Podcast | Education is the Science of Relations | Principle #12

Education is the Science of Relations | Principle #12

In today’s episode I’m talking about the twelfth principle of Charlotte Mason’s Twenty Principles. This principle focuses on what we often refer to as the “guiding principle” and a phrase I’m sure you’ve often heard. “Education is the Science of Relations.”

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Principles

Principle #12: “Education is the science of relations” that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts; so we train him upon physical exercises nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books, for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything but to help him make valid as many as may be of – those first-born affinities that fit our new existence to existing things.”

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Leading Thoughts

1. Mason believed that all knowledge is connected
2. Every person builds a relationship with knowledge.
3. This knowledge ultimately becomes virtue.

Listen to the podcast above to hear more!

Quotes

Principle #12: “Education is the science of relations” that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts; so we train him upon physical exercises nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books, for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything but to help him make valid as many as may be of – those first-born affinities that fit our new existence to existing things.”

“The art of standing aside to let a child develop the relations proper to him is the fine art of education” (School Education p. 67)

“We have relations with what there is in the present and with what there has been in the past, with what is above us, and about us; and that fullness of living and serviceableness depend for each of us upon how far we apprehend these relationship and how many of them we lay hold of. Every child is heir to an enormous patrimony. The question is, what are the formalities necessary to put him in possession of that which is his? (School Education, p. 218)

All knowledge is joined by a unity of “the relations which bind all things to all other things” (Parents and Children, p. 259)

Links

A Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason (pages 128-138)

Article from the Parents’ Review in 1905 on “Education is the Science of Relations”

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I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Charlotte Mason Motherhood podcast. Thank you so much for listening!

SOURCES:

1. Mason, Charlotte. Home Education. Simply Charlotte Mason, LLC, 2017.
2. Mason, Charlotte. A Philosophy of Education. Simply Charlotte Mason, LLC. 2017.