If you’re going to take education seriously, it’s not enough to have a stack of curriculum and a list of things to do. How do you know you chose the right curriculum? How do you know that what is on your to-do list are things worth doing? And how do you know what to do when things go wrong?
A philosophy starts not with what to do, but why to do. What are we about? Why are we here in our homeschools with our children and what are we trying to accomplish?
When you have a good philosophy, you can make most decent curriculum work for you. You can press everyday life into the service of your educational project. You can be flexible and creative when things fall apart.
In short, you become the master of your homeschool instead of a slave to your curriculum and list.
The Charlotte Mason Think Tank isn’t about venerating an old British woman. Instead, we’re learning to think philosophically about education, discovering philosophical truths for ourselves, and then strategizing together about how to apply this philosophy in our day to day lives.
We’re currently in the middle of a study of Charlotte Mason’s 20 Principles of Education. We’ve set up the study so that there is a way for new students to jump in whether we are on principle 3 or 13. All you need to do is work through the Welcome Section material. Then, print out the checklist for the current month and start where we are currently at. It’s that simple.
