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.
The Charlotte Mason in Our Homes series continues with an interview with Michele Jahncke, mother of five and business owner. We are grateful for her years of experience that have given her insight and encouragement for all busy moms everywhere, and especially those who find it necessary to work outside the home while trying to do a conscientious job of homeschooling. Michele shares honestly about her own mistakes and failures, and how Charlotte Mason’s instructions have guided her to paths of wisdom.
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{Michele, as Dolores Umbridge with her children} {Michele’s Family in their historic Cafe}
“If mothers could learn to do for themselves what they do for their children when these are overdone, we should have happier households. Let the mother go out to play! If she would only have courage to let everything go when life becomes too tense, and just take a day, or half a day, out in the fields, or with a favourite book, or in a picture gallery looking long and well at just two or three pictures, or in bed, without the children, life would go on far more happily for both children and parents. The mother would be able to hold herself in ‘wise passiveness,’ and would not fret her children by continual interference, even of hand or eye––she would let them be.” (3/33-34)
In the curriculum feast Charlotte Mason spreads for children is the subject of physical geography. This podcast episode will define how physical geography fits into the curriculum and the way it was developed throughout the forms.
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Home Education (Volume 1), Part II, Chapter IX
“Small Things may teach Great…Pictorial Geography.––But the mother, who knows better, will find a hundred opportunities to teach geography by the way: a duck-pond is a lake or an inland sea; any brooklet will serve to illustrate the great rivers of the world; a hillock grows into a mountain––an Alpine system; a hazel-copse suggests the mighty forests of the Amazon; a reedy swamp, the rice-fields of China; a meadow, the boundless prairies of the West; the pretty purple flowers of the common mallow is a text whereon to hang the cotton fields of the Southern States: indeed, the whole field of pictorial geography––maps may wait until by-and-by––may be covered in this way.” (1/72)
“The knowledge to be acquired must be gained by the experiences and discoveries of the children themselves. … the children during their daily outings should observe for themselves the action of wind, frost, and rain, the alteration caused to the landscape by a flood. Let a child once see for himself the action of ice on the rocks, how the windings of a stream are due to the peculiarities of the land, that the formation of a lake is similar to that of a roadside puddle, and there will be no more difficulty in learning or remembering the scientific terms which at the outset seemed hard. Moreover, instead of being dependent on their book for diagrams, the children will be able to draw these from their own observations, thus assuring full comprehension of the subject studied.” (Heath, C.N. The Uses of Books in Geography. PR 14)
This episode of A Delectable Education podcast addresses a question Charlotte Mason never had to face: reading and electronics. Reading in our day is in a state of plummeting deterioration. Electronics are here to stay but have a detrimental effect on the reading habits. How do we cope with these two conditions? How do we help our children live with technology and become deep readers?
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“Education should be by Things and by Books.” (3/231)
“Supply them with books of calibre to give the intellect something to grapple with.” (5/257)
“Thus, a boy’s head may be so full of his stamp collection or of the next cricket match that there is no room in it for bigger things. The stamps and the cricket are all right, but it is not all right by any means to miss the opportunities of great interests that come to us and pass unnoticed, while we think only of these small matters. Not only so: boys and girls may be so full of marks and places, prizes and scholarships, that they never see that their studies are meant to unlock the door for them into this or that region of intellectual joy and interest. School and college over, their books are shut for ever. When they become men and women, they still live among narrow interests, with hardly an outlook upon the wide world, past or present. This is to be the slaves of knowledge and not its joyful masters. Let it be said of us as it was of the late Bishop of London, ‘His was the rare gift of mastering knowledge as his splendid servant, not being himself mastered by it as its weary slave.'” (4/I/44)
This month’s Charlotte Mason podcast question for us is asked so often in so many forms that the entire episode is devoted to it. Multiple questions are summed up in “Am I failing? What if I’m not doing things perfectly, not doing it all, leaving out subjects, don’t know what I’m doing, can’t figure it all out, am avoiding subjects…should I give up?” Emily, Liz and Nicole share Miss Mason’s counsel, Biblical encouragement, and their own honest experiences.
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“There is no doubt that definite work, on a well-considered programme, with a given object in view, is a clear gain, leading to definiteness of purpose and concentration of effort and attention, the qualities that go to make a successful man.” (5/182)
“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. Shelley offers us the key to education when he speaks of ‘understanding that grows bright gazing on many truths.’ Because the relationships a child is born to are very various, the knowledge we offer him must be various too.” (6/157)
“We may not choose or reject subjects–You will see at a glance, with this Captain Idea of establishing relationships as a guide, the unwisdom of choosing or rejecting this or that subject, as being more or less useful or necessary in view of a child’s future…But we do not know how much we are shutting out from Tommy’s range of thought…” (3/162-163)
“Sometimes, parents have the mistaken notion that the greater the number of subjects the heavier the work; though, in reality, the contrary is the case, unless the hours of study are increased.” (3/286)
“There are always those present with us whom God whispers in the ear, through whom He sends a direct message to the rest. Among these messengers are the great painters who interpret to us some of the meanings of life. To read their messages aright is a thing due from us.” (4/I/102)
“We are waking up to our duties and in proportion as mothers become more highly educated and efficient, they will doubtless feel the more strongly that the education of their children during the first six years of life is an undertaking hardly to be entrusted to any hands but their own. And they will take it up as their profession––that is, with the diligence, regularity, and punctuality which men bestow on their professional labours.” (1/2-3)
“In the things of science, in the things of art, in the things of practical everyday life, his God doth instruct him and doth teach him, her God doth instruct her and doth teach her. Let this be the mother’s key to the whole of the education of each boy and each girl; not of her children; the Divine Spirit does not work with nouns of multitude, but with each single child. Because He is infinite, the whole world is not too great a school for this indefatigable Teacher, and because He is infinite, He is able to give the whole of his infinite attention for the whole time to each one of his multitudinous pupils. We do not sufficiently rejoice in the wealth that the infinite nature of our God brings to each of us.” (2/273)
This Charlotte Mason podcast episode is an interview with a father. Every home has special challenges and Jonathon Landell’s particular one is that of being a single father teaching his children himself. He shares how this method has changed his attitude toward education and children, has helped him with his challenges, and has brought special rewards.
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{Jonathon and his two girls}
“One more thing is of vital importance; children must have books, living books; the best are not too good for them; anything less than the best is not good enough; and if it is needful to exercise economy, let go everything that belongs to soft and luxurious living before letting go the duty of supplying the books, and the frequent changes of books, which are necessary for the constant stimulation of the child’s intellectual life.” (2/279)
