What is the ultimate purpose of education? What are we trying to accomplishing in our homeschools and our schools? In the final analysis is education about “the assimilation of facts [and] the retention of information”? Is its goal to achieve “knowledge of external nature”? Or is it more about the heart than the head? Is …
A paper submitted to Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh in fulfillment of the requirements for the Graduate Diploma in Christian Studies from Regent College April 2023 “My dear, my life does not matter… It is the work that matters and, I say it with all reverence, it will some day (not in my lifetime) be seen to …
Editor’s Note: Essex Cholmondeley (1892–1985) is mostly remembered today as the biographer of Charlotte Mason. She also wrote the impactful booklet Parents Are Peacemakers, revived in recent years by Nancy Kelly. Cholmondeley’s association with the PNEU began in 1911 when Helen Wix, a graduate of the House of Education, became the governess of Essex’s younger …
My early childhood memories are of me running barefoot on a farm in South Africa. My grandparents had a small piece of land where we milked cows by hand, raised our own chickens, and grew our own corn. Whenever I visit a dairy farm, the scent of fresh cow dung always transports me back to …
Editor’s Note: In 2009, Dr. Benjamin Bernier completed his groundbreaking book entitled Education for the Kingdom: An Exploration of the Religious Foundation of Charlotte Mason’s Educational Philosophy. The book remains the finest exposition in print of the theological origin and basis of the Charlotte Mason method. In his research, Bernier explored many documents that had …
Several years ago, a good friend of mine told me that he had been asked by his church to teach a class for some of the children. He had never done anything like this before, so he was not sure what to do or what to expect, but he said he would do it anyway. …
Editor’s Note: When the reader of Charlotte Mason’s first volume has reached only the twelfth page, he or she is struck by Mason’s bold hermeneutical stance: It is worth while for parents to ponder every utterance in the Gospels about the children, divesting themselves of the notion that these sayings belong, in the first place, …
Editor’s Note: The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus famously wrote: God … either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able… if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from …
Last year I received an email from a friend that included the following: When you have a moment, I would be very interested in your thoughts on this from Ourselves: “Nay, that very story of the stopping of the sun in its course, an embedded myth, let us say, is recorded, we may believe, by …