Editor’s Note: Essex Cholmondeley (1892–1985) is mostly remembered today as the biographer of Charlotte Mason. She also wrote the impactful booklet Parents Are Peacemakers, revived in recent years by Nancy Kelly. Cholmondeley’s association with the PNEU began in 1911 when Helen Wix, a graduate of the House of Education, became the governess of Essex’s younger …
Editor’s Note, by Haley Struecker In the second part of her article “Children Up to School Age and Beyond,” Elsie Kitching clarified for parents: There should be no so-called ‘lessons’ in the playroom. ‘Occupations’ is the right word, and for these no time-table should be set and there should be a sense of much freedom …
Editor’s Note: Donald Beswick was born in 1928 near Manchester. “After two years at a Teacher Training College and one year at Trinity College of Music, he took up teaching and [became] music master at a Secondary Modern School in London.” It was said that “his hobbies [were] singing with the Oriana Madrigal Society, and …
Editor’s Note: The appearance of Maria Montessori’s first book in English in 1912 greatly alarmed Charlotte Mason and the PNEU. Mason’s response was swift and strong. On December 3 of that same year The Times Educational Supplement published her letter entitled, “Miss Mason on the Montessori System.” This letter became chapter VII of the 1913 …
Thoughts and Encouragement for Habit Training Probably one of the first principles of Charlotte Mason I encountered when I started reading and researching her philosophy was that of habit training. At that stage I had no idea that it formed part of one of her twenty principles—that of “Education is a Discipline.” I read somewhere …
Editor’s Note: In 1919, a set of students at Charlotte Mason’s House of Education were each invited “to write an essay on some subject suggested by the volumes of the ‘Home Education Series.’”[1] Charlotte Mason herself then reviewed these essays and published them in the opening pages of the November 1919 issue of The Parents’ …
Editor’s Note: This year we are celebrating the Charlotte Mason Centenary — the one-hundred-year anniversary of Charlotte Mason’s death. However, this is not the first Charlotte Mason Centenary. In 1942, a different anniversary was celebrated — the one-hundred-year anniversary of Charlotte Mason’s birth. The January 1942 issue of The Parents’ Review was named the “Centenary …
Editor’s Note. Lucy Barnes was born in 1805 as the first of four children of the poet and philologist William Barnes. She recalled that she and her siblings “never had in the remotest corner of their memories the shadow of an unkind word from their father, who was as ready to play ‘bears’ with them …
Editor’s Note. “Just before the summer holidays [in 1887],” reminisced Charlotte Mason, “a few persons met in a neighbouring drawing-room to discuss a scheme for a Parents’ Educational Union.”[1] As a direct result of that meeting, the PNEU was born. But that was not the only momentous event in PNEU history that took place in …