A Dangerous Adventure by Art in Kenosha

“Like religion, education is nothing or it is everything–a consuming fire in the bones” – Charlotte Mason

We made the decision to homeschool when my first son was a toddler. I realized that homeschooling would require an enormous amount of time. So I counted the cost and figured out a schedule that would work for my family. I set aside containers of time to devote to lessons with my children.

There are containers for time, containers for objects, and containers for chemicals. Sometimes it is hard to find the right container for a substance. Of course, chemicals that are inert are very safe. But I have heard of acids that are so reactive that they interact with their container. If you are not careful, the container can be transformed by what’s inside.

We decided to implement Charlotte Mason’s ideas in our home school. At first it was very simple. I just took Charlotte Mason’s ideas and put them into the containers of my week that were set aside for lessons. I did not realize that her ideas were more reactive than any chemical. In fact, I warn anyone interested in applying Charlotte Mason’s ideas to his school setting. Your intention may be to transform your teaching, but you may end up transforming yourself.

I remember the first time I realized that Charlotte Mason’s ideas were leaking out of the school room and into my life. I drove to the office and parked my car in the lot just like I do every day. I opened the door and stepped out into the air and suddenly I was overwhelmed with sound. There was music everywhere. There were many kinds of instruments and many songs. Every voice was separate, but somehow they joined together into a marvelous symphony.

I paused and looked around. I was hearing the sound of birds! They were everywhere, singing, calling, and whistling. They drowned out every other sound of the place. I gasped. It was as if Day 5 of creation had been repeated. I wanted to run into the office and shout, “Come outside! God created birds today!”

Then I realized that today was no different from any other day. The birds had always been there. The music was playing for me every morning. But I had no ears to hear them. Until that day.

Months later I went to California for business and had lunch with a colleague. As we walked, I thought I heard a red-winged blackbird. “Do you guys have red-winged blackbirds here? At this time of year?”

My colleague gave me a puzzled look. “You must know a lot about birds,” he said. “Well, actually, No,” I thought. “It’s just that I’ve started teaching my children with Charlotte Mason, and it’s given me new ears to hear.”

I had already developed a love for music. Specifically, classical music. Specifically, French romantic classical music. My good friend loves Mozart. “I don’t like Mozart,” I would tell him.

We use the Ambleside Online curriculum. The curriculum indicated that the composer for the term is Purcell. Purcell? Who’s that? “Honey, can we use Ravel instead?”

“No, dear, we should follow the curriculum.”

So my son and I listened to Purcell. It was our assignment, it was doing school, it fit in the container. But after repeated listening, I suddenly discovered the beauty of Purcell’s music. The eyes of my heart were opened and the music began to leak out of the container. My friends came over for dinner and somehow I had to play “Hosanna to the Highest” by Purcell for them. They all sat politely, quietly, and listened. So there is another great composer after all!

After Purcell came Clara Schumann. To my surprise, her music turned out to be wonderful and beautiful. Isn’t it odd that the curriculum pointed me to two great composers in row? Next came Mozart. After a term with Mozart, I smiled and told my good friend: “I found out that I like Mozart after all.”

The beauty of the music was always there. I was just given new ears to hear.

Charlotte Mason also indicated that I should do picture study. I must say that I never quite understood the point of art museums. Nowadays you can get such high-quality prints, surely they are as good as the real thing. Our artist was Vermeer, so I got an oversized book of prints of his paintings. My son and I faithfully studied those pictures until we knew them from memory.

Later we went to Washington, DC on vacation. I figured we might as well go to the National Gallery of Art and look at the Vermeer paintings that we had studied. We hiked through the building, winding through the corridors and going from room to room until we found the chamber with a handful of Vermeer’s paintings. This was to be an educational moment for my son, you see.

I looked at “A Lady Writing” and gasped. There was light emanating from the painting itself. I took a step closer. The light inside the painting – it’s shining out in the room. It’s magic, I thought. At that moment I realized why we have art museums. I realized that a print is nothing like the real thing.

