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We often talk about the Charlotte Mason method, or the Charlotte Mason approach, and we think about that in terms of curriculum, homeschooling, and how do we do the lessons. But Charlotte Mason turns out to be much more than just a curriculum. Joining me today is my friend Amber O’Neal Johnston.
Sonya: Amber, when we first started with Charlotte Mason; well, I’m speaking for myself, but I think your experience is the same. It was “How do I do homeschool?” and “This is the curriculum. This is the method I want to use in my homeschool.” But it turned into something more than that.
Amber: Oh absolutely. I was definitely looking for methods of introducing lessons to my children to educate them, and I really had no idea in the beginning what I was doing. I was looking for direction and pretty quickly I realized, “Okay, this is causing us to alter the rhythms of our days,” and that led to the rhythms of our months and our year. After a while I realized, “Okay, we’re a Charlotte Mason family,” and now I know more of what that means when people say that.
I was looking for direction and pretty quickly I realized, “Okay, this is causing us to alter the rhythms of our days,” and that led to the rhythms of our months and our year.
Sonya: Yes. It changes the way you think about your days, as you said, the way you think about what you see around you. If you think about it, Charlotte said education is that we are educating the whole person. When we started homeschooling, at least when I did, I was thinking, “How do I shape their minds?”
Amber: Oh definitely. I was thinking the same thing as well.
Sonya: But Charlotte is all about, “let’s educate the whole person,” mind, heart, spirit, soul, all of them. And so with that in mind, she talked about that three-legged stool. Well, I call it a three-legged stool. She didn’t use that term, but it’s an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life. Education is all three things. The atmosphere is from the ideas that rule your life as the parent. That’s not found in our school lessons, necessarily. That’s in all of life. The discipline of good habits, that’s all of life as well. And education is a life. It is living ideas everywhere you turn. You should be connecting and making more relations with what you see and hear. So it’s like she snuck up on us.
Amber: It’s true. I wasn’t expecting those, and I always tell people, I think that that’s an unexpected gift as part of using Charlotte Mason’s practices for your schooling, for your education, for the lessons. You get this big gift that you weren’t necessarily seeking or even expecting as a by-product of that. It also filters down. I started with my oldest, and it was lessons, but by the time I realized, “Oh wow, this really is an entire lifestyle,” it impacted my younger children because we were waiting until they were about 6 for lessons. But actually, at birth, I was thinking about the atmosphere in which they were coming up and the habits that I wanted them to form even as little wee ones. So I stopped thinking, “Oh we’re just playing until lessons start.” But rather, “This is our household, and this is our family, and this is how we operate.” It has even impacted how we spend our free time.
Sonya: Tell me a little bit more about that.
Amber: I found that the things we were doing in our lessons became second nature. I noticed it most when we traveled. My family loves to travel, and friends would point out, “Why are you guys doing school on vacation?” And I would think, “Oh, we don’t consider that school!” We’re on vacation, we’re off lessons, we aren’t doing lessons, but the museums, the hiking, the exploring, the geography, the music, the art, and even the poetry of the places; and the food! We’re really soaking in all the ideas that each place we visit has to offer and that’s what we do! That left me thinking—I’m not sure what we would do otherwise if we were traveling somewhere.
Sonya: That brings to mind how, as the students got older in Charlotte’s schools, what used to be set lessons became afternoon occupations. Like picture study, that was written into the lessons for the younger kids, but then as they got older and older and older, it was just assumed that it would be part of their afternoons on their own. They would do these things because it became a lifestyle, and I think the same thing, especially with nature study, I’ve been seeing that a lot. A couple of summers ago, there were a bunch of Joro spiders all over and—you know the ones I’m talking about, that came to us courtesy of another part of the world and are spreading through—they’re very interesting and we had like four or five webs right across our front porch, and we spent the whole summer, every day, we’d go out and sit on the bench and watch those spiders. And our neighbors would come by and we’d be like, ”Look at this!” and we were telling them everything we saw, and they would look at us like we were crazy. And then it dawned on me, “Oh yeah, not every family spends time in nature doing these things.”
Amber: Most people would have gotten a broom and knocked those things down right off of the porch, and you’re fascinated by it. That’s a perfect example. I’ve experienced that in my own home, where people or relatives have come and they’re like, “Oh, you said you wanted this in a house and you don’t have that. What made you guys buy this home?” And I’m like, “Have you seen the outside and the creek and the lake and the trees and the forest floor?” And that superseded what our expectations were for the inside, because we were just so happy to be able to look outside and see all the greenery and for our children to be able to spend their days, frolicking, if I may say, outdoors. That is definitely a by-product from a Charlotte Mason education for my family, because that’s a vast departure from how my husband and I were raised.
