This Charlotte Mason education podcast focuses on the papers, the recordings, and drawings–all the reproductions of knowledge in the making. In particular, Liz, Nicole, and Emily address the explicitly described or preserved examples of various notebooks Mason’s students used from which we can glean ideas to benefit our own students today.

Listen Now:

“It is very helpful to read with a commonplace book or reading-diary, in which to put down any striking thought in your author, or your own impression of the work, or of any part of it; but not summaries of facts. Such a diary, carefully kept through life, should be exceedingly interesting as containing the intellectual history of the writer; besides, we never forget the book that we have made extracts from, and of which we have taken the trouble to write a short review.” (5/260)

“The children keep a dated record of what they see…” (3/236)

“Children should be encouraged to watch, patiently and quietly, until they learn something of the habits and history of bee, ant, wasps, spider, hairy caterpillar, dragonfly, and whatever of larger growth comes in their way.” (1/57)

“Let all he finds out about it be entered in his diary—by his mother, if writing be a labour to him,—where he finds it, what it is doing, or seems to him to be doing; it’s colour, shape, legs: someday he will come across the name of the creature and will recognize the description of an old friend.” (1/58)

“These note-books are a source of pride and joy, and are freely illustrated by drawings (brushwork) of twig, flower, insect, etc.,” (3/236)

“A flower and bird list should always be kept, and also any other lists which interest the individual-fungi, birds’ nests, insects, animals, fossils, etc. These lists work best kept in columns, with the name, number, and date of finding all on one line, and the next underneath and so on. Latin names, and names of families are a great help in classification and Latin names for flowers are invaluable, especially in cases where a single flower has a different name in practically every county.” (The Charm of Nature Study by G. Dowton, The Parents’ Review, Volume 41, 1930)

“In Science, or rather, nature study, we attach great importance to recognition, believing that the power to recognise and name a plant or stone or constellation involves classification and includes a good deal of knowledge. To know a plant by its gesture and habitat, its time and its way of flowering and fruiting; a bird by its flight and song and its times of coming and going; to know when, year after year, you may come upon the redstart and the pied fly-catcher, means a good deal of interested observation, and of; at any rate, the material for science.” (3/236)

“Calendars.––It is a capital plan for the children to keep a calendar––the first oak-leaf, the first tadpole, the first cowslip, the first catkin, the first ripe blackberries, where seen, and when. The next year they will know when and where to look out for their favourites, and will, every year, be in a condition to add new observations. Think of the zest and interest, the object, which such a practice will give to daily walks and little excursions. There is hardly a day when some friend may not be expected to hold a first ‘At Home.’” (1/54)

“Let him never work with figures the notation of which is beyond him, and when he comes to ‘carry’ in an addition or multiplication sum, let him not say he carries ‘two’ or ‘three,’ but ‘two tens,’ or ‘three hundreds,’ as the case may be.” (1/259)

For the Love of Physics, Walter Lewin

Emily’s Bird & Flower List Notebook

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The Charm of Nature Study, G. Dowton, The Parents’ Review, Volume 41

P.U.S. Programme 105

Nature Work at the House of Education, H.D. Geldart, The Parents’ Review, Volume 9

Some examples of HOE Nature Note-Books:

Episode 98: Drawing

Blog Post with Bird and Flower List examples

Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Blog Post on the Science Notebook

Riverbend Press (email for notebooks)

Irene Stephens’ Article on Teaching Math

This week’s Charlotte Mason podcast episode is another Q&A session with Liz, Nicole, and Emily, notably:  is it okay to start a Mason education midyear? are the special studies books too simple and demeaning to our child’s intelligence? and what about a passage in Mason’s writings  that contradicts ideas she shares in other places?

Listen Now:

“Not what we have learned, but what we are waiting to know is the delectable part of knowledge.” (3/224)

“The real use of naturalists’ books at this stage is to give the child delightful glimpses into the world of wonders he lives in, to reveal the sorts of things to be seen by curious eyes, and fill him with desire to make discoveries for himself. There are many to be had, all pleasant reading, many of them written by scientific men, and yet requiring little or no scientific knowledge for the enjoyment.” (1/64)

“Away with books, and ‘reading to’–for the first five or six years of life. The endless succession of story-books, scenes, shifting like a panorama before the child’s vision, is a mental and moral dissipation; he gets nothing to grow upon, or is allowed no leisure to digest what he gets.” (5/216)

“The endless succession of storybooks, scenes, shifting life a panorama before the child’s vision, is a mental and moral dissipation; he gets nothing to grow upon, or is allowed no leisure to digest what he gets.” (5/217)

