Olive Norton: The Transcript
Editor’s Note, by Art Middlekauff
On a fateful January day in the early 1970s, two girls visited a school. Their names were Margaret and Kirsteen. Their mother recalled that it “was a small PNEU school, run in a classroom built onto the back of someone’s private home, looking into an English country garden.”[1] The mother then described what happened when the girls got home:
After the first day, Kirsteen came home glowing with life and interest. “We had the most exciting story today, but Mrs. Norton stopped at just the wrong place. I can’t wait to hear the next part of the story!” And what was this exciting, vitalizing story? To my astonishment, it was Pilgrim’s Progress, read to them in the original.[2]
Kirsteen’s mother was intrigued and spoke with the headmistress, whose name was Olive Norton. Years later she would write, “Thank you, Olive Norton, for introducing us to Charlotte Mason in the first place.”[3] Kirsteen’s family was deeply involved in L’Abri and wanted to introduce Charlotte Mason to the wider community. What better way than to invite Mrs. Norton to speak? And so she did. And the lecture was recorded.
The name of Kirsteen’s mother is Susan Schaeffer Macaulay. Macaulay went on to write For the Children’s Sake, the book that introduced countless parents and teachers around the world to Charlotte Mason. The cassette recording of Mrs. Norton’s lecture has survived for half of a century. However, the quality of that recording has deteriorated so much over those years that it now takes effort and concentration to make out what exactly she was saying.
So, two years ago we began a project to transcribe the recording. A team of volunteers including Antonella Greco, Melissa Solomon, Dawn Tull, Heather Johnson, and Lanaya Gore painstakingly studied every syllable on the cassette to piece together the original lecture. We now present the complete transcript here.
The text was originally delivered as a lecture, however, and we wanted you to be able to hear it as well. So our talented reader Jennifer Talsma has produced a tour de force recording that captures the spontaneity of a live speech while maintaining word-for-word fidelity to the original text. Thanks to the work of Jennifer and the other volunteers, you can now find yourself in that “classroom built onto the back of someone’s private home, looking into an English country garden.” You can find yourself like Susan Schaeffer Macaulay, wanting to tell the world about this life-giving approach to education.
Note: in the text below, square brackets mark off portions where the quality of the original recording has so deteriorated that we could offer a conjecture of the text. When square brackets mark off ellipses ([…]), the recording was indecipherable.
By Olive Norton
How do you do, everybody? Please may I introduce myself to you all? I’m Olive Norton, and I have a P.N.E.U. school in Sussex, England. As well as being a headmistress of this school, I am also the wife and mother of a very happy family, and I have two grown up children, John and Sarah. During the first fourteen years of our married life, my husband was serving in the Royal Navy and so it was that we felt very strongly about the unity of a family life. So we then followed. Wherever he was sent, we went as well. And so it was extremely fortunate that it was at this very time, when my daughter was at the age to begin school, that I first met Parents’ National Education Union School and all that it offers, and also the philosophy of Charlotte Mason. This home school service offered us a wonderful continuity during those years. The children never had any change in their curriculum or in their examination questions or in the books, and everything came to us from headquarters in London where they kept a very helpful eye on the children’s progress; of course, by this time my son was also joining me in home school education.
When my husband left the Royal Navy in later years and my daughter by this time had completed her education, I was very delighted to be invited to start a P.N.E.U. school here in the country in Sussex. [Over the past] years I’ve had ample opportunity to read and reread books written by Miss Charlotte Mason on her philosophy, on her attitude to education generally. And I have come to the conclusion that I was her natural disciple. As a qualified teacher, I felt completely at one with her thoughts and felt that I should go ahead and try and put into practice what I had assimilated and was longing to do. I am very grateful therefore for this marvellous opportunity to talk to you and share with you my 26 years’ association with the P.N.E.U., to thank Mr. and Mrs. Macaulay here and now for their great effort in coming forward and finding P.N.E.U. schools through their determination to send their children to a Charlotte Mason school with her philosophy being carried out.
Charlotte Mason believed that children are born persons. They are naturally avid for knowledge. From the time they can speak they ask questions and these must be answered. They want to know and so from an early age the best books […] to satisfy their hunger for knowledge must be given. Once you stimulate the natural urge, discipline troubles and boredom seldom arises.
This is the moment, I think, to tell you our motto. The words are “I am, I can, I ought, I will.” And the bird, which is the crest, is the lark which, as we explain to children, flies the highest and sings the sweetest. […] is to see that the child can carry out that motto “I am, I can,” then you, the teacher, must really believe in that child. I will give you a small example that happens here in school nearly every day. A child will leave his desk and come up to me and say, “I’m stuck. I can’t do that,” and I will give it a short lesson and explain and the child will return quite happily to its desk and settle down and deal with it. On the other hand, another child will come up and say, equally the same, “I can’t get on.” I say “No, I am not going to help you. You go back to your desk and try yourself.” Rather reluctantly the child returns. I keep an eye in that direction while I’m carrying on with other things. And then I notice, and it’s happened always, the child achieves it. Its face looks towards me and smiles and says in those eyes, “I’ve done it! I’ve done it! I did it all alone.” And this is the beginning of leading this child to confidence and to know those words have a meaning: I can.
It is a shame to waste the opportunity given to one, and so I think a strong urge “I ought to do it,” which brings us next to I will. The I will for me is interpreted as I will see to it, that I do my utmost for that child and for the parents, that I can honestly say and know that I have helped the child and the family both morally, spiritually, mentally, physically, and given them a love and a desire to work the rest of their life. And so it brings me to these happy days when I can speak to the child of their future to come. Their senior school, possible university days. Perhaps they’ll be fine explorers, do wonderful things, help other people, and all the great choice that lies before them. All for this love and this will to work.
Now let me tell you something about the staff here. As we are a very small school, I only have four other teachers helping me, but each one has been trained to understand the philosophy of Charlotte Mason in their approaches to these children. And it has been very rewarding when I see the progress that they, the teachers, have made as I have trained them. For example, when you get a child who on her first day in school or her first term in school is whiny, truculent, non-cooperative, mopey, you don’t quite know yet why, but it is your duty to, however irritating that child may be to you, to haul that child in, to bring it into the fold and not to say to yourself, “Oh, bother, that child! Oh, it does get on my nerves so! Oh, I wish that child wasn’t in this class!” No, do exactly the opposite of what you may feel on the first account. And this is what I have gone on [saying] […]: please make a super effort to deal with the less attractive, the more problematic, the more difficult child, and the sooner you make them feel wanted and for love coming to them, and your understanding or love to understanding, you will find that child will begin to be less difficult or [wild]. In fact, will very soon become a delight.
