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.
A Charlotte Mason education included the best novels the world had to offer. This episode is a lively discussion of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, a book Miss Mason referred to in all of her six volumes and one of the first English historical novels. To read it is to understand more about Miss Mason, and ourselves.
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“Waverley by name was wavering by nature, was ever the sport of circumstances because he had not learned in youth to direct his course. He blunders into many ( most interesting) misadventures because he had failed to get, through his studies, the alertness of mind and the self-restraint which should make a man of him. Many pleasant things befall him, but not one of them, unless we except Rose Bradwardine’s love – and when did woman study justice in the bestowal of her favours?–not one did he earn by his own wit or prowess; each advantage and success which came to him was the earnings of another man. The elder Waverley had not only fortune but force of character to make friends, so we are not made sad for the amiable young man for whom we must needs feel affection ; he does nothing to carve out a way for himself, and he does everything to his own hindrance out of pure want of the power of self-direction, but his uncle has fortune and friends, and all ends well. For the sake, no doubt, of young persons less happily situated, and of parents who are not able to play the part of bountiful Providence to sons and daughters whom they have failed to fit for the conduct of their own lives, the great novelist takes care to point out that Edward Waverley’s personal failure in life was the fault of his education. His abilities were even brilliant, but ‘ I ought’ had waited upon ‘ I like’ from his earliest days, and he had never learned to make himself do the thing he would.” (2/63-64)
“These things arrive to us after many readings of a book that is worth while ; and the absurdity of saying, ‘I have read’ Jane Austen or the Waverley novels should be realised.” (5/374)
Charlotte Mason homeschoolers know that the curriculum feeds the whole person. Miss Mason tackled helping young persons to understand themselves and their place in the world through one of her volumes, Ourselves, to widen their understanding of themselves and the world they live in. This episode gives an overview of the purpose and plan for this book in the feast and is the first of the season 6 podcast series covering topics from Self-Knowledge, the first book of Ourselves.
Listen Now:
Ourselves (Volume 4), Book I: Introductory (pp. 1-10)
“You must not understand that all these are different parts of a person; but that they are different powers which every person has…” (4/I/10)
Charlotte Mason developed her educational method upon underlying philosophical principles, but many of those influences popular in her day are unknown to today’s homeschooling teachers. This episode unpacks three prominent figures who were giants in education then, discussed in Miss Mason’s Home Education series, and attempts to distill their contributions, and to compare and contrast them to the ideas Miss Mason rejected or accepted.
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“‘The Mother is qualified, and qualified by the Creator Himself, to become the principal agent in the development of her child…and what is demanded of his is–a thinking love…Maternal love is the first agent in education.’” (1/2)
”What we may call the enthusiasm of childhood, joyous teaching, loving and lovable teachers and happy school hours for the little people, are among the general gains from this source.” (3/55)
“Pestalozzi aimed more at harmoniously developing the faculties than at making use of them for the acquirement of knowledge; he sought to prepare the vase rather than to fill it.” (2/30)
“Worked out, for the most part, [his] educational thought with an immediate view to the children of the poor. Because the children that he had to deal with had a limited vocabulary, and untrained observing powers, Pestalozzi taught them to see and then to say: ‘I see a hole in the carpet. I see a small hole in the carpet. I see a small round hole in the carpet. I see a small round hole with a black edge in the carpet,’ and so on; and such training may be good for such children.” (2/226)
“It is not their perceptive powers we have to train, but the habit of methodical observation and accurate record.” (2/226)
“We reverence Froebel. Many of his great thoughts we share; we cannot say borrow, because some, like the child’s relations to the universe, are at least as old as Plato; others belong to universal practice and experience, and this shows their psychological rightness. Froebel gathered diffused thought and practice into a system, but he did a greater thing than this. He raised an altar to the enthusiasm of childhood upon which the flame has never since gone out. The true Kindergartnerin [that is the teacher of the kindergarten class] is the artist amongst teachers; she is filled with the inspiration of her work, and probably most sincere teachers have caught something from her fervour, some sense of the beauty of childhood, and of the enthralling delight of truly educational work.” (1/185-86)
“Given such a superior being to conduct it, and the Kindergarten is beautiful––’tis like a little heaven below’; but put a commonplace woman in charge of such a school, and the charmingly devised gifts and games and occupations become so many instruments of wooden teaching.” (1/178)
