When Maryellen St. Cyr first dreamed of Ambleside School, what was it that she sought to bring to life? With 25 years of our life’s work behind us, I want to bring us back to the foundation of our movement.

 

At Ambleside, we begin with the end in mind.¹ Imagine an 18-year-old who is consistently kind and quick to serve; who, wherever he or she goes, radiates joy and creates belonging; who is diligent, careful, and accurate in work; who can manage emotional distress well and stay his or her best self; who shows appropriate respect for appropriate authority; who communicates well in speaking and in writing; who is curious and hungry to know; who delights in neutrinos and quasars, differential equations, birds of the air and flowers of the field, the stories of Julius Caesar and Mother Teresa, great novels, and beautiful poetry.

 

And above all, picture this one who loves God with the entirety of heart, mind, soul, and strength. Nurture such a man, such a woman, and we at Ambleside are convinced that “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”²

 

Such aspirations cannot be realized by the grade-grinding, factoid-memorizing, testing-and-forgetting, run-of-the-mill, Darwinian competition that is so common to so many classrooms.

 

At Ambleside, we take guidance from a 19th century British educator named Charlotte Mason, and we are convinced she got it right in her understanding of how to best educate children. This philosophy of education is best summarized by her motto.

 

Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.³

 

Education as an Atmosphere

 

Contrary to what we have been led to believe, it is not actually a child-centered environment that children want. What children need is something that doesn’t have to be contrived: an emotional-relational atmosphere.

 

The chief characteristic of an Ambleside atmosphere is joyful belonging. For a person, particularly a child, to flourish, he must be part of a community where he is known and where others are glad to be with him. An anxious, competitive environment deforms the heart, hindering academic, psycho-social, and spiritual development.

 

We are made for joy in our relationships, and we cannot thrive without it.

 

In addition to joyful belonging, an Ambleside atmosphere has many elements — peaceful authority, serene order, warm smiles and kind greetings, hospitality and courtesy, shared curiosity, beautiful spaces and places both in the classroom and on school grounds — to name but a few.

 

Education as a Discipline

 

By education is a discipline Charlotte Mason meant “the discipline of habits formed definitely and thoughtfully, whether habits of mind or of body.”⁴ To be clear, discipline is not punishment. It is the impartation of skills that make for the fullness of living.

 

While not all human responses are simply the result of habit, there is no human response that does not presuppose an underlying set of habits. Using a fork, throwing a ball, solving a math problem, writing an essay, praying regularly, making eye contact, negotiating conflict, sustaining attention, returning seamlessly from distress to peace — all require distinct, well-formed habits.

 

Thus, the intentional cultivation of life-giving habits of body, mind, and heart is a very large part of an Ambleside education.

 

Education as a Life

 

Like the body, the mind too is alive. And just as the body needs food to survive, so the mind needs its food. In Charlotte Mason’s words:

 

The mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows, and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body.⁵

 

Ideas are spiritual, and the power to know them is a spiritual power which cannot be reduced to data processing. Good, true, and beautiful ideas (rightly understood as grounded in the mind of God) strike us as a revelation.

 

In light of this recognition, Ambleside schools provide a broad, rich curriculum: “living” works of literature, sacred Scripture, art of great masters, music of the best composers, the wonders of nature, mathematics, and handcrafts.

 

Our concern in education is not with strings of names or dates, nor with nice little reading-made-easy stories brought down, as we mistakenly say, to the level of the child’s comprehension. We recognize that a child’s spiritual power to learn is at least equal to our own, and that it is only his immaturity and inexperience that we work to develop.

 

Education that’s Alive

 

This is the Ambleside education we are offering. The enrichment of an emotional-relational atmosphere, the training of discipline toward life-giving habits, and an abundance of Good, True, and Beautiful Ideas — this is that living education, birthed 25 years ago at the first Ambleside School, which is feeding the heart, mind, and soul of a generation.

 

Bill St. Cyr
Founder, Director of Training
Ambleside Schools International