Educating Persons: An Introduction to Charlotte Mason's Twenty Principles

Educating Persons

An Introduction to Charlotte Mason's Twenty Principles

Amy Fischer

Hazelnut Press

Copyright © 2024 by Amy Fischer

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For any questions, please contact the author at [email protected].

Cover art: The Country School by Winslow Homer. In the public domain. Available from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Winslow_Homer_-_The_Country_School_(1871).jpg.

All quotations from Charlotte Mason are taken from her six published volumes which are in the public domain.

Contents

Introduction

1.Personhood

2.Tools

3.Mind

4.Method

5.Purpose

Next Steps

About the author

Introduction

I discovered Charlotte Mason’s ideas through an internet rabbit trail. While scrolling on Pinterest, I clicked through to a blog post about home education. My mind started to whir, realizing for the first time that sending my children to school was only an option, not a requirement. I immediately had more questions. As the mother of a six-month-old, I wondered when I needed to start home educating, if my husband and I wanted to. A Google search told me it would depend on my educational philosophy. My M.A. in Education hadn’t included a discussion on educational philosophy, so I googled that, too. Another blog post detailed several styles and approaches to homeschooling and when I came to the section about Charlotte Mason, living books, and time in nature, I knew I was onto something exciting.

While that first exposure to Charlotte Mason was pretty superficial, I loved what I learned about her and her ideas. Narration made complete sense to me. I could imagine reading, singing, and nature journaling with my children. Education could be so much more than what I knew as a child in school. 

But while narration, living books, and nature journals are invaluable tools for the Charlotte Mason educator, I soon found that it was her educational principles that made her method so potent. Education is a method, not a system, she wrote. She was too wise and honest to promise specific results. Instead, she gave a framework for understanding both children and education that can guide the practice of the educator as she seeks to see the children in her care thrive as persons.

When we first read over her twenty principles, however, we find challenges. Her ideas are cloaked in an older language. We find references to people and cultural trends that we have forgotten 120 years later. We need to do some digging in order to understand her meaning. In this short book, I offer you some of my own digging. I piece together some context, elaborate where Charlotte Mason is brief, and highlight where to learn more. This book is for anyone who wants an overview of Charlotte Mason’s philosophy, a reminder of her essential ideas, or another perspective on her method.

Before I begin, let me point out a few things to keep in mind as you study Charlotte Mason’s principles.. 

First, not all of her principles are created equal. Charlotte Mason herself writes that there are just a few essential principles of education, and that everything else in her method hangs upon these. The leading ideas of her philosophy are that Children are born persons and that Education is the science of relations. Karen Glass writes about this eloquently in her book, In Vital Harmony.

Second, it's helpful to note that there is some overlap within the principles. This makes writing about the twenty principles, one principle at a time, an interesting challenge. In fact, when Charlotte Mason wrote her last book, Towards a Philosophy of Education, she wanted to present her ideas to people encountering her philosophy for the first time. This is the only place in her published work that she discusses her principles as a cohesive group of ideas. However, as you read you will notice two things: not all her principles appear, and they are not all in order. Even in her most logical, structured writing on her ideas, Charlotte Mason