CMP Review 2025-04-15

April 15, 2025

Years ago I heard Pastor Shane Idleman say that crises reveal who we really are. Those words stuck with me.

Charlotte Mason developed her philosophy of education during relatively peaceful times. The five-volume Home Education Series and a portion of An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education had already been published before a world-wide crisis came to England. That crisis was the Great War.

This crisis would reveal who Miss Mason really was. Would she continue to hold to the principles that she had so consistently presented for so many years? Or would she find that some had failed the test in the light of a world at war?

In 1915 Mason wrote a letter to The Times as the doyen, or senior representative, of teachers. The letter was then published in tine April 1915 Parents’ Review with the title “The War and the Children.” Its message is applicable to anyone in any kind of trial — as it asks what place a living education has in the darkest of times. We’ve transcribed and recorded it for you here.

@artmiddlekauff