Guide, Philosopher, and Friend

Charlotte Mason wrote that the teacher’s “part is not the weariful task of spoon-feeding, but the delightful commerce of equal minds where his is the part of guide, philosopher and friend.” It’s easy to assume that Miss Mason herself coined the phrase, but the fact is that people had been applying the label “guide, philosopher and friend” to roles, persons, and books for over a century before Mason’s time. But sadly, the label seemed always just out of reach for the ordinary, official teacher, who was more often seen as a master than a mentor.

Charlotte Mason changed all that, showing us how we can be the companions, coworkers, and confidants of our children. This past weekend at the Living Education Retreat, I explored how. You can hear it too:

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Quotes Cited

Charlotte Mason

“The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.”
— Charlotte Mason (“Self-Education,” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 24, p. 407; later reprinted in Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 32)

“Some of the results of this theory and practice of education are,— that the children work with eagerness and delight and the teacher is relieved of the heart-sickening process of ‘forcible feeding;’ that the teacher is able to give his energies to the disciplinary subjects (Mathematics, Grammar, etc.), and teaches children who are accustomed to attend; that, instead of forcing facts upon his class by way of tedious drawing out, illustration, recapitulation, etc., the teacher becomes its guide, philosopher and friend, a wonderfully stimulating influence through his own natural enjoyment of and interest in the books his pupils read.”
— Charlotte Mason (“A Liberal Education,” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 26, p. 565)

“We as teachers depreciate ourselves and our office; we do not realise that in the nature of things the teacher has a prophetic power of appeal and inspiration, that his part is not the weariful task of spoon-feeding with pap-meat, but the delightful commerce of equal minds where his is the part of guide, philosopher and friend.”
— Charlotte Mason (“A Liberal Education: Theory,” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 27, p. 644; later reprinted in Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 237)

“For the action of fear as a governing motive we cannot do better than read again our David Copperfield  … and study ‘Mr. Creakle’ in detail for terrorism in the schoolroom”
— Charlotte Mason (Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 81)

“the educator has to deal with a self-acting, self-developing being, and his business is to guide”
— Charlotte Mason (Home Education, p. 9)

“The business of every day is not for the teachers to teach, but for the children to learn; when the children are at work, she works too; if they are painting a given object, she paints it”
— Charlotte Mason (“Three Educational Idylls,” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 23, p. 807)

“Can any of us love like a little child? Father and mother, sisters and brothers, neighbours and friends, … all come in for his lavish tenderness.”
— Charlotte Mason (in Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 43)

“Suddenly … we are in a flood of rage, resentment, crooked contrivings, … We do not intend, will, or foresee these sudden falls; we become as persons possessed, and have no power in ourselves to struggle out of the flood of malice … whatever else of evil has overwhelmed us.”
— Charlotte Mason (in Ourselves, Book II, p. 115)

“No home can be happy if a single member of it allow himself in ugly tempers … By degrees, great sensitiveness to the moral atmosphere of the home will be acquired; the happiness of a single day will come to be regarded as a costly vase which any clumsy touch may overthrow.”
— Charlotte Mason (in Formation of Character, p. 207)

Other PNEU Literature

“Late in the autumn of 1882 I was travelling with Mr. Ruskin in Italy. We had driven up from Florence in the heat of the day; sketched Fra Angelico’s monastery …; and we went down before dusk to see the ancient walls of the town. Just outside the gate, my guide, philosopher and friend showed me a strange thing…”
— W. G. Collingwood (“The Fésole Club Papers,” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 2, p. 31; later reprinted in The Parents’ Review vol. 14, p. 21; the latter version is quoted here)

“The ideal way was, of course, to let the boys watch and discover for themselves, the teacher acting merely as ‘guide, philosopher, and friend.’”
— Mr. Morgan (“Nature Study, its Aims and Methods,” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 15, p. 318)

“Children accustomed to study, to self-education, are independent of the teacher for a large part of the time. Then what is left for the teacher to do? The teacher’s part is that of guide, philosopher and friend.”
— Elsie Kitching (“Elementary Schools and the Parents’ Union School,” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 28, p. 24)

“Natural conditions demand natural treatment, and therefore all formal talk is left behind. The child occupies the first place and the teacher takes the part of guide, philosopher and friend. This cuts directly across the traditional methods of teaching and discards much of the formalism of the past. The teacher’s personality becomes a guiding force rather than a leading one.”
— Mr. W. Smith (“A Liberal Education for All,” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 28, p. 581)

“If the teacher is a guide, philosopher and friend, rather than a dictator, the child’s own work uses all the powers of his mind, and by making full use of his habit of attention, he is able to accomplish more in, say, twenty minutes than in a forty minutes’ oral lesson which has to be taken down in notes and learnt by heart with a view to answering questions.”
— Elsie Kitching (“The Teaching of English,” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 51, pp. 495–496)

“The student as a potential graduate needed tutors with high (and recent) academic qualifications. The student as a person wanted a guide, philosopher, and friend who had seen something of the world outside the classroom.”
— J. P. Inman (Charlotte Mason College, p. 67)

“There are, however, many slow by nature to grasp mathematics or grammar—what is the teacher to do about them? Keep the work relevant, suited to the child’s power of understanding. Give him a programme easier than that of his Form; easy enough for the confidence to return which Miss Mason wanted, and give him a sense of mastery—and, no doubt, with it the assurance that this teacher can teach after all! Or let the French Dictée chosen be easy enough for some to get it all right, and none to feel defeated and silly; for that is to offend against their integrity.”
— Vyvyan Richards (“The Parents’ Union School,” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 66, p. 128)

