​The following blog is published with permission of the Charlotte Mason institute and was originally posted on October 17th 2025 and can also be accessed here.
It describes Lisa's time at Ambleside,  the former site of Charlotte Mason's teacher college, in advance of our next issue of Appraisal which will be dedicated to Charlotte Mason.

​It has long been a desire of mine to bring to light what I have sensed are the metaphysical undergirdings of Charlotte Mason’s educational philosophy and practice, so when Dr Jen Spencer suggested we apply to the Charlotte Mason Institute (CMI) and the University of Cumbria’s Scholar-in-Residence (SIR)  program so as to continue our research into parallels between Mason’s work and Personalism, I was eager to do so. This program provides funds toward travel and provides housing at the University of Cumbria”s Ambleside campus, the former site of Mason’s teacher’s college and center for the work of the Parents’ National Education Union.                                                                           

Once Jen and I expressed interest in the Scholar-in-Residence program to Dr. Carroll Smith and Dr. Deani Van Pelt, we were sent general information and various forms to complete detailing our proposed project. In addition, we were instructed to request letters of recommendation from those familiar with our scholarship to be sent to CMI. Other documents to complete included a Statement of Intent and Accountability. 

Our next steps upon receiving our letters of acceptance were coordinating dates for our residency with the Ambleside campus, setting dates and times for meetings and visits during our stay, and making travel arrangements to the UK from our respective cities. We both arranged to fly into London and make our way to the Lake District over the next several days as our particular research project involved meeting with individuals and making visits to archives in various locations between London and the Lake District. For the next several days, our travels took us north of London to Loughborough where we met with the founders of the British Personalist Forum, and to Cardiff, Wales, to view items pertinent to our project in the archives at Cardiff University.

​Arriving at last at the University of Cumbria campus in Ambleside, we made our way up the steep hill to the building called The  Barn to officially check in and be shown to our cottage-turned-dormitory accommodations. Weary from travel by planes, trains, buses, taxis, and our own tired legs – we were excited to be  on site and officially  “in residence!”

​Our first day involved meeting with our gracious hostess, Professor Sally Elton-Chalcraft, who eagerly introduced us to a fellow Charlotte Mason researcher from Turkey. We immediately fell into  delightful discussion of our various interests in Mason’s work.  Later in the day, Jen and I explored the village for provisions with which to  stock our small dormitory kitchen and to find a pharmacy for Jen who had caught the cold I had come down with previously somewhere between London and Cardiff.

​We also got our bearings on campus, discovering that the university’s library opened at 8:30am with staff on site to provide directions as to how to access the university’s databases, special collections, and other resources on campus. The Armitt, just at the bottom of the steep hill, charged a one-time fee of seven pounds good for the duration of our stay and was open Tuesday through Saturday, 10a-5p, plenty of time in which to mine the lode of riches therein. 

And so we settled into something of a routine using morning into early afternoon hours for reading and meetings, and later afternoon hours for exploration. Indeed, after the intensity of study and deep thought, we found a ramble to be in order! ​

​There is, of course, a variety of excursions available in and around Ambleside ranging from an hour or so’s walks along waterways to lengthier and more strenuous full-on mountain climbs. All of it instills in one a deep appreciation of Mason having chosen to situate her teacher’s college in this part of England. Jen and I found maps and guides online and, for a few pounds, in the shops in the village. Jaunts of ours included Rydal Cave and Rydal Water, Grasmere, and High Sweden Bridge. Favorites  of former Scholars-in-Residence are Stock Ghyl Force, the Coffin Road to Grasmere, and Loughrigg Fell. Also popular are Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top Farm in Hawkshead;  John Ruskin’s home, Brantwood, at Coniston Water; Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount, and Lake Windermere.

​We didn’t hesitate to stop for a pint and bite to eat either along the way (The Badger Bar) or once back in Ambleside  (The Golden Rule, The Priest Hole). There are  many quaint pubs and restaurants to choose from, each with their own unique features and fare, and all of which admit the most unbelievably well-behaved dogs!

​We soon realized that dining out each day can become expensive, and we were grateful for a lift on another day from our hostess to Booths in Windermere for provisions for light breakfasts, lunches and suppers. There was light until late into the evening during our July into August stay, so our days usually concluded with a spot of tea, conversation, and sometimes a bit more study before retiring. Because there is much to stimulate the scholarly brain, we found rest to be essential for our subconsciouses to assimilate all that we had taken in each day. 

