For the World's Sake: Charlotte Mason's Enduring Wisdom for the Anthropocene

by Douglas J. Sikkema

One of Charlotte Maria Shaw Mason’s most enduring legacies was her belief that education is fundamentally about relations. And one of the most essential relationships to nurture was with the natural, non-human world. Throughout her life, Mason consistently advocated that in order to cultivate proper relationships, a child’s “personhood” should be understood and taken into account by an educator. As a full person, a child needs water, air, atmosphere, and light as much as he or she needs a rich diet of living books and a rigorous approach to habit formation and good moral discipline. A good education, then, puts a child in right relation with the material world in which the child is enmeshed as a creature. In the current cultural moment, our culture is characterized by an increasing detachment from the natural world. And while some emphasis has been made to recover activity for learning, so much of the cultural momentum in the Anthropocene and the digital age buffers students from the material world. Cultivating the habits for inhabiting this world is essential to being human. Mason saw this over a century ago, yet her wisdom still goes unheeded by many in the Anthropocene.