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| Actual icon on my actual kitchen wall |
We became Charlotte Mason home educators at roughly the same time that we started to become Catholic. In our oldest daughter's last year of school – we quit going to school in 2003, when she was nine, her brothers were five and one, and her baby sister was still in utero – I had spent a great deal of time plotting our escape from institutional education via hours of research. By the end of that year I had settled on the Charlotte Mason philosophy, or what I'd managed to learn about it, as the learning approach that appealed to me the most.
But then a bunch of things happened: a free-fall from England back to America and our hometown, unemployment, a new baby, children who didn't know what had hit them or how to feel about it. There was, shall we say, resistance. Specifically, there was resistance to anything that I proposed that we do, such as read a lovely book together and narrate it, and then some copywork. No. It was not happening. That is all. So we spent two years basically on sabbatical before picking up the threads of formal education again.
Now, at the time that all this chaos went down, we were Anglican. My husband was an Episcopal priest, and we had spent four years in Cambridge while he pursued a PhD in theology. The story of our arrival in the Catholic Church is a convoluted one; suffice it to say that we did arrive there. The former Episcopal priest is now a mandatum-holding lay professor of theology in a small Catholic liberal-arts college. Also suffice it to say that it was as we were making the break with our last Episcopal parish, and gathering up (again, resistant) children and dragging them to the first of the rest of our lifetimes of Catholic Masses, that I rediscovered Charlotte Mason.
The short story of that is that I was cruising around our local Catholic homeschool support group's website, looking for ideas for Catholic curriculum. We were pretty unschooly, or on sabbatical, depending on how you want to look at it, but I wanted some instruction in the Catholic faith, at the very least – though I wasn't even sure what that would look like – to implement at home. And that was how I found Mater Amabilis, a Catholic Charlotte Mason curriculum for grades K-8.
And the short story of that is that, again, I was struck by how much this kind of education was exactly what I was looking for. Simply as education, it ticked all the boxes:
It was oriented toward the idea of good books. Like, really good books. Like, well-written, literary, non-didactic, non-dumbed-down, wholesome, GOOD books, for which Charlotte Mason had a name: living books.
It was oriented toward the idea of the pursuit of truth: discerning truth, wherever it is found, in whatever academic discipline or branch of learning, with the understanding that all truth inheres in God.
It was oriented toward the idea of Christian civilization as something to know about, understand, and uphold, as a civilization in which one might find one's own active role as a human being.
It was oriented, further, toward the very idea of the human being as made in God's image: possessing free will, capable of both good and evil, touched by sin but valued and loved by God, who could still see His divine image, with all the dignity that that image implies, even in the sometimes-grimy faces of His smallest children.
Even at the time, on the brink of our Catholic homecoming, all of this struck me as not only a good education, but a deeply and intuitively Catholic education.
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After many years of both Catholicism and Charlotte Mason homeschooling, I still think so. In fact, the more I learn, the more convinced I am.
Famously, Charlotte Mason's own triggering epiphany, the flash of insight that illuminated her already-developing ideas about education, occurred as an interaction with a fresco in the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, dominated by the figure of Thomas Aquinas. This is St. Thomas, the "Angelic Doctor" of the Church, the great mind whose synthesis of Aristotelian reason with unquestioning faith has given us the discipline of theology and an entire system for parsing reality. The fresco in which he sits enthroned, on the chapel's west wall, abuts the depiction, in the west vaulting, of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Possibly the Book of Wisdom which Thomas holds is meant to echo, or even to name, the Holy Spirit of the Pentecost fresco. The entire scene, of Thomas enthroned above figures representing the various branches of knowledge, allegorizes that very synthesis of faith and reason for which Thomas is rightly venerated, and suggests further that the source of all knowledge, whether arrived at by reason or received by divine inspiration, is the Holy Spirit Himself. (source p 46) There simply can be no knowledge outside the reality of God, and no reality, either, for that matter.
The Charlotte Mason Institute's Art Middlekauff has unpacked this encounter at some length, as has Brandy Vencel of Afterthoughts. What I would add, as a Catholic, is how utterly, if intuitively, Thomistic Charlotte Mason's epiphany is. As my husband is fond of saying, Thomas does not ask how do we see a thing? Instead, he asks, what is it? In other words, he is more concerned with the truth of a thing than with how we see it: ontology, not epistemology. In Thomas's view, reality isn't some kind of dualist proposition, with "spiritual things," or "Catholic things," and then "other stuff." If, truly, Christ "holds all creation together in Himself," as my favorite verse from Colossians has it, then, truly, "we … [may] conceive of the divine teaching as co-operating with ours in a child’s arithmetic lesson.”
