This month marks the 100th anniversary of Charlotte Mason’s death, and Calvary Schools is setting this week aside to share with our community more about her life and history. Each day, you’ll be learning from educators around the country who have been impacted by her teachings and have dedicated their lives to educational renewal one student at a time.

Charlotte Mason – painted in 1902 by Frederic Yates

By Dr. Bill St Cyr
Founder and Director of Training, Ambleside Schools International

One day, at the age of eight, Charlotte Mason noticed a tall lady who wore a dark shawl and had a train of tiny children following, holding on to her skirt. Discovering that this woman was the teacher at a nearby girls’ school, she immediately knew that teaching was to be her life’s work, and above all the teaching of poor children like those she just had seen. (1) By the time of Charlotte Mason’s death, thousands of England’s poor were being educated according to her methods and discovering that “studies serve for delight.” (2)

At the age of nineteen, Charlotte Mason began working as a teacher. She found the experience both exhilarating and profoundly disappointing, for while she delighted in the children nothing extraordinary happened. In her first book, Home Education, she describes her frustration.

The children were good on the whole, because they were the children of parents who had themselves been brought up with some care; but it was plain that they behaved very much as ”twas their nature to.” The faults they had, they kept; the virtues they had were exercised just as fitfully as before. The good, meek little girl still told fibs. The bright, generous child was incurably idle. In lessons it was the same thing; the dawdling child went on dawdling; the dull child became no brighter. It was very disappointing. …This horse-in-a-mill round of geography and French, history, and sums, was no more than playing at education; for who remembers the scraps of knowledge he labored over as a child? and would not the application of a few hours in later life effect more than a year’s drudgery at any one subject in childhood? If education is to secure the step-by-step progress of the individual and the race, it must mean something over and above the daily plodding at small tasks which goes by the name. (3)

It would be Charlotte Mason’s life work to discover and promote principles of education that would lift children above their nature, respect their dignity as persons and provide for their physical, intellectual, moral, and spiritual needs.

In January of 1892, in Ambleside, England, Charlotte Mason celebrated her fiftieth birthday, and the House of Education received its first students. More than simply training in teaching techniques, the House of Education was a school of Christian discipleship. One student describes her initial meeting with Charlotte Mason as follows:

On my arrival at Ambleside, I was interviewed by Miss Mason who asked me for what purpose I had come. I replied: “I have come to learn to teach.” Then Miss Mason said: “My dear, you have come here to learn to live.” I have never forgotten those precious words which have helped me with my children. (4)

In this school of discipleship, no time was more formative than the regular Sunday afternoon gatherings during which Charlotte Mason and her students reflected on the words and deeds of Jesus. From 1895 until 1922 (when she was too infirm to continue), Charlotte Mason led these weekly meetings which her students came to call “Meditations.” They consisted of an “attentive reading of the gospel narratives, comparing them, letting the mind dwell upon the incidents and words, pondering their significance and then keeping the whole in mind.” (5) Their content was later published in six volumes of verse under the title The Savior of the World. Thus, Charlotte Mason authored twelve volumes, six reflecting on the principles of an education that takes seriously the dignity and spiritual capacity of children and six reflecting on the words and deeds of her Savior.

To sum up, Charlotte Mason’s mission can best be described as an extension of the ministry of her Savior and Lord, who stated “I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly.” In her words:

It is more life and fuller that we want, that we crave sometimes with a sick craving; and we have a thousand ways of seeking that satisfaction which comes to us in only one way. Work, wine, art, pleasure, politics, the passion of love, all have been tried again and again and again, and have been found wanting. They give, indeed, the sort of galvanic life of the moment, which fails as soon as the stimulus is no longer applied. But life, no longer conscious of limitations, life of joyous, generous expansion, free and gay as a bird’s life, dutiful and humble as the life of angels — this sort of glad living is the instant reward and result of that recognition of the Son which we call faith.

It is not difficult to distinguish between eternal life and that life of the hour with which men seek to fill the void when the eternal life is not theirs. Eternal life is like the life of God, because it is the life of God. It is outgoing, generous, always giving, never grasping and seeking. Nature and art, literature and history, all men everywhere — these are its interests; these offer the wide field for its expansion. (6)

This is Charlotte Mason’s mission and her vision of Christian education.

A Motto Worth Repeating

Ambleside students regularly recite these four phrases which serve to inspire students toward a higher vision of life.

I AM.
I CAN.
I OUGHT.
I WILL.

“I am, I ought, I can, I will’–these are the steps of that

ladder of St. Augustine, whereby we

‘rise on stepping stones
Of our dead selves to higher things.’

‘I am’–we have the power of knowing ourselves.
‘I ought’–we have within us a moral judge, to whom we feel ourselves subject, and who points out and requires of us our duty.
‘I can’–we are conscious of power to do that which we perceive we ought to do.
‘I will’–we determine to exercise that power with a volition which is in itself a step in the execution of that which we will.”
– Charlotte M. Mason, Home Education

1 Essex Cholmondley, The Story of Charlotte Mason (Petersfield, Hants, UK: Child Light Ltd., 2000), 4, 5.
2 Charlotte Mason, Philosophy of Education (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1989), XXV, XXVI..
3 Charlotte Mason, Home Education (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1989), 98, 99.
4 Essex Cholmondley, The Story of Charlotte Mason (Petersfield, Hants, UK: Child Light Ltd., 2000), 69.
5 Ibid. 185.
6 Ibid. 191.