And it’s been my happy, I think one of my happiest moments this very term, when my staff has said to me, independently, “Oh, we’ve got such a happy lot upstairs in the 5-to-6-year-old form. Everything is going very smoothly, everybody is in tremendous good humour,” and so on. And I say very honestly, […] this is the first time that you’ve said this because you’ve walked it through this situation yourself. There is not a single one that you have left out.
I have often been asked by parents being interviewed here for the first time: can I put my finger on the secret of the atmosphere of this school that they have heard so much about? And I’ve come to the conclusion that the right answer is self-respect. From the moment we meet in the morning, I try to create an atmosphere where we are all holding each other in the highest respect, and also ourselves. Our general appearance, for example. The children are seldom corrected over tidy hair or dirty hands. Their books. I tell them I don’t want to have to correct a dirty book. It’s a very unpleasant experience to pick up a book for correction and feel “Ew.” I’d rather put it on one side, so that they keep their exercise books nicely. The textbooks, they’ve got again to be shared by a lot of other children year after year, or many of them have to be used over the years, so they don’t scribble in them. They realize that they are much nicer than [soiled like that]. And so on.
And I think that it also generates in the way of how we all, we teachers, appear to them. I, for example, I like to wear fairly bright clothes. I like to change my dress so they don’t see the same dress week in week out. I make an effort to, almost as if I was in theatre. They have got to stand and look at you. It’s very boring for children always seeing the same, same thing. And I think they like this, this thing of everybody is making effort to be as pleasant to each other as possible. Which affects their language too. If I overhear a child speaking perhaps unnecessarily abusively to someone else, and I thought, well, I don’t know, I think it’s rather a shame because you are upsetting that child; try to manage without it; they do. We are by no means a prim and proper school, believe you me. We are a very, … have a lot of fun.
We are boys and girls up to the age of 13 from the age of 5. This is a sort of esprit, a kind of spirit now amongst them all which has passed on from one lot to another; new ones coming in very soon capture this. For example also, I think when you enter the school in the morning, say for instance the night before your mother-in-law has been taken terribly of the ill, or your child has been rushed off to hospital, or you’ve had a bereavement in the family, or you yourself don’t feel particularly well — I think it is absolutely right not to carry it into the schoolroom. When I come into the schoolroom in the morning, into the class I am going to teach, the children are there, and they turn to look to me, and I say, “Good morning, children!” And I hear just, “Good morning, Mrs. Norton.” Oh, dear! What’s the matter? Let’s have good morning, so, it’s “GOOD MORNING MRS. NORTON!” And I’m delighted and it makes us all put a smile on our faces and start. And from these really young voices, of course, it’s charming. It’s almost like a chant.
And so we settle down with a nice feeling of, “Hmm, here we go now!” And, “Now what have we got on our plate for today?” And as much variation as possible on a theme. We don’t want to see your head bob and, “Oh well, I know first thing this morning it will be this, and then it will be that, and oh I dread Mondays,” and so on. No thank you! We have none of that. Every lesson it seems to be as far as I can see and know, that all these little faces staring at me as they are all in vertical lines in my classes, all the desks are in lines, and I’ve got an eye on every face and it is lovely to see that from one lesson to the next it is never, “Oh no,” but “Oh yes. Yes, oh good, now we can do that,” and after that “Oh good,” and then we have lessons again, and then I say, “We’re going to close the books now, and we are going to do something else,” and “Oh no, can’t we go on, oh, can’t we just finish?” Which is the whole point. That everything they are doing, that they should be enjoying it, doing it thoroughly, thoroughly involved in it, not distracted, and so on.
And that’s why, you can see, it is a delight, and you feel that you’ve got your finger on the pulse of the whole school and the whole school is on the same path together, one large happy family working extremely hard and playing hard and doing… I think we get a lot more in this way because we don’t waste so much time dragging our feet and having to repair miserable children or wasting our effort in that way so much. […] misdemeanors with you in a way.
I should have told you earlier the meaning of the letters P.N.E.U. They mean Parents’ National Education Union. And so I think I’ll talk now about the parents’ role in this. The get-together of parents, teachers, and children is quite a normal thing, quite a perfectly ordinary family affair, as the child, of course, spends a great deal of its life in the teacher’s company. Children come to school here, they start at 9, and they finish at half past four in the afternoon. They have quite a large slice of the week spent away from the home. Therefore when they go home it’s then they pour out all their stories and their activities and exchange all these nice things they’ve been doing or their worries.
I think that it’s a wonderful system or thought of Miss Mason that the parents should be quite at ease, and I must say I repeat this so much in my interviews with parents, not to have any qualms about ringing me up, or writing to me, but ringing me up at any time of the day or evening, that I’m rather like a doctor; I’m never off duty. In this way we can avoid little troubles. Children’s minds, they seem to, some small thing will worry them whereas it’s quite easy just to say, […] “Don’t think about that anymore, if that’s bothering you.” But they want to talk it over and clear the air, and then mummies begin to worry, and it’s much better to straightaway, the same evening or within a matter of a few days, talk it over with the teacher. And then altogether we can smooth the path and get over that little problem. This is just one of the things.
Another sad thing, I think, is that today we come up under such pressure. So much more has been put on education, and nothing of course can be taken away from the ground floor of education. And parents are aware that to get into senior schools from junior schools, to get into university and so on, these children have got to achieve much more than they were, let’s say, 10, 20 years ago. And some parents tend to get terribly panicky and start putting that pressure on children through what they would say was love. “Darling, have you done that? Don’t you think you ought to go and do that again? Maybe you ought to go and study that. […]” And they carry on like this. Which is, of course, to my mind, undoing the work of a school like this.
