Dads in the Homeschool

All our great educational reformers have been men. The reforms of women have taken the direction rather of practical application than of original thought. This is worth thinking of in connection with the theory that the home-training of the children is the mother's concern. Happily, it does not fall to each of us to conceive, for the first time, the principles which underlie our work. But when we take the conceptions of other minds into ours so that we are able to work them out - to handle them as the skilled artisan handles his tools, to produce by their means - why, then, do we originate. Such exercise of original thought on the subject of the bringing up of their children falls to both father and mother. "Oh that all children were born orphans!" cries an irate schoolmaster. They are not so born, and neither are they born fatherless; and that the father should be, as a bird, ever on the wing homewards with a worm in his bill, is not, however praiseworthy, the sole duty that attaches to human paternity. This is not a protest against the practice of fathers. The annals of fatherhood, no doubt, furnish as fine reading as those of motherhood. But it is a protest against the notion that early education is the concern of the mother alone.

Charlotte Mason, Home Education, Fragments, The Appendices, Third Edition, p369