Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition

by Karen Glass

When we pause to consider that grammar is equivalent to literature, we see how education was originally begun—by learning to read, and by reading the best books. Rules for how to pronounce words or mark sentences correspond to our modern phonics and punctuation, and these things were learned in the course of reading books.

Her emphatic conclusion about a child is that “his mind is the instrument of his education and that his education does not produce his mind.”

“Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.”

Charlotte explains that children thrive best—as plants do—when they are not raised in hot-house conditions.

She wanted children to have the opportunity to explore the world and interact with the people in it—to learn to conduct themselves with their “betters” as well as their servants. She doesn’t suggest that no safeguards be taken of course, as parents have a duty to make sure truly vicious influences do not intrude, but she believed children should partake of real life, not an artificial environment.

First, a healthy interaction with the world, the experience of natural disappointments and failures, and the triumph of small successes contribute to keeping a child humble about his place in the world, and aware of his own ignorance and need to continue learning.

Second, the natural interaction with the world and people around him, as well as the natural enjoyment of labor and play and exercise, contribute to that “poetic knowledge” or synthetic understanding of the connectedness of all things.

This is not, and never can be, a lesson taught by lecture or precept. It must be caught, and the understanding must grow naturally in the process of acquiring firsthand knowledge of the world and making...

If we do well, we let most of the virtues be their own reward and do not heap praise upon him.

We are creatures of habit, and our habits are forming themselves all the time. If we do not take care to form good habits, the bad ones establish themselves without effort, just as desirable plants require care while weeds thrive in untended soil.

we will not neglect to nourish our children’s minds any more than we would neglect to provide them regular, adequate meals.

Each child’s mind will take what it requires, and we respect the personhood of children by not substituting our insights for their own needs.

But they want a great quantity of the sort of food whose issue is conduct, and that is why poetry, history, romance, geography, travel, biography, science and sums must all be pressed into service. No one can tell what particular morsel a child will select for his sustenance. One small boy of eight may come down late because “I was meditating upon Plato and couldn’t fasten my buttons,” and another may find his meat in ‘Peter Pan’! But all children must read widely, and know what they have read, for the nourishment of their complex nature. (Philosophy of Education, p. 59)

Educating a man to be intelligent, but ignoring his moral education, would have been a travesty both to Charlotte Mason and to the long line of classical educators who saw their task as one of turning out wise and good men, not merely clever or knowledgable ones.

No effort of choice is necessary to serve self—this we do naturally, and choices made to indulge our natural desires do not require an act of will.

When we will ourselves to act for others, or for God, or for the sake of an ideal, we are behaving like men rather than animals.

“There are but two services open to men—that which has self as the end and centre, and that which has God (and, by c...

We already love self, and need no conscious willing to pursue ease, leisure, profit, and pleasure for ourselves.

Not that he does persuade himself, but that his reason appears to act in an independent way, and brings forward arguments in favour of a conclusion which he has already unconsciously accepted.

This is a piece of self-knowledge upon which every child should be brought up if we would not have him at the mercy of chance convictions. Perceiving this, he would see for himself the object of his education; and young people would be eager to acquire knowledge were they brought to perceive that wide knowledge of men and events is a necessary foundation for convictions which shall be just as well as reasonable.

They must learn not to lean upon their own understanding (reason), as Proverbs says, but to evaluate the rightness of the ideas that present themselves, and then, with the way of the will, to accept or reject them.

Next, we must avoid the short road to opinions; we must not pick them up ready made at any street-corner; and next, we must learn—and this is truly difficult, a matter that takes us all our lives—to recognise a fallacy, that is, an argument which appears sound but does not bear examination. (Ourselves, Book II, p.185)

Children must understand that it is not safe to assume logical and right are the same.

Charlotte Mason encourages educators to focus their efforts, not on developing logic, but on learning to detect fallacies within logical arguments.

a man’s reason is his servant and not his master;

approach knowledge as a whole, learn to know, and not merely to know about.

he explicitly interprets music to include literature, especially stories. In fact, all arts practiced by the muses were “music” to the Greeks.

We have allowed utilitarian thinking to rob us of the awe and wonder afforded by mathematical relationships, which are impossible except in a meaningful and ordered universe.

it is possible to learn both grammar and rhetoric in the process of natural exposure to correct speech and eloquent speakers (or writers).