So we work in calmness and we have no homework, but never, the child’s [evenings] are all free. It will go home and do an extension of the things which we enjoy doing at school, probably bring them back to show me. But they’re free then. And it’s a terrible sad thing when you get, in some cases, parents who then start at home to say, “It’s all right being [… and] very good in school today; don’t you think you ought to go and do a little more? Practice it now, and so on?” No. This exhausts the child, and it’s pulling the child in two directions. And clearly you undermine the good being done.
It’s interesting, I think, the little ways that we are able to help, we are, it’s really like having a confederate, a friend. The teacher should be the friend of the child and friend of the parent — parents. That they can communicate; communication is absolutely everything, to my mind. For example, you’ll get amusing little things which are so easy to put right. A mother arriving there from Singapore to this climate in the autumn time, a child coming here age 5, said, “I’m having such a terrible time getting John to have a good night’s sleep. He seems to wake every morning about three o’clock in the morning. I’m afraid he must be so, such a drag at school. He’s getting so tired. I really don’t know what to do about it.” So said I, “Have you tried putting on another blanket?” “Oh, no, I hadn’t thought about that.” So the next night she did, and that was the end of the matter.
Little things that sometimes an outsider can see, it might not always be the teacher, but somebody who is spending time with their children and that person can become your friend. Another very vital thing is to have a preconceived idea about what they’re going to be like; again you’ll hear, “Oh, if this child comes to this school next term age 5 — I think I ought to tell you that my husband and I were never very good at math; it’s just not one of our things.” And I say, “Oh, I’m afraid Mrs. Robins” — whatever you want to call her — “Well, Mrs. Robins, I’m afraid I don’t accept that. Your child is coming absolutely fresh, in the sense that, it’s like a new…. a bud, you know, a flower, and it’s going to open up and we see all the lovely things possible in knowledge and discovery. And I think you must be very careful not to say these things in front of her, to cast the idea in her mind, because you will be undermining our work. I believe and my staff all believe that your child will be capable of doing everything in this programme and getting very good results and our standard is about 8% above average. Getting very nice successes when the children move on into senior schools that they are passing examinations and so on, so please don’t say, “Oh, we’re like that, and my child is bound to have the same blockage.” I can’t bear that word blockage. There isn’t such a thing as a blockage, because really it’s an insult to the child; it’s [impactful].
Where and how it is possible, as I’ve been saying about staff being trained to be patient with children. If we could all take a look at ourselves, we parents in our home life, I think we also can learn to be a little bit more patient. If we become conscious of that, making an actual effort. Again, it’s so much easier if I give you an example. A family with two children, Susan age 5, Tessa age 3 and a half. Susan coming to school; after she’s been here for a few weeks, her mother arrives one evening and says, “Are you finding Susan extremely difficult? Are you finding her irritating? A problem?”
I say, “No, not at all. Absolutely delightful. She’s obviously very intelligent. And she’s settled down very nicely. None at all. Why, what’s the matter?”
“Well, at home, my husband comes home about 5 o’clock. As soon as he comes home, Susan is falling all over him and the little girl, Tessa, she can’t get to her daddy’s lap and Susan wants to be in the front, and pushing herself all the time, and so there’s a real squabbling scene goes on, and my husband is very bored with it and is tired and doesn’t want it. In the end we have to send Susan up to her bedroom. What do you think is the matter?”
And I said, “Quite honestly, it is quite, quite simple. Let’s stop and have a think. Susan has been in the world […]. Susan should be, in a sense, more tired than your husband who should be able to control his fatigue just for that short time while Susan is bursting with desire, just bursting with desire to tell Daddy everything that’s just happened to her in her exciting little life. And then she would be satisfied and settle down. But you are [starting] her on one side, because you are putting yourself, your husband is putting himself before the child. And if he could just reverse it, and be a little patient, everybody will be happy. “Thank you very much,” she said; and I’m happy to tell you all that it worked. [Brilliantly.] […].
Now we look to what I’m sure in your mind, and in ours, not only in the teaching world, but in the world generally, a grave, serious problem of discipline; yes, discipline seems to have disappeared in schools. And the foundation is just not there. And we are getting into this desperate situation in all countries, of crime, lay-abouts, bullying, in all its various stages and names of this problem. To my mind, it all stems from the early days. If a child in school is beginning to be restless, wandering around, looking at the loose ends, it will begin to disturb others, to be an irritation. So immediately, do something about that child, get it [offsite], in some instance, and then, they’ll stop. Well, you build this up on an […] of what I’ve just said, and if the children are thoroughly involved and busy, and the best is being drawn out of them, and the best is being given to them for their minds, I don’t think we would be in half the troubles we are today.
I often see that I shouldn’t be in my own school here, that I should be in a big school in the East end of London in the problem schools, somewhere where they’ve already had trouble. And I would very much like to have that challenge where I could control a group of miserably unhappy people through their problems, and to help them! It’s simply because I’ve had so much experience in handling different ages and stages of young people, right up to their school-leaving that I feel that some of these schools are having a very frightening experience if the teacher in charge is young, maybe it’s her first post, and it’s all too much.
So we come back to this thing that we must do something about presenting these children in their junior schools, their foundation, build the house on a rock foundation. Also, I think, I haven’t touched on this, because I’m going to bring this into the second stage of the talk with you, is the point of religion. These people have nothing to hold onto, so many of these young people. And whereas in this, where I am standing now, in my main classroom, from where I’m talking to you, the children know that God, these young children, God is here in this room, with us. We are never alone; wherever we are in the world, God is with us. And this, this gives them a tremendous […] young age, Form III, IV, V, it starts to give them what I’m sure everyone of you in this hall listening to me knows exactly what I mean. That gives them something that these other poor, sad boys and girls who are in all these troubles haven’t got.
It’s been our duty to teach, pass on, the Word of God… The Word of God should be amongst our daily discussions which I shall be coming to. Also I feel that these [schools], who had this opportunity to get a good foundation in the right and wrong way to go in life, some said they started probably with boredom, even people with a bad background can be saved, a problem background, the father may be in prison, their mother may have disappeared, these children can still be given, if they’re given the same chance of a school with this sort of attitude, again, they would still be all right.
And this comes, of course, from the fact that the teachers have got to have courage. You see, I’m not afraid at all. I do go and see, very serious prison cases, you might say my hobby, one of the various things, if you can call it that, but I mean my spare time thing, I’m not afraid to go into those prisons, I’m not afraid of people, I’m not afraid of any situation, because, of course, God is with me; He’s my friend. He’s my strength. And if you are not afraid of standing up and facing a group of thugs, it’s like with an animal, they are very aware, animals have extra instincts about who and who doesn’t, and I believe that young people are the same. That if you communicate and make them feel at ease, once you’ve made that communication, everything can go forward from there.