“They must grow up upon the best. There must never be a period in their lives when they are allowed to read or listen to twaddle or reading-made-easy. There is never a time when they are unequal to worthy thoughts, well put; inspiring tales, well told…and we shall train a race of readers who will demand literature–that is, the fit and beautiful expression of inspiring ideas and pictures of life.” (2/263)

“In the first place, it is not her business to entertain the little people: there should be no storybooks, no telling of tales, as little talk as possible…” (1/45)

“The mischief begins in the nursery. No sooner can a child read at all than hosts of friendly people show their interest in him by a present of a ‘pretty book.’ A ‘pretty book’ is not necessarily a picture-book, but one in which the page is nicely broken up in talk or short paragraphs. Pretty books for the schoolroom age follow those for the nursery, and, nursery and schoolroom outgrown, we are ready for ‘Mudies’ lightest novels; the succession of ‘pretty books never fails us; we have no time for works of any intellectual fibre, and we have no more assimilating power than has the schoolgirl who feeds upon cheesecakes.” (5/214)

“Guard the nursery; let nothing in that has not the true literary flavour; let the children grow up on a few books read over and over, and let them have none, the reading of which does not cost an appreciable mental effort.” (5/215)

“‘Books for the young’ used to be few and dull; now, they are many and delightful.” (5/215)

Formation of Character (Volume 5), Part III, Chapter I

Gathering Moss

A Field Guide to Bird Songs (CD)

First Look at Books by Millicent Selsam

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Science, A Vast and Joyous Realm Teacher Training Video

A Vision for Children Teacher Training Video

This Charlotte Mason education podcast episode explores our responsibilities in teaching. If we have agreed to take on homeschooling as our work, what are the attitudes and practices that will make us good at our job?

Listen Now:

“Our co-operation appears to be the indispensable condition of all the divine workings….
The contrary is equally true. Such teaching as enwraps a child’s mind in folds of many words that his thought is unable to penetrate, which gives him rules and definitions, and tables, in lieu of ideas––this is teaching which excludes and renders impossible the divine co-operation.”(2/274)

“As we have had occasion to say before, in this great work of education parents and teachers are permitted to play only a subordinate part after all. You may bring your horse to the water, but you can’t make him drink; and you may present ideas of the fittest to the mind of the child; but you do not know in the least which he will take, and which he will reject. And very well for us it is that this safeguard to his individuality is implanted in every child’s breast. Our part is to see that his educational plat is constantly replenished with fit and inspiring ideas, and then we must needs leave it to the child’s own appetite to take which he will have, and as much as he requires.” (3/127)

“The task God has given to mothers must always be the most responsible committed to any human being. It is nothing less than the training for His Service of His own children–children whose bodies must be sound and healthy, whose minds must be disciplined and alert, whose souls if they are to fulfill the purpose for which He has sent them here” (In Memoriam)

“Now, the eager soul who gives attention and zeal to his work often spoils its completeness by chasing after many things when he should be doing the next thing in order. … It is well to make up our mind that there is always a next thing to be done, whether in work or play; and that the next thing, be it ever so trifling, is the right thing; not so much for its own sake, perhaps, as because, each time we insist upon ourselves doing the next thing, we gain power in the management of that unruly filly, Inclination.” (4a/171)

“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 [although I would propose that she means this for all of the years we educate our children] 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.” (1/3)

“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)

“The mother is qualified,” says Pestalozzi, “and qualified by the Creator Himself, to become the principal agent in the development of her child; … and what is demanded of her is––a thinking love … God has given to the child all the faculties of our nature, but the grand point remains undecided––how shall this heart, this head, these hands be employed? to whose service shall they be dedicated? A question the answer to which involves a futurity of happiness or misery to a life so dear to thee. Maternal love is the first agent in education.” (1/2)

…”in the faith that mothers work wonders once they are convinced that wonders are demanded of them. (1/44)

In Memoriam

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Episode 3: The Role of the Teacher

Episode 26: Charlotte Mason–Food for Mothers

Episode 32: The Perilous Privilege of Mothering

Charlotte Mason encouraged a practice called “Masterly Inactivity.” Emily, Liz, and Nicole discuss  what this is, why it is important, and how in the world a mother actually manages to balance law and freedom in her home.

