Our founder Maryellen St. Cyr shares how she came to know Charlotte Mason, how it changed her understanding of education, and how this new understanding is implemented in our Ambleside classrooms. Check out the Making the Leap podcast from our partners at the Herzog Foundation, hosted by Christine and Chris Stigall.
In cultivating an atmosphere for learning, we at Ambleside are ever-mindful of our responsibility and vocation as educators to nurture the children, providing a place for them to grow and thrive — a place that encourages and supports the development of their mind and capacities through their own worthy efforts to apprehend knowledge.
In this next part in our video and discussion guides, we flesh out Charlotte Mason’s ideas on how to ‘excite appetency … toward things lovely, honest, and of good report.’ And we wholeheartedly agree that this is the earliest and most important ministry of the educator.
Charlotte Mason emphasized cultivating an atmosphere conducive to learning and growing. At Ambleside, we take great care to develop such an atmosphere, and our teachers are actively engaged and attuned to what is ‘going around’ in the classroom, on the playground, and through the school hallways.
With the principle always in mind that children are born persons, an Ambleside teacher is trained to be aware of the innate, God-given desires within each child, while at the same time being cautious to tread carefully in how to satisfy these.
At Ambleside Schools we wholeheartedly agree with Charlotte Mason’s premise that children are born with an innate desire to know. They’re “pre-wired,” so to speak, to naturally learn and grow — to “self-educate.”
A vital principle in an Ambleside education is the idea that ‘Children are Born Persons.’ Charlotte Mason reminds us that children are made in God’s image with great capacity and born with an innate desire for knowledge.
As an Ambleside teacher, preparing and teaching a lesson is a lesson itself — a great adventure that takes the teacher on his or her own path of discovery. We search, we read, we consider, we ponder, we reflect, we gain insight … we’re inspired. In the preparing and planning we grow and learn ourselves. The text is the teacher, and the teacher is taught. And each subject has its own distinct path of learning.
In the five years since graduating from Ambleside, I have held close the loves that it shaped in me. I love peaceful learning; Ambleside formed in me a diligence and deep interest which outlasts and supersedes the bribery of grades, the perfectionism that drives procrastination, and the harshness of hurry.
We started visiting Christian schools and the second school we visited was an Ambleside school. The Head of School answered our questions and we knew we were in the right place. We decided to take that next step, trusting that God would provide the tuition — which He did miraculously.
