Amid growing and urgent demand from families for alternative educational models for their children, Ambleside Schools International has launched an expanded effort to bring its comprehensive homeschooling mentorship program to more families to train them in the Charlotte Mason philosophy and Ambleside Method.
In a moment, these three simple words shed a better light on a year’s work of daily lessons and nurturing and mending relationships.
For Ambleside students in the home and school classroom, the handwork lesson is a time of rest, contemplation, joy and accomplishment. Emphasis is placed on the skill to be learned rather than the project to be produced.
How often it is that we go through life missing the simple pleasures. Our focus is on ourselves; our thoughts, our plans and our concerns–failing to hear the joy around us. Charlotte Mason reminds us to be fully present and to listen. Miss Mason’s idyllic picture of being “in the fields on a spring day” is far from the reality of most 21st century lives. Although being in the fields on a spring day, or most days for that matter, would do us all good.
We endeavor that all our teaching and treatment of children shall be on the lines of nature, their nature and ours, for we do not recognize what is called ‘Child-nature.’ We believe that children are human beings at their best and sweetest, but also at their weakest and least wise. We are careful not to dilute life for them, but to present such portions to them in such quantities as they can readily receive.
“An idea is more than an image or picture; it is, so to speak, a spiritual germ endowed with vital force—with power, that is, to grow, and to produce after its kind. It is the very nature of an idea to grow: as the vegetable germ secretes that it lives by, so, fairly implant an idea in the child’s mind, and it will secrete its own food, grow, and bear fruit in the form of a succession of kindred ideas.”
