Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition

by Karen Glass

What does this look like when considered as lessons? Suppose the lesson is a historical one. A synthetic approach to history will tell us a continuing story, a comprehensible sequence of events with people, places, or dates included as needed. The story will show us people interacting with each other. There will be choices and consequences; causes and effects. There will be promises made and kept or made and broken. There will be places or events that give rise to determinations or provocations; there will be the whole gamut of human experience and emotion—love, passion, hatred, war, reconciliation. We will not learn everything at once, but we will learn each lesson in its turn as part of a whole pageant of human experience. There will be continuity, connection, and, it is to be hoped, compassion and fellow feeling, because the people of history were real people exactly like ourselves.