S5E67: Science in the Charlotte Mason Homeschool with Jeanne Webb

The New Mason Jar with Cindy Rollins

Again, we have made a rather strange discovery, that the mind refuses to know anything except what reaches it in more or less literary form. Persons can ‘get up’ the driest of pulverised text-books and enough mathematics for some public examination; but these attainments do not appear to touch the region of mind. Of Natural Science, too, we have to learn that the way into the secrets of nature is not through the barbed wire entanglements of science as she is taught but through field work or other immediate channel, illustrated and illuminated by books of literary value.

Charlotte Mason, Philosophy of Education Show Summary:

• Today’s guest on The New Mason Jar is Jeanne Webb, veteran homeschool of one daughter and former member of the AmblesideOnline Auxilliary, and her whole family are involved in the sciences
• How Jeanne first heard about the Charlotte Mason philosophy
• What make Charlotte Mason’s approach to science different from that of typical American science education?
• What is the relationship of nature study to other areas of scientific study?
• How do nature study and nature lore prepare children for the more formal study of science?
• What Jeanne and her family did for nature study
• Does a Charlotte Mason approach to science do enough to prepare students for higher education?

Books and Links Mentioned:

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

The Burgess Bird Book by Thornton W. Burgess

Napoleon’s Buttons by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson

The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

Gulp by Mary Roach

It Couldn’t Just Happen by Lawrence O. Richards

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson

Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe

A Meaningful World by Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt

Who Made the Moon? by Sigmund Brouwer

The Language of God by Francis Collins

But the object of the Parents’ Review School is not merely to raise the standard of work in the home schoolroom. Our chief wish is that the pupils of the School should find knowledge delightful in itself and for its own sake, without thought of marks, place, prize or other reward; that they should develop an intelligent curiosity about whatever is on the earth or in the heavens, about the past and the present. The children respond and take to their lessons with keen pleasure, if they get even tolerably good teaching, and the want of marks, companionship, or other stimulus is not felt in those home schoolrooms where the interest of knowledge is allowed free play.

attributed to Charlotte Mason, from “Parents’ Review School”, The Parents’ Review, Vol. 12, No. 9 (1901) Find Cindy:

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