When Wendy and Shirley started homeschooling their families about 20 years ago, they were among the few pioneering homeschooling parents in South Africa at the time. The internet was just an infant and social media was limited to email groups.
We read a lot of books from the American homeschool movement and researched how children learn best at home and tested out concepts we read about with our own families.
In the first of a series of short video clips , we discuss the ideas of Charlotte Mason, a British educator from the 18th century, who has had a strong influence on the home education movement worldwide. We adopted some of her ideas and incorporated them into our homes and into our Footprints programmes.
Charlotte believed that the development of good habits within a child provides the foundation for early education. She wrote, “The mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days.”
She recommended delaying formal academic study until age six and encouraged work and play in the home.
Charlotte Mason recommended short lessons for young children and she is well-known for the use of living books (rather than twaddle).
Narration and dictation are methods she encouraged and which we find much preferable to the traditional text book and worksheet methods used in modern schools.
Further she encouraged a generous education which embraced music, art and nature study, the latter being enjoyed mostly out of doors.
We have published a short clip on YouTube where we explain some of these ideas and how we applied them.
Some Charlotte Mason quotes
"As for literature – to introduce children to literature is to install them in a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast exquisitely served. But they must learn to know literature by being familiar with it from the very first. A child's intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find."
“The most common and the monstrous defect in the education of the day is that children fail to acquire the habit of reading.”
“Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education.”
"Our aim in education is to give a full life. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests."
“What a child digs for becomes his own possession.”
Read more about Charlotte Mason on our website here:
