A New Educational Frontier

So many of us either have already learned or are in the process of discovering that Charlotte Mason provided an incredible system for a living K–12 education. Her thoughts and ideas have been further developed and spread through various publications, retreats, and websites such as this one. But if you have any children who went to or are looking at going to college, you have probably found that the options of continuing this living education in a higher education setting are few to none. Why is that? Is Mason’s method only for K–12 education, or is it a truly comprehensive method for students and lifelong learners of all ages? These are the questions that have been plaguing me for the past year or two, and this article is a brief overview of my preliminary thoughts, ideas, and questions on the subject.

I am an 18-year-old rising college sophomore who was Mason-educated for my entire K–12 education. I am the youngest of five homeschooled children, so I grew up listening to Shakespeare and participating in picture studies basically from the time I was born. My family participated in a local co-op group that met every two weeks to do lessons and share our work from the previous weeks with our peers. I could talk for days about how incredible my K–12 education was and how it truly cultivated a love of learning in my life, but that is not the topic of this article, and neither you nor I have the time for such rabbit trails. Suffice it to say that my K–12 Mason education was a profound blessing from God and formed the backbone of a childhood that consisted of a true feast of living ideas.

During my junior and senior years of high school, I took full-time dual-enrollment classes from both my local community college and also online from the University of Northwestern, St. Paul. Not surprisingly, the teaching and learning method I encountered in those classes was vastly different from my experience in a Mason group. While I did not struggle to get good grades and even excelled in these classes, I could tell that the entire educational method was different and that my days of participating in a true living education were over. Then, this past year, after I graduated from high school, I chose to take online classes from a private Christian university in Virginia called Patrick Henry College. I planned to save money while taking those online classes so I could afford to attend that college in-person the next fall. Patrick Henry College is a school that prides itself on academic rigor and its commitment to a classical education. I was thrilled when I learned that in my first semester, I would be reading living books such as The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost, among many others. Finally, I thought, I could get back to my living education and continue my feast of great ideas. However, while the books we read were incredible, and I learned much from reading them, I found that the focus and method employed were woefully inadequate and didn’t facilitate an atmosphere conducive to a living education.

I was reading great works of literature like The Iliad, but instead of focusing on what interested and inspired me, I found myself focused on what would be on the quiz about the book. In other words, instead of thinking and interacting with the ideas that stuck out to me, I was using all my time and energy on what I thought the professor would want me to take from the reading. I would take notes, but I wouldn’t write down quotes that struck me or meaningful ideas that I learned in the reading; instead, I would write down the stats, names, and facts of things that I thought would be on the test. This is one of the main flaws in the mainstream educational system: focusing on what the teacher wants the student to learn instead of what the student finds meaningful. We recognize that this is a problem in our K–12 schools, but we seem to have accepted that this is simply “the way it is” in higher education.

These experiences led me to begin wondering if Mason’s methods could be extended to higher education. After all, the Mason method is not just a way to educate children in the home, but a true lifestyle and method for all to learn more effectively and more joyfully. Parents learn alongside their children as they choose to implement the Mason method in their home. So why must this rich, living education end when the child hits the arbitrary age of eighteen and graduates from high school? I will contend that it should not.

While Mason did write a little about the processes of the House of Education, which was a post-secondary school that operated using Mason principles, she did not lay out an extensive framework for what post-secondary education should look like, the way that she did for K–12 education. Since Mason never fully developed her method into a comprehensive system of higher education, does that mean that we shouldn’t either? In Susan Schaeffer Macaulay’s foundational book For the Children’s Sake, she points out that “Neither did [Charlotte Mason] ever consider that she had arrived at a final, authoritative, ‘last word’ in the field of education. There is a striking lack of pride in the title of her final book: An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education.” Mason knew that she hadn’t developed an absolutely flawless educational system that could never be modified or adapted to different situations than the ones she laid out in her volumes. So, just because Mason didn’t provide a model for instituting her method in a college setting doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen. We need a team of wise, God-fearing men and women who are able to further develop Mason’s method into the area of higher education.

As a Charlotte Mason homeschooling graduate, I am often asked whether I felt that my Mason education properly prepared me for college. My answer to that question has always been a resounding “Absolutely!” My response is then followed by my explanation that my Mason education taught me how to truly think and learn, and how that applies to all classes I take. But recently, I have begun to realize that this is not the right question to be asking when wondering whether to homeschool your children using the Mason method. If we truly believe that the Mason method is the very best way not only to learn and educate a child, but also the best way for anyone to live, and if we believe that it provides meaning, value, and God-given life, then it really doesn’t matter if this education prepares children for college or not. In fact, if a Mason education does not properly prepare a child for college, we should not be asking how we can change their living K–12 education, but how we can change the colleges themselves.

What exactly would a Mason-method college look like and how could that possibly work? These are the questions that I continue to wrestle with and honestly have not found any clear answers to. There are major challenges inherent in an undertaking like this, and it won’t be an easy task. But it also wasn’t easy for Mason to revolutionize the K–12 educational system, yet she found a way to do so. Perhaps it is time for us to venture into the “next frontier” of educational reform and seek to revolutionize the higher education setting.

I would be delighted to hear any and all feedback and questions that any of you have on this subject. Do you believe Mason’s method should be applied to higher education? What are the challenges of such an idea? And most importantly, how could Mason’s method be applied to higher education? Let me know what your thoughts are, and let’s venture into this next educational frontier together.

Keegan Spittle has been educated with the Mason method since his earliest memories. He grew up the youngest of five children and was blessed to participate in a Mason homeschool group for his entire K-12 education. He graduated high school in 2025 and took classes online from a small Christian university, Patrick Henry College, last year. This year he will be moving out to Virginia to take classes in-person from PHC while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Classical Liberal Arts. Keegan has long appreciated the value of a living, Mason education and has recently started to dive into the practical aspects of a Mason education and ways it could be implemented into a higher education setting.

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