Parents and Children
1897
Parents and Children
1897
Charlotte Mason wrote for parents who wanted to understand their children deeply and raise them with intention. In this 1897 work, she builds on her earlier 'Home Education' to argue that parents are not merely caregivers but the primary educators and moral architects of their children's lives. The book arrives as a critique of its era's educational thinking: Mason examines what Rousseau and others got wrong, then offers her vision of the family as society's foundation, children as persons deserving respect, and education as the cultivation of character, not just information. She weaves together practical guidance with philosophical depth, insisting that parents must take their role seriously because the work of childhood shapes a lifetime. The writing feels like a conversation with a wise, earnest woman who believed parents were capable of something greater than feeding and clothing their children. For modern readers, the book endures because its central conviction - that how we raise our children matters enormously - hasn't changed a bit.
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“The child brings with him into the world, not character, but disposition. He has tendencies which may need only to be strengthened, or, again, to be diverted or even repressed. His character”
— Charlotte M. Mason
“To bring the human race, family by family, child by child, out of the savage and inhuman desolation where He is not, into the light and warmth and comfort of the presence of God, is, no doubt, the chief thing we have to do in the world.””
— Charlotte M. Mason
“the mind of the little child is an open field, surely 'good ground,' where, morning by morning, the sower goes forth to sow, and the seed is the Word. All our teaching of children should be given reverently, with the humble sense that we are invited in this matter to co-operate with the Holy Spirit; but it should be given dutifully and diligently, with the awful sense that our co-operation would appear to be made a condition of the Divine action; that the Saviour of the world pleads with us to 'suffer the little children to come unto Me,' as if we had the power to hinder, as we know that we have.””
— Charlotte M. Mason
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Mason, Charlotte M.. Parents and Children. Lex, lex-books.com/book/parents-and-children-23093fe0-fc9d-4598-bf52-1d651f4fa028.Mason, C. M. (1897). Parents and Children. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/parents-and-children-23093fe0-fc9d-4598-bf52-1d651f4fa028Mason, Charlotte M.. Parents and Children. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/parents-and-children-23093fe0-fc9d-4598-bf52-1d651f4fa028.