One of the subjects we openly discuss in assembly time, all together, quite often as it arises usually after playtime period, is jealousy. Of all the deadly sins, perhaps jealousy ought to have a classification heading of its own because it has so many offspring. And we have discovered, talking all together, that the thing that affects so many of our activities, playing games, playing ball, “Oh, she’s got a bigger ball than I have” or “She’s had more turns than I have” or skipping “he’s had more goes at the rope than I have.” And so on and so on, these little petty, niggly, distressing things, and we keep discussing this point of, let us try and put aside […] that arise over, more jealousies when we think of, when we look around the world and we see the terrible troubles that the world is in, and sometimes these jealousies lead to wars; it certainly leads to unhappy marriages, unhappy family lives and so on. So let us try all the time to put it out of our daily life.
And I think it’s interesting to watch those who do try, and they definitely get a different expression on their face after a time, they lose that disgruntled look, almost to say life had something against them. And it’s lovely to see when they look at peace, their faces relaxed, and they’ve found [constance], because they are aware that the friends around them are all in a nice sort of atmosphere feeling, and going to make everything as pleasant as possible rather than as niggly and unpleasant.
Part 2
I will now start on Part 2 of this talk, and will discuss with you, in general, the programmes that are arranged by the director of studies at P.N.E.U. headquarters in London and sent to all P.N.E.U. heads of schools. This programme covers the educational year, 3 terms. And it provided for all children from the age of 5 to school-leaving, which is 18 years old. As this school where I’m talking only covers the junior half from 5 to 13, the subjects I will be discussing will only be applicable to them.
We are very grateful for this programme because it saves myself and the staff a lot of work, extra work, in finding, choosing, selecting, making decisions on what are the best books for these children. And therefore this group who work at headquarters are doing a very valuable job. Because we get all the books presented here on the programme, even the chapters that we should cover each term. And at the end of term we will do our examinations on those chapters. And also a very important thing goes on in that they put together nice things like, the history that’s selected for that term will also have the English set literature book will be in the same period so that your history you’re studying, you’ll be able to visualize the way the people lived and nice [store] running at, in chapter.
Now I’ll give you a list of the subjects rather quickly, and then I’ll break it up and talk about each of them in turn as to how we present them to the children. This is every week; we will be repeating these subjects. Daily we do religious knowledge, alternately New Testament and Old Testament. Then we have recitation in Bible when the children learn some of the shorter Psalms off by heart.
English Grammar. English Literature will cover classical literature, as in your country something like Tom Sawyer, and a very wide range of books. The children will also have library books in their desks; again, we can select it from this programme, leisure reading, we call it. All this they get to choose from. Then there’s Creative Writing, which means your own composed, your own composition. Poetry that they read as well as writing your own. Essays on factual matters such as History, Geography, Bible, Science essays. They read a play per term. I shall go into that in more detail later on; that’s a special feature of this school.
And then there’s British History and Classical History which covers, teaches them something of the early civilisations of Ur, Egypt, Crete, Greece, Roman civilisation they cover during the years they’re here. Citizenship teaches them something; it gives them a covering of how the affairs of this country are carried out, how Parliament proceeds, what goes on in urban and rural councils, the social services such as education departments and hospitals and so on. Then there’s another very nice subject called Benefactors of the World and the Great Leaders.
We do elementary science and elementary experiments, biology, nature notes, which are done by going for walks or for the children bringing in nature notes that they’ve observed on their own walks in their spare time or at weekends. Languages, we do [French] and Latin. Mathematics using the metric system which we’ve been using for some years now. And Picture Study and a lot of illustrative work for the young ones which is used in the terms of an essay, which I will, again, enlarge upon later. Crafts of all kinds, needlework, imaginative crafts, collages, using all sorts of different mediums in their crafts. Singing, [thought], drawing, [painting], and music. And I think that is just about the sum total of our general subjects.
At the… two terms in the year we write exams, and the children in the senior half of the school which I’m going to explain to you here, I regard the senior half as the 9 to 13 and the junior half 5 to 8. The senior half arrived at the end of term in the two terms in the year when we do exams, 15 scripts. And the 6-to-8s will narrate to an invigilator who will write down all their answers. They will narrate 9 scripts. The little children, the 5-to-6s, don’t have anything to do with that cause they’re just beginning their narration.
Now this narration is, I think, the most unusual and the most effective part of Charlotte Mason’s theories, in how to teach children and get answers back in a way that really gives them the gift of the language. She believed, and it really does work, that when a child is giving full attention to the lesson being explained, let us say a history story, and it is read through once, once only, and if that child has been sitting without fidgeting and giving all its mind to the lesson, then it will be able to stand up, either immediately after this lesson when they’re very young, and older in the class they will either tell it back the next day or write it as a short essay in their own words. In their own words they will make it quite clear to you that they have understood. And it’s charming to hear them express it in their own way. This means that by the time they’re about 9, they write an essay with ease. They’re used to putting what they’ve heard into their own simple way or more complicated way, but at least it’s an individual expression of what they have learned.
The young ones of 5 to 6 have another means of narration through their illustration. Let me give you an example. If the teacher has been teaching about a country, let’s just say like a country in Africa, somewhere like Kenya. And if it’s rained a lot, and she has said that the roofs are slanting because of heavy rains, and the child then draws a picture of all these people and the things she’s mentioned and draws it with a flat roof. And then she’ll say, “Oh darling, you didn’t listen. Didn’t you hear me say that …?” And these little details come out in their drawing, and the drawings are used instead of an essay. Not just as a pretty picture, of course; they’re enchanting to look at, but they are not, their sole purpose is not just to have fun drawing a pretty picture, but to get the facts right. The teacher will discuss them when she looks at them, saying, picks them up as fact: “Yes, that’s right, you’ve got the right kind of dress on that person, that person in the field picking the right thing,” and so on and so on. This is very helpful.