I would also add that nothing about Charlotte Mason's Anglicanism detracts from the Catholicity of her thought here. A person does not have to be a Catholic to have a Catholic thought; in fact, Thomas might say that there are no "Catholic thoughts," but only truths. That Charlotte Mason never mentions Thomas by name in her writing seems immaterial to me. Perhaps as a Victorian Anglican she could not bring herself to admit the influence of a medieval Dominican. She lived in an era when conversion to Catholicism was a scandal, as the lives of St. John Henry Newman and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins attest. Still, Anglican though she was, she had a thoroughly Catholic view of education, which perhaps merely bears witness to the fact that the Holy Spirit is always smarter than we are.
*
More, and more disjointed, thoughts on the subject of a Charlotte Mason education as a deeply Catholic education, mostly deriving from various online conversations on this subject.
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Study is meant to lead us to truth, period. It's not meant to preach to us, or to tell us what to do. Presumably if we know what is true, then we will also know who we are, and that will lead us closer to God, which is to say in the way of righteousness. The study of great literature, for example, reveals truths about human beings and the universe in which they operate. I care far less whether Shakespeare was actually a Catholic (except that it would have been better for his own soul) than that a work like King Lear IS Catholic, in that it says something true about both the depravity of sin and the action of grace: Lear's whole world has to be destroyed to open him to the possibility of grace. This action is very much the same kind of action that happens in the work of the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor -- she doesn't make that idea more Catholic by BEING Catholic herself. It just is. As readers, immersing ourselves in great literature, we don't learn how to be better Catholics. We're not meant to. What we do learn is who we are, which tells us more about who God is.
...
Catholic historian Christopher Dawson notes that it was with the Reformation that faith began to be de-integrated from the rest of culture -- when you stopped having a culture that revolved around the liturgical year, with art and music and everything in your world as part of your life as a Christian, and instead began to experience Christianity as something that belonged to Sunday, as opposed to every day, everywhere you went . . . then eventually, particularly in education, the notion of faith and faith formation began to be more like a separate thing that you added on, a whole compartmentalized subject, than like something that just was your whole world, breathed into everything. So you had your utilitarian education – learning as preparation to do something useful, because what else would it be for? – and then education for your soul at Sunday School.
So what Charlotte Mason is doing is having a very Catholic epiphany about education, far more Catholic than she would probably have admitted to herself. She's pushing back at the dry utilitarianism of the education of her day, but she's also having a vision that basically restores a Catholic notion of learning as valuable not just for what it enables you to do, but as necessary for the development of your soul.
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It saddens me to think that an idea might – simply because the person having the idea is Protestant – be considered somehow a "contaminant," or assumed to be untrue simply because of its human source. For one thing, this kind of thinking exemplifies a logical fallacy. It is the idea itself that is either true or untrue; it doesn't matter who articulates it. Evaluate the idea on its own merits, not the person who holds it.
For another thing, "Protestant" is a broad brush painting many, many things, and in seeking to understand Charlotte Mason, it's useful to try to learn something about Victorian Anglicanism. A Victorian Anglican is nothing like a Presbyterian or a Baptist. In fact, even a mid-20th-century Anglican would have been nothing like a Presbyterian or a Baptist. The Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien, in addition to being friends with C.S. Lewis, admired his friend, the Anglican theologian and priest Austin Farrer, of Keble College, Oxford. Tolkien sparred theologically with Lewis; as far as I can tell, he didn't argue theology with Farrer. Farrer's Anglicanism did not, in Tolkien's view, automatically make him wrong or untrustworthy on the level of ideas.
As far as I know about either of them, Tolkien didn't substantially disagree with Farrer beyond the obvious things which you'd be bound to disagree about, ie "Of course, Fr. Farrer, your Eucharist is not THE Eucharist, and I can't receive it from you." (But Farrer would have known as much, and that wouldn't have prevented their mutual admiration. Farrer is a longtime hero of my theologian husband's, and I'm glad to know that Tolkien loved him as well, as his letter to Farrer's widow on his death makes evident).
...
