CMP Review 2025-10-23

October 23, 2025

At the annual Charlotte Mason Poetry team retreat, our days were filled with ideas. We discussed poetry (Charlotte Brontë was our poet this year). We did composer study (Maurice Ravel was our composer, and we read a wonderful PNEU Journal article about him). We had devotions (from The Golden Key and The Cloud of Witness). We compared the Socratic method to narration. We went out in nature and identified flowers and fungi.

But a highlight of the retreat for me was craft time. For the second year in a row we made small notebooks. (I also made some repairs to my pocket notebook from last year.) I enjoyed working with my hands and developing a new skill.

Is it strange to have a retreat that caters to both heads and hands? Perhaps. Charlotte Mason noted the tension in a March 1914 letter to Mr. Wood, a school inspector:

The contest is between the humanists & the naturalists. Now it seems to me that Schools have two functions, educational (humane learning only) & vocational, training of senses & muscles & the learning of trades.

I think we only can combine the two because [children] learn quickly on our lines & are alert for handwork etc. for which they have much leisure.

Mason asserted that “we only” can combine the two. She claimed something unique for her philosophy. And every time we gather to stitch and sing, work and wonder, construct and contemplate, we testify to her claim.

@artmiddlekauff