I walked with a new reverence to the next room. This museum had suddenly become a place of wonder. We came to the French impressionists. I saw Monet’s “Woman with a Parasol.” I was transfixed as I stared at the image. I saw the effect of the wind flowing across the canvas. I stood motionless, and for a moment, I thought I could feel the breeze across my face.

The beauty of the art was always there. I was just given new eyes to see.

In our Charlotte Mason home school we of course practice narration. I learned about how narration helps develop the habit of attention. It is important to retain and retell the story after a single careful reading. It is a good practice for a school, and I was diligent to employ it in the container.

In the office, I found myself talking with a colleague and taking notes. Suddenly there was another leak. Why am I taking notes? “Listen to what he is saying,” I said to myself. “Give all of your attention so that you understand what he is saying after just this one hearing.” Suddenly I was completely present with that colleague. As I have been at countless meetings since. I am learning the habit of attention.

Charlotte Mason occasionally mentions Sir Walter Scott. I suggested to my friends that we read “The Bride of Lammermoor” together and we did. The crest of the House of Ravenswood says, “I bide my time.” I was also reading in Charlotte Mason about “Masterly Inactivity.” At work I faced a lengthy and challenging situation. Taking action would be foolish. I remembered the crest of Ravenswood. I will be wisely inactive, I will bide my time. The living idea carried me through.

I decided to join the CMSeries Yahoo group so that I would have encouragement to read Charlotte Mason’s original volumes. In one email, I commented on Charlotte Mason’s faithfulness to her Anglican church. I wrote, “I too was born Anglican (the American kind — Episcopalian). I left my father’s religion to find truth and life. Miss Mason chose to remain.” Someone replied to me that it is still possible to find truth and life in the Anglican Communion. I replied, “I am actually still an Anglican at heart.”

What followed was a remarkable series of events that brought integrity and wholeness to my spiritual life. God in His providence worked a wonderful blessing for me. On Epiphany Sunday, my family and I were received as members into an Anglican fellowship in my neighborhood. I spoke to the regional pastor over our fellowship and explained to him that Charlotte Mason provided the key thread that completed my tapestry. “Have you heard of Charlotte Mason?” I asked.

He smiled gently. “Have I heard of Charlotte Mason,” he repeated quietly. Then he proceeded to explain to me that his wife has carefully studied Charlotte Mason’s writings for many years. She even taught a Sunday school class in 1995 on caring for the soul, using Charlotte Mason’s writings.

I run every day. I used to prefer to run in the basement on a treadmill. Now I run outside. Recently I returned from my morning run and found my beloved in the kitchen. She asked me how I like it, running outside. “I love it,” I said. “There is so much beauty by the lake.”

“You’ve changed so much,” she said.

So how does my beloved feel about all this, that I am not the same man she married fourteen years ago?

For poetry, the curriculum assigned us Sara Teasdale. I began to read these poems with my son. They were meant for the container of my life called “school.” One after another, Sara Teasdale’s poems evoked emotions and memories within me, some fourteen, some fifteen years old.

I took the book to my beloved and showed her a poem called “The Years.” “Read this,” I said. “It tells the story of me, finding you.”

To-night I close my eyes and see
A strange procession passing me –
The years before I saw your face
Go by me with a wistful grace;
They pass, the sensitive, shy years,
As one who strives to dance, half blind with tears.

The years went by and never knew
That each one brought me nearer you;
Their path was narrow and apart
And yet it led me to your heart –
Oh, sensitive, shy years, oh, lonely years,
That strove to sing with voices drowned in tears.

I think my beloved is pleased with what Charlotte Mason has done to me.

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Charlotte Mason’s Early Correspondence by Dr. John Thorley

The Charlotte Mason archive in the Armitt Library in Ambleside, UK, contains around a dozen letters to or from Charlotte from the period 1860 to 1873. These were the years when she was at the Home and Colonial College in London (1860) and at the Davison School in Worthing, on the south coast of England (1861-73). These years were in many ways a formative period for Charlotte, since they include her training as a teacher and the 13 years that she spent in her first teaching post, in charge of a large infants’ school (it was in fact a church school, but open without payment to all children of the area). These letters are not the only evidence that we have for this period, since we also have the school log-book that Charlotte completed from 1862 until she left the Davison School at the end of 1873. But the letters are of course a much more personal record.

