“Our aim in education is to give a full life.”
Charlotte Mason

Who was Charlotte Mason?

Read a brief introduction about Charlotte Mason and her educational methods.

Charlotte Mason series

Where can I read her writing?

Charlotte Mason's six volume Original Homeschooling Series has been transcribed and made available at AmblesideOnline along with Parents' Review articles, her school programmes and exams as well as many other resources.

Where can I find community?

You can search for a Charlotte Mason community in your area.

Where can I find a proven curriculum?

AmblesideOnline is the definitive Charlotte Mason curriculum used by thousands of families and educators around the world.

About Charlotte Mason Education

Charlotte Mason threw a door wide open to the public over one hundred years ago conveying her magnanimous ideas on education in ways that have had a profound effect on the way children learn. Those ideas have gained fresh interest in our modern lives as parents continue seeking a better way to educate their children, a way that treats them as a person created in the image of God. 

This site is an attempt to honor Charlotte Mason’s heartfelt passion to “throw open for public use” her ideas and methods for all who care to seek it. 



Education, like faith, is the evidence of things not seen. We must begin with the notion that the business of the body is to grow; and it grows upon food, which food is composed of living cells, each a perfect life in itself. In like manner, though all analogies are misleading and inadequate, the only fit sustenance for the mind is ideas, and an idea too, like the single cell of cellular tissue, appears to go through the stages and functions of a life. We receive it with appetite and some stir of interest. It appears to feed in a curious way. We hear of a new patent cure for the mind or the body, of the new thought of some poet, the new notion of a school of painters; we take in, accept, the idea and for days after every book we read, every person we talk with brings food to the newly entertained notion. 'Not proven,' will be the verdict of the casual reader; but if he watch the behaviour of his own mind towards any of the ideas 'in the air,' he will find that some such process as I have described takes place; and this process must be considered carefully in the education of children. We may not take things casually as we have done. Our business is to give children the great ideas of life, of religion, history, science; but it is the ideas we must give, clothed upon with facts as they occur, and must leave the child to deal with these as he chooses.
Charlotte Mason
Towards a Philosophy of Education, p.39-40