Also I think these children, in standing up in class and narrating back what they have just heard, teaches them to face people, overcome their shyness, which they do quite soon after they’ve arrived. They’re looking at 35 people in my classroom now and it’s remarkable. They speak clearly and know that they will not be laughed at. One of the rules of this school is to encourage each other. And it is absolutely forbidden to laugh at another child’s efforts. We laugh together when things are funny, but we don’t laugh at somebody, so they shouldn’t feel at all embarrassed or overwhelmed with lack of confidence.
The teacher’s work is such a variety of subjects and variety of children because every single person is different. It’s very rewarding, coming back to this thing of looking at the children’s faces. You can see a puckered brow? You can say, “What’s troubling you?” Or you can watch them making an effort, and there is a little bit of a puckered brow, and you will observe that after another lesson on that subject a week later, child is going at it with quite a different expression on his face. I expect you’ve already noticed how much I talk about expression of the face. Of course, what the mind is thinking shows on the face a great deal.
The other thing is that we have this problem with the easier form of gaining knowledge through the film, through the television mostly. And all the wonderful medium done so much for all of us, being able to see places we could never have otherwise had an idea about. I have found that, amongst some children, they tend to look at a beautiful book, a book of discovering knowledge for themselves, and they tend to do what they do at looking at the television. The photo is passing in front of them and then gone. And they will turn over pages of the book like that, picking over the pages, looking at marvellous photographs of that and then quick over to the next page and not having really even read the caption. Just had these quick glances.
And in order to help those sort of children, I don’t want them to lose their enthusiasm for finding out their own research work. So I’ve now very recently started something new; that’s to let them once a week, twice a week, or have as a library book in their desk, these fabulous books that you can get. There’s a wonderful new series Time Life has just produced on Geography and Science and Flora and Fauna of the World […] These are all in the classroom as just as they’re leaving these publishers. And these children who have been slower over writing their work down but have been full of what is going on on the television and have become lazy, really, to make the effort to write or even to read the captions. I now make them try to read, stand up during the afternoon time when we’re doing lesser work of the so-called Three Rs, maths, and those subjects, and stand up and give a lecture on what they have discovered in their own research book in their desk. And this of course has made them, forced them, to read the captions and find out what is really happening in that picture they’re looking at. And it’s lovely because I should say [I can be got a little aware] of teachers popping up and down, and it’s very refreshing. And I feel that we’ve got over another stumbling block like that.
Of course, once the memory, your memory will be very good on things provided you have clearly understood what you’ve been taught. And if you have no dark patches or no…, you will retain what you have just heard. And that is proved because you can come a term or two later, a year or two later, five years later, children are doing their school-leaving exams from here to enter other schools, and it will be based on what they have learned over the six years they’ve been here, and it’s remarkably good what they retain.
The next thing I would like to talk with you is their own attitude to helping each other in school. They don’t actually get up and go and help each other, but they do try very hard not to disturb each other. On occasion you’ll hear somebody in class say, “Shh! shh!”, because someone else is fidgeting, fidgeting with their pencil or making an unnecessary, inconsiderate noise. And you may find you’ll get a group of noisy boys who come into your classroom from the other classroom where perhaps they haven’t been behaving quite so considerately. They will very soon catch on that it’s much better to be able to get on and then we’ll be able and out to play and in again and settle down and get on with all their things. All […] prefer it. Children prefer to have peace, normal peace while they’re working.
I have had children come to this school, and on asking the parents, “Why have you left your last school?” They say, “It’s simply because it’s not — my children say to us, ‘We can’t work; we can’t hear what the teacher’s saying; we can’t concentrate! Please take us somewhere where we can get on.’” And I’m happy that in this way we have created an atmosphere that seems to suit the child, and the child help themselves, they are creating the atmosphere. [Not but then is going to say] thinks that it’s quiet all the time. We have the most tremendous responses, outbursts of enthusiasm during oral verbal lessons, absolutely bursting to narrate or give the answers. And one has to be very strictly fair with it all. And I, they again understand, I will probably choose, first of all, for instance, in, let us say an answer after a Bible story, I probably choose from the youngest ones in the class or the most shy and the others will just have to wait, for [the] however eager they are to tell me, they’re to encourage, encourage those who are a little slow to come forward. They understand it; they don’t feel that I’m being unfair in not letting them have the first go. Those who can get on don’t need that same chance quite as often.
So again, we come to this thing, we are always trying to help those who lag a little bit behind, for reasons, various reasons, and get them up to the standards of the others. We aren’t holding the others back because there’s plenty for them to get on with. You see, we don’t work all doing the same thing at the same time. I must teach up 17 different […] of maths because each will be at a different term, or perhaps there’s two or three at the same stage and so on. So you break it up. There’s no business just screaming on that you’re worse than somebody else. You may have been away ill with the measles; you may have missed a period like that. You may have come in without some basic good rules. You may have to perhaps take a different book. But nobody’s aware that you are not as good as them.
Now we come to the point of how we correct our work and how we mark the work. We have no marks. We don’t say, “That out of 10 times, you got 9 right out of 10.” And we don’t know what each of us is doing; it is not that; we haven’t got a list up in the classroom saying, “You’re top of the class and you’re bottom of the class.” No. Here, nobody is top of the class and nobody is the bottom. We have remarks which are Above Average — is excellent and very good. Average is good, and then we have and fairly good, Below Average, Poor and that’s the lowest. But we don’t think of it being the lowest and hardly ever gets Poor. The attitude is that they know that I believe that each one of them is doing their very best all the time. Each one is wanting to present their best. I know that may sound to you just an ideal, but I can honestly tell you it is an actual fact. These children always are doing their best. They may do better than their best sometimes, but they are not just going through the motions. They’re very keen.
Every evening I correct an in-basket of about fifty books. I don’t leave it hanging over two or three days to suit myself. I very seldom am finished my work before 10 or 11 at night. And I’m very happy in the morning. I’ve left the books on their desks, returned. And in the morning when they come into school, they rush to their desks, open to see what they’ve got, to see how they’ve got on. “What remark have you got?”, so on. I have given them a little mark, an extra mark or a star, when I feel that they’ve made progress. It’s more important to have got six right today when you’ve got five right yesterday, that’s progress. You have done better for yourself; you’ve made the effort. And that must be appreciated. It’s not necessary because you’ve gotten everything right. I see you are making an effort to go over your …. perhaps you’ve had a difficult stage with a subject. Then this is worthy of reward, and the reward is that little merit that I scribble on the page there, a little star shape. That means I’m well and truly pleased with your progress. You’ve made the effort. I also give for [curation]; sometimes I see some kind thoughts in somebody, or somebody’s taken the trouble to help tidy up the schoolroom before leaving. Little things that happen to all fit in to [the whole] aspect of the child’s mind. And these are shared in this way.