In the following letters the text is transcribed directly from the manuscript, with the original punctuation and underlinings, though a few notes have been added in square brackets, and a few passages that would require fuller commentary have been omitted.

The Home and Colonial College, London

Charlotte went to the Home and Colonial College (popularly known as the ‘Ho & Co’) in London in January 1860 at the age of 18. She had apparently been a pupil teacher (that is, a teenage classroom assistant; the scheme had been introduced first into ‘workhouse schools’ in the 1830s), in Liverpool or Birkenhead, for the previous four years, and had won a Queen’s Scholarship to the Ho & Co. How Charlotte supported herself at the Ho & Co we do not know for sure (the Queen’s Scholarship covered only tuition). She had probably earned a little money from her work as a pupil teacher, but this must have been minimal. It seems likely that she was funded at least in part by her Anglican church, St Luke’s, in the docklands of Liverpool.

Charlotte made three particular friends at college, Lizzie Groveham from Bradford, Selina Healis from Ambleside, and Sally (later Coleman) from Wolverhampton. She maintained contact with all three for many years. She also regularly met her uncle, William Huston, who lived in London, though he came originally from N. Ireland (as probably did Charlotte herself). He was Charlotte’s only known relative. He appears in the census returns for 1861 as a ‘Scripture Reader’, which was a kind of verger in a church, who also read the lessons at services.

But Charlotte completed only one year of the two-year course at the Ho & Co. We do not know for sure why this was, though we can make an informed guess. She must have been very conscious of her lack of money, especially since her friends at college were from comfortable backgrounds. In the later part of the year she was offered the post in Worthing to which she would go in January 1861, and the offer of real employment and real money must have been too good to miss. How this offer came about is interesting, and probably her tutor, Mr Dunning, about whom we shall hear in a moment, and Mr Brandreth, about whom we shall hear later, both played a part in this. Charlotte also knew that it was possible to complete the teacher training certificate later while she was teaching, as many teachers did.

So we come to our first letter – and it has been misinterpreted by some, so it is worth noting carefully.

Near the end of 1860, probably during Charlotte’s last month at the college, she was due to have a tutor into one of her lessons. She had not been well, perhaps partly because of nervousness about the classroom assessment itself, but her constant financial worries also probably contributed. The result was that at the last minute she could not face the assessment of her lesson. Her tutor, Mr Dunning, wrote to her that very afternoon, probably in December:

Letter 1

I was very sorry indeed this morning when I found that giving a lesson was too much for you. When I saw you first I was exceedingly pleased thinking you were better and strong and not nervous in giving a criticism. Indeed I felt as if you had lost all fear of me as a critic and regarded me as a friendly genius sitting there to do you a good turn. But oh you naughty girl – it was your own spirit and resolution that would not give way even before disease – that would discharge a duty at whatever it might cost you. You must not attempt another. I shall not let Mr Hasselass [another tutor at the college] pound you any more. You can teach well and need only to study our principles. I liked your lesson much [presumably the lesson plan that Charlotte had submitted]. I trust the good Lord will spare your life and permit you to work in his vineyard a while here …

Some have interpreted this letter to mean that Charlotte failed her teaching practice assessment, but there is no indication of that in the letter at all. This was simply one of the regular visits by Mr Dunning to see a student teach. In fact Mr Dunning became a close friend of Charlotte, as we shall see, and she was still consulting him about her career 13 years later.

So Charlotte did not complete her certificate – though that was not uncommon, and she did in fact receive a certificate later after teaching for some years in Worthing.

For the rest of this blog see the new issue of the Charlotte Mason Education Review on the ChildLightUSA website.  It will be posted soon.

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