Charlotte Mason, the Educational Philosopher

In researching Charlotte Mason’s life for my forthcoming book on her with Classical Academic Press (preorder Charlotte Mason: A Liberal Education for all!), the latest in the Giants in the History of Education series (register for my live webinar with Classical Academic Press!) I was struck by Mason’s insistence on the importance of educational philosophy. This stands in contrast to many of the other “giants” in this series (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Milton, C.S. Lewis), who were not educational philosophers first and foremost, but philosophers and theologians simply, who also happened to address education specifically. None of these thinkers felt the need to press the point of philosophy’s importance in the same way. 

We might posit the source of this confusion in the modern turn to pragmatic considerations as the main focus of educational theory. Or we could note the human tendency in general to focus on a part of the truth, the need for a student to be prepared for a job, for instance, as if it were the whole of education. We set our sights too narrowly on a certain educational outcome and miss the forest for the trees. We can detect these problems in Mason’s diatribe on the topic:

We do not sufficiently realise the need for unity of principle in education. We have no Captain Idea which shall marshal for us the fighting host of educational ideas which throng the air; so, in default of a guiding principle, a leading idea, we feel ourselves at liberty to pick and choose. This man thinks he is free to make science the sum of his son’s education, the other chooses the classics, a third prefers a mechanical, a fourth, a commercial program. . . . 

Everyone feels himself at liberty to do that which is right in his own eyes with regard to the education of his children. Let it be our negative purpose to discourage in every way we can the educational faddist, that is, the person who accepts a one-sided notion in place of a universal idea as his educational guide. Our positive purpose is to present, in season and out of season, one such universal idea; that is, that education is the science of relations. (Mason, School Education, 160–161)

I am grateful to Karen Glass for pointing out this passage in her book In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education (23). This diatribe is remarkable for Mason’s insistence on a harmony, coherence or unity to the philosophy and practice of education. Her allusion to the biblical book of Judges reinforces her point that confusion and disorder reign when a guiding law is not followed. Salvation from the oppression of educational faddism can only be attained by a Captain Idea, a Judge, who will unite the tribes and marshal the hosts to restore right worship of the divine. 

The tone of religious authority for such a “guiding principle” is further reinforced by her second biblical allusion to the apostle Paul’s instruction to Timothy:

Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. (2 Tim 4:2-4 KJV; emphasis added)

The danger of faddism is clear in this passage as well, which describes “itching ears” of those who will not continue in sound Christian doctrine. Mason has made herself the Apostle of Educational Philosophy in beginning to propound her sovereign principle: education is the science of relations. 

To understand Charlotte Mason as Educational Philosopher par excellence, it will be helpful to consider two battles she fought in the war of educational philosophy. One of these was near to home and involved Mason defending her own turf for leadership of the Parents National Educational Union (PNEU) against Lady Isabel Margesson. The other involved a confident Mason going on the offensive through a newspaper article review of Maria Montessori (Have you read Patrick Egan’s article comparing Charlotte Mason with Maria Montessori?). Each of these battles reveals something unique about Mason’s relationship with the classical tradition and new educational movements of her day.

Battle #1: The PNEU Identity Crisis

Lady Isabel Margesson represented a major challenge to Charlotte Mason’s leadership of the Parents National Educational Union. In part, the seeds of controversy had already been sown from the union’s founding. After Charlotte Mason’s breakthrough at Bradford with her Home Education lectures (later revised into the book Home Education) and the founding of the first parents union there and then in London, the PNEU constitution was written in such a broad and general way, that it is not surprising that conflict would arise over the direction of the organization. The issue in this case concerned the importance of the new educationists or modern reformers, like Herbert Spencer and Friedrich Froebel.

In the first edition of Home Education, Mason had explicitly endorsed these educational reformers, a move that she would come to regret (as seen by the fact that she excised the comment in later editions). Mason appealed to natural law and the emerging sciences of physiology and psychology as important sources for parents and teachers in the education of their children. In doing so, she struck a chord with the late Victorian mood. Herbert Spencer, however, as one of the most famous English philosophers of her day, also had coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and propounded social darwinism, in addition to his “idiosyncratic take on non-coercive upbringing, parental defects, good health, and the sound Pestalozzian education in which [Mason herself] had been trained” at the Home & Colonial Training College. With Froebel, the disciple of the Christian Romantic educator Pestalozzi, she was at least on more clearly Christian ground, even if the Kindergarten play-way methods were still controversial. Charlotte Mason was walking a tightrope by endorsing traditional conceptions of habit training and character development and these new educationists.

Lady Isabel was an aristocratic member of the Belgravia branch who advocated for a strong endorsement of the new educationists. By 1892 she had already been conducting classes in her area for parents on Froebel, Pestalozzi, Locke, and Spencer. The PNEU executive committee pushed Mason to include her essay, “What Is the P.N.E.U.?” in the Parents’ Review magazine that Mason edited to promote the organization. In the winter of 1894 Mason departed for Florence, Italy, as a sabbatical of sorts for her health. While she was gone Lady Isabel made her move. She pushed through a number of reforms that would centralize PNEU operations in London and which effectively excluded Mason’s Bradford supporters who could not appear regularly there for meetings. Her goal seemed to be to remake the PNEU along explicitly new educationist lines. 

When Mason returned from her inspiring trip to Florence in May 1894, she became aware of the looming threat. She received Lady Isabel at her home in Ambleside to assess the situation, and wrote to Dr. Schofield who was one of her close allies on the executive committee.

