Stars: ★★★★★ (Study This Book)
Premise
Leah Boden walks through many of the main principles taught more than a century ago by British educator Charlotte Mason. The ideas were revolutionary during Mason’s time, and they unfortunately remain quite revolutionary today. While there are some excellent suggestions at the end of each chapter, this is not a how-to guide on how to homeschool. It’s a description of a philosophy that will not only educate your children but also solidify your relationship with your children simultaneously.
Loved
- “It’s not enough to love your children…you must learn to love motherhood”: I will be the first person to tell you that I do not always love motherhood, especially as it is set up in modern Western society. It can be heavy, lonely, and hard. However, this principle has the capability to change much of that. I can do something fun just because I can; there doesn’t have to be a product at the end. She also discussed how “fake-resting” (looking like you are resting while your brain is stressing about All. The. Things. or while you are doom scrolling) leads to “real tired.” If I want to be refreshed, then I need to rest in a way that refreshes not that leads to more emotional exhaustion. My play shouldn’t wait until I’m crashing with exhaustion. It should be built into my daily schedule.
- Embracing Masterly Inactivity: I’m so grateful for the years that I spent exploring unschooling because it gave me the flavor of homeschooling that I love even though we use a curriculum. It taught me to look at my children immersed in an art project while enjoying music, whether solo or in concert, and appreciate the learning that was taking place, even though it could not be seen or measured. This idea also takes pressure off me. I don’t have to fill their days with “educational activities.” I can allow them to explore the world on their own and allow them to make their own connections; this allows me a chance to breathe. It also allows me a chance to play. I can do the activities I enjoy while the kids do the ones that they enjoy. I have recently learned the rejuvenating power of ten minutes of lying in the grass in the afternoon watching the sky, perhaps with a few clouds depending on our Southern California weather.
- “The key to nature study is not the location of where we live, but how much we live in the locations we find ourselves in.”: For the foreseeable future, our family will be in the Greater Los Angeles area, the opposite of remote forests, so I appreciate the idea that we can immerse ourselves in the nature that we have rather than pining away about the nature that we don’t. I love the suggestion that nature study can be a series of observations like “I notice…I wonder…it reminds me of…” rather than an interrogation of what the kids about what they are learning. In so many areas, they love to follow my example instead of my forcing them in any direction.
Didn’t Love
While the most important lesson from this book is that you can take the principles of Charlotte Mason and apply them in your home in the ways that produce the best results, I am a big fan of checklists and rules because I find them easier to implement. The author provides some ideas at the end of each chapter, but the open-endedness of even the suggestions put the onus on the reader to figure out what’s best. In reality, not a drawback but definitely a little more pressure.
Lessons Learned
- “What constitutes twaddle can be in the eye of the beholder.” I have a struggling reader, and she likes to read “books with big words,” by which she means books that have large print with lots of space between the lines. Her favorite books are the “Froggy Goes to Camp” and other ones in that series. I know these are not “living books” by any definition, but they help the resistance to reading because she can actually read them. This concept helps me not be so pretentious.
- The explanation of community helped put into words an idea that has been bouncing around in my head for a long time. She describes three of Charlotte Mason’s close relationships and how each met a specific need, demonstrating that expecting a single “best friend” to meet all our relationship needs is not necessarily realistic or healthy. It always throws me off guard when people say their child is looking for a “best friend,” and this is why – I think we should be encouraging them to have multiple close friends without putting so much pressure on a single person, and then dealing with the issues that inevitably arises when that “best friend” moves away or vice versa.
- I don’t have to have all the answers, and I don’t even have to be a few days ahead of my kids’ learning. We can all learn it together. This is especially true in subjects like poetry, classical art, and composers. These are all such foreign subjects to me that the kids and I simply learn with one another, and there’s nothing wrong with that.