CMP Review 2025-12-16

December 16, 2025

Daisy Golding was a teacher who described her situation in the book In Memoriam:

Our school is situated in an urban industrial district: a large majority of the children are from homes where the father and the mother, too, work in a boot factory when employment can be obtained at all. With one or two rare exceptions, our girls do not belong to the company of favoured children whose parents are able to take an intelligent interest in them. English, as it should be spoken, does not exist for them in their home life, and their vocabulary is sadly limited.

Into this environment Golding introduced the Charlotte Mason method in 1918. Two years later she was a featured speaker at Mason’s children’s gathering in Whitby. Essex Cholmondeley, Mason’s biographer, was present, and wrote that “Miss Golding read a splendidly direct paper on the true meaning of the work of the P.N.E.U., and gave us her experience of it in elementary school work.”

Golding’s paper provided a wonderful picture of how the method was implemented during Mason’s own lifetime. Golding even proposed a customization which was “sanctioned” by Miss Mason herself. This “splendidly direct paper” has been hidden away in a handful of libraries for a hundred years. Until today. Read or hear it here.

@artmiddlekauff