Mother Culture: My Continuing Education
I thought it was time to re-vamp this much neglected and abandoned blog, as part of my commitment to writing 50,000 words across all my blogs and websites in November for ‘NaNoWriMo’.
NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, is of course intended to encourage aspiring writers to start novel projects, and that is something I have previously done, but didn’t feel up to trying this year. I did, however, think that it would be a good opportunity to get writing regularly again and that I could do so on my own various projects such as this one.
What is Mother Culture?
As you may know, I home educated my four children from 1999 to 2018, and some of that experience is documented over on Ohana Home Education (also much in need of attention and updating).
One of the most interesting, significant and impactful philosophies of education I encountered during that time was that of Charlotte Mason – a nineteenth century teacher and teacher of teachers who revolutionised British primary school education in her lifetime for the better, but for various reasons fell out of fashion and became forgotten in the UK until she was rediscovered by Susan Schaefer Macaulay, who wrote about the philosophy and how it could be related to education at home in her book “For The Children’s Sake” and later, Charlotte Mason’s ideas were amplified (although debatably, possibly misrepresented) by Karen Andreola with a very conservative, Ameri-centric perspective. Having said that, I did very much value Andreola’s first book “A Charlotte Mason Companion”.
Andreola has much more recently produced a book on Mother Culture, again from a particularly conservative, Ameri-centric (and, to my mind, unfortunate) perspective. If that perspective is what you’re looking for, you may love it. But I’m not convinced that perspective was what Charlotte Mason had in mind.
Charlotte Mason was a radical, revolutionary, cutting edge educational thinker, right at the very forefront of educational philsophy. she emphasised the personhood (agency) of children and the imperative for their educators (Mothers in this case, although it would equally apply to Fathers, Teachers, Carers) to keep up-to-date on every area of educational thought and learning.
Mother Culture, then, is the quest for the continuing self-education of those with whom children are entrusted, regardless of whether we are currently in the process of home education. On this blog I have dubbed it ‘Continual Professional Education’ but it need not only apply to those of us who are professionally engaged in education either.
As I understand it, when Charlotte Mason talked about the education of Mothers, she included every academic subject, and recommended that one keep at least three books on the go: one light fiction, one heavier (perhaps classic) fiction, and one non-fiction.
It isn’t an easy task if you are in the thick of educating young children. As they grow it becomes easier and now mine are grown and almost flown, I finally have the time, if not energy, to devote more to my own studies.
On our UK Mother Culture facebook group, I mostly post interesting links to art & painting, music, ballet, opera and literature. If this sounds like something that might interest you, and you’re not looking for that conservative, Ameri-centric perspective, please do join us!
11 Nov 2021
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Mother Culture: My Continuing Education 