships proper to him.” (6/157)
Homeschool teachers must consider many aspects of education beyond the books and pencils, especially with the Charlotte Mason method. This “shorts” episode includes three widely dispersed topics: the role of the “State,” sensations and feelings, and mottos.
Listen Now:
“…children are the property of the nation, to be brought up for the nation as is best for the nation, and not according to the whim of individual parents. The law is for the punishment of evil-doers, for the praise of them that do well [and, as an aside, that’s I Peter 2:14 she’s quoting there]; so, practically, parents have very free play; but it is as well we should remember that the children are a national trust whose bringing-up is the concern of all…” (1/6)
“The smallness of the family tends to obscure its character, and we see no force in the phrase [‘The family is the unit of the nation.’]; we do not perceive that, if the unit of the nation is the natural commune, the family; then, is the family pledged to carry on within itself all the functions of the State, with the delicacy, precision, and fulness of detail proper to work done on a small scale.” (2/5)
“The wonder that Almighty God can endure so far to leave the very making of an immortal being in the hands of human parents is only matched by the wonder that human parents can accept this divine trust with hardly a thought of its significance.” (1/333)
“…they are, like the bloom to the peach, the last perfection of a beautiful character; but when they become subjective, when every feeling concerns itself with the ego, we have, as in the case of sensations, morbid conditions set up; the person begins by being ‘over sensitive,’ hysteria supervenes, perhaps melancholia, an utterly spoilt life.” (2/295)
“…we perceive that the education we are giving exceeds all that we intended or imagined.” (3/148)
“…has had much effect in throwing children upon the possibilities, capabilities, duties and determining power belonging to them as persons.” (6/29)
“The P.U.S. motto, ‘ I am, I can, I ought, I will ‘, is known as the Augustine ladder. A ladder suggests a necessity to climb, and this ladder should help us in our efforts to achieve higher things. The first step of the ladder, ‘ I am ‘ reminds us of our responsibilities. Our conscious existence suggests all kinds of possibilities. This is our starting point. ‘ I can ‘ suggests an ideal. There may be a series of failures, but each effort should bring us a little nearer to the goal; we all can do a little, and *every mickle makes a muckle ‘. ‘ I ought *, which is sometimes put before ‘ I can ‘, is a twin to it, for what we ought to do we can do. ‘ I ought’ may suggest to us but cold duty. It might be an assistance if we thought of this step surrounded by a glowing halo, we would do better if we loved warmly what we ought to do. The story of Balaam in the Old Testament is an illustration of a man who did what he ought with his heart attached to that which was not permitted, and the end of the story shows us that his desire for wealth and worldly success was too strong, and his fall was inevitable. The last step, and likewise the most important, ‘ I will’, should be prefaced by the phrase ‘ by the Grace of God ‘ We are often too much inclined to feel that our strength is in ourselves, but St. Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, shows us the right view. ‘ Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling he says, and then adds, *It is God Who worketh in you, both to will and to do … ‘ We may not know what the will is, but we know what it does. It may be likened to a door-keeper letting in the guests. The door-keeper, having once let in the guests (ideas), has no further control over them. The more we consciously perform an act of will the stronger that will-power becomes….found in an old catechism book … I’m only one, but I am one; I can’t do everything, but I can do something. That which I do, I ought to do, and that which I ought to do, with God’s help so I will do” (THE P.U.S. MOTTO by Nancy Hatch (C.M.C.) PR 65, p. 68)
“I am told that we, as a society, are destined to live by our motto. … An inspiring motto must always be a power, but to live upon the good repute of our motto, and to live up to it and in it, are two different things, and I am afraid the Parents’ Union has much and continual thinking and strenuous living to face, if it proposes to stand before the world as interpreting and illustrating these ‘memorable words.’ But we are not a faint-hearted body; we mean, and mean intensely; and to those who purpose the best, and endeavour after the best, the best arrive.” (3/148)