Going to share with you the way we teach some of the subjects I’ve mentioned. Let me start first with religious knowledge. We, at the age of five to six, these children are given stories from the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament. At six or upward, they get the Bible read aloud to them, direct from the Bible. And in this way they learn, they hear the music, the beautiful music of the language of the Bible. And when they are retelling these stories in their own words, they very quickly fall into the habit of using Thy, Thou, Thee, and these words, these gentle words in the Bible.
The children are extraordinary. When I’m about to start the Bible lesson, they create an atmosphere of their own. Very quickly, they settle down and become very hushed and listen more profoundly perhaps than during other lessons. I am certainly very moved when reading aloud the Old Testament and the life of our Lord. And there’s such love for this too, by the children, to sit there very quietly, that they seemed to have created an atmosphere which is infectious to newcomers. Almost as if to say, “Now, I’m going to listen to the work and life of a great friend, or great friends. They’re dead now. But I can never get tired of hearing about them.” As for example, in the stories of the New Testament, the work of Jesus Christ, they may have heard the parable of the five loaves and two fishes or the parable of the sower each year since they were six. And perhaps they feel, well in fact I know, that when they’re hearing these again, when they’re perhaps eleven, they are still learning something each time they hear it. Every year they will hear it again out of the Bible, different parts of the Bible, some that they’ve heard before. Each of them hears it afresh as if to say, “Now, I can learn something more from this every time I hear it.” And then they, of course, have the opportunity to stand up and discuss what impact it has upon them, what meaning it has for them personally.
Now to English grammar. Miss Mason had observed that few children took pleasure in this subject, and so she took pains to write a little booklet on the guide to teaching English grammar to young children. And in addition, we use the most marvellous books written by the great authority Ridout. They’re called Better English. The children adore them. For example, here is one exercise in the Book 1 for 6-year-olds. They’ll have to fill in the missing noun, or missing word which they learn is the noun. “Windows are made of _____.” Now choose the missing word. “Windows are made of …. rubber? paper? or glass?” They have great giggles about that; fancy windows being made of paper! Ha, ha! And they then choose the right word. Now this is explained that the name of a thing, of an ordinary thing, is a noun.
And another example: They will say, “My father is a fat man.” “My father is a jolly man.” Next child will say, “My father is a funny man.” And then we’ll say, “Well, what are you doing to father?” “Well, we’re describing our fathers.” Fine, well, then we know that that’s a describing word, and then when they are seven, they will know that that describing word is called an adjective. And then we might say that now we want to talk about a doing word. So the six-year-olds will start off by saying, “Father marched to work today.” “Father shuffled to work today.” “Father ran to work today!” Well, what is he doing? Well, he shuffled or he marched or he ran; well, those are doing words. So then again, a year later and onwards, they will know that that doing word has a special name, in English grammar it is called a verb.
And in this way we overcome that sort of dreary thing, and the books are quite delightful, and it is a very popular, very popular, subject. It is the foundation of their studies for foreign languages. I have a young friend who’s just got her first teaching appointment in a very well-known, large school in England, and at the end of first term she came feeling most dejected. “What’s the matter?” I said to her. She said, “Well, I’m trying, it’s impossible to teach them Latin, French, Russian, which are my subjects, because they don’t know their own English grammar. So how can we get on?”
Now English Literature. What a beautiful choice these children have in the books presented. For example, the age of six they hear read aloud to them, Aesop’s Fables. Each little short story in Aesop’s Fables has a meaning, and they very much love those. At seven, they start Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It’s a two-year course. In the first year they hear about the life of Christian, and the following year Christiana, his wife, on their great pilgrimage to the Celestial City. And they hear of these characters. They read and learn and enjoy hearing how the story unfolds; wonderful people like Mr. Faithful, Mr. Greatheart, and Piety, Charity, Prudence, and then these others, oh my, Simple, Sloth, and so on. And that they illustrate; I make them illustrate it as a scroll, like little drawings, each episode that happened. You see Christian carried, he was given a scroll which he would have to present at the gates of heaven in the Celestial City when he got there. And so I make them do it in this way which is just different [again]. So they roll up their little scroll at the end of each reading having done little drawings and little captions to them. That they enjoy, something different.
And then the other selections during the rest of the years they are here. They hear the early religions of the Scandinavians and the beautifully written heroes of Asgard, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the Greek, early Greek religions in Tanglewood Tales, and then a lovely illustration of Homer’s Iliad, and the following year the Odyssey. And you can see that in the selection of these books, everybody, the characters in these books, are fighting for good and against evil. For instance, in The Heroes of Asgard, the Æsir people were always trying to break down the evil of the giants in the land of Jotunheim. And everything had to be lovely and was lovely in Asgard, and so on. And this of course presents this lovely thing that they are discussing all the time and making decisions and coming to terms with through all these examples of moral judgments and being [respective] about following the right path and not taking the wrong.
Very enormous subject of learning to read. I hope one day I shall have the time to write a book on this subject because I have made it rather a special feature of this school. And I think that those little people who come in at the age of five, by the time they are six, they are able to read and to spell. And of course, once they do that, it’s all open to them. They can then read their maths books, their English grammar books, their own little storybooks. They can stand up and read their own stories back to their little friends and so on. It’s a very much discussed subject, this. Lots and lots of arguments amongst the education authorities in this country. And they’ve come to realize that there is something wrong in the teaching of reading.
Well so let me say, that I do hope that through what I’m able to share with you, perhaps there are teachers in the audience who may be able to be helped by the way we go about it. I can only just touch on the subject because as you can see it’s such a very large one. We teach from the beginning both aspects, both ways. We teach phonetically and picture words. The first word that a child wants to be able to read is mother. Now mother you can’t break up phonetically. It breaks down the rules. And so you learn that by constantly seeing this word written up or before you, or we have what we call flashcards, great big cards with Mother is here or Mother hen and her chicks or Mother and Father are something-or-another. And this way they are constantly seeing these words; they have a storybook, and in that storybook with lovely pictures, the lot of these, what I call the picture words, are there. And they will recognize them just like you recognize a photo of your grandmother or something like that.
