Gillingham

The CM conference this year was, in part, a celebration of the so-called "Liberal Education for All" movement, which Charlotte Mason originally proposed in 1914 in the midst of World War I. Apparently concerned that Britain's working class was being left out of liberal education, Mason wrote that a liberal education (think liberal arts) ought to be not just a privilege of the educated and the wealthy but a right for all citizens -- by virtue of their personhood. (CM folks make a great deal of this idea of personhood: children are people, not machines). Human beings need a human education, in other words.

In any event, there's much I don't know about the original movement, but one of the ways the conference celebrated the "liberal education for all" idea was with a kind of strand focused on Charlotte Mason in the public arena -- as it tends to be an educational approach for private and home schools. It seems that the Pottsville neighborhood in Philadelphia is home to the first American Charlotte Mason public school, a charter school called Gillingham. It's a K-12 school of about 225 students, and Nicolle Hutchinson, the head of the school, was at the conference along with 4-5 of her teachers -- most of whom had no idea who Mason was before applying to work at Gillingham. Hutchinson uses a kind of translated CM language: "relational education" instead of CM, "retelling" instead of narration. They don't send home letter grades, but teacher's write narratives of their students' progress, and students themselves narrate orally what they've learned in parent-teacher conferences. Instead of point systems and demerits, they use something called "restorative practices". Their music education is based on the Kodály Method -- they taught us to do this song:

So it's a challenge, translating a Christian educational philosophy to a non-sectarian environment, but the bigger challenge is actually making CM square with the high-stakes testing regime of our current public educational system. CM values narration -- which can't be done on a multiple choice test. CM values showing what you know, while tests tend to shame you for what you don't know. CM values connections between ideas, joining what Mason called the "Great Conversation;" the tests value discrete, factual knowledge. CM values lifelong learning -- learning as delight, pleasure, joy, curiosity -- the high stakes testing regime is predicated on global competition, by which I think they mean ready participants in the new global working class. 

Anyhow, Gillingham has 5 years to prove that they are doing good work, and the proof will be in the test scores. 

Still from the stories they told, these challenges are very much worth facing. Students who had always hated school weeping on the last day because they don't want to leave. Teachers who love what they do and get to do what they love. 

I know there are problems with the charter school movement, but all of this is nevertheless exciting to us, because I think the Mason approach combats the quantification craze in helpful ways. It's a movement -- probably like Waldorf and Montessori -- that a century after it first coalesced is again relevant. Education can be joyful, delightful, a place of rest and wonder instead. 

Tom