CMP Review 2026-05-19

May 19, 2026

Portrait of a woman in armor seated on a throne on the left, with a red cape; to the right, a small oval engraved metal pin on a dark book cover reading 'The Home Education Series, Vol. IV, Ourselves'

In the Idyll Challenge we tend to have interesting conversations about the second-to-last chapter of volume 5, entitled “Better-than-my-neighbor.” In this chapter, Miss Mason quotes Plutarch as saying that “philosophy must be put first in all education.” She then adds this commentary:

The functions which Plutarch claims for philosophy we ascribe to religion, and by so doing we place life on a higher level. There is this fundamental difference between the two: while philosophy instructs, religion both instructs and enables. But it is a question whether that science of life or art of living which philosophy should teach had not better be made a distinct study, with its own methods, classifications, rules of progress, under the sanction of religion, and tried at every step by a religious standard.

Often people ask: how would we go about making “that science of life or art of living” a “distinction study” in our homeschools and school? Mason gifts some general parameters (starting on p. 385) but is perhaps not quite as specific as some would like her to be.

I believe that her student, Rose Amy Pennethorne, gave the more precise answer many are looking for. It was the content of her address to the 33rd Annual Conference of the PNEU in London in the summer of 1921, reprinted in the September Parents’ Review. Read or hear it here.

@artmiddlekauff