About Charlotte Mason


Charlotte Maria Shaw Mason (1 January 1842 – 16 January 1923) was a classical English educator in England at the turn of the twentieth century. She proposed to base the education of children upon a wide and liberal curriculum. She was inspired by the writings of John Amos ComeniusMatthew Arnold and John Ruskin.


Biography

Charlotte Mason was born in the hamlet of Garth near Bangor on the Northwest tip of Wales, near Caernarfon. Garth has now been incorporated into the modern city of Bangor. An only child, she was mostly educated at home by her parents. Mason taught for more than ten years at Davison School in Worthing, England. During this time she developed her vision for "a liberal education for all".

Between 1880 and 1892, Charlotte Mason wrote a popular geography series called The Ambleside Geography Books:

  • Elementary Geography: Book I for Standard II (1881)
  • The British Empire and the Great Divisions of the Globe: Book II for Standard III (1882)
  • The Counties of England: Book III for Standard IV (1881)
  • The Countries of Europe Their Scenery and Peoples: Book IV for Standard V (1883)
  • The Old and New World: Asia, Africa, America, Australia: Book V (1884)
Mason was later a lecturer at the Bishop Otter Teacher Training College in Chichester, England, where she stayed for more than five years and gave a series of lectures about the education of children under 9, later published as Home Education (1886).

She co-founded the Parents' Educational Union (PEU), an organisation that provided resources to parents educating their children at home. She launched and served as editor-in-chief at the Parents' Review to keep in touch with PEU members.

In 1890 she met Henrietta Franklin in what others consider to be the "inspiring experience" of Franklin's life. By 1892 Franklin had opened the first school in London based on Mason's principles. In 1894 Franklin became the secretary of the re-named Parents' National Educational Union and she undertook speaking tours to major cities in America, Europe and South Africa. She devoted her own money to the cause and wrote on its behalf. Franklin's biography cites that the PNEU's continued existence is down to her.

Ambleside

Mason moved to Ambleside, England, in 1891 and established the House of Education, a training school for governesses and others working with young children. By 1892, the Parents' Educational Union had added the word "National" to its title to become the Parents' National Educational Union (PNEU), and a Parents' Review School had been formed (later to be known as the Parents' Union School), at which the children followed Mason's educational philosophy and methods.

Mason wrote and published several other books developing and explaining her theories of education:


  • Parents and Children: Parents and Children is a collection of her articles and essays previously published in various sources.
  • School Education: outlines her methods for educating children from approximately age 9 to 12.
  • Ourselves, was also published in 1904. In it, Mason addressed herself directly to the children, or for parents to read aloud with their children, to help them learn to examine themselves and develop high moral standards and self-control. The first part is for children under age 16. Book two of Ourselves is written for students over 16.
  • Formation of Character, published the following year, in 1905, was developed from a revision of earlier volumes. Mason explained in the preface to volume 5 (Formation of Character) that "In editing Home Education and Parents and Children for the 'Home Education' Series, the introduction of much new matter made it necessary to transfer a considerable part of the contents of those two members of the series to this volume, Some Studies In the Formation of Character." Her purpose with this volume, she said, was to demonstrate how her methods should assist children to naturally develop and strengthen good character traits.

"We may not make character our conscious objective," she wrote, but she believed that parents and teachers should "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."

Mason's last book, Towards A Philosophy of Education was published in 1923, nearly forty years after her first book. It is written primarily to address the application of her methods and principles with high school students, but she also revised a summary of her principles, and in some cases revises and refines what she had written in previous volumes. Many home educators who read her volumes recommend starting with volume 6.

In addition to the geography series and her six volumes on education, Mason also wrote and published a six volume work called The Saviour of the World (published between 1908–14), a study of the life and teaching of Jesus in verse.

Over the years between the publication of volumes 1 and 6 of her education series, other schools adopted her philosophy and methods, and the Ambleside establishment became a teacher training college to supply all the Parents' Union Schools that were springing up, as well as to assist with correspondence programs provided for British parents living overseas. Mason spent her final years overseeing this network of schools devoted to "a liberal education for all."

After her death, the training school became Charlotte Mason College and was run by the Cumbrian Local Education Authority. 


Teaching philosophy

Mason's philosophy of education is probably best summarized by the principles given at the beginning of each book mentioned above. Two key mottos taken from those principles are "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life" and "Education is the science of relations." She believed that children were born persons and should be respected as such; they should also be taught the Way of the Will and the Way of Reason. Her motto for students was "I am, I can, I ought, I will."


Mason placed great emphasis on the reading of high-quality literature, and coined the phrase "living books" to denote those writings that "spark the imagination of the child through the subject matter." Her philosophy has had a tremendous impact on homeschooling around the world and her methods were adopted by curriculum pioneers such as David Quine, Sonya Shafer, and Karen Smith, and lists of "living books" have been compiled by Leslie Nolani Laurio and Susan Craven.


This short biography is an annotated version of her Wikipedia biography, to read the full version Click Here.