At a time when most children were educated only to a minimum standard, Charlotte Maria Shaw Mason challenged the accepted view of her time and stressed that “children are persons,” and that teachers and parents should treat them as individuals. Children, she said, need to be stimulated from an early age by a broad curriculum, not simply to be trained to read, write and count. She believed that this broad curriculum should contain the best literature, the best art, the best contemporary science, in fact, the best of everything.
A “living” education as defined by Charlotte Mason is one where a child is exposed to and acquainted with a large and various amount of “things and thoughts“. He is educated through the use of many living books, the study of nature, physical exercise, handicrafts, science, art and music. Charlotte Mason taught that ideas were the food of the mind and that it was of the utmost importance that children be given a wide and varied diet of this essential food. Through the use of living books, real life experiences and conversations, a child’s mind should be fed on the good and the sublime, the honorable and true, because, as Miss Mason writes, “out of our ideas comes our conduct of life.”
“It is for their own sakes that children should get knowledge. The power to take a generous view of men and their motives, to see where the greatness of a given character lies, to have one’s judgment of present events illustrated and corrected by historic and literary parallels, to have, indeed, the power of comprehensive judgment these are admirable assets within the power of every one according to the measure of his mind; and these are not the only gains which knowledge affords.” (A Philosophy of Education pp. 302-303)
The seeds of Mater Amabilis were sown in October 2003 when Michele Quigley visited England to carry out research in the Charlotte Mason archive at Ambleside and to spend time with Kathryn Faulkner and her family.
In discussing the ideas of Charlotte Mason we discovered that we had each followed a similar course. After becoming interested in Charlotte Mason we began to introduce a number of her ideas into our homeschooling. As time went on and we read more of her own writings we came to realize that the style of education offered by Charlotte Mason (and her educational organization, the PNEU) was both highly structured and highly efficient. Thus we found ourselves adopting what we believed was a more complete application of her principles and method.
Mater Amabilis is our attempt to provide an example of that style of education for Catholics educating their children at home —in the 21st century.
A Charlotte Mason Education
As we read and discussed Charlotte Mason style education we became aware that there is some confusion over what a Charlotte Mason education means. “CM” homeschooling is portrayed as everything from a relaxed, almost unschooling style, to a formal, structured method. We think this confusion can be resolved by dividing the different styles into two categories: CM structured and CM influenced education.
- A Charlotte Mason structured education attempts to follow the methodology set out in CM’s own writings as closely as possible. Children follow a set, formal course of study, using a highly efficient method which allows children to cover a broad range of subjects in the course of a short school day.
- A Charlotte Mason influenced education gleans ideas such as living books, narration, short lessons and nature study from CM and applies them to a range of different styles of education –“ a particular curriculum, literature based education, relaxed homeschooling or even unschooling.
Mater Amabilis presents a structured approach but the ideas here can be used or adapted as part of any CM influenced education.
For over seventy years children educated at home could be registered with CM’s Parents’ Union School (PUS), which provided them with programs of study. We have used those programs as a guide to the subjects studied at each level, the workload that can be comfortably covered, and the time required for formal schooling.
When you first look at the levels you may think them overwhelming. In practice, the efficient nature of the Charlotte Mason method means they are far less time-consuming than they may appear.
At Levels 1 and 2 it should be possible to cover the whole program in no more than two to two-and-a-half hours daily over a 36 week year. You may also notice that our programs do not require a great deal of reading aloud. As soon as children are capable of doing so they begin to read their own books. Once they reach Level 2 (ages 9 to 11) children work increasingly independently. A CM structured education is designed so that the child does the work, not the teacher!
Support and Discussion:
For questions, support and to learn how how other families are using this program, we recommend that you join the
Mater Amabilis Teacher Training Forum at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MaterAmabilisTTF
Suggested Further Reading:
The Original Homeschooling Series by Charlotte Mason
For the Children’s Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay
When Children Love to Learn edited by Elaine Cooper