​In addition to access to the Mason archives at the Armitt Museum and to University of Cumbria students and faculty members who are involved in educational instruction and research, Jen and I discovered other advantages to being “in residence.” The luxury of being relieved of every-day duties and obligations to go deeply into research was truly a gift. Being able to walk among and even live in the buildings and surroundings that date back toMason’s time transports one by imagination to something of her context. Seeing with one’s own eyes and holding with one’s own hands Mason’s books, records, correspondences, and papers as well as those whose thought flourished alongside hers allowed us  to make formerly unimagined and unexpected connections from her work and thought to the work and thought of those who came before her, those who were her contemporaries, and to those who continued to explore and expand her thought beyond her lifetime. In such a stimulating atmosphere, Jen and I  couldn’t help but indulge ourselves in generating myriad topics into which future Scholars-in-Residence might delve!

The following blog is published with permission of the Charlotte Mason institute and was originally posted on October 17th 2025 and can also be accessed here.
It serves as an introduction to Charlotte Mason's thinking in advance of our next issue of Appraisal which will be dedicated to Charlotte Mason.

​In November of 2021, I was sitting in Dr. Deani Van Pelt’s home office in Canada when she handed me a book she was reading. “Have you read this?” she asked. It was a copy of An Introduction to Personalism by Juan Manuel Burgos. “No,” I answered, “I’ve never heard of it.” As she talked about the book, she reached towards the shelf again and pulled down What Is a Person? by Christian Smith. Though she had not gotten very far in either of them yet, she sensed, as I did, that they might contain insights relevant to Charlotte Mason’s philosophy. After all, Mason’s central thought was that the child is born a person. Any book that expounded on what that means was bound to be interesting, at the very least. I added both to my Amazon cart (as one does), and we continued our visit. This turned out to be one of those rare moments in life where you bump into an idea and, though the impact doesn’t feel strong at the time, it nudges you just enough to alter your life’s trajectory. Nearly four years later, I would find myself digging through archives in Cardiff, Ambleside, and Kendal, looking for evidence of a direct tie between Mason and personalism.

​By the time I returned home from my 2021 trip to Canada, my new books had arrived. I flipped through them and skimmed a few sections that caught my eye. There was so much gold there, but they were so dense that I just couldn’t devote the time or mental energy that would be required to fully understand them. These were books for another day, so on the shelf they went, and I got on with my duties leading the Alveary. 

I left that position just a few months later. In December, Deani and I were talking again, this time by phone. She was working on editing the monograph series, and the deadline was quickly approaching. She wanted to write one on Mason and personalism, but there just wasn’t time. “Oh, Deani, that one is too important! There has to be a monograph on personalism!” I said. We decided we would join forces to get it done. Deani would articulate what she had gleaned about personalism, and I would focus on how those ideas related to Charlotte Mason. Our monograph, titled Students as Persons, was published the following summer.

​Working on that project renewed my curiosity. No, “curiosity” is not the right word. “Obsession” might be closer. I needed to understand personalism and figure out why it had so much in common with Charlotte Mason. When I returned from the Centenary Conference in Ambleside in 2023, I called Lisa Cadora and asked her if she wanted to read Christian Smith’s book with me and hash it out together. When we finished that one, we read Burgos. We found ourselves making charts, cross-referencing names, following rabbit trails, and being so incredibly nourished by it all. Ultimately, our book study morphed into a formal research project that would send the two of us back to the UK this past summer as Scholars-in-Residence for The University of Cumbria and the Charlotte Mason Institute. 

​In our two years of exploration, we have encountered a number of iterations of personalist thought. The common thread that runs through them all is the centrality of the person. Essentially, personalism says that any action, organization, theory, economic system, religion, or government is good inasmuch as it honors the inborn dignity of every person and is bad inasmuch as it does not. Personalism is most closely associated with Europe from the 1930s onward. In fact, Burgos argues that personalism belongs exclusively to thought that originated in this specific time and place. Its most widely-known thinker is undoubtedly Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), whose contributions prior to his ascendancy brought this fairly niche school of thought into the international spotlight. Wojtyla’s ideas continue to be taught in Catholic seminaries and, thus, infuse church teaching. Although Burgos focuses mainly on personalism’s development in Europe, he also gives brief mention of parallel movements in Britain and America, which actually predated the one that took place on the continent. In America, personalism is most closely associated with Borden Parker-Bowne of Boston University. Though his name is probably unfamiliar, he was highly influential to one PhD student whose name you will recognize – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But here is where things got really interesting for us: The development of personalism in Britain began when Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Charlotte Mason’s strongest influences, traveled to Germany and brought back the ideas of Immanuel Kant. This sparked a movement that would help shape the world in which Mason lived – British Idealism. 

