A Charlotte Mason Education: A Homeschooling How To Manual By Catherine Levison

I must say this book was a dry read. It was difficult to get through and difficult to follow. It is short; only 70 something pages. Had it been longer, I probably wouldn’t have finished it. Basically, it is a book dedicated to the Charlotte Mason way of homeschooling. Charlotte Mason was a very prominent homeschooling figure in the 1800’s. She has a lot of good concepts, and I feel her way of homeschooling is interesting. I do not yet know if her method would be something we will follow in our own home.

This book is essentially a how to manual as stated in the title. Charlotte Mason wrote several volumes of work to outline her philosophy, and this book serves the purpose of condensing Mason’s original volume to give a brief overview. Almost too brief. After reading this book, I do not feel I understand the Charlotte Mason way of education any better than I did before. I feel this is attributed to the way the book is written. I found the writing rather choppy. There were examples used for many things that I had difficulty referencing to what the author’s point actually was. Quotes of Charlotte Mason chosen by the author seemingly had no relevance to the discussion at hand.

If perhaps you had already read all of Charlotte Mason’s original volumes of work, then it would be easier to follow this book, which would somewhat defeat the purpose. I feel this book may be more useful if you are already quite familiar with homeschooling and/or Charlotte Mason. This book did not give me much information in homeschooling in our modern day. I suppose I am in search more for homeschooling information such as the varying requirements by states, resources available, applicable ideas for homeschooling, amongst other things. I will continue my quest until I find resources such as these that give me the confidence and understanding to homeschool.

A few points of Charlotte Mason’s philosophy that I did enjoy are her idea of only having a child do one activity for 15 minutes and move on. This prevents the child from daydreaming and wasting time. I found this to be very refreshing. She also puts a lot of emphasis on the need to let children be children. It is important for children to spend much time playing as this is how they also learn. Mason also feels it very important for children to learn about nature and be in touch with nature. I love this as it is something very important to me.

In conclusion, this was not the book for me or what I was looking for. I was a bit disappointed in it, but have not ruled out the Charlotte Mason way of homeschooling. I will continue to find other sources that highlight her work as I would like to have a better understanding of this subject.