Home Education consists of six lectures by Charlotte Mason about the raising and educating of young children (up to the age of nine), for parents and teachers. She encourages us to spend a lot of time outdoors, immersed in nature, handling natural objects, and collecting experiences on which to base the rest of their education. She discusses the use of training in good habits such as attention, thinking, imagining, remembering, performing tasks with perfect execution, obedience, and truthfulness, to replace undesirable tendencies in children (and the adults that they grow into). She details how lessons in various school subjects can be done using her approach. She concludes with remarks about the Will, the Conscience, and the Divine Life in the Child. Charlotte Mason was a late nineteenth-century British educator whose ideas were far ahead of her time. She believed that children are born persons worthy of respect, rather than blank slates, and that it was better to feed their growing minds with living literature and vital ideas and knowledge, rather than dry facts and knowledge filtered and pre-digested by the teacher. Her method of education, still used by some private schools and many homeschooling families, is gentle and flexible, especially with younger children, and includes first-hand exposure to great and noble ideas through books in each school subject, conveying wonder and arousing curiosity, and through reflection upon great art, music, and poetry; nature observation as the primary means of early science teaching; use of manipulatives and real-life application to understand mathematical concepts and learning to reason, rather than rote memorization and working endless sums; and an emphasis on character and on cultivating and maintaining good personal habits. Schooling is teacher-directed, not child-led, but school time should be short enough to allow students free time to play and to pursue their own worthy interests such as handicrafts. Traditional Charlotte Mason schooling is firmly based on Christianity, although the method is also used successfully by secular families and families of other religions.

Volume 1 of Charlotte Mason's Original Homeschool Series paraphrased sentence by sentence into plain English by Leslie Laurio. This is a good place for parents of very young children to begin, since Charlotte Mason details ways to prepare children up to age 9 for a CM education. If you prefer to print or read this book online for free, the complete text is also available at http: //www.amblesideonline.org/CM/ModernEnglish.htm

Towards a Philosophy of Education is the sixth volume of Charlotte Mason's six part homeschooling series, a series that is considered one of the finest ever written on education. Towards a Philosophy of Education gives the best overview of Mason's teaching philosophy. Written years after she was able to see her teaching methods in action she is able to give further examples and directions. Mason's method of education shows its strength through its widespread use today by private schools and homeschooling families. It is flexible and includes first-hand exposure to ideas through books in art, music, and poetry, nature observation as the primary means of early science teaching, use of manipulatives and real-life application to understand mathematical concepts and learning to reason, rather than rote memorization, and an emphasis on character and on cultivating and maintaining good personal habits. The complete collection of Charlotte Mason's Original Homeschooling Series includes: Volume 1 - Home Education Volume 2 - Parents and Children Volume 3 - School Education Volume 4 - Ourselves Volume 5 - Formation Of Character Volume 6 - Towards A Philosophy of Education

Parents and Children consists of a collection of 26 articles from the original Parent's Review magazines to encourage and instruct parents. Topics include The Family; Parents as Rulers; Parents as Inspirers; Parents as Schoolmasters; The Culture of Character; Parents as Instructors in Religion; Faith and Duty (a secular writer has useful suggestions for using myths and stories to teach morals; along with the Bible, these can give examples of noble characters to emulate); Parents' Concern to Give the Heroic Impulse; Is It Possible?; Discipline; Sensations and Feelings Educable by Parents; What is Truth? (Dealing with Lying); Show Cause Why; A Scheme Of Educational Theory; A Catechism of Educational Theory; Whence and Whither; The Great Recognition Required of Parents; and The Eternal Child. Charlotte Mason was a late nineteenth-century British educator whose ideas were far ahead of her time. She believed that children are born persons worthy of respect, rather than blank slates, and that it was better to feed their growing minds with living literature and vital ideas and knowledge, rather than dry facts and knowledge filtered and pre-digested by the teacher. Her method of education, still used by some private schools and many homeschooling families, is gentle and flexible, especially with younger children, and includes first-hand exposure to great and noble ideas through books in each school subject, conveying wonder and arousing curiosity, and through reflection upon great art, music, and poetry; nature observation as the primary means of early science teaching; use of manipulatives and real-life application to understand mathematical concepts and learning to reason, rather than rote memorization and working endless sums; and an emphasis on character and on cultivating and maintaining good personal habits. Schooling is teacher-directed, not child-led, but school time should be short enough to allow students free time to play and to pursue their own worthy interests