Discovering "Miss Mason"
A lot of home educators are deeply inspired by a woman named Charlotte. A lot of them are also Christians. I wonder if that's a coincidence!
Last spring, when I was wrapping up a lot of my research into the Montessori Method and the history of it’s founder, Maria Montessori, I was on a roll. I needed to know more about more educationsal leaders! And there’s one lady you hear a lot about in the homeschool world, and that lady is Charlotte Mason.
Other homeschool parents talked about the Charlotte Mason approach as if it was a magical breath of fresh air, bound to delight any child and inspire any parent. The fact that I wasn’t interested initially interested seemed to confuse them. They looked at me like I was an alien. There were plenty of Charlotte Mason inspired curriculums out there, as far as I could tell the main things were lots of books (the older the better) and doing like a million teeny tiny lessons a day.
And I just didn’t get it.
I couldn’t let that stand, so I started doing research. Why were people drawn to Charlotte Mason’s work? What was it a breath of fresh air from? And what was actually happening in a Charlotte Mason approach to learning? After digging into Waldorf, Montessori, and Classical education, I could not leave this gap in my own education education!