As all the arts of the trivium are based upon words, it is through the use of books that the arts will be mastered. Books will be read and understood (grammar); their rationale will be discerned and may be confirmed or refuted (logic); and writing projects will be assigned to give opportunity for thoughtful reflection on various aspects of a book or selection of books (rhetoric).

Grammar, logic, and rhetoric may be employed synthetically, together, to make the most of every book, through the simple process of reading and narrating, while incidentally examining a grammatical construction or rhetorical trope—perhaps a metaphor—along the way.

It is not a bad test of education to be able to give the points of a description, the sequence of a series of incidents, the links in a chain of argument, correctly, after a single careful reading. (School Education, p. 180)

Casual reading—that is, vague reading round a subject without the effort to know—is not in much better case: if we are to read and grow thereby, we must read to know, that is, our reading must be study—orderly, definite, purposeful. In this way, what I have called the two stages of education, synthetic and analytic, coalesce; the wide reading tends to discipline, and in the disciplinary or analytic stage the mind of the student is well nourished by the continued habit of wide reading. (Formation of Character, p. 382)

We are not reading books merely to check off a list or to be able to say we have read them. We are reading to grow as persons, to know more that we may understand more, and ultimately, it is to be hoped, to act according to our greater wisdom.

Allowing a child time—as much as fifteen years—to develop relationships with knowledge and grow into a synthetic understanding of the universe is more important than hurrying to the analytical activities that seem more important to us only when we place more value on test results than character formation.

To know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies no more but only to retain what one has entrusted to our memory. That which a man rightly knows and understands, he is the free disposer of at his own full liberty, without any regard to the author from whence he had it, or fumbling over the leaves of his book. A mere bookish learning is a poor, paltry learning; it may serve for ornament, but there is yet no foundation for any superstructure to be built upon it. (Montaigne, Of The Education of Children)

Education is no more than applied philosophy. (School Education, p. 118)

And what is a living book? Simply put, a living book is one that conveys living ideas. It should be of the highest literary quality and should present its subject in a way that engages both the mind and the heart of the reader. Charlotte rejects diluted texts, from which the living ideas have been reduced to mere information, as well as compilations of facts which contain no life in the first place. The test of a living book is whether or not it can be narrated by the student. If the mind is unable to assimilate the knowledge, the book has not done its living work of providing nourishment to the reader.

The books chosen should always have real literary value, because we are not reading for the mere acquisition of information but for the sake of relationships with knowledge, with words, with heroes, and with ideas.

This is the logos of classical education—that the bulk of our educational efforts are going to take place within the context of words—reading them, thinking about them, and then producing our own words. Regardless of subject matter, the child is practicing the arts of grammar a...

Because the driving purpose behind such studies is the formation of a relationship, it is important that children acquire real knowledge from their own observations, rather than simply learning facts from a book.

One thing at any rate we know with certainty, that no teaching, no information becomes knowledge to any of us until the individual mind has acted upon it, translated it, transformed, absorbed it, to reappear, like our bodily food, in forms of vitality. (Philosophy of Education, p. 239–40)

What he has heard or read, then narrated, he knows.

The trivium arts are meant to be the roads that lead to wisdom and virtue. If we want to make that journey, we must develop a synthetic understanding of the unity of knowledge and of our relationship to that knowledge.

What he wants of his teacher is moral and mental discipline, sympathy and direction; and it is better, on the whole, that the training of the pupil should be undertaken by one wise teacher than that he should be passed from hand to hand for this subject and that. (School Education, p. 170)

We should never imagine that because we know a part well—even very well—we therefore comprehend all knowledge.

This perception of knowledge as always being greater than we can apprehend allows us to retain that intellectual humility which is so necessary to continued learning.

We have replaced the never-ending desire to know with the utilitarian concept of learning only that which will enable us to make a living, or worse, merely entertain us.

Everything from moral codes to societal norms to absolute truth has been taken apart—has been, in fact, entirely shredded—so that the ability to see knowledge as a whole is a concept utterly foreign to the minds of many.

Rather than conducting a dialectical inquiry in pursuit of truth, the postmodern thinker assumes that there is no truth or meaning, and either attempts to construct his own meaning—which is not absolute and will not be meaningful for anyone else—from the shreds of knowledge that come his way, or else resigns himself to living with uncertainty.