Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition

by Karen Glass

“The purpose of education is not the assimilation of facts or the retention of information, but the habituation of the mind and body to will and act in accordance with what one knows.” This idea, that education is more about doing what is right rather than merely knowing information, is founded on a long tradition. When our knowledge is transformed into action, it becomes virtue, and virtue was the goal of the classical educators.

It was their desire to teach children not only to know what was right, but to love what was good, true, and beautiful so that their conduct would reflect their wise understanding.

Only within the past several generations has education become entirely divorced from moral development, and we see the results around us every day.

Our educational methods should inspire and lead children toward right thinking and acting, and every practice or educational fad must be considered within that framework.

Education, as conceived in our earliest records and understood through many centuries, was never about intellectual achievement alone, or even primarily. The development of the intellect was meant to serve in the formation of good character, and good conduct was the desired end of wise thinking.

Our thinking is not a separate thing from our conduct and our prayers, or even from our bodily well-being. Man is not several entities. He is one spirit (visibly expressed in bodily form), with many powers. He can work and love and pray and live righteously, but all these are the outcome of the manner of thoughts he thinks. (School Education, p. 114, emphasis mine)

while philosophy instructs, religion both instructs and enables.

If we think of education as a journey whose destination is virtue or wisdom, then we may compare it to a real life journey.

If we are humble, we are teachable. If we are not humble, we are not teachable.

If virtue is the true goal of classical education, pride in intellectual achievement is the perfect stumbling block to ensure that the goal is never reached. In other words, we must not only become humble, but remain humble if we want to continue our pursuit of wisdom and virtue.

He therefore considered his most important duty to be to convince men of their ignorance, and to excite them to remedy it, as the indispensable preliminary to virtue; for virtue he defined as doing a thing well, after having learnt it.

Sometimes we consider humility a spiritual virtue, but it is an intellectual virtue as well.

The mature disciples of Christ needed not only to become as children, but to realize that they could learn something, even from a child.

This fundamental understanding—that everyone, everywhere might be able to teach us something—...

It is a valuable thing to be able to approach every person or object or book with a view to learning something from them. What might we learn from an infant? From a primrose or other flower? What does a worm have to teach us, or a homeless man in the street? This we will never find out, unless we place ourselves in that attitude of teachableness which makes learning possible.

Parents and teachers exercise authority, but they hold their offices as under authority, the divine authority, without which she considers right relations between pupil and teacher to be impossible.

The recognition that there are things beyond our ken is humility.

Charlotte Mason equates the principle of docility with teachableness.

wisdom begins with the knowledge of our own ignorance.

The moment that intellectual pride takes root, we cease to be teachable.

We do not list “humility” among our school subjects or put it on a transcript, but that is actually the little secret of classical education. The things that make it truly classical, truly worthwhile to pursue, aren’t school subjects at all, but principles that add depth and cohesion to everything we study in all areas of the curriculum.

This primary understanding of the unity of knowledge was recognized as a fundamental truth by later Christian educators who had the advantage of divine revelation. Knowing the Creator, they were easily able to place the classical understanding of universal principles within the context of Scripture, and to see that the universal principles were in fact instituted by God, who created the world as a place of order.

Charlotte was deeply impressed by the depiction of all knowledge having its source in divine outpouring, even the mundane matters of grammar and arithmetic. She admired the complete conception of knowledge having its origin in God, and being introduced into the world by various teachers.

This understanding, of a single source of all knowledge, and further, of the interconnectedness and wholeness of knowledge, is one of the hallmarks of classical education as it was developed and formalized during the medieval and Renaissance eras.

Seeing the universe as a wholeness, and understanding that all things are connected to all other things, and ultimately to God, and to yourself, might be called synthetic thinking.

Synthetic thinking can be understood as an approach to knowledge that places things together, comprehending the relationship of new knowledge to old knowledge, one discipline to another, and man to all things.

Analysis should not be our primary approach to knowledge or our primary mode of thinking, especially in the earliest years of education. We should not begin taking apart the things that we learn until we have put them together first, and so solidly unified our understanding of the world that we will not lose sight of the relationships between things when we do begin to analyze.

Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking—the

the strain would be too great—but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest.

The question is not,—how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education—but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and therefore, how full is the life he has before him? (School Education, p. 170–71)

When we approach something with synthetic thinking, we first get well acquainted with it, as we would become acquainted with a new friend.

We know it at first hand, and the knowledge belongs to us as a possession, becoming part of our own understanding of the world as a whole.

That kind of relational approach to knowledge is fairly natural to us as children, but must be developed in order to reach its full potential, because it is not something that can be taught, as a lesson, nor memorized, nor tested, but must be caught, or grow naturally as the mind matures. When it becomes more deliberate, it might be called “dialectical inquiry,” in the manner of Socratic questions, but that is a later, more mature form of synthetic thinking. It beg...

Synthetic thinking is about wholeness—considering each new piece of knowledge as one piece of a larger puzzle and finding its place within that ever-more-complete big picture.

Synthetic knowledge tastes good and gives us an interest and desire for more. Our affections are engaged and a relationship is formed.

In fact, the mere division of our schools into “subjects” such as history (or the more modern social studies) and biology and geology, and so on, contributes to the disconnected approach analysis brings to knowledge and does nothing to help us understand how scientific endeavors took place within a historical context or how philosophical principles affected art, architecture, or politics.

Once grounded with a view of the wholeness and unity of knowledge, we may specialize as much as we like without losing that perception.

All knowledge is connected.

Our modern system of beginning education with analytic thinking, and in fact of teaching analysis almost exclusively, deprives our children of synthetic thinking and prevents them from developing relationships with all areas of knowledge.

“education is the science of relations.”

First, the primary purpose of education is wisdom and virtue, and every part of the program should serve to teach learners how to think and act rightly. Second, humility is vital to the pursuit of virtue because it keeps us teachable. Third, our approach to knowledge should be relational, synthetic, so that we develop a foundational understanding of the unity of knowledge and our own place in the universe.

It is probably worth saying a word here about how this kind of synthetic thinking works harmoniously toward the pursuit of virtue as the end of education. When we break things down analytically and lose connections, one of the connections that is lost is the connection between ourselves and the things we are learning. Our education does not spur us to right action, which is virtue, if we feel no personal attachment to our knowledge.

When we love virtue itself, we are more likely to behave virtuously.

The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things—not merely industrious, but to love industry—not merely learned, but to love knowledge—not merely pure, but to love purity—not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.

Right conduct might be induced by coercion, threat, or other means, but in the classical tradition, it is linked to the synthetic relationship between the learner and his knowledge. He is motivated to act rightly because he has learned to care. Classical education involves the heart as much as it does the mind.

If knowledge means so much to us, “What is knowledge?” the reader asks. We can give only a negative answer. Knowledge is not instruction, information, scholarship, a well-stored memory. It is passed, like the light of a torch, from mind to mind, and the flame can be kindled at original minds only. Thought, we know, breeds thought; it is as vital thought touches our minds that our ideas are vitalized, and out of our ideas comes our conduct of life. (Philosophy of Education, p. 303)

True honor is that which follows on virtue and right action of its own will.

We who share the goals of the classical tradition should insist that every method of education which would call itself “classical” be based upon this ideal, so that we do not fall into the error of mimicking what the classical educators did while ignoring the reasons why they were doing it.

When we are more concerned with what the classical educators were doing than why they were doing it, we are unlikely to achieve what they achieved.

They had in common the goal of producing virtue in their learners, and they understood that the outcome of education was meant to influence character and conduct, not intellect alone.