The CMP Review — Week of January 13

January 13, 2025

“No parent/home/child/teacher/school has an all-round 100 percent wholeness. We all have limitations and problems. But I must never think that it is everything or nothing.

“Perhaps I’d like to live in the country, but I don’t. Well, maybe I can get the family to a park two times a week, and out to the country once every two weeks.

Maybe I have to send my child to a not-so-good school. Well, maybe we can read one or two good books together aloud. If you can’t give them everything, give them something.” (Susan Schaeffer Macaulay, For the Children’s Sake, p. 156)

@tessakeath

January 14, 2025

Magi, wise men from the east, saw a star. If they had already possessed everything they needed, they never would have left their homeland. But they felt a need. So they journeyed until they found the One they lacked.

Many parents and teachers feel that something is lacking in the world of education today. Perhaps there are some lost tools of education that the ancients knew that can now meet our needs.

Sara Timothy is a homeschool teacher, founder of a school, and a writer. Years ago she found what she was looking for. It turns out that only one lost tool was needed.

Read or listen to Sara Timothy as she revisits the question of Charlotte Mason and the classical tradition and reveals the lost tool. Find her inspiring and original piece here.

@artmiddlekauff

January 15, 2025

One of the goals of a Charlotte Mason education is to instill a sane sense of patriotism. This takes place through books, discussion, current events, field trips, and more—such as watching the events of our Presidential Inauguration. Among these are the procession to the Capitol, the swearing-in ceremonies, the Inaugural address, and the Pass In Review. Every four years, no matter the outcome, we have enjoyed this part of our country’s heritage. Will you be watching in 5 days?

@rbaburina

📷: The US Capitol as seen from the National Gallery of Art

January 16, 2025

In 1892 Charlotte Mason wrote, “We find that the feeling is gaining ground, that ‘Education’ demands more than mere reading; many mothers feel that they would be the better in body and mind for the mental activity that nothing but definite study affords and the time seems ripe for the carrying out of another item of our original programme, and we have made arrangements for a course of study on Education—a three years’ course—with questions.”

Miss Mason called this the Mothers’ Educational Course, and it was run as a correspondence school for 23 years. According to In Memoriam, in 1899 about 80 mothers were working on it.

A syllabus of the course has been preserved from circa 1905 and our team has transcribed it. It is fascinating, challenging, and inspiring to review the list of books that Mason assigned to home-educating parents to read over a three-year span.

Take a moment to review it here. Do any of the books surprise you? Have you read any of them? Are there any you would like to read? Let us know in the comments.

@artmiddlekauff

January 17, 2025

Serafina has been wanting to learn how to read a pattern to be able to sew herself a blouse.

At the beginning of January, while visiting my mother-in-law in Ottawa (2200kms away from where we live), Serafina took advantage of the opportunity and asked grandma to teach her. Grandma Greco, an avid sewist, graciously embarked on this multi-day project with her.

They went to the fabric store to find a pattern and to buy the fabric. Grandma taught her how to read the pattern, how to measure, how to cut out the pattern, how to properly place the pattern in order to cut the fabric, and together they sewed this lovely blouse for Serafina!

I watched from the sidelines, working on a puzzle (image 8), smiling as grandma said “let me show you how to sew a button hole. Do we have any dark fabric around? No? Here, I’ll show you on my pants!” (image 13).

I can’t even tell you the swell in Serafina’s heart.

Yes, she was proud of herself for learning all she did from grandma through this project. But more importantly, she was so thankful to have been able to experience all of this with her. These memories will last a lifetime.

Enjoy this story in pictures of the love of a girl and a grandma and their shared love of sewing.

@antonella.f.greco

January 18, 2025

Emily captures my January mood:

Winter is good – his Hoar Delights
Italic flavor yield –
To Intellects inebriate
With Summer, or the World –

Generic as a Quarry
And hearty – as a Rose –
Invited with asperity
But welcome when he goes.

~Emily Dickinson

@rbaburina

Charlotte Mason sheds unusual light on the topic of hypocrisy. In her 1898 meditation entitled “Simplicity,” she asserts that we now have a superficial view of this vice. “Our rude modern notion of hypocrisy makes it the sin most easily to be avoided,” she explains.

The hypocrite, in our view, is the man who makes believe in the eyes of others to be that what he is not; but our Lord flashes a searching light upon his friends and upon his enemies and shews in a way never to be forgotten that the leaven to beware of is the posing before the eyes of our own consciousness, making believe to ourselves to be that which we are not. The all-penetrating leaven is that which we call insincerity; insincerity as to what we are, what we think, what we purpose, which is, alas, “the natural fault and corruption of the nature of every man,” unless as he is illuminated by the Light of the world.

One of the places Christ speaks of this “all-penetrating leaven” is Luke 12:1. A few years after writing her “Simplicity” meditation, Miss Mason wrote a poem about this passage in Luke. Not surprisingly, it develops and extends the theme with piercing and poetic power. Do we think we are free from hypocrisy? Let’s read or hear Charlotte Mason’s penetrating poem and ask ourselves again. Find it here.

@artmiddlekauff