As an Ambleside teacher, we often discuss our “paradigm shift’ – from textbooks, grades, and stickers to “living books,” “narrations,” and “habits.” It’s difficult, for many of us. We’re not just learning about a method of education; we’re learning again how to learn.
There is little, if anything, that brings such sweetness to the soul of devout Christian parents as their children’s allegiance to the risen Savior King. And few things are so harrowing as the prospect that one’s child might abandon Him, who is the Source of all life and goodness.
On January 1, 1842, Charlotte Mason was born. We at Ambleside Schools are eternally grateful to her for teaching us through her own living books and ideas, one of the most important of which is the view of a child as a whole person. From the beginning, she has inspired and influenced our sacred work of educating children, and we honor her today for the beautiful legacy she left us.
Charlotte Mason evokes several principles in her call for children to serve: Service is a deliberate work; service widens one’s sympathy; and service involves self-sacrifice.
While there are many aspects to maturity, there is none as important as the nature of one’s relationship with God.
Education is the science of relations, relations with saints and sinners, the past and the present, earth and sky, art and craft, work and leisure. Still, there is more. Nothing matters so much in the making of a man or woman as his/her relationship with God.
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.
In the six volumes of her Home Education Series, Charlotte Mason speaks of joy over 270 times. This is not surprising, for the consistent experience of joy is essential to a child’s well-being. Through experience, parents and teachers know how difficult it is to help the sullen child move forward. Ms. Mason would take it a step farther, arguing that “The happiness of the child is the condition of his progress.” Thus, “his lessons should be joyous and that occasions of friction in the schoolroom are greatly to be deprecated.”
In the six volumes of her Home Education Series, Charlotte Mason speaks of joy over 270 times. This is not surprising, for the consistent experience of joy is essential to a child’s well-being. Through experience, parents and teachers know how difficult it is to help the sullen child move forward. Ms. Mason would take it a step farther, arguing that “The happiness of the child is the condition of his progress.” Thus, “his lessons should be joyous and that occasions of friction in the schoolroom are greatly to be deprecated.”
When Charlotte Mason discussed the spiritual life in relationship to ideas, she identified spiritual life as the life of thought, of feeling, of the soul, of that which is not physical. This very human life needs food, and “this life is sustained upon only one manner of diet: the diet of ideas — the living progeny of living minds.” She uses this framework—the spiritual life is sustained only by a diet of ideas—to answer the perennial question, “What manner of schoolbooks should our boys and girls use?”
