Have you ever gone on the Charlotte-Mason side of instagram and felt like there’s no way you can afford the atmosphere of a Charlotte Mason education? We can’t either.

But don’t worry. We’re pretty sure instagram has this Charlotte Mason principle off. 

Books Mentioned: Home Education | Parents and Children | A Philosophy of Education | For the Family’s Sake (*affiliate links) 

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COMMONPLACE:

There are but three left for our use and to each of these we must give careful study or we shall not realise how great a scope is left to us. Seeing that we are limited by the respect due to the personality of children we can allow ourselves but three educational instruments–the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit and the presentation of living ideas. Our motto is,–'Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life. (Philosophy of Education, pg. 94)

We all know the natural conditions under which a child should live; how he shares household ways with his mother, romps with his father, is teased by his brothers and petted by his sisters; is taught by his tumbles; learns self-denial by the baby's needs, the delightfulness of furniture by playing at battle and siege with sofa and table; learns veneration for the old by the visits of his great-grandmother; how to live with his equals by the chums he gathers round him; learns intimacy with animals from his dog and cat; delight in the fields where the buttercups grow and greater delight in the blackberry hedges. (A Philosophy of Education, pg. 96)

Our children live in it and breathe it, and what we are is thus incorporated into them. There is no pretense here or possibility of evasion: we may deceive ourselves: in the long run, we never deceive our children. The spirit of home lives, and what is more, home atmosphere is accentuated in them. (The Atmosphere of the Home)

are held in that thought-environment which surrounds the child as an atmosphere, which he breathes as his breath of life; and this atmosphere in which the child inspires his unconscious ideas of right living emanates from his parents. Every look of gentleness and tone of reverence, every word of kindness and act of help, passes into the thought-environment, the very atmosphere which the child breathes; he does not think of these things, may never think of them, but all his life long they excite that 'vague appetency towards something' out of which most of his actions spring. (Parents and Children, pg. 37)

The atmosphere is life-encouraging to us or not; our home’s routines either enable us to enjoy a balanced quality of life or not; and we either trudge bleakly and disinterestedly along life’s path or enjoy intellectual input through books, nature, art, music, good relationships, and so on. These give us the spark of fresh aliveness mentally and spiritually that we call life. (For the Family’s Sake, pg. 81) 

Good homes are good places to live and grow. They make possible and ornament a secure life that is vitally alive with joys appropriate to the personalities and abilities of those living there. (For the Family’s Sake, pg. 81) 

That he should take direction and inspiration from all the casual life about him, should make our poor words and ways the starting-point from which, and in the direction of which, he develops-this is a thought to make the best of us hold our breath. There is no way of escape for parents; they must needs be as "inspirers" to their children, because about them hangs, as its atmosphere about a planet the thought-environment of the child, from which he derives those enduring ideas which express themselves as a life-long 'appetency' towards things sordid or things lovely, things earthly or divine. (Parents As Inspirers)