Now the phonetic must be balanced with the picture words. Every day they must, first of all, they start off to learn their alphabet phonetically; that is to say, the name of the first letter is A but the sound is ă. I say the name of a creature running around, an animal, is dog but its sound is bow-wow. Or, like, the name is cat and the sound is meow. So the name is A and the sound is ă. And the name is B and its sound is /b/.
Now, we’ve heard a great deal discussed about this rather new name in medical history, dyslexia. Now I am very interested in this because I have found in my experience that the cases of dyslexia — and when I say, people who have been announced as dyslexic by specialists in London — they send to me these children where because their mother or father can’t accept that because they’ve been told they’re dyslexic you will have, for the rest of their lives, they will be unable to write down or write letters or write essays or write past exams cause they can’t write it. And certainly the cases that [have for] me, and I’ve fortunately been able to help them, is that I’ve discovered that they don’t understand or have never been taught the vowel sounds.
The clearest example I can give you is one child, she was thirteen, a clever child: she could narrate, she could tell her teachers anything, she wasn’t at this school. She was brought to me at thirteen having been declared dyslexic at eight. And I discovered in the first 20 minutes, I got her to write down just some little sentence. And I saw, of course, there were no vowel sounds in it; she was writing, a word like dirt, and she wrote D and then T. And so I said, “Well, I see straight away, you’ve [been told] … you’ve heard it phonetically that D is duh and T is tuh. Well, now, if you say the alphabet incorrectly phonetically, you are going to say ă, buh, cuh, duh and so on, ĕ, fuh, and mmm will be muh. Now we don’t say muh-other, we say m-other. We don’t say cuh-atuh, we say c-at, and so on. I then teach that first having said your ă, /b/, /c/, /d/, ĕ, /f/, not fuh. And I make them, when we come to something like /f/ it’s almost as if we are going to spit. Anything to make them laugh about it and be interested and capture the imagination, and we have /f/ and not fuh for F and so on.
Now, in this way, they are able to group together, and you must make the first two sounds to be said at once. In other words, that the first grouping that we put, we put into family groups: ma, ca, pa. We go over like that, and then we say fa, and I put my hand over that; I have great big sheets all around the schoolroom like Chinese flags, and I put my hand over, painted in five colours these letters are, and sa and ma and ca will be painted in red, and the last letter will be a lovely /t/. Now that /t/ will be at the end, so we’ll have ca followed by /t/. Now you say ca and I’ll say /t/. And you say ma and I’ll say ma /t/. And so then eventually they’ll be longing, when they’ve got this ca, ma, fa. Then we go to the next vowel sounds like mu, cu, pu, and so on. And then finally you make up the whole word like that. And then you move on to other sounds like they know, they will recognize that O–R and A–W is or and that O–U and O–W mostly is ow and that S–H is sh and C–H is ch, and when they come to those two next door to each other, they will say them like that. So they will go mu, and then they’ll see C–H and they’ll go ch. And then they’ll say mu-ch, and they won’t be going muh-u-ch. Mu-u-c-h. No, they will see these families together, and therefore, by the time they are six they can read, not just their own little reader, but they can read, they can break up words, and they can read and spell, and they can really read.
We trace a great deal, starting off with nice capital letters. And then script writing, and at seven they start joined-up writing. And they trace a great deal, so they have a good example, and they write every day. And then they also do rather nice patterns out of letting the wrist flow to the end of the line, with lovely round patterns and then pointed patterns like you would get in the letter W. And join up patterns, pretty colouring, but it really is that you get this lovely flow and rhythm in the writing. Girls who have a bad writing, usually are, very often are trying to hide something that they are ashamed of their spelling or they’re nervous. And boys and girls that are particularly behind in spelling and reading, when I’ve got problems, you know, like this boy’s coming in fairly late into the school, I notice that they’ve gone as far as putting one letter right on top of the other. Really as though they were thoroughly in the darkness about it. And so the writing is very interesting because then you can spread it out as they gain confidence and show it and present it. And presentation gets an actual remark here at exams, how you present all your work. So important. The first time you, when you write your letter for your first application for a job, the first impression is, “Oh, what a nicely presented letter.” How important it is for their future.
Mathematics is another vexed question because there are so many arguments, pros and cons, as to which is the right way to go about it. But again, I think that in a primary school, in the first 12 years of your life, you should learn general math so that you are in a position to really understand what numbers mean, to juggle around with them very quickly. And then after that you can move into computer math and modern math if you have got the full understanding of what is 5 squared or to add on 10 very quickly, grouping numbers, 7 and 7 and their next door neighbour 7 and 8, 1 figure, add on 10, add on 9, quickly add on 10, take 1 away and so on. And to be able to juggle around with these as though they were balls in a game. And again, it must be done with delight. And you have various apparatus; not too much. I’m not very keen on them always working with pieces of wood or bricks or, not always, but I think then you stop to use your own brain. I teach them with something that they can look at the thing, and then say, “Right, now let’s see if we can go and do it without that.” And if we haven’t gotten it the first time we’ll come back and try again.
I don’t teach with a clock, strictly saying, “We’ll have half an hour and then stop then.” I think that certain subjects, for example math in particular, by experience you know when to stop. You’ve got to see the explanation through to the end. Not let the, [lest you] just stop because the clock says half past 10, and then halfway through that explanation you’ve got to go to another subject or another room to teach somewhere else. No, you must see it right, and then the child can immediately put that into practice, prove whether he’s understood by even perhaps doing two or three of that type of sum, and then start again tomorrow. But to break it off just because the time, the clock says that, is a disaster. Equally so over this thing of time, I think you’ve got to, in reading history, or you’ve got to get through to the end of that episode. But when it’s something like in literature, it’s very important to stop just before the very next excitement for too many excitements spoil the cake. So I close the book with voices shouting, “Oh, do go on! Oh, do let’s go on! Oh, no, no, don’t stop!”