Charlotte Mason's educational vision really does come down to a view of the human person, and therefore the role of parents in forming the person – not as writers on a blank slate, or molders of shapeless clay, but as nourishers and guides for what is already in existence and complete, though immature: body, mind, soul.
I've long thought about this in light of Catholic pro-life convictions. We don't believe the unborn child is incomplete, or incompletely human, just immature and growing. But everything that organism needs to be fully human is present from conception: body, mind, soul. It makes sense, then, that a little born child is complete in the same way. If a child in the womb has dreams, recognizes voices, etc, then a child out of the womb can have real thoughts, real responses, real (though immature) reason, valid feelings, impulses to recognize and connect, and so on.
It makes sense, then, to educate THAT person – who isn't a blank slate, or an empty bucket, or a lump of clay – with things that satisfy the mind and the senses (because you can't easily dis-integrate those things from the soul), and with respect for the thoughts that that mind has. That doesn't mean that you don't enter into conversation with it, to make your own thoughts clear. It's just that you don't underestimate the powers that the child already has, by virtue of being human.
As far as I can tell, there is nothing about this line of thinking, which is the basic thinking in CM's philosophy, that contradicts anything that the Church says about human dignity – on the contrary, it underscores what the Church says about human dignity. And this doesn't contradict what the Church says about our rights and duties as our children's primary educators in the faith – on the contrary, part of our duty is not to forget what the Church says about human dignity, in our zeal to teach.
...
On the question of why a Catholic would embrace Charlotte Mason's educational philosophy, and not a more purely Catholic model.
Charlotte Mason's vision of education, it seems to me, draws especially deeply on the tradition of Christian Humanism, which was a further development on the model of medieval scholasticism. She was inspired by that fresco of Saint Thomas Aquinas, but the spirit of her philosophy also seems rooted in a slightly later (but still completely Catholic and Christian) Renaissance model, as envisioned by Thomas More, Desiderius Erasmus, and other Catholic humanist thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Where the educational models of the high Middle Ages were oriented toward the idea of God as a single pole around which the cosmos is oriented, and union with God as the highest good, Renaissance Catholic philosophers – without negating that ultimate idea – added a second, pole, the human, to their view, in order to develop a greater sense of discourse and dialectic between those two poles, the divine and the human.
Again, this is not a canceling of Catholic thought, but a further development in that thought tradition, which naturally found its reflection in the educational models of the Renaissance. In The Crisis of Western Education, Christopher Dawson notes that it was this Christian Humanism which, at the Reformation and the loss of a unifying Catholic culture across Europe, saved European culture from complete disintegration. A shared body of knowledge, taught in universities in Catholic Italy and France, as well as in Protestant Germany, Holland, and England, became a tradition that would have been as available to the Anglican Charlotte Mason as to her Italian Catholic counterpart, Maria Montessori. Their nationalities, local cultures, and religious identities differ; the idea of Christendom which both would have inherited does not differ so much as you might suppose. Certainly the fundamental idea of the human person, on which any philosophy of education must rest, is very much the same Christ-centered idea.
One thing that's evident in reading Dawson, meanwhile, is that there is no single, static tradition of Catholic education. There were the rhetoric schools of St. Augustine's day (though those were often pagan, and St. Augustine himself as a teacher was a Manichean). Monasteries, especially in the early Middle Ages, did often take on the education of boys. There were of course the schools founded by King Alfred – also thoroughly Catholic, but not monastic and not particularly classical, with the aim of preserving English culture (which of course was Catholic; I don't think Alfred would have felt it particularly necessary to specify that). Eventually a village of any size had a school, teaching basic literacy (you didn't really begin with the trivium and quadrivium until you went to the university, IF you went to the university), and until the Reformation, the whole European cultural default mode was Catholic. Later, of course, you have the Jesuits and their Ratio method – but also many other orders founding schools that didn't necessarily subscribe to that method. Simply put, Catholic educational tradition itself is a diversity. There just is no pure pedigree, but much variance according to time and place. Charlotte Mason's methodology is as much "ours" as any other.
