Who was Charlotte Mason and what is her method of homeschooling?
Charlotte Mason lived in England in the 1800’s. [see photos of the Ambleside area where she lived and worked here.] Orphaned at age 16 and never married, she devoted her life to children and their education. Her ideas were ahead of her time – while others thought that children were no more than empty slates to be filled with information, she believed that they were already real people capable of independent, intelligent thought and that they needed vital ideas, rather than dry facts, to feed their growing minds. The students in the schools she founded read and discussed living books written by excellent authors on various subjects, took daily nature walks and recorded their observations in notebooks, enjoyed art and music, cultivated and maintained good personal habits such as attention to detail, focused attention and consideration to others, and learned foreign languages. And, by using short lessons, they accomplished all of this (and more) by lunchtime so that they had their afterno
