CMP Review 2025-03-30

In 1912, Charlotte Mason wrote a series of letters to the Times which were published the following year with the title The Basis of National Strength. The first letter focused on knowledge. “It is for their own sakes that children should get knowledge,” she wrote.

Each letter appeared as a crescendo, strengthening and echoing her theme. And then finally in the fourth letter she made her great claim: “knowledge is the basis of a nation’s strength.”

Reading this booklet, now forever made part of her final book, one might think that for Mason, knowledge is the highest good. But it is in her poetry that we find the completeness of her thought.

A day is coming, she foresaw, when a Judge is coming. And then we will be asked not “What did you know?” but “What did you do with what you know?” Read Mason’s important and challenging poem here.

@artmiddlekauff

🖼️: Behold the Bridegroom Cometh by William Blake Richmond