It seems natural and even healthy to me that a traditional Christian education would derive from a living tradition, and not one particular moment in that tradition, identified as somehow more true than all other moments. The classical model, whether based on medieval scholasticism or on something like the schools of late antiquity, such as those in which Saint Augustine taught, represents one, or two, or however many moments (since that part of tradition in itself is a kind of varied continuum), is often held up as somehow a more pure representation of Catholic education, but to me that just seems false on the face of it. It's the educational model in use at certain moments in the history of Catholicism, whereas the Father Furlong model of 1930s Catholic schooling is another. Philosophically, it seems to me, a Charlotte Mason education in its living and flexible quality, manages to encompass what is most good about the entire history of the education of children, largely because it's rooted in truths about the human person which Renaissance philosophers were able to articulate in Catholic terms.
I tend to think of a CM education as the kind of education Cardinal Newman would have hailed, had he been moved to write The Idea of the Primary or Secondary School, instead of The Idea of a University. It is in many ways a thoroughly sensible traditional (in the sense of being about tradition, and cultivating a positive relationship with tradition) *English* education, about which there's really nothing that's not Catholic. Its deepest ideas are deeply Catholic ideas.
The other striking connection to me, in terms of Charlotte Mason's methods and sensibilities, is – though I don't have any hard evidence for this –with those schools which King Alfred founded in England during his reign, as the high Saxon culture was starting to wane (under invasions from the Danes, for one thing). Much of what Alfred wanted for his people – to be able to read in their own language, so that they would maintain a connection to the Bible, first and foremost, but also to their own history – is very much the aim of a Charlotte Mason education. Alfred's, again, was an education that was really English, rather than classical, though obviously England had received her Christianity by way of Rome – and Alfred did want the sons of nobles to learn Latin, so as to be able to read Latin texts.
...
Again, I heartily recommend Christopher Dawson's The Crisis of Western Education as a meaty but very good read, of both the history of education in the European world, and as a treatise on what a good education would look like today. He doesn't discuss Charlotte Mason, but does discuss Matthew Arnold – whom Charlotte Mason admired – at some length, as a pioneer in reviving the sense of education as a process with a spiritual, and not a merely utilitarian, dimension. Dawson argues that the utilitarian notion of education is a function, specifically, of a mindset that segregates faith from the rest of a person's pursuits (religion is what you do at Sunday School; the rest of your education is learning how to be useful somehow, as if you didn't have a soul except when you were at Sunday School). Part of the crisis of Western education, actually, as Dawson understands it in this work, is precisely that utilitarian view of the human person as a being somehow separated from his soul except when he goes to church.
As a superintendent of schools in the mid-Victorian era, Matthew Arnold opposed this educational vision, which regarded particularly the children of the working classes as fodder for tomorrow's factories. The faintly luckier middle-class child might be fodder for tomorrow's bank. The idea that children of these classes required, or deserved, anything ennobling in their education was laughable. Dawson sympathizes with Arnold's contrarian insistence – though Arnold himself had become a religious skeptic – that the child, any child, was possessed of an intellect which was in fact indivisible from his soul, and that his education should in some way address this reality. Arnold occupies as much space as he does in Dawson's work because in this recognition of the spiritual humanity of children, Dawson believes, lies the way to recovering a humane mode of education. Charlotte Mason follows and expands on Arnold's vision, developing his triggering intuition into an educational methodology.
Her philosophy often strikes people as revolutionary and wholly new, and it seems to me that a number of Christians struggle to justify it as Christian by attempting to ground it in scripture, as the ultimate authority. Here I think the Catholic has the advantage, in that – because we trust the idea of tradition and find it authoritative on its own terms – we can look at the development of education as a sweeping tradition, taking in Augustine and King Alfred, the medieval scholastics and the Renaissance humanists, the binding cultural force that was humanist education, in whose wake we find both the Jesuits and, later, Matthew Arnold. This tradition, again, is never static, and no one moment in it represents a "pure" model of education, Catholic or otherwise. But we can see how these dynamics in the development of Christian education over time form a continuum in which Charlotte Mason takes her valid place. Like the tradition itself, Charlotte Mason's philosophy is a living thing, drawing on the past, but not stuck there. It is a living methodology founded on fundamental truths, available to us in our own moment.
Further:
Longtime Catholic Charlotte Mason educators Steve and Marcia Mattern discuss the integration of Charlotte Mason's philosophy and methods with their Catholic faith.
As far as I know about either of them, Tolkien didn't substantially disagree with Farrer beyond the obvious things which you'd be bound to disagree about, ie "Of course, Fr. Farrer, your Eucharist is not THE Eucharist, and I can't receive it from you." (But Farrer would have known as much, and that wouldn't have prevented their mutual admiration. Farrer is a longtime hero of my theologian husband's, and I'm glad to know that Tolkien loved him as well, as his letter to Farrer's widow on his death makes evident).