In his book, British Idealism: A History, W. J. Mander traces the development of this movement, which flourished from the 1860s through the 1930s. The primary figure credited with popularizing the idealisms of Plato, Kant, and Hegel, was a professor at Balliol College named T. H. Green. Mason never mentions Green in her volumes, but his influence is present.* This is likely because one of his most ardent students, T. G. Rooper, joined the very first executive committee of the Parents Education Union in Bradford in 1890 and continued to work closely with Mason, giving lectures at local PNEU branches and assessing House of Education students, until his untimely death in 1903. Mason wrote about what she owed to him in the last chapter of Formation of Character. 

​British Idealism was very successful in pushing back against the materialism, empiricism, determinism, utilitarianism, dualism, and all the other “-isms” we associate with the age of science that followed the Enlightenment. In particular, it rescued metaphysics and religion from total cultural obsolescence. Mason would have been very pleased by this and attracted to the renewed importance given to ideas, but she was not carried away by the idealists. As often happens when one movement arises in response to another, the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction. Many of her contemporaries slid all the way into Absolute Idealism (or “monism”), which states that all things are one; matter is ultimately not real in itself, but, rather, a construct of the mind. It does away with dualism, to be sure, but it does so at the expense of the individual – most importantly, the individual person. Others who had also been inspired by Kant arose in opposition, and in 1902 Henry Sturt coined the phrase “personal idealism” to differentiate them from the Absolute Idealists. The name stuck, even though these thinkers probably should not have been called “idealists” at all. They acknowledged not only the real-ness of the material world, but the moral imperative to study it. As embodied persons, we are part of the material world; to flourish, we must understand and attend to our physicality. But we are not only material, and we resist being reduced to such. Most personal idealists believed in a personal God (as opposed to an impersonal energy or a disinterested or authoritarian deity) who had endowed all those who bear His image with a dignity that requires honor. Each is unique, irreplaceable, and of inestimable worth as a self-determining individual, but each is also made for relationship with other persons, with God, and with the non-personal world. Here, we have made it to the headwaters of personalism in Britain. And who do we find waiting for us there, but Charlotte Mason. 

​Finding out that early personalist thought could be found in Britain led us to an exciting resource: The British Personalist Forum, an organization founded by R. T. Allen dedicated to preserving the legacy of personalist thought in Britain and promoting the continuance of personalist ideas worldwide. Lisa and I had dinner with Professor Allen and one of his fellow board members, Dr. David Jewson, while we were in residence. They had never heard of Charlotte Mason, but it only took moments for them to see the striking parallels. When the evening concluded, we gifted them with Mason’s sixth volume and two monographs, and they invited us to introduce Charlotte Mason as an early personalist thinker to their audience. 

​And so, Lisa and I continue to meet weekly. There is so much work left to do. Currently, we are rereading the volumes and coding them for personalist themes, as well as noting where she might diverge from common personalist thought. As we read, we are gleaning fresh insights and nuance that we simply could not see before. In some ways, it is like reading her words again for the first time. We look forward to sharing the fruits of our residency with the Mason community soon, and we are very grateful to the University of Cumbria and the Charlotte Mason Institute for making our research possible. 

* For example, we believe that Mason’s “science of relations” is rooted in Green’s educational ideas, though she takes them further to create what she considered to be her only truly original contribution.

I had some thoughts recently on democracy. Democracy is a way of expressing the personal views of a population so that they can choose good government rather than, for example, tyranny. But for people to be able to make good choices they need to be able to effectively evaluate whatever politicians offer rather than simply accept it. What is then needed is the ability to analyse whatever is on offer and be able to form an independent opinion while having an understanding quite complicated ideas, such as what is important to human beings, what really makes for a happy life, and how human relations operate.
This understanding requires a special type of education both at home and at school that concentrates, not on facts, but on discovering the joy of learning and analysis, as well as the joy of human relationships and friendship - for when people find a love for something, they will naturally develop it. There are also skills that need to be practiced, such as the ability to concentrate. Key to all of this is valuing the freedom of yourself  and others to decide, after analysis, what you believe and what you do not believe and for everyone to have a respect for those decisions, whatever they are.
This type of education was proposed by a British personalist and educator, Charlotte Mason (1842 - 1923), whose ideas I think have a particular modern relevance when it comes to making democracy effective, for what good is democracy is people simply accept the 'spin' they are given and can be manipulated  by ideas that may seem superficially good but drastically fail when subject to deeper analysis?

Welcome to the new British Personalist Forum Blog. We hope the blog will inspire some interesting philosophical insights and discussion amongst our members. Please feel free to send us a new post at [email protected] or comment on any of the posts.

​The British Personalist Forum Team.