Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition

by Karen Glass

This was not the work of a single generation, and perhaps the work of reclaiming the classical ideal will take longer than we would wish as well.

Believe me, nothing is so practical as a great idea, because nothing produces such an abundant outcome of practical effort.

The first application of the practical principle that “education is the science of relations” is that a wide variety of knowledge is necessary. We should not limit our children’s exposure to knowledge, not because they need to acquire a great deal of information about everything, but because they need to develop relationships with every area of knowledge. During the earlier, synthetic years of education our task is to open as many doors as possible for them, to set their feet in a “large room” which it will be their privilege to explore in depth later, according to their own inclinations.

no education seems to be worth the name which has not made children at home in the world of books, and so related them, mind to mind, with thinkers who have dealt with knowledge. We reject epitomes, compilations, and their like, and put into children’s hands books which, long or short, are living. (School Education, p. 226)

Education is of the spirit and is not to be taken in by the eye or effected by the hand; mind appeals to mind and thought begets thought and that is how we become educated. For this reason we owe it to every child to put him in communication with great minds that he may get at great thoughts;

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.

knowledge of God, knowledge of men, and knowledge of the natural world; or, as we should say, Divinity, the Humanities, and Science.

In Science, or rather, nature study, we attach great importance to recognition, believing that the power to recognise and name a plant or stone or constellation involves classification and includes a good deal of knowledge. To know a plant by its gesture and habitat, its time and its way of flowering and fruiting; a bird by its flight and song and its times of coming and going; to know when, year after year, you may come upon the redstart and the pied fly-catcher, means a good deal of interested observation, and of, at any rate, the material for science.

Comenius perceived how all studies, including knowledge of the natural world, contribute to a unified understanding of knowledge which gives God first place in the process of ordering the affections.

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.

The master must not omit to set as an exercise the reproduction of what he has given to the class. It involves time and trouble to the teacher, I know well but it is essential. A literal reproduction of the matter taught is, of course, not required—but the substance of it presented in the pupil’s own way. (Erasmus, Upon the Right Method of Instruction)

Narration requires mental attention from the first word to the last. The mind must sift and evaluate everything that was included in the material. What were