What is Knowledge? - Thoughts from Charlotte Mason

If you missed my previous posts on education, you'll want to go back and read those. So far I gave a brief introduction to Charlotte Mason and discussed why we're planning to use Ambleside Online.

Charlotte Mason wrote a lot. Most of her thoughts on education are contained in 6 Volumes commonly referred to as the Home Schooling Series. Her audience is both mothers schooling their children at home in the younger years (or more commonly hiring governesses to school the children at home) and teachers of children in the PNEU schools she helped found.

Toward the end of her life, Charlotte Mason took everything she’d thought and wrote about and attempted to consolidate it all into 20 Principles. Studying these 20 principles can be a great way to get started learning about Charlotte Mason. Brandy Vencel over at Afterthoughts created a wonderful guide for doing this. She developed a study guide to walk through the principles with her fellow homeschooling friends. For each of the 20 principles, she guides you through Charlotte Mason’s own words from her writings. If you’re new to Charlotte Mason, I highly recommend clicking here and purchasing her Start Here Guide. It’d be even better if you were able to form your own study group to go through it together.  

I’ve been studying through the 20 Principles with the Ambleside Online Forum community myself. A few weeks ago, we covered principle 13. I’ll type the whole thing out here so you get a feel for what the principles are like. Here it is:

In devising a syllabus for a normal child, of whatever social class, three points must be considered:

• He requires much knowledge, for the mind needs sufficient food as much as does the body.
• The knowledge should be various, for sameness in mental diet does not create appetite (i.e. curiosity)
• Knowledge should be communicated in well-chosen language because his attention responds naturally to what is conveyed in literary form

In Volume 6, Charlotte Mason identifies 3 areas of knowledge: Knowledge of God (the most important), Knowledge of Man (History, Literature, Citizenship, Composition, Languages, Art), and Knowledge of the Universe (Science, Geography, Mathematics).

So those are some categories of knowledge. But what is knowledge? Here's Charlotte Mason herself:

“No information becomes knowledge to us until the individual mind has acted upon it, translated it, transformed, absorbed it, to reappear, like our bodily food, in forms of vitality. Therefore, teaching, talk, and tale, however lucid or fascinating, effect nothing until self-activity be set up – that is self-education is the only possible education, the rest is veneer laid on the surface of a child’s nature.”

I think this quote covers so very thoroughly what we do wrong in modern, progressive education. We work so hard to create knowledge for the students. We devise lesson plans. We plan out unit studies so that every subject is integrated with every other subject. We try to make as many connections as we can so that the students don't have to make those connections themselves. And after we go through that whole process, who has received the education?

A plethora of moms homeschool because they love learning along with their children. They truly love giving themselves the education they never received themselves. I think we have to be so careful that we're actually guiding our children to be receiving their own education. We can't do the work of education for them. Let them create their own projects and their own play. If we give them the proper nourishment for their minds and the time and space to work in, they will automatically give themselves the education they need. It is innate. Just read some stories to your children and then watch what they do with them. I find it to be amazing.

How does a Charlotte Mason education make this happen? That's a big question. In my next 2 posts in this series, I'll touch on two of the key components: living books and narration.