Knowing as Loving: Philosophical Grounding for Charlotte Mason's Expert Educational Insights

We come together to propose and demonstrate that covenant epistemology accords fundamentally with Charlotte Mason’s innovative and effective theory for educating children, thus giving expression to the philosophical grounding of her approach.

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A theory of education is rooted most deeply in philosophical commitments regarding what it means to be human, what is real and how we know it (philosophical anthropology, metaphysics, and epistemology.) The still-dominant, defining implicit philosophical commitments of our own modern era (1600s to the present), are skewed to disavow the real, instrumentalize understanding, and dehumanize persons. These play out damagingly in educational theory and practice. Charlotte Maria Shaw Mason’s theses enact an alternative philosophical vision which correctly diagnoses and healingly subverts modernity’s skewed and damaging claims. We propose and show that philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek’s “covenant epistemology” accords profoundly with Charlotte Mason’s innovative and effective vision for educating children, giving expression to the philosophical grounding of her approach. This alignment serves to confirm Mason’s insights and expand our grasp of how to implement them. 

Coauthored with Mason expert Lisa Cadora, this monograph is one of the Charlotte Mason Centenary Series, Deani Van Pelt, Series editor, produced in honor of the 2023 Mason Centenary, by the Charlotte Mason Institute. The multi-authored Charlotte Mason Centenary Monograph series is designed to highlight and explore the continuing educational and leadership relevance of Charlotte Mason (1842–1923) through the collective contributions of the Armitt Museum and Library, the University of Cumbria, the Charlotte Mason Institute, and other scholars and practitioners worldwide.

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A Word from KasL's Co-Author Lisa Cadora

"Great ideas are brooding over the chaos of our thought; and it is he who shall say the thing that we are all dumbly thinking who shall be to us as a teacher sent from God."  Mason, C. Parents and Children, 1897.
 
In the "chaos of my thought(s)" regarding education -- its content, its methods, its aim, indeed, the whole endeavor -- I knew that there had to be something more than the traditional behavioristic approaches to teaching, our modern-day atomistic treatment of reality, and a de-personalized view of the learner that prevailed in my teacher education program, my certification process, and the ways in which I was held accountable for my efforts with students.
 
Providentially, I encountered the methods and philosophy of Charlotte M. Mason in my last year of education studies, and her account of the personhood of the learner set me in the direction I was to go for the next forty years of my life. At about the same time, I began to become familiar with the epistemological ideas of Michael Polanyi, and recognizing parallels between his thought and Mason's, I longed to bring the two together. This is when I discovered Esther Meek, who has been unto me as "a teacher sent from God," offering not only a clear explication of Polanyi's ideas, but taking them further to develop her own "covenant epistemology," an account of knowing that honors the complexity and agency of both knowers and that which is made to be known.  
 
Esther's Longing to Know connected so many dots for me, strengthening my confidence that Mason's understandings of knower, known, and knowing were indeed nascent to Polanyi's thoughts on the same, and therefore relevant to the 21st century. But LtK did more than that. It brought relief to many cognitive dissonances -- "chaoses" -- that plagued me about not only secular education, but my own "sacred" education and the ways in which western protestant evangelical theology had caused me to view myself and my ability to know God as inherently problematic and nearly unattainable. 
 
Imagine my joy when Esther agreed to read Mason through the lenses of her own covenant theology, developed out of her work in Polanyi's theories, and to testify to the connections among these ideas! Thank you, Esther, for bringing a robust, reasonable and human account of knowing to so many through Longing to Know. May present and future educators, Mason and otherwise, continue to read it, undergo their own "epistemologically rehabilitation," and be affirmed in their efforts to bring persons into the legacy of knowing God and His reality. 

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