CMP Review 2023-11-21

November 21, 2023

In 1912, Professor Henry W. Holmes of Harvard University made a stunning announcement:

We have no other example of an educational system—original at least in its systematic wholeness and in its practical application—worked out and inaugurated by the feminine mind and hand. It is remarkable, also, because it springs from a combination of womanly sympathy and intuition, broad social outlook, scientific training, intensive and long-continued study of educational problems, and to crown all, varied and unusual experience as a teacher and educational leader.

Professor Holmes wrote these words in the introduction of the first American edition of a book about … the Montessori method.

Charlotte Mason was shocked. “We have no other example,” wrote the professor! And what have I been doing these past 26 years, she must have thought to herself!

Miss Mason realized her legacy was at stake. The method she thought would change the world was now being eclipsed by not one but two new and idyllic methods of education.

Well, not if she could help it. Read or hear the astonishing 1912 article by Charlotte Mason in which she defined her own place in history. The article in which she made perhaps the most extraordinary claim in print about her method. A claim so many would dismiss out of hand — unless it had been made by Charlotte M. Mason herself. Find it here.

@artmiddlekauff