A Humane Vision of Education Charlotte Mason’s final volume stands as her most comprehensive work, synthesizing decades of educational practice into a coherent philosophy. Writing in the early 20th century, Mason challenges the mechanistic, factory-model approach to education that dominated her era – and, unfortunately, still dominates ours. At the heart of her philosophy is a simple but radical claim: children are born persons. This isn’t sentimental rhetoric. Mason means that children possess full human dignity from birth, capable of engaging with ideas, beauty, and truth …

If teaching and learning are meant to be emancipated from the schoolhouse—freed from confinement to a place, a schedule, and a mood—then we must also be emancipated from a common lie about children: that liberty and discipline are opposites. In many minds, liberty means the absence of constraint, and discipline means the presence of constraint. Liberty is what happens when we “let children be children.” Discipline is what happens when we “make them behave.” And so we oscillate: either we clamp down and call it seriousness, or we loosen everything and call it freedom.