You can’t hang around homeschoolers for very long without hearing the name “Charlotte Mason.” She is considered one of the most influential people in homeschooling’s history, and I thought it would be interesting to learn more about her.
She was born in 1842, and she herself was educated at home by her parents. She obtained her teaching certificate and taught for ten years, and began to seek after a way to provide a broader educational experience for her students. She disliked the class ranks that often dictated how well a child was educated, and she desired a way for every child to get quality instruction.
As she progressed in her career, she became a lecturer, and developed a belief that if parents better understood how to raise their children, their education would be greatly helped. She established the Parents’ Educational Union to teach parents more about their children’s needs. She then went on to write several books, which are still available and are used by educators all over the world for the methods and ideas they teach. Her basic premise for approaching education was that children are people, and should be treated with the same respect as we treat adults. She didn’t believe in talking down to children, but wanted them to study from books with substance and to have meaningful experiences in the world around them.
She said, “Provide a child with what he needs in the way of instruction, opportunity, and wholesome occupation, and his character will take care of itself: for normal children are persons of good will, with honest desires toward right thinking and right living. All we can do further is to help a child to get rid of some hindrance––a bad temper, for example––likely to spoil his life.”
Despite the fact that Charlotte suffered from ill health, she never faltered in her commitment to reform education, and that commitment is why we still follow so many of her principles today.
If you would like to learn more about Charlotte Mason and her approach to learning, you can follow these links:
http://charlottemasoneducation.com/
http://simplycharlottemason.com
http://www.charlottemason.com/
Related Families.com Blogs:
Homeschooling with Charlotte Mason
Tools for Teaching Charlotte Mason