Lady Isabel is charming, her ardour and enthusiasm a pure delight—but the rush with which she takes things is appalling. I well understand it must leave the Committee panting. The situation seems to be this— the Froebel people have got hold of Lady Isabel & are endeavouring to use her, & our Society through her, as an agency to advance KG [i.e., kindergarten] principles and work. For a whole day we contested the point—! The discussion was a little feminine and droll. At one moment it was—that I had drawn all our P.N.E.U. teaching out of Froebel & was to be honoured as an interpreter of that great sage—The next moment, I had not read, did not understand Froebel & that was why I held aloof! I think the talk did some good . . . but they both cling to Froebel as a mystic who has said the last word on Education. In fact I think they rate him with Wagner and Ibsen amongst the “eternities & immensities.” . . . We managed to agree a sentence to be submitted to the Committee—“Herbert Spencer & Froebel supplemented by the progressive scientific thought of the day”– though personally I should rather we boldly claimed to originate our own school of educational thought, hanging on, not to the educational reformers—but to the physiologists of today & the philosophers of all time, but I trust all to the Committee—only we must be on the alert. (Quoted in Margaret Coombs, Hidden Heritage and Educational Influence, 181-182)

A few points stand out from this masterful letter of political positioning. First, Mason’s skillful positioning of Lady Isabel and her friend as rushed innovators, who engage in hero worship of Froebel, gave her own contingent a stronghold of philosophical strength. By refusing to contest Froebel, she left Lady Isabel on the offensive and made her into an outsider insinuating the interests of another organization (“the Froebel people”). Her mockery of Lady Isabel’s extreme endorsement of Froebel resonates with Mason’s later distaste for faddism. 

The subtle suggestion she makes, while conceding a sentence on Spencer and Froebel, that she and the other PNEU founders had originated “our own school of educational thought” was perhaps her master stroke. If nothing else, it foreshadows the role she envisioned for herself, which the PNEU later recognized, as the PNEU’s resident educational philosopher. We can note here that she defines her stance not with the educational reformers, but by a synthesis of modern research (“the physiologists of today”) and “the philosophers of all time.” 

In the end, Mason won out and the 1890 constitution was retained, leading Lady Isabel and her followers to resign from the executive committee. The PNEU identity crisis resulted in Charlotte Mason taking a clearer stance as an educational philosopher in her own right, and with the tradition of classical or liberal educational philosophy. 

Battle #2: Confronting Scientism

Charlotte Mason engaged in another battle much later on in her life, when she was the established Matron of Educational Philosophy for her movement. She had recently published six fiery letters in The Times called The Basis of National Strength, where she prophesied doom for a material education not centered on living books and ideas. A scientistic pedagogy developing the “faculties” of children but void of living and imaginative content was gaining steam.

In 1912 Mason took on Maria Montessori through a review in a public journal (Have you read Patrick Egan’s article comparing Charlotte Mason with Maria Montessori?). Mason criticized Montessori for her “neglect of books, and her utilitarian, scientific pedagogy, which segregated children in simplified environments while denying their personalities” (Coombs, Hidden Heritage, 229). As she wrote in The Times Educational Supplement, 

The Montessori child . . . sharpens a single sense to be sure at the expense of a higher sense but there is no gradual painting in of the background to his life; no fairies play about him, no heroes stir his soul. God and good angels form no part of his thought; the child and the person he will become are a scientific product.

Charlotte Mason, “Miss Mason and the Montessori System,” in The Times, 3 November 1912. Quoted in Coombs, Hidden Heritage, 229 (see also 305n39). The article can be accessed online here.

The problem with scientism and materialism in education is that they are literally soul-killing. For Mason, modern education has lost something essential to humanity from the imaginative, poetic and religious traditions of humankind. “It is on this basis that Mason rejects the notion of training the faculties that was utilized by traditionalists and progressive educators alike in their war over the utility of classical languages and higher mathematics. In her view, reducing the mind to various faculties had little support from the latest research of her day, and it collapsed a Christian philosophical understanding of mind as spirit.” (From the author’s forthcoming Charlotte Mason: A Liberal Education for All, 39)

Perhaps Mason herself explains it best in her Towards a Philosophy of Education:

Our errors in education, so far as we have erred, turn upon the conception we form of ‘mind,’ and the theory which has filtered through to most teachers implies the out-of-date notion of the development of ‘faculties,’ a notion which itself rests on the axiom that thought is not more than a function of the brain. Here we find the sole justification of the scanty curricula provided in most of our schools, for the tortuous processes of our teaching, for the mischievous assertion that ‘it does not matter what a child learns but only how he learns it.’ If we teach much and children learn little we comfort ourselves with the idea that we are ‘developing’ this or the other ‘faculty.’ (12)

Here Mason the educational philosopher outflanks the materialists and scientists of her day and explains how raising a faulty philosophical banner (the faculty theory) results in dangerous educational practices. Educational ideas have consequences and children bear the brunt of this faddism that results in “scanty curricula” and little learning, when students could be narrating from living books.

Charlotte Mason is a unique figure in the history of educational philosophy because of how she is able to draw from different streams and yet “marshal… the fighting host of educational ideas” to engage in polemic when necessary. She sounds a clarion call against faddism and for educational philosophy, not neglecting modern resources, but also not abandoning the tradition of the great “philosophers of all time.” To learn more about Mason’s life and thought, make sure to preorder my book with Classical Academic Press, Charlotte Mason: A Liberal Education for All!