Sonya: I have friends who get season tickets, or I don’t even know what they’re called, maybe it’s an annual ticket, to the botanical gardens just so they can go have picnics there on Sunday afternoons. And the kids are grown, they’re out of school, but they still love to go gather as a family there. Or a season ticket, a yearly ticket, to the museum, as you said, it’s things like that. It becomes part of your family culture.
Amber: Those annual memberships are things we ask grandparents for. My kids have that type of relationship with the Atlanta History Center, which is a history museum, and most people are focused on the inside, but my kids will tell you it’s the grounds that bring them there, the picnicking, knowing the trails, and all the acres that the museum sits on. That has excited them since they were young children. I think that what we’re talking about brings a lot of hope and encouragement to families who are just getting started, because I feel that there is a risk that you’ll look at long-standing Charlotte Mason families and be like, “Oh my goodness, that’s so far of a departure away from anything I know or where we are.”
Sonya: It’s easy to think that those families were like that before they began and that’s what drew them to Charlotte Mason. But that’s not always the case, in fact, it’s rarely the case, I think.
Amber: I would agree. That’s rarely the case, and it definitely wasn’t for me and for my friends.
Sonya: Nor for me.
Amber: This is something that we grew into over time, and it comes quite naturally as you are learning more about her words, and her writing, and executing on these lesson plans and being a guide for your children. These are the types of things that come naturally. I was so delighted one time to run into this letter that Charlotte Mason wrote to her students and she said, “I know that all good teachers have some study each day and preparing for the next day’s work, but besides this, study some two or three subjects definitely on your own account. Do not think this is a selfish thing to do because the advantage does not end with yourself.” And she went on and said, “Every hour of definite study enriches your mind and increases your power so that the more you study in your spare time, the more there is in you to bestow upon your pupils.” That just inspired me to no end, because I felt that longing to study on my own and to experience some of the things that I was being introduced to through my children’s lessons, apart from being their teacher or their guide, but just on my own. I see that that has grown more and more over time and over the years and I find myself, even when I’m alone, doing things I never would have done before: reading things, experiencing things, visiting places that I had no interest in prior to this.
This is something that we grew into over time, and it comes quite naturally as you are learning more about Charlotte Mason’s writing, and executing on these lesson plans and being a guide for your children.
Sonya: Yeah, I’ve been doing that lately too; reading thick biographies of different people just for my own pleasure. Yes, I’ve got a stack of books to read for school that I’m reviewing and making sure about, but I just started one last night; I started James Earl Jones’s autobiography. Fascinating. Written with Penelope Niven, who wrote a fabulous book on Carl Sandberg as well—oh, they’re so good—but yeah, like you said, this is just for my own enrichment, my own relation-building, and it becomes a part of life.
Amber: It does, and I notice that the things that I’m learning on my own, the ideas that I get, I am always fascinated by how they often connect back to things that my children are reading or learning or experiencing. And I can add a little something to that like, “Oh this is the same person who,” or “During that time, did you know . . . ?” I always stood in awe when I would hear other moms doing things like that because I’m like, “How does she know that?” I would have never known that about that person.
Sonya: How did she plan to have that little tidbit in place?
Amber: Exactly! I’m like, “Okay, so these things are related, and living ideas are connected without much effort from our end.”
Sonya: And that’s where almost the living ideas, and the atmosphere and the discipline all meet, because you make it your habit to continually feed your own mind and heart, and that affects the ideas that are ruling your mind and heart, but it also gives you more living ideas to share with your kids and it all just comes together.
Amber: It does, and you start getting excited about it and then that excitement is what others around you see, and it can become infectious.
Sonya: I know Charlotte encouraged parents to learn on their own, as you said in that quote, but she also had some specific categories that she encouraged parents to learn, right?
Amber: Definitely, in her mother’s education course she talked about divinity, and so for us that would be religious studies of our faith, physiology and health was a category, mental and moral education, and then nature lore and science, and in all these directions, and when you think about it, it almost covers everything. There were lots of different areas in which a mother was encouraged to learn and grow.
Sonya: Why do you think she recommended having two or three subjects on the side?
Amber: That’s such a good question. I think that this idea of spreading a feast; when we think of this feast, we always think of our children, but if we are guides in their education and we’re coming alongside them, it would make sense for us also to be fed from a wide breadth of ideas. Just as the Holy Spirit speaks to our children and sends them in a direction, I think her expectation was, as whole people, we as adults also would experience those same urges and feelings and direction.
Sonya: And from a practical standpoint, sometimes I feel like reading this one and not that one. It just goes with what kind of day I just went through, you know.
