A Liberal Education for All: From the letters of Charlotte Mason

by John Thorley, J Carroll Smith, Charlotte Mason

399 pages, Hardcover

Published March 5, 2025

About the author

John Thorley is a lecturer in history at Lancaster University and St Martin's College, Lancaster. Formerly head of Trinity School, Carlisle, and the Principal of Charlotte Mason College, Ambleside, until his retirement in 1994.

Reviews

[Michaiah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good read for anyone interested in Charlotte Mason’s thought and work. It badly needs a good editor though - the commentary was extremely repetitive, sometimes contradictory, and occasionally made things more confusing instead of more clear.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an annotated collection of the letters of Charlotte Mason, a 19th century British educator whose ideas are becoming popular with many homeschoolers and church-affiliated schools. The book begins with a short biography of Mason, then talks about the influences on her educational philosophy and the main aspects of it. It then includes letter that she wrote to several of her colleagues (mostly from the time shortly before World War I until her death in 1923). The authors annotate these letters and provide important background on them. I think the book would be more interesting to someone who knew more about Charlotte Mason and her time, but I came away impressed with her. Particularly the fact that she pressed for liberal education at a high standard even for the children of the poor. While Mason herself was a member of the Church of England, she worked with Irish convent schools to implement her methods there. I found her tolerance for different types of people to be inspiring. I had read an article about Mason a few years ago that said she was a Quaker, but the authors said that her father was a Quaker and her mother was a Catholic, and that she joined the Anglican Church as an adult. She discusses in one of her letters how she has students read/memorize passages from the Bible, but that she tries to do it in a way that all denominations could support. I really appreciated learning more about this type of broad-minded Christianity interspersed with the liberal arts. It reminded me of the best parts of my own education, and left me hoping that her methods will enjoy a larger revival.