Our Introduction to Charlotte Mason Education
It has been said that great minds discuss ideas, medium minds discuss events and small minds discuss people. Most home educators would hope that their children might eventually be part of the first group, not as a matter of pride but that they might become people who could make a positive difference in the world; for without ideas you are able only to follow the crowds.
Traditionally the focus of education has been upon internalising an outline of people and events – the facts which make up cultural knowledge. Early in my own homeschooling experience I came across a book by an educator who proposed to give children a different education, one which would be more than a treadmill of subjects. It would, she said, so stimulate their imaginations that they would love learning for the rest of their lives. “Education is a life,” the writer said, “a life built on ideas.”
My interest piqued, I sought to learn more about this educator, Charlotte Mason. The last thing I wanted to do for my children in this massive endeavour was to dredge up some tired, musty old ideas on education and force my children to take a deep breath and swallow. Even though Charlotte Mason was a nineteenth century woman (and a rather liberated one at that), her philosophy seemed to contain a winning quality which made it relevant, even for today. She seemed to really understand how children learned and how to draw the best out of them. And different to all those philosophies of learning one studies at University, she had actually worked out ways to make them work. They were not just fanciful ideas that she dreamed up. They were practical, and were tested on children from varied backgrounds for over 50 years. Better still – all the details were written down in a book. More surprisingly, Charlotte Mason’s ideas were not complicated; a reader wouldn’t need a psychology degree to understand them – they were simple. By following her clear steps a parent could become not only a better educator, but a better parent.
All of these elements explain the worldwide explosion of interest in Charlotte Mason education.
Charlotte Mason lived and worked in England – the Lakes district, home of Beatrix Potter and the poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, in the late 1800’s. By the time she died in 1923 having trained hundreds of parents and teachers and overseen the starting of several schools (the PNEU), she had earned the respect of England’s powers that be including the late Queen Mother who wrote endorsements for each of her books. After her death it appears that most of her schools gradually mixed her clear, simple ideas with other methods that were filtering through the education system of the day, lost their defining characteristics and eventually closed or just became regular schools. It seemed the Charlotte Mason era was over.
It was – until in the 1970’s a young couple in England, troubled with sending their children to the horse in a mill tedium of the local school, came across one of the few remaining PNEU schools. This mother was so pleased with how her daughter was thriving there after a typical schoolroom experience, that she wrote a book about her amazing discovery – For The Children’s Sake. Susan Schaeffer Macaulay had kick-started the modern resurgence of Charlotte Mason education which would prove to be more far-reaching than the first.
Some years later another young couple working in London with a missionary organization came across the Original Series, of which there were limited copies, in a library. Homeschooling their own small children, they decided to use Mason’s commonsense and visionary ideas in their own family. Meeting with success, this entrepreneurial couple, Dean and Karen Andreola, set out to reprint and republish the entire 6 volume set of Charlotte Mason. Now these books were accessible to the wider public. The stage was set for these ideas to take the world by storm.
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