Amber: Or that anecdote, it talks about a woman, she had a stiff story, a stiff book, and an easier one, and so on, and kind of having that no matter what the mood you have, no matter what your mood, there’s something on your nightstand that you’re interested in that night.
Sonya: Charlotte was an example of that, because she would have that stiff classic going, but she would also have her favorite novels that she cycled through at night, and on the side she would read Punch magazine, which was humor and stuff like that.
Amber: She had great diversity in her reading life. I also love that she had her readings spread throughout the day. There were different times of the day. Though she wasn’t a mother, I can really relate to that, because I don’t have long blocks of time to just sit and delve into all these different books for a big chunk of my day. But I can grab at those smaller pieces, in the morning maybe, during lunch, a little bit in the afternoon, a little before bed. It reminds me that that’s not a second rate plan but that’s actually the way she did it as well.
Sonya: So let me ask this for someone who is just new to Charlotte Mason. We started out giving hope, but I think we might have gotten into the more “advanced.” Yes, we learned this with our kids, and we create a lifestyle with our kids as we learn how to do these different types of methods. But then with reading more on your own, do you see that as it must happen all at once if you’re going to do Charlotte Mason? You must do the picture study, the music study, the nature study, the poetry, the handcrafts, and then you should also have three books that are going on the side for yourself. Let’s just reassure the ones who are new to Charlotte Mason, shall we?
Amber: Definitely not like that! It also depends on your season of life. So a lot of the things that I’m talking about, this is over a decade in. I don’t have babies to feed, I’m not up changing diapers, I’m getting a good night’s sleep every night, and so, what my involvement or growth looks like today is much different than it was when I had a house full of little ones. I think that it wasn’t something that I had to try to do. There was no straining involved. This is something that through day after day of learning alongside my children came naturally and painlessly over time.
This is something that through day after day of learning alongside my children came naturally over time.
Sonya: That’s a great way to put it, yes. How old is your youngest now?
Amber: He’s 8.
Sonya: Okay, yeah, and you’ve got a teenager.
Amber: Yep, I have a 14 year old; 14, 12, 10, and 8. So I’m at that point now; my 8 year old is still a little guy, but he has older siblings around to help him. But I received a lot of mind space and clarity once I was not nursing and didn’t have little ones and was sleeping all night. I can’t overstate how important that was for me. But there were times. I can look back and at that moment I thought, “I’m not learning anything, this is not a lifestyle for me, I’m just trying to survive.” But even then, I can look back now and say, “Oh yes, it was,” because I was outside in nature with my children; when they were looking at pictures, beautiful art, I was gazing at that same art; when they were listening to composers, my ears were hearing the same things and in that moment, I was growing.
Sonya: Yeah, it’s almost like those are planting the seeds and as you are faithful over time to nurture those seeds, they flourish and as you go into a different season of life you have even more opportunities to plant more seeds and water those, and it just keeps going.
Amber: You’ll see that manifestation over time. It’s a beautiful thing; it’s a wonderful relationship where you initially start out with what you want to give your children and what you want them to have and, so in doing that, you receive something in return without even trying. To me, that’s one of life’s biggest pleasures.
Sonya: It shapes your whole family.
Amber: Definitely, even my husband.
Sonya: Yes! Tell me about that.
Amber: Well, my husband, without even realizing it, I mean, I kind of set the tone for how our family life is scheduled, our family calendar, and what we do and how we spend our time, and the dinner table conversations, he’s talking to the kids over dinner, and what are they going to talk about? They’re going to talk about their day, and how they spent their afternoons, and the things that they’re making, and the things they’re reading, and he’s very involved in that. He has some aspects that he really loves; they’re different than mine. He’s geography all the way, and he wants to engage the kids in this and he loves that they’re learning things that he’s passionate about as well. I think that it’s made him excited. He likes seeing that the kids are able to discuss so many different things with him and it’s invigorating. He participates, he goes on field trips with us; he’s on a field trip with the kids right now, actually! And he travels, obviously, when we’re as a family, and so he’s doing and pursuing the same things and the kids teach him too, and I love that. They’ll say, “Daddy, look at this picture in the museum. Let me tell you about this artist,” and he’s like, “okay, this is great.”
Sonya: Yeah, I read a great little letter in the In Memoriam book from a homeschool dad and he was saying that these are the things that I do: I’ll take them on nature walks every once in a while but it’s not to tell them what I know about nature, it’s just to have them tell me what they found here recently and let them wax eloquent about it.
Amber: Definitely. I see that a lot in my family and I think it’s a joy.
Sonya: It’s part of the family culture and the lifestyle that is Charlotte Mason. Thanks so much.
Amber: Thank you.
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Such an encouraging talk, thank you!
These podcasts are so helpful as we homeschool our children. I look forward to this small dose of weekly encouragement. Thank you!