...
Charlotte Mason's educational vision really does come down to a view of the human person, and therefore the role of parents in forming the person – not as writers on a blank slate, or molders of shapeless clay, but as nourishers and guides for what is already in existence and complete, though immature: body, mind, soul.
I've long thought about this in light of Catholic pro-life convictions. We don't believe the unborn child is incomplete, or incompletely human, just immature and growing. But everything that organism needs to be fully human is present from conception: body, mind, soul. It makes sense, then, that a little born child is complete in the same way. If a child in the womb has dreams, recognizes voices, etc, then a child out of the womb can have real thoughts, real responses, real (though immature) reason, valid feelings, impulses to recognize and connect, and so on.
It makes sense, then, to educate THAT person – who isn't a blank slate, or an empty bucket, or a lump of clay – with things that satisfy the mind and the senses (because you can't easily dis-integrate those things from the soul), and with respect for the thoughts that that mind has. That doesn't mean that you don't enter into conversation with it, to make your own thoughts clear. It's just that you don't underestimate the powers that the child already has, by virtue of being human.
As far as I can tell, there is nothing about this line of thinking, which is the basic thinking in CM's philosophy, that contradicts anything that the Church says about human dignity – on the contrary, it underscores what the Church says about human dignity. And this doesn't contradict what the Church says about our rights and duties as our children's primary educators in the faith – on the contrary, part of our duty is not to forget what the Church says about human dignity, in our zeal to teach.
...
On the question of why a Catholic would embrace Charlotte Mason's educational philosophy, and not a more purely Catholic model.
Charlotte Mason's vision of education, it seems to me, draws especially deeply on the tradition of Christian Humanism, which was a further development on the model of medieval scholasticism. She was inspired by that fresco of Saint Thomas Aquinas, but the spirit of her philosophy also seems rooted in a slightly later (but still completely Catholic and Christian) Renaissance model, as envisioned by Thomas More, Desiderius Erasmus, and other Catholic humanist thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Where the educational models of the high Middle Ages were oriented toward the idea of God as a single pole around which the cosmos is oriented, and union with God as the highest good, Renaissance Catholic philosophers – without negating that ultimate idea – added a second, pole, the human, to their view, in order to develop a greater sense of discourse and dialectic between those two poles, the divine and the human.
Again, this is not a canceling of Catholic thought, but a further development in that thought tradition, which naturally found its reflection in the educational models of the Renaissance. In The Crisis of Western Education, Christopher Dawson notes that it was this Christian Humanism which, at the Reformation and the loss of a unifying Catholic culture across Europe, saved European culture from complete disintegration. A shared body of knowledge, taught in universities in Catholic Italy and France, as well as in Protestant Germany, Holland, and England, became a tradition that would have been as available to the Anglican Charlotte Mason as to her Italian Catholic counterpart, Maria Montessori. Their nationalities, local cultures, and religious identities differ; the idea of Christendom which both would have inherited does not differ so much as you might suppose. Certainly the fundamental idea of the human person, on which any philosophy of education must rest, is very much the same Christ-centered idea.
One thing that's evident in reading Dawson, meanwhile, is that there is no single, static tradition of Catholic education. There were the rhetoric schools of St. Augustine's day (though those were often pagan, and St. Augustine himself as a teacher was a Manichean). Monasteries, especially in the early Middle Ages, did often take on the education of boys. There were of course the schools founded by King Alfred – also thoroughly Catholic, but not monastic and not particularly classical, with the aim of preserving English culture (which of course was Catholic; I don't think Alfred would have felt it particularly necessary to specify that). Eventually a village of any size had a school, teaching basic literacy (you didn't really begin with the trivium and quadrivium until you went to the university, IF you went to the university), and until the Reformation, the whole European cultural default mode was Catholic. Later, of course, you have the Jesuits and their Ratio method – but also many other orders founding schools that didn't necessarily subscribe to that method. Simply put, Catholic educational tradition itself is a diversity. There just is no pure pedigree, but much variance according to time and place. Charlotte Mason's methodology is as much "ours" as any other.
