New to Charlotte Mason?
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Charlotte Mason devoted her life to children, their education, and the training of educators. She believed children were born persons with the ability to think intelligently about living ideas, not empty vessels to be filled with dry facts. She stressed the importance of laying out a feast of ideas for the children to think through as they were able. The main source of this feast were “living” books written with great literary power and which captured the imagination with ideas that inspire children to keep wondering and pondering. While she exposed her students to a large quantity of subjects with short, focused, lessons, within each subject she emphasized the quality of books rather than the quantity of books. She believed education was an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life and should primarily focus on finding out who we are in relation to God, man, and the universe.
As a British educator in the late 1800’s and early 1900's, her ideas were well ahead of her time and were overrun by the 20th century competitive drive to work harder and faster and to assess everything with assembly line precision. However, in 1987, Susan Schaeffer Macaulay reintroduced the world to Mason’s philosophy and methods in her book For the Children’s Sake. Homeschooling in general is on the rise and Mason’s approach has been gaining momentum as more and more homes reject the notion that education is a means to an end and rather embrace the goal of instilling a lifelong love for learning. Mason’s approach is not exclusively used by homeschoolers; many small Christian schools also use her approach to education. |
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A Good Place to Start
Mason's 20 Principles
Mason's Home Schooling Series
Companions and Interpretations
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