Exploring the Charlotte Mason Approach to Education: A Journey Through Philosophy and Practice
There’s a moment most homeschool parents have — usually somewhere between “what curriculum should I buy?” and “what am I even doing?” — where the bigger question sneaks up on you: What is education actually for?
Tessa Carman, daughter-in-law of Davis and Rachael Carman, has been sitting with that question since high school. A literature teacher, writer, and homeschool mom, Tessa says she didn’t have a vision for her wedding growing up — but she did have a vision for how she’d educate her kids. That vision was shaped largely by Charlotte Mason‘s approach to education. In a recent episode of Let’s Talk Homeschool, Tessa shared what she’s learned — and it’s the kind of conversation that sticks with you.
Who Was Charlotte Mason
According to Tessa, Charlotte Mason was a British educator who lived around the turn of the 20th century. She never married, never had children of her own, and yet spent her entire life obsessed with one question: How do we raise human beings well?
“She didn’t just theorize,” Tessa explains. Mason trained teachers, started schools, led lectures, organized nature studies — she was in the trenches. She wrote it all down in a series of books that were largely forgotten after the World Wars, then rediscovered by families trying to homeschool in the 1980s — republished by Karen and Dean Andreola as The Original Homeschooling Series. What those families found wasn’t a method. It was a philosophy — and, Tessa is quick to point out, a deeply practical one.
Children are Born Persons
This, Tessa says, is the cornerstone of everything Mason taught.
“Children aren’t blank slates waiting to be filled, or computers ready to be programmed. They are persons — image-bearers of God — from day one.”
That sounds simple. But Tessa argues that if you follow it all the way, it’s actually pretty radical. It means the goal of education isn’t producing a certain kind of output. It’s honoring something that’s already there.
Because persons are made for relationship — with God, with people, with the natural world, with ideas and stories and beauty — Tessa describes education as “really just the work of introducing them to all of it.” Mason called this “the science of relations.” Your child is meant to know what grass feels like, how numbers work, and what it’s like inside a carpenter’s shop. They’re meant to love stories — not just hear them and to have a relationship with history, not just memorize it.
Tessa reminds us,
“The most important relation we have is toward our Creator. That’s the ultimate goal.”
They Already Want to Learn
Here’s something Mason wrote that Tessa says should stop every parent in their tracks:
We don’t need to teach children to learn any more than we need to teach them to digest.
Watch a toddler. Tessa knows this firsthand — her two-year-old is currently in the “is this this thing?” stage, checking and double-checking that the world is what she thinks it is. That “what is that?” impulse, she says, “does not stop. It does not end. It just… gets squashed sometimes.” It’s not intentionally, of course. However, Tessa points out how easily it happens — when finding out things starts to feel inconvenient, or when we accidentally reward performing over curiosity. She shared the story of a friend who noticed a light going out in her kids’ eyes at school — they’d stopped wondering and started worrying about whether they had the right answer. That was enough for that family to change course.
Tessa says,
“The flame can be dimmed, so our job isn’t to ignite it. It’s not to put it out.”
Don’t Despise the Children
Tessa loves Mason’s bluntness here. Mason said plainly: “Do not despise the children.” By which she meant — don’t give them garbage. Don’t underestimate what they’re ready for.
Tessa uses Mason’s favorite food analogy: you can technically survive on Twinkies, but there’s so much real food — good, nourishing, delicious food — that there’s simply no reason to start there. “And honestly,” Tessa adds, “it doesn’t even taste as good as the real thing.”
The same goes for what we put in front of our kids intellectually. She says Mason would tell us, “Set a feast, because you don’t know what’s going to light the fire. So give them everything — unstintingly.”
The Kingdom of the Soul
One of Tessa’s favorite Mason ideas draws on classical philosophy — Plato, Augustine — to describe the inner life of a person as a kingdom. Each of us has parts: reason, appetite, and spiritedness. A well-formed person learns to rule themselves — not in a rigid, suppressed way, but in a genuinely free way.
True freedom, in Tessa’s reading of Mason, isn’t doing whatever you want. It’s being able to do what’s right. She uses the example of a pianist: you can’t just decide to play something beautiful. You have to have practiced, developed, and done the work. Then — and only then — you’re free to play.
“That’s a whole, wonderful part of yourself that you get to enjoy as a human being,” she says.
For homeschool parents, Tessa frames this as a realization that discipline, character, and virtue aren’t separate from education. They are education.
So What Do You Actually Do?
Tessa offers a few practical starting points for families:
Remember you’re a person too. “Mothers are persons. Fathers are persons,” she says — meaning you’re under authority, you’re going to mess up, and that’s okay. Mason herself believed the Holy Spirit is the ultimate educator. “That’s always a good comfort,” Tessa notes.
Seek out real relationships. Read Mason’s books, yes — but do it with friends. Talk it through. Find mentors you want to be like. “Have a living relationship with people you want to learn from,” Tessa urges. “Same principle, different context.”
Be suspicious of the “computer” metaphor. Tessa warns against labeling kids early. “Children are not just math people or just English people. They are many-splendored beings who can take delight in many different areas.”
And have fun. Genuinely. “If you’re not enjoying life with your kids,” Tessa says, “step back and make sure you’re enjoying it — because that’s where the true life will be.”
Tessa recommends Mason’s book Ourselves — written directly for middle schoolers — as a fantastic read-aloud for families wanting to bring these ideas into the home in a concrete way. It covers virtue, character, and the kingdom of the soul in language kids can actually engage with.
If you’re at the beginning of your homeschool journey, wondering what the whole thing is even for — Tessa would say that’s exactly the right question to be sitting with. Charlotte Mason spent her life trying to answer it. You don’t have to get it perfectly. You just have to keep going.
