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 …
My early childhood memories are of me running barefoot on a farm in South Africa. My grandparents had a small piece of land where we milked cows by hand, raised our own chickens, and grew our own corn. Whenever I visit a dairy farm, the scent of fresh cow dung always transports me back to …
Editor’s Note: A letter dated February 15, 1935 from Elsie Kitching to Henrietta Franklin included a tantalizing line: Thank you very much for your letter, and all the trouble you have taken to improve the pamphlets. I kept up the type of the Playroom Leaflet, but we had to get some printed off, as we …
Which seems more interesting to you? Reading stories of Greek and Roman heroes, or sitting in a dim classroom all day memorizing historical dates? When I was little, my schoolwork looked like reading books and spending time out in nature. Many of us have childhood memories of schoolwork that looks like a blank classroom and …
Editor’s Note: By Dean and Karen Andreola In an episode of Wodehouse’s humorous stories of Wooster and Jeeves, the servant Jeeves ruefully remarks to his hapless master that he is retiring to bed “with an improving book.” Ha. Not likely. Jeeves is good at pulling the wool over the eyes of Bertie Wooster. “An improving …