What Is Fire In the Bones?

There are moments when a mother senses that something essential has slipped away. I did. 

 

My daughter was in her middle school years and something was amiss. I couldn't name it; I just tried harder.

 

The plans were well laid out and according to my understanding of Charlotte Mason's model of education. The books carefully chosen. The days filled with meaningful work. 

 

And yet there was a feeling that school has become thin. Not wrong, exactly. Just… diminished.

 

Charlotte Mason had addressed this. Not in words of alarm and, certainly, not of blame. Simply this;

 

She was naming something important not telling us to “fire up.”

 

Education, she insisted, is not the transmission of information, nor the accumulation of skills, nor even the orderly completion of a program. It is formative. It reaches inward. It shapes the person who receives it—and the parent who gives it.

 

When that inward fire is absent, something always rushes in to replace it. Pressure. Anxiety. Noise. Endless adjustment. We feel this instinctively. Mothers often know before they can name it.

 

The times are always changing. Every day there is a new idea of how things are.  Mason knew that as well as we do. Keeping up can be exhausting. 

 

She lived through social upheaval, industrial expansion, war, and profound cultural shifts. Yet, she did not respond by chasing the latest or reinventing education to keep pace with the moment.

 

Instead, she turned deliberately toward what does not change. The permanent things that always point us to the truth.

 

She understood education as rooted in natural law—not the laws of a system, but the laws of human nature itself. 

 

Children are persons. Minds feed on ideas. Formation occurs through relationship, attention, habit, and meaning. 

 

These are realities not historical artifacts. They belong to the way human beings are made.

 

Mason did not see herself as an innovator. She resisted that role. Again and again, she positioned herself as a guide—one who stood by the roadside, pointing educators back to the way that aligns with life.

 

This matters now more than ever.

 

In times of rapid change, there is a strong temptation to tighten down on education: to prioritize what feels urgent, measurable, or marketable. 

 

Narrowing does not protect children. It makes them fragile. Breadth, balance, and living ideas do far more to steady a person than intensity ever can.

 

When education is alive, it does not require constant propping up. Ideas awaken interest. Interest sustains attention. Attention forms habits. Habits shape character. This is not a strategy. It is how we are made;  there is order in our learning.

 

Perhaps this is why many mothers feel the weight of education not only in their homeschool, but in themselves. Mason warned—almost in passing—that this way of education shapes lives, not just lessons. 

 

She was right. Education forms the teacher alongside the child. There is no neutral ground. We grow alongside our children.

 

This series, Fire in the Bones, is an invitation to return to first principles. Not to recover a method, but to re-orient toward the laws that make education living in any age. No matter what you are up against.

 

The world will continue to change. What matters is whether the fire still burns.

 

We’ll stay with this question.

 

In the next Open Doors, we’ll look at how mothers come to recognize when education is alive, and when something else has taken its place.