It seems natural and even healthy to me that a traditional Christian education would derive from a living tradition, and not one particular moment in that tradition, identified as somehow more true than all other moments. The classical model, whether based on medieval scholasticism or on something like the schools of late antiquity, such as those in which Saint Augustine taught, represents one, or two, or however many moments (since that part of tradition in itself is a kind of varied continuum), is often held up as somehow a more pure representation of Catholic education, but to me that just seems false on the face of it. It's the educational model in use at certain moments in the history of Catholicism, whereas the Father Furlong model of 1930s Catholic schooling is another. Philosophically, it seems to me, a Charlotte Mason education in its living and flexible quality, manages to encompass what is most good about the entire history of the education of children, largely because it's rooted in truths about the human person which Renaissance philosophers were able to articulate in Catholic terms.
I tend to think of a CM education as the kind of education Cardinal Newman would have hailed, had he been moved to write The Idea of the Primary or Secondary School, instead of The Idea of a University. It is in many ways a thoroughly sensible traditional (in the sense of being about tradition, and cultivating a positive relationship with tradition) *English* education, about which there's really nothing that's not Catholic. Its deepest ideas are deeply Catholic ideas.
The other striking connection to me, in terms of Charlotte Mason's methods and sensibilities, is – though I don't have any hard evidence for this –with those schools which King Alfred founded in England during his reign, as the high Saxon culture was starting to wane (under invasions from the Danes, for one thing). Much of what Alfred wanted for his people – to be able to read in their own language, so that they would maintain a connection to the Bible, first and foremost, but also to their own history – is very much the aim of a Charlotte Mason education. Alfred's, again, was an education that was really English, rather than classical, though obviously England had received her Christianity by way of Rome – and Alfred did want the sons of nobles to learn Latin, so as to be able to read Latin texts.
...
Again, I heartily recommend Christopher Dawson's The Crisis of Western Education as a meaty but very good read, of both the history of education in the European world, and as a treatise on what a good education would look like today. He doesn't discuss Charlotte Mason, but does discuss Matthew Arnold – whom Charlotte Mason admired – at some length, as a pioneer in reviving the sense of education as a process with a spiritual, and not a merely utilitarian, dimension. Dawson argues that the utilitarian notion of education is a function, specifically, of a mindset that segregates faith from the rest of a person's pursuits (religion is what you do at Sunday School; the rest of your education is learning how to be useful somehow, as if you didn't have a soul except when you were at Sunday School). Part of the crisis of Western education, actually, as Dawson understands it in this work, is precisely that utilitarian view of the human person as a being somehow separated from his soul except when he goes to church.
As a superintendent of schools in the mid-Victorian era, Matthew Arnold opposed this educational vision, which regarded particularly the children of the working classes as fodder for tomorrow's factories. The faintly luckier middle-class child might be fodder for tomorrow's bank. The idea that children of these classes required, or deserved, anything ennobling in their education was laughable. Dawson sympathizes with Arnold's contrarian insistence – though Arnold himself had become a religious skeptic – that the child, any child, was possessed of an intellect which was in fact indivisible from his soul, and that his education should in some way address this reality. Arnold occupies as much space as he does in Dawson's work because in this recognition of the spiritual humanity of children, Dawson believes, lies the way to recovering a humane mode of education. Charlotte Mason follows and expands on Arnold's vision, developing his triggering intuition into an educational methodology.
Her philosophy often strikes people as revolutionary and wholly new, and it seems to me that a number of Christians struggle to justify it as Christian by attempting to ground it in scripture, as the ultimate authority. Here I think the Catholic has the advantage, in that – because we trust the idea of tradition and find it authoritative on its own terms – we can look at the development of education as a sweeping tradition, taking in Augustine and King Alfred, the medieval scholastics and the Renaissance humanists, the binding cultural force that was humanist education, in whose wake we find both the Jesuits and, later, Matthew Arnold. This tradition, again, is never static, and no one moment in it represents a "pure" model of education, Catholic or otherwise. But we can see how these dynamics in the development of Christian education over time form a continuum in which Charlotte Mason takes her valid place. Like the tradition itself, Charlotte Mason's philosophy is a living thing, drawing on the past, but not stuck there. It is a living methodology founded on fundamental truths, available to us in our own moment.
Longtime Catholic Charlotte Mason educators Steve and Marcia Mattern discuss the integration of Charlotte Mason's philosophy and methods with their Catholic faith.