CMP Review 2024-01-16

January 16, 2024

Last week we shared the remarkable story of Olive Norton, the homeschool mother. Her testimony as a mother-teacher was recorded in the 1962 issue of The Parents’ Review, soon after her daughter had left the “home-schoolroom … at the age of sixteen and a half years.” As with many parents today who have graduated their last child from homeschool, Mrs. Norton faced a decision. Was educating the Charlotte Mason way just a temporary phase in her life? Or had the years of teaching her children at home transformed Mrs. Norton into a new person and given her a new calling?

It turns out that for Mrs. Norton, “twelve and a half years” of home education was just the beginning. In the decade that followed, she turned her focus outside the family and became headmistress of the Compton PNEU School, near Chichester in West Sussex.

In 1976, another article by Olive Norton appeared in print, this time in The PNEU Journal, the new name of The Parents’ Review. This article, entitled “In Defence of Shakespeare,” includes a testimony from one of her students on how the study of Shakespeare is carried out in the Compton school. But Norton’s article gives more than simply practical guidelines on how and why to study Shakespeare. It also gives a glimpse into how and why to trust the Charlotte Mason method, even in the third decade of teaching. Read or listen here.

@artmiddlekauff