I listened to a great episode of the Charlotte Mason Poetry podcast on a run yesterday. It featured a letter, written by CM herself, explaining how her differed from that of Maria Montessori’s. The whole letter, which is very short, is really worth reading or listening to – is there any educationalist alive today who writes …
Author Archives: willorrewing
Charlotte Mason Retreat | Lake District | May 2018
A quick post to promote what looks like a glorious opportunity to reflect on Charlotte Mason’s work AND hear from the peerless Malcolm Guite in the splendour of the Lake District later this month. To quote from the website, Charlotte Mason Institute’s English Lake District Retreat The Afternoon of 30 April – the Morning of 4 …
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Episode #5 – Jason Fletcher, founding Headmaster of Heritage School Cambridge
In this interview, I talk with Jason Fletcher, founding Headmaster of Heritage School in Cambridge. Heritage is the only school I am aware of that is committed to (and actively promotes) a Charlotte Mason education in the UK. In our conversation, Jason explains its unique pertinence to the educational priorities of our times. Listen on …
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A Pedagogy of Perception
“The wise man sees a different tree from the fool.” William Blake When you look at a tree, what do you see? Imagine that we ask this question to a class of teenagers as they near the end of their schooling. What would they say? Would Blake say that they had answered “wisely” or “foolishly”? …
Affordable independent schools
(First published in the Autumn Newsletter for the CRE) The latest news from the Independent Grammar School, a new affordable independent school in Durham reads as follows: “We have been delighted that, without advertising as such, we have had almost 100 expressions of interest. That confirms our view that there is a real demand for …
Charlotte Mason – who was she, and what is her relevance?
Who was Charlotte Mason? Charlotte Mason (1842 – 1923) was a teacher and educational writer who lived and worked all over the UK. Orphaned at 16, she taught both as a governess and as a classroom teacher. Despite suffering ill health for much of her life, she founded a teacher training college at Ambleside for …
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Charlotte Mason schooling
This series of videos from Ambleside Schools International goes through the many aspects of Charlotte Mason schooling in great detail: http://www.amblesideschools.com/main/video/introduction Also viewable on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/100226642
Education Philosophy – 3 FAQ
(First published on the Keystone blog here.) Parents today take a more active interest in their children’s education than the generation or two that preceded them, so that it’s not unusual for those of us working in education to be asked our views on a “growth mindset” one day or the “outdatedness of the 19th …
IQ – a short and (over)simple FAQ for parents and teachers
There is something distasteful about IQ. Leaving aside the fact that it is often used by those who want to make race-based claims about merit, it reduces the educational project to the merely quantitative, crowding out other virtues. However, these objections should not mean that IQ be buried – as it has been largely since …
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Poetry and Memory
Somewhat stating the obvious but good to read nonetheless: The emerging findings point strongly towards memorised poetry being a resource with the potential to enrich lives in different ways over many years. Knowing a poem by heart appears to support a very distinctive quality of attention and connection which in turn fosters a rich and …
