Why Charlotte Mason?

How I choose to educate my children depends greatly on what I think of the nature of a person.  Is a person a bucket to be filled?  A fire waiting to be lit?  Clay to be formed?  A plant to be tended so as to bear fruit?  An image-bearer of the Living God?  How I conceive of the human person influences how I go about educating my children, whether I realize it or not.

How I choose to educate my children also depends on what I think of knowledge.  Is it something that is discovered from within, waiting only to be drawn out?  Is it something that exists solely on the outside, the development of man’s thought through the ages that must be given to the child?  Is knowledge something that is primarily gained in childhood through schooling, or is it a lifelong endeavor?  Is knowledge a bitter pill that must be disguised or sugar-coated for a child to accept it, or does a child have a natural appetite for knowledge?  And where does knowledge come from?  Is the Holy Spirit the inspirer of all knowledge, or only the sacred?

I believe a child is a person, and a person created in the image and likeness of God.  He is a temple of the Holy Spirit, and his inheritance is the Kingdom of God.  He deserves to have a living relationship with his Creator, fully grounded in prayer, knowledge of God’s Word, and His Church.  Since the Holy Spirit inspires all knowledge, not just sacred knowledge, a child also has as his inheritance the Kingdom of Man. He is also a citizen of the world he is born into, and deserves to be firmly grounded in where his country and people came from and how they developed.  His inheritance from the Kingdom of Man not only includes history and the great ideas of man, but also art, music, literature; all that is true and good and beautiful.  As a child of God, he has a natural appetite for this knowledge, and he deserves to be introduced to his inheritance with living methods, methods of education that build relationships and honor both what is being learned and the person learning.  He is also an inhabitant of this wondrous planet that God has created, and deserves to have relationships with a great number of the things that God has placed here for us to know.  There are so many wonders in this world, wonders of God, Man, and God’s creation, that we must be lifelong learners, continuing to explore and grow our entire lives.   With all these opportunities, however, comes concupiscence, that limitation on our nature which can prevent us from becoming the person that God has created us to be.  A child must learn how to have good habits, to pursue virtue, and to live magnanimously in his family and in the world so he can live out his calling in this world and be happy with God in the next.

I have found Charlotte Mason’s philosophy and methods of education to be the best way to educate my children.  It is a way that honors them as individuals, helping them to become the unique persons God has created each of them to be as well as helping them to form relationships with God, His creation and our heritage of history, literature, music, science, art, and mathematics.  It helps them to develop themselves as writers and speakers with their own voices, and helps them to have a wide range of interests and worthwhile thoughts to contribute.  It assures that every child, no matter how gifted or struggling in a particular area, has an opportunity to join the feast of ideas and relationships available to her.  My children can study together in many areas, building our family culture around great ideas and beauty.  Where skill levels prohibit working together, my children can study independently using methods that take them from what they know to draw them further up and further in.  Mason’s methods require me to come alongside my children to help them learn and grow, encouraging me to continue to learn and to model lifelong learning.  Mason’s methods help my children to overcome their shortcomings by insisting on habits like full attention and careful execution.  Habit training and lessons in virtue are not extra subjects tacked onto the curriculum, they are woven into the very fabric of the lessons themselves.

I have been homeschooling for almost eleven years now and did not start as a Charlotte Mason educator.  I started as an eclectic homeschooler, influenced by the Latin Centered Curriculum and The Well Trained Mind, with a smattering of Charlotte Mason’s methods.  When I decided to transition fully to Mason’s methods eight years ago, it was a move born out of my desire to bring more beauty into our homeschool and to preserve my daughter’s writing voice and joy of writing. It was a gradual process which became a paradigm shift, giving my family all that I had hoped for and so much more.  As I have grown in the philosophy by reading and discussing Mason’s volumes and attending, leading, and speaking at retreats and conferences, I have have found that our homeschool has gotten better and better for me and for my children. It has also had a profound impact on my husband, and has led him to have a larger role in our family and homeschool.  I believe this philosophy of education is a gift for everyone, and while it isn’t a quick and easy system, it offers so much beauty and glory that the way becomes easy and the burden becomes light.

[This was prompted by a email to my local homeschooling list, asking what style of homeschooling we use and why. I've long thought about writing something like this, and as I went about my day this afternoon, this is what was in my mind.]