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.
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.
Listen Now:
“‘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)
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.”
