Education is a Life

Charlotte Mason believed that minds are nourished when they engage ideas—the best thoughts of the best minds. These life-giving ideas exist in the “thought atmosphere” that surrounds students; they breathe these ideas through the “books and things” with which they are acquainted, just as their bodies breathe life-giving air.

Indeed, Charlotte Mason wryly observed, “there is but one sphere in which the word idea never occurs, in which the conception of an idea is curiously absent, and that sphere is education!” Today much that passes as education is actually data and technique, assessed by quizzes and tests.

Many contemporary students only pass time in school. Day-to-day, week-to-week, even year-to-year, their minds find only scraps of ideas to feed upon through study sheets motivated for the grades.

There is a better way. Real learning happens when students engage with novelists, poets, philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, artists, musicians, historians, and explorers. Real learning happens when students wonder, ask why, and see how. Ambleside teachers foster this engagement using carefully chosen Ambleside curriculum.

For example, a student gleans from the Psalmist the idea that one knows God in stillness. From composition she receives the idea that silence—or sound associated with night—emphasizes solitude or peace. From composer study she learns that Mendelssohn diligently copied and transmitted Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, without believing the work would ever be performed again. These ideas are seeds in the child’s mind. As they germinate, others emerge, and a whole crop springs up from just one morning’s sowing.

At Ambleside, children experience education as a life each day. They receive consistent intellectual nourishment via:

• Living books and living things.
• “Worthy thought and worthy work.”
• Times of silence and reflection.
• Narration and discussion that promote the assimilation of ideas.