“…during the first six or seven years in which he might have become intimately acquainted with the properties and history of every natural object within his reach, he has obtained, exact ideas, it is true … but this at the expense of much of that real knowledge of the external world which at no time of his life will he be so fitted to acquire.” (1/180)
“…in the home a thousand such opportunities occur; if only in such trifles as the straightening of a tablecloth or of a picture, the hanging of a towel, the packing of a parcel––every thoughtful mother invents a thousand ways of training in her child a just eye and a faithful hand.” (1/180)
“…that some of the principles which should govern Kindergarten training are precisely those in which every thoughtful mother endeavours to bring up her family; while the practices of the Kindergarten, being only ways, amongst others, of carrying out these principles … but may be adopted so far as they fit in conveniently with the mother’s general scheme for the education of her family. (1/181)
“In the first place, we take children seriously as persons like ourselves, only more so.” (3/61)
“The problem is simplified anyway. All our complex notions of intellect, will, feeling and so on, disappear. The soul is thrown open to ideas––a fair field and no favour; and ideas, each of them a living entity, according to the familiar Platonic notion, crowd and jostle one another for admission, and for the best places, and for the most important and valuable coalitions, once they have entered. They lie below the ‘threshold’ watching a chance to slip in. They hurry to join their friends and allies upon admission, they ‘vault’ and they ‘taper,’ they form themselves into powerful ‘apperception masses’ which occupy a more or less permanent place in the soul; and the soul– what does it do? It is not evident otherwise than as it affords a stage for this drama of ideas; and the self, the soul or the person, however we choose to call him, is an effect and not a cause, a result, and not an original fact.” (3/59)
“This idea of all education springing from and resting upon our relation to Almighty God is one which we have ever laboured to enforce. We take a very distinct stand upon this point. We do not merely give a religious education, because that would seem to imply the possibility of some other education, a secular education, for example. But we hold that all education is divine, that every good gift of knowledge and insight comes from above, that the Lord the Holy Spirit is the supreme educator of mankind, and that the culmination of all education (which may, at the same time, be reached by a little child) is that personal knowledge of and intimacy with God in which our being finds its fullest perfection.” (3/95)
“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. Further, within it lie no forms of intuition or thought, no laws of willing and acting, nor any sort of predisposition, however remote, to all this.” (3/58-59)
“We see that each advances truth, but that neither expresses the whole truth even so far as to afford a working basis for educators.” (3/62)
Of supreme importance to homeschool and other educators is knowing who Charlotte Mason called “The Supreme Educator of all mankind”–the Holy Spirit. This podcast episode discusses the implications of her capstone point in the synopsis, the role of the Holy Spirit in education.
Listen Now:
Home Education (Volume 1), pp. 142-144 Parents and Children (Volume 2), pp. 22-23 School Education (Volume 3), 95-96, 117-118, 125, 146, 153-155
[20] We allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual and ‘ spiritual ‘ life of children, but teach them that the Divine Spirit has constant access to their spirits, and is their continual Helper in all the interests, duties and joys of life.
“…but the great recognition, [is] that God the Holy Spirit is Himself, personally, the Imparter of knowledge, the Instructor of youth, the Inspirer of genius…” (2/271)
“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 teacher 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 great recognition resolves that discord in our lives of which most of us are, more or less, aware. … Is it not a fact that the spiritual life is exigeant, demands our sole interest and concentrated energies? Yet the claims of intellect––mind, of the æsthetic sense––taste, press upon us urgently. We must think, we must know, we must rejoice in and create the beautiful. And if all the burning thoughts that stir in the minds of men, all the beautiful conceptions they give birth to, are things apart from God, then we too must have a separate life, a life apart from God, a division of ourselves into secular and religious––discord and unrest. We believe that this is the fertile source of the unfaith of the day, especially in young and ardent minds. The claims of intellect are urgent; the intellectual life is a necessity not to be foregone at any hazard. … But once the intimate relation, the relation of Teacher and taught in all things of the mind and spirit, be fully recognised, our feet are set in a large room; there is space for free development in all directions, and this free and joyous development, whether of intellect or heart, is recognised as a Godward movement. (2/274-75)
“Such a recognition of the work of the Holy Spirit as the Educator of mankind, in things intellectual as well as in things moral and spiritual, gives us … a sense of harmony in our efforts and of acceptance of all that we are.” (2/276)