Listen Now:

“We ought to do so much for our children, and are able to do so much for them, that we begin to think everything rests with us and that we should never intermit for a moment our conscious action on the young mind and hearts about us. Our endeavors become fussy and restless. We are too much with our children, ‘late and soon.’ We try to dominate them too much, even when we fail to govern, and we are unable to perceive that wise and purposeful letting alone is the best part of education.” (3/27-28)

Masterly inactivity “indicates the power to act, the desire to act, and the insight and self-restraint which forbid action.” (3/28)

“The sense of authority is the sine quâ non of the parental relationship, and I am not sure that without that our activities or our inactivity will produce any great results.” (3/28)

The child is “free under authority, which is liberty; to be free without authority is license.” (3/29)

“The masterly and the abject ‘yes’ are quite different notes.” (3/29)

“…parental relationship and of that authority which belongs to it, by right and by nature, acts upon the children as do sunshine and shower on a seed in good soil. But the fussy parent, the anxious parent, the parent who explains overmuch, who commands overmuch, who excuses overmuch, who restrains overmuch, who interferes overmuch, even the parent who is with the children overmuch, does away with dignity and simplicity of that relationship…” (3/29)

“children are always playing a game––half of chance, half of skill; they are trying how far they can go, how much of the management of their own lives they can get for the taking, and how much they must leave in the hands of the stronger powers.” (3/31)

“…see without watching, know without telling, be on the alert always, yet never obviously, fussily, so. This open-eyed attitude must be sphinx-like in its repose. The children must know themselves to be let alone, whether to do their own duty or to seek their own pleasure. The constraining power should be present, but passive, so that the child may not feel himself hemmed in without choice.” (3/31)

“In this matter the child who goes too much on crutches never learns to walk; he who is most played with by his elders has little power of inventing plays for himself; and so he misses that education which comes to him when allowed to go his own way.” (3/37)

“Nature will look after him and give him promptings of desire to know many things, and somebody must tell as he wants to know; and to do many things, and somebody should be handy just to put him in the way; and to be many things, naughty and good, and somebody should give direction.” (1/192)

“‘That’s not a star, it’s a planet, Tom,’ with a little twaddle about how planets are like our earth, more or less, was all I had for his hungry wonder. As for how one planet differs from another in glory, his sifting questions got nothing out of me; what nothing has, can nothing give. Again, he has, all of his own wit, singled out groups of stars and, like Hugh Miller, wasn’t it?––pricked them into paper with a pin. ‘Have they names? What is this, and this?’ ‘Those three stars are the belt of Orion’––the sum of my acquaintance with the constellations, if you will believe it! He bombarded me with questions all to the point. I tried bits of book knowledge which he did not want. It was a ‘bowing’ acquaintance, if no more, with the glorious objects before him that the child coveted, and he cornered me till his mother interfered with, ‘That will do, Tom: don’t tease father with your questions.’ A trifling incident, perhaps, but do you know I didn’t sleep a wink that night, or rather, I did sleep, and dreamt, and woke for good. I dreamt the child was crying for hunger and I had not a crust to give him. You know how vivid some dreams are. The moral flashed on me; the child had been crying to me with the hunger of the mind; he had asked for bread and got a stone. A thing like that stirs you. From that moment I had a new conception of a parent’s vocation and of my unfitness for it. I determined that night to find some way to help ourselves and the thousands of parents in the same ignorant case.” (5/122-123)

“The mother exercises the friendly vigilance of a guardian angel, being watchful, not to catch the child tripping, but to guide him into the acting out of the duty she has already made lovely in his eyes; for it is only as we do that we learn to do, and become strong in the doing.” (1/340)

“let them stand or fall by their own efforts.” (3/38)

“One of the features, and one of the disastrous features, of modern society, is that, in our laziness, we depend upon prodders and encourage a vast system of prodding.” I would say things are worse today than she could have imagined. I have reminders on my phone for every last little thing! Almost more important to our topic, however, is the fact that the “more we are prodded the lazier we get, and the less capable of the effort of will which should carry [us] to, and nearly carry us through, our tasks.” (3/39-40)

“Boys and girls are, on the whole, good, and desirous to do their duty.” (3/40)

“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)

“No doubt children are deeply grateful to managing parents, and we are all lazy enough to be thankful to persons who undertake our lives for us: but these well-meaning persons encroach; we are required to act for ourselves, think for ourselves, and let other persons do the same… [T]he feeding in quiet pastures, the being led beside still waters, we…do not see…is a natural state and condition, proper to everyone who will claim it. If we saw this, we should be less obtrusive in our dealings with children; we should study to be quiet, only seeing to it that our inactivity is MASTERLY.” (5/417)

“When we recognise that God does not make over the bringing up of children absolutely even to their parents, but that He works Himself, in ways which it must be our care not to hinder, in the training of every child, then we shall learn passiveness, humble and wise. We shall give children space to develop on the lines of their own characters in all right ways, and shall know how to intervene effectually to prevent those errors which, also, are proper to their individual characters.” (3/35)

School Education (Volume 3), Chapter 3

I Buy a School, Marion Berry

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Episode 62: Afternoons

Charlotte Mason wrote vastly on the subject of opinions, and this podcast will address some of her salient points. Do opinions matter? Does each person need to form their own? What do we do to help our children make sensible opinions? These questions and more will be discussed.

