There is a quality that Charlotte Mason said “is our first duty and our last duty, and includes all our duties.” She said it “is the hall-mark of character,” and that “all men are divided into two sorts”: those who have this quality and those who do not. Only the “few” have this quality, but …
Editor’s note: Lucy Gore attended the House of Education during its first decade. While there, she enjoyed nature walks under the guidance of M. L. Hodgson, the naturalist credited with instituting the practice of nature notebooks at the school. Many years later, classmate E.C. Allen recalled a poem that Gore wrote: Now students dear, Miss …
In 1890, Charlotte Mason wrote, “Is not physiology hurrying up with the announcement that to every man it is permitted to mould and modify his own brain?” By 1894, Mason clearly saw the implications: “Within our own time the science of Education has been absolutely revolutionised, not by educationalists, but by Physiologists, who have made …
Editor’s Note: In 1905, Charlotte Mason published the fourth volume of her Home Education Series and called it Ourselves, Our Souls and Bodies. Four years later, a teacher wrote about her experiences using the book with a class of children. Published in the 1909 Parents’ Review, this article stirs the imagination with what can be accomplished with Miss Mason’s …
Editor’s Note: On November 26, 1948, the PNEU celebrated its Diamond Jubilee. Many great figures from the PNEU were present and spoke, including Henrietta Franklin, Elizabeth Molyneux, and Elsie Kitching. One man was invited, but he was unable to attend. “How I wish that I could be at the Anniversary Luncheon to bear testimony,”[1] he wrote. Why …
Few aspects of a Charlotte Mason education are more hotly debated or deeply misunderstood than the question of lesson planning. On the one hand, some say that the teacher must provide elaborate “scaffolding,” pre-reading every book, highlighting words and phrases, and evaluating daily progress. On the other hand, Marian Ney in 1981 wrote that Mason …
Editor’s note: In April, 1909, Charlotte Mason hosted the Fourth Students’ Conference at Scale How, which drew fifty-five former students of the House of Education to Ambleside: In all our annals was ever a conference like this in the world before? And the days flew by, and the week was done, did ever week go so …
Editor’s Note: Mrs. Dermod O’Brien was the President of the Dublin Branch of the PNEU for many years. In the January 1943 issue of The Parents’ Review (which was published after her death) it was stated that she was “a most loyal and brilliant colleague and a most gracious personality… Her wise as well as witty …
Editor’s Note: In Charlotte Mason circles today, we sometimes hear the claim that Miss Mason retracted or even recanted some of her beliefs about the role of habit in education. I like to say that if that’s the case, somebody forgot to tell the rest of the PNEU. As late as 1967, an article in the PNEU …