The book, When Children Love to Learn, is finally completed...it wasn't an easy read, and I'm sure that I missed a number of good points, but it did help me with a greater understanding of Charlotte Mason's philosophy. When I first heard about her, I hadn't realized that she was a Christian, but just a good educator. The more I've learned about her, the more I've come to see how much her love for children and teaching springs from her love to God.
One of her primary ideas, and a good constant reminder to me, is that children are persons...they are made in God's image and have their own unique personality, needs, and abilities. She also greatly focuses on the concept that we should lead children to their own conclusions rather than spoon feed them information...that we learn/grow more when we come to the knowledge rather than it being just given to us. Also, that we are learners together...that the teacher doesn't have all the knowledge and just doles it out, but that the children have insight and as teachers, we always have more areas to grow in as well.
My main challenge with CM is that although I love many of her ideas, the feasibility of implementing them alludes me. I, personally, do not have the breadth and depth of knowledge needed to teach the way she encourages (exciting children with background about authors/artists/musicians, prereading books for hard vocab/applicable map work/spelling words, etc), nor do I have the time to get to that point. So, as I am prepping my Learning Plans for VAL and working on next year's schedule, I have included some of her concepts...particularly adding more read-aloud time, poetry, and nature study. I was surprised in looking at some sample schedules how little time they gave to certain subjects like Grammar for only two days a week for twenty minutes. Perhaps I am still deluded into the workbook, complete-a-page philosophy, but I'm not quite ready to abandon that..I've also found that we are still working on staying focused and being self-disciplined around here so that a half hour Math lesson often takes substantially more than that. That is something I hope to work on this next year.
Anyways, I still appreciate her philosophy and have another book about her on my reading pile...so you'll continue to be hearing more about CM as time rolls by. :) I wanted to end with a superb quote she had:
This idea of all education springing from and resting upon our relation to
Almighty God--we do not merely give a religious education because that would
seem to imply the possibility of some other education, as secular education,
for example. But we hold that all education is divine, that every good gift
of knowledge and insight comes from above, that the Lord the Holy Spirit is
the supreme educator of mankind, and that the culmination of all education
(which may at the same time be reached by a little child) is that personal
knowledge of and intimacy with God in which our being finds its fullest
perfection.
from 2004...I love this picture