Listen Now:

“The thought we have about person or thing is our opinion.” (4/1/179)

“…the catch-word of the class…[the] sort of opinion [that] is quite worthless.” (4/1/180)

“It is a great part of our work in life to do our duty in our thoughts and form just opinions.” (4/1/181)

“We must all get opinions about our own country, about other countries, about occupations, amusements, about the books we read, the persons we hear of, the persons we meet, the pictures we see, the characters we read of, whether in fiction or history; in fact, there is nothing which passes before our minds about which it is not our business to form just and reasonable opinions.” (4/1/182)

“Perhaps no rules for the right conduct of life are more important than the following: (a) that we may not play with chance opinions; (b) that our own Reason affords an insufficient test of the value of an opinion (because Reason, as we have seen, argues in behalf of Inclination); (c) that we must labour to get knowledge as the foundation of opinions; (d) that we must also labour to arrive at principles whereby to try our opinions.” (4/2/59)

“We all know that, entertain a notion that a servant is dishonest, that a friend is false, that a dress is unbecoming, and some power within us, unconsciously to us, sets to work to collect evidence and bring irrefragable proof of the position we have chosen to take up. This is the history of wars and persecutions and family feuds all over the world. How necessary then that a child [or an adult I will add] should be instructed to understand the limitations of his own reason, so that he will not confound logical demonstration with eternal truth, and will know that the important thing to him is the ideas he permits himself to entertain, and not by any means the conclusions he draws from these ideas, because these latter are self-evolved.” (3/116)

“All that reason does for us is to prove, logically, any idea we choose to entertain.” (3/116)

“We often allow other people’s opinions to pass without protest, because we believe that they have been carefully thought out…” (4/116)

“It is intellectual Courage, which enables us to grapple with tasks of the mind with a sense of adequacy. Intellectual panic is responsible for many failures; for our failure to understand an argument, [for one]… Intellectual panic is responsible, too, for the catchwords we pass as our opinions. We fear it is not in us to form an opinion worth the holding and worth the giving forth.” (4/117)

“It is worthwhile to examine ourselves as to what our opinions are as to the questions discussed in conversation or otherwise. We may find that we have no distinct opinion. If so, let us not take up with the first that offers, but think, inquire, read, consider both sides, and then be ready with a gentle, clear, well-grounded expression of opinion… ” (4/115-116)

“The natural function of the mind, in the early years of life, is to gather the material of knowledge with a view to that very labour of generalisation which is proper to the adult mind.” (1/288)

“We may gather three rules, then, as to an opinion that is worth the having. We must have thought about the subject and know something about it, as a gardener does about the weather; it must be our own opinion, and not caught up as a parrot catches up its phrases; and lastly, it must be disinterested, that is, it must not be influenced by our inclination.” (4/1/180)

“It is our duty to form opinions carefully, and to hold them tenaciously in so far as the original grounds of our conclusions remain unshaken. But what we have no right to do, is to pass these opinions on to our children.” (3/42)

“…we must not allow ourselves to be occupied too much with one set of ideas.” (4/1/182)

“The more you withhold your opinions, the more anxious they are to get at them.” (5/229)

“The notion of doing all for the child with which the parents began gradually recedes. So soon as he shows that he has a way of his own he is encouraged to take it. Father and mother have no greater delight than to watch the individuality of their child unfold as a flower unfolds. But Othello loses his occupation. The more the child shapes his own course, the less do the parents find to do, beyond feeding him with food convenient, whether of love, or thought, or of bodily meat and drink. And here, we may notice, the parents need only supply; the child knows well enough how to appropriate. The parents’ chief care is, that that which they supply shall be wholesome and nourishing, whether in the way of picture books, lessons, playmates, bread and milk, or mother’s love. This is education as most parents understand it, with more of meat, more of love, more of culture, according to their kind and degree. They let their children alone, allowing human nature to develop on its own lines, modified by facts of environment and descent.

“Nothing could be better for the child than this ‘masterly inactivity,’ so far as it goes. It is well he should be let grow and helped to grow according to his nature; and so long as the parents do not step in to spoil him, much good and no very evident harm comes of letting him alone. But this philosophy of ‘let him be,’ while it covers a part, does not cover the serious part of the parents’ calling; does not touch the strenuous incessant efforts upon lines of law which go to the producing of a human being at his best.” (1/4-5)

“To tolerate, or bear with, the principles and opinions which rule the lives of others is the part of Indifference and not of Goodwill. Candour, fair-mindedness to other people’s thoughts, is what Benevolence offers.” (4/1/93)

Ourselves, Book I, Chapter XVIII: Opinions: Justice in Thought

Essays of John Milton

In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason

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Episode 89: Mothers’ Continuing Education