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 keynote of a Charlotte Mason education is the nature walk. Would you believe we have never had an episode dedicated solely to this topic? By way of apology for the delay, this episode covers all things nature walk–where, when, how, what preparations, destinations, options for families or groups of families. Spring has sprung, and this episode should inspire you whether you are a beginner or an old hand at nature rambles and hikes.
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“Before the walk commences it is a better plan to have some definite aim to propose to the children; for example, that they should note how many different kinds of flowers they will find in their walk ; how many different kinds of birds they will see, etc.” (Alfred Thornley, PR 19, p. 726)
“It is our personal attitude to the wonders of Nature that both in theory and practice will be of more value to the child than many words.” (Walton, PR 65, p. 70)
“What place does narration take in these lessons? Miss Mason says that a lesson without narration is a lesson wasted.” (V. C. Curry, PR 36 p. 531)
“I know that many parents feel handicapped…by their own defective education in nature knowledge…they must dismiss from their minds any idea that it is the quantity of knowledge acquired that makes a nature student. It is rather the particular habit of mind induced in the act of acquiring such knowledge which is of the most value to us and our children.” (Alfred Thornley, PR 19, p. 722)
Charlotte Mason addresses concerns about our body in Ourselves and this week’s lively discussion focuses on the body’s need for rest. Not just our students, but homeschool teachers also need rest. We hope this episode will energize you to consider how to work true rest into your life.
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Ourselves (Volume 4), Book I: Part I (pp. 11-32)
“[this] fellow-servant and brother, Rest, steps in with, ‘It is my turn now,’ and the tired person is glad to sit down and be quiet for a little, or lie on his face with a book, or, best of all, go to sleep soundly at night and wake up refreshed and ready for anything.” (4/I/19)
“The less he exerts himself, the less he is able to exert himself, because the muscles which Restlessness keeps firm and in good order, Sloth relaxes and weakens until it becomes a labour to raise a hand to the head or drag our foot after another.” (4/I/20)
“Once Sloth is ruler in Mansoul, the person cannot wake up in the morning, dawdles over his dressing, comes down late for breakfast, hates a walk, can’t bear games, dawdles over his preparation, does not want to make boats or whistles, or collect stamps, drops in all his lessons, is in the Third form when he ought to be in the Sixth, saunters about the corners of the playing-field with his hands in his pockets, never does anything for anybody, not because he is unkind or ill-natured, but because he will not take the trouble.” (4/I/20)
“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 favorite 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.” (3/33-34)
“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28, quoted in 4/II/93)
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.
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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)