Then the question of languages. It depends which ones you are doing. But, this might interest you, that when I’m teaching English or French or Latin, there are times when I find myself standing in front of the blackboard writing the three languages down at once. It maybe to do with an English vocabulary word, I want to try and give them the meaning of the word, not just to say it, but explain it to them, that they could see it for themselves. And they can improve their own vocabulary by finding the meaning of words through French roots or Latin roots. For example, they will see on the board suddenly, we’ve been talking about a terrace, and the child hasn’t heard what a terrace is, but it has learned already la terre in French and terra in Latin. Or it’s learned iuvenis in Latin, and that I is a J in French, jeune, and juveniles in English and so on, those little examples. And so, they like that too. They see the sense of, they see the combination and it interests them rather than just learning it off pat as like tables, their language roots.
Notes are a great feature. The children go out for walks from school. And we all go looking, searching, it can be anything, anything: stones, insects, wood, leaves, name it. And what we all collect, we bring back, and then we write in our, we draw, straight with the colour of the object, using the colour of the object before us, and never with pencil. And then the young ones can ask for me to make a copy of the little [record] and we put it on the board and sometimes we dissect the things that we’ve found. But they keep a regular nature notes and they have the dates on it, and then they keep those books year by year and they can count, they can look back to the previous year: “Oh, the snowdrops came out on the 1st of February last year and this year they’re earlier, they came out on January 27th,” something like that.
And they also, it’s lovely because parents come to me and say, “You know, since you’ve been, since they’ve been here doing nature walks, our own walks at home at the weekends are such fun, because we’ve begun looking too.” I can remember once giving a mother a little bouquet on Parent’s Day saying, “That’s the mother who’s done the best in helping out collect nature notes this term, [great lark].” Mind you, sometimes you get great shocks when they bring you the slow worms or something; I’m terrified of snakes, so I rather dread when the box is opened as to what’s coming out, but so far we’ve all survived over the years.
What a brilliant idea of Miss Mason’s to start picture study. We have each term a different famous painter. This term we’re doing Rembrandt and last term we did Botticelli and so on. And these, we have the Medici Gallery in London, they printed a special selection for us, so that [each] term we are studying about six of the most well-known paintings of that particular painter. And we discuss it, we make copies of it, we draw it, we look at the composition. And these pictures really become great friends.
Teaching history. I can’t see how you can separate it from geography. I think that the effect of climate and conditions and where you live in the world has an effect upon what sort of temperament and this has an effect upon history. And people are living in the country and people are history. And when, for example, teaching the seven-year-olds about the invasion of England by William, Duke William of Normandy, one begins with history, and then you start to talk about the geography, how they had to cross the sea to come to England, and so you get out the maps and you learn some of the geography. And then you come to discussing the language they brought, that the French language became the first language of the court here, and so on. Then you begin to talk about leadership and the obedience of his army and how that gained William the crown of England. And then I go on and mention how, I get out actual photos of the Bayeux Tapestry and explain that since there were no books, that this embroidered strip of linen depicted the scene of the whole history of the invasion and the whole story, and it was hung up in the church at Bayeux for the people to “read” by thus looking at these great pictures of the event. And then I described, as a needlewoman, I described the embroidery stitches, that it wasn’t actual tapestry, there was a definite type of stitch used, one type of stitch used, throughout that. And then one boy put his hand up to, “Oh, I see! One thing leads to another.” And so it does.
Last year at a meeting of Heads of P.N.E.U. schools in London, one of the things we discussed was that a number of teachers were having difficulty in presenting Shakespeare to the young. And after the meeting, I wrote an article which was published in the P.N.E.U. Journal called “In Defence of Shakespeare.” And in my article I included an uncorrected essay written by one of my pupils in the open class which had 18 children in it. And the ages were from nine to twelve; this is the age we start, this is the group each year, nine to twelve. The essay that I’m going to read to you was written by Christine Williamson. And the Williamson family came from Australia to join the large wonderful family at L’Abri and have now returned to Australia. So it’s my [pleasure] to share, to have this nice little link with you. So here is Christine Williamson’s essay on Shakespeare:
When I first started reading Shakespeare on Friday afternoons, I found it very hard to understand. I was eleven years old, and the first play was The Merchant of Venice. I found it even harder to write about it the following Monday. After I had written quite a few essays, I could understand it, and I put it into my own words better.
I have read and written essays now on The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night. The way we do Shakespeare is this. On Friday afternoon, for an hour, we read the play set for the term. We each have a book and we read the speeches in turn. After we have read a few speeches, first we try and explain what the characters are talking about, and if it’s too hard and we can’t, Mrs. Norton explains it to us. Then we carry on reading.
The next Monday morning we write what had just happened in our own words. In this way, we write the whole play in our own words. We study a play a term and if you stay till the end of the twelve-year form, you read and write twelve plays. If you stay only until the end of the eleventh, you have done nine.
During the summer term we learn our roles for the play to be performed at the end of the term. The play that we act has either been read before or is being read at the time.
We choose our costumes from our theatre cupboard but often we have to alter and adapt them by our own choice of perhaps a different ruff or jacket or colour of tights.
We make all our own props and scenery. We act the play outside in the garden. Shakespeare has greatly increased my vocabulary.
That ends the essay.
Now to finish with a little more of the… Last year we all went to watch an amateur Shakespeare company performing at the […] theatre. The children’s reactions were interesting. They admired the diction and the word perfection of the actors, but their criticisms were, “Their dresses were not the right thing.” “The modern hairstyles and permanent waved hair was not acceptable being out of period.” “Why play a modern Spanish guitar? Where was the lute?” After our last summer’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the children wished we could find a village green suitable to repeat the performance as presented by strolling players one Saturday afternoon. But where could we find a green that had no traffic dashing by to drown our words? We keep a record of each year’s performance, an album of coloured photos provides us with happy memories.
I hope I can inspire other teachers to give the children the heritage they deserve. And I believe that if you have not got the taste for it, the children will get it, if you give them the chance.
I will now say goodbye to you all, having explained to you some of the philosophy of Charlotte Mason and the dedicated life of the teacher who should never underrate her pupils’ ability, and try to remember that teaching is a sharing through patience, love, and understanding.
Endnotes for the Editor’s Note
[1] Macaulay, Susan Schaeffer (2022). For the Children’s Sake. Wheaton: Crossway. (Original work published 1984.) p. 56.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., p. 13.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music