Tag: Maria Montessori

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

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Exploring Educational Alternatives: A Comparison of Charlotte Mason and Maria Montessori

The early 1900s was a watershed moment in education. The second wave of the Industrial Revolution brought about what we might call the educational-industrial complex. Here I intentionally draw upon Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address when he warned against the disastrous potential of the military-industrial complex. Looking back over the previous decades of global warfare, he saw how the industry-fed war machine would never be satiated. Something like this happened in the field of education. Industry, an expanding economy and globalization demanded of education a new kind of production-line format. School buildings began to resemble factories graduating a populace

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