“This idea of all education springing from and resting upon our relation to Almighty God is one which we have ever laboured to enforce. We take a very distinct stand upon this point. We do not merely give a religious education, because that would seem to imply the possibility of some other education, a secular education, for example. But we hold that all education is divine, that every good gift of knowledge and insight comes from above, that the Lord the Holy Spirit is the supreme educator of mankind, and that the culmination of all education (which may, at the same time, be reached by a little child) is that personal knowledge of and intimacy with God in which our being finds its fullest perfection.” (3/95)
“How to fortify the children against the doubts of which the air is full, is an anxious question. Three courses are open: to teach as we of an older generation have been taught, and to let them bide their time and their chance; to attempt to deal with the doubts and difficulties which have turned up, or are likely to turn up; or, to give children such hold upon vital truth, and at the same time such an outlook upon current thought, that they shall be landed on the safe side of the controversies of their day, open to truth, in however new a light presented, and safeguarded against mortal error.” (2/41)
“The Mind of the Child is ‘Good Ground.’––Their keen sensitiveness to spiritual influences is not due to ignorance on the part of the children. It is we, not they, who are in error. The whole tendency of modern biological thought is to confirm the teaching of the Bible: the ideas which quicken come from above; the mind of the little child is an open field, surely ‘good ground,’ where, morning by morning, the sower goes forth to sow, and the seed is the Word. All our teaching of children should be given reverently, with the humble sense that we are invited in this matter to co-operate with the Holy Spirit; but it should be given dutifully and diligently, with the awful sense that our co-operation would appear to be made a condition of the Divine action; that the Saviour of the world pleads with us to ‘suffer the little children to come unto Me,’ as if we had the power to hinder, as we know that we have.” (2/48)
“The problem before the educator is to give the child control over his own nature … In looking for a solution of this problem, I do not undervalue the Divine grace––far otherwise; but we do not always make enough of the fact that Divine grace is exerted on the lines of enlightened human effort; that the parent, for instance, who takes the trouble to understand what he is about in educating his child, deserves, and assuredly gets, support from above; and that Rebecca, let us say, had no right to bring up her son to be “thou worm, Jacob,” in the trust that Divine grace would, speaking reverently, pull him through. Being a pious man, the son of pious parents, he was pulled through, but his days, he complains at the end, were ‘few and evil.'” (1/104)
For every homeschool teacher, Charlotte Mason’s wisdom on the child’s personality is invaluable. This next installment of the synopsis, points 16-19, covers these two aspects, aspects the teacher has an obligation to understand and instruct their children in.
Listen Now:
Home Education (Volume 1), Part V, Chapter I
Ourselves (Volume 4), Book I, Chapter VI; Book II, Part II
An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education (Volume 6), Chapters VIII & IX
[16] There are two guides to moral and intellectual self management to offer to children, which we may call ‘the way of the will’ and ‘the way of the reason.’
[17] 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 tum 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.)
[18] 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.
[19] Therefore, children should be taught, as they become mature enough to understand such teaching, that the chief responsibility which rests on them as persons is the acceptance or rejection of ideas. To help them in this choice we give them principles of conduct, and a wide range of the knowledge fitted to them. These principles should save children from some of the loose thinking and heedless action which cause most of us to live at a lower level than we need.
“…the business of reason is rather to prove for us what we think is right, than to bring us to conclusions which are right in themselves.” (4/64)
“…what the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies. The mind doesn’t direct the will. The mind is actually captive to what the will wants, and the will itself, in turn, is captive to what the heart wants.” (Dr. Ashley Null)
“Logic gives us the very formula of reason, and that which is logically proved is not necessarily right.” (6/144)
“It is madness to let children face a debatable world with only, say, a mathematical preparation. If our business were to train their power of reasoning, such a training would no doubt be of service; but the power is there already, and only wants material to work upon.” (6/147)
“Every mother knows how intensely reasonable a child is and how difficult it is to answer his quite logical and foolishly wrong conclusions. So we need not be deterred from dealing with serious matters with these young neophytes, but only as the occasion occurs; we may not run the risk of boring them with the great questions of life while it is our business to send them forth assured.” (6/150-151)
“Children should know that such things are before them also; that whenever they want to do wrong capital reasons for doing the wrong thing will occur to them. But, happily, when they want to do right no less cogent reasons for right doing will appear.” (6/142)
