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!

DD101 – TMA 03

I have just finished the third TMA (essay) for my Open University Course, DD101 Introducing the Social Sciences.

I didn’t think I could do it at all, in fact this essay has had me in tears and convinced that not only I don’t want to carry on with this particular bit of the course, but that I’m really not cut out to be doing Social Science at all.

It has been so discouraging, because I have studied Sociology before at GCSE (although actually, ahem, I suppose it was actually O Level) and A Level and I had loved the subject, but I don’t remembering it being this hard.

TMA 03 was a two part essay. The first part was 500 words analysing a table of data from the Census related to the ethnicity of residents of the national parks in England and Wales. Huh, I didn’t know we had any ‘national parks’.

The second part was 1000 words on the topic of how certain communities are included or excluded in certain places.

Oh my. I had thought the essay on ‘rubbish’ was hard.

It was the data table that really had me in tears, because my mathematical skills are oo, rusty shall we say? It was fairly obvious that ‘White’ was vastly more numerous than any other ethnicity, but it was a very poorly categorised set of data really. Why, for example, does the government categorise ‘Gypsy’ and ‘Irish Traveller’ together as one ethnicity? They seem political rather than bona fide ethnic categorizations. But ours not to reason why or comment, just to analyse.

Part two was just a straightforward essay really, and should have been easy because it was only 1000 words, but because I had procrastinated for so long, putting it off because I was finding the first part such a headache, I had to cram everything in today and cobble it together before the deadline. So I’m not expecting a very good result this time. Ho hum, I got it done anyway.

Now I just need to start getting back into a regular rhythm of study and keep to it so I don’t get into so much trouble next time.

How’s everybody else finding the course?

 

DD101 Introducing the Social Sciences Weeks 1-3

I have completed the main tasks for weeks 1-3, including finishing reading the first Learning Companion, watching the films and completing the online tasks. I do need to go back and make some additional notes on a couple of the films, and listen again to the audio files and take notes. I also need to turn my notes into an essay for the first TMA.

It has been a pretty relaxed and gentle introduction so far, and I’m quite looking forward to our first tutorial.

I am a little troubled though about the TMA. The task is to write about a street ‘you know well’. Well, I have moved around a lot, and I have lived in several cities, but recently I have been in a very rural location.

The course materials use City Road in Cardiff as a ‘window’ on society, and state that it is possible to apply what is observed there to any street in any town in the world. Perhaps. I can certainly compare my location to City Road, Cardiff. But it does seem to me that rural locations have very different issues to urban societies. Perhaps ‘people are the same wherever you go’ but it will be interesting to see if the differences outweigh the similarities. I know my tutor would prefer me to write about an urban location, but I don’t ‘know’ any town streets and to discover what I would need to know to compare one with City Road Cardiff would require hours of research that would take it well beyond the 20 hours per week that I bargained for. Hopefully I’ll be able to make a case for writing about my rural locality.