“The word ‘philosophy’ has lost much of its meaning to-day, the modern conception of a philosopher being a specialist interested in certain branches of abstract thought. ‘We must remember,’ says Sir R. W. Livingstone, ‘the literal meaning of the word, “love of wisdom,” and envisage the sort of person whom Plato had in mind when he said that the philosopher was “a man ready and eager to taste every kind of knowledge, who addresses himself to its pursuit joyfully and with an insatiable appetite…” There are no restrictions on the appetite of the “philosopher” for knowledge; science, history, metaphysics, every branch of study, fascinate him, excite his curiosity, awake his “wonder,” and stir him to press on, by their means but beyond them, to something higher still than knowledge—wisdom.’”
— Elsie Kitching (“Children Up to School Age and Beyond” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 54, p. 66)

“The teacher too is a person in need of mental food, and it is as the teacher shares a common banquet of living food with the child that the limitations of environment, of class, of the dominating personality on the teacher’s part, and of inanition on the part of the child, cease to exist.”
— Elsie Kitching (“A Great Inheritance,” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 36, p. 404)

“I always find it an excellent plan to work with the children, then they do not feel as if they are being watched.”
— R. M. Harrison (“Miss Mason’s Inspiration in ‘The First Steps of Education,’” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 47, p. 96)

“preservice teachers ‘did all the things the children learned to do — nature walks, picture talks, musical appreciation, living books. Everything was on the level of the child so we could learn in the same way as they were supposed to.’”
— Margaret Wigan, CMC 1948 (in Lessons to Learn — Charlotte Mason’s House of Education and Resistance to Taxonomic Drift by Jack Beckman, p. 21)

“The child loves knowledge, and to the home circle he turns for it… And this is the main reason surely why parents should continue their own education and make friends of their sons.”
— Arthur Burrell (“How to Preserve the Imaginative Power in Children,” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 13, p. 630)

“I do most sincerely believe that if a girl is trained on right lines from her earliest days, and that the mother realizes, when the critical period has come when she must abdicate her throne as ruler, and ever after walk hand in hand with her daughter in perfect motherhood and sisterhood, there can be no question of a perfect friendship between the two.”
— Emeline Steinthal (“Friendship Between Mothers and Daughters,” in The Parents’ Review, vol. 16, p. 409)

Alexander Pope 

“When Statesmen, Heroes, Kings, in dust repose,
Whose Sons shall blush their Fathers were thy foes,
Shall then this Verse to future age pretend
Thou wert my Guide, Philosopher, and Friend?”
— Alexander Pope (in An Essay on Man) 

Grasp the whole Worlds, of Reason, Life, and Sense,
In one close System of Benevolence!
Happier, as kinder! in whate’er degree;
And height of Bliss but height of Charity.
— Alexander Pope (in An Essay on Man) 

Other Sources

“to use the language of a celebrated English Poet:
…
And shall then this verse to future age pretend
Thou wert my Guide, Philosopher, and Friend?”
— Andrew Duncan (Observations on the Operation and Use of Mercury)

“A good wife is always her husband’s ‘guide, philosopher and friend.’”
— Helen Rowland (A Guide to Men, p. 32) 

“Sir T. F. Buxton says he owed more to his father’s gamekeeper, who could neither read nor write, than to any other source of knowledge. He said this man was truly his ‘guide, philosopher, and friend,’ whose memory was stored with more varied rustic knowledge, good sense, and mother wit, than his young master ever met with afterwards. He adds that he was his first instructor, and that he profited far more by his remarks and admonitions than by those of his more learned tutors.”
— Maturin Ballou (Genius in Sunshine and Shadow, pp. 19–20)

“[Creakle] received me, like a man who had formed my mind in bygone years, and had always loved me tenderly. On my introducing Traddles, Mr. Creakle expressed, in like manner, but in an inferior degree, that he had always been Traddles’s guide, philosopher, and friend.”
— Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)

“idiom : a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (e.g. over the moon).”
— Concise Oxford English Dictionary

“the person who knows best what a student is struggling with in assimilating new concepts is not the professor, it’s another student.”
— Eric Mazur (“Confessions of a Converted Lecturer”)

“if the boy does not learn, whose fault is it save the teacher’s?”
— John Amos Comenius (In John Amos Comenius by Simon Somerville Laurie, p. 93)

“If subjects of study are rightly arranged and taught, they themselves attract and allure all save very exceptional natures; and if they are not rightly taught, the fault is in the teacher, not the pupil… A musician does not dash his instrument against a wall, or give it blows and cuffs, because he cannot draw music from it, but continues to apply his skill till he extracts a melody.”
— John Amos Comenius (In John Amos Comenius by Simon Somerville Laurie, p. 131)

“In the fourth epistle of the Essay, however, the one on individual human happiness, Pope’s speaker makes and responds to a troubling discovery, a discovery that Pope himself made in real life: his philosophical friend, with whom he enjoyed a perfect harmony while he expatiated on topics concerning mankind in general, is not himself happy, is not himself reconciled to the part he has been forced to play … in the great scheme of things. Bolingbroke has not been able to find personal happiness.”
— William Bowman Piper (in “The Conversational Poetry of Pope,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 10, p. 512)

“Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie

Thy soul’s immensity;

Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage; thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep”

— William Wordsworth (in Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, quoted in Home Education p. 11)

Summary Table

Traditional Teacher	Guide, Philosopher, and Friend
Teacher is like a dictator	Teacher is like a prophet
Teacher is a leading force	Teacher is a guiding force
Teacher has academic qualifications	Teacher has seen the world
Atmosphere of formalism	Atmosphere of freedom, liberty, and independence
Forcible intellectual feeding	Self-education
Tedious drawing out	Delightful commerce of equal minds
Heart-sickening process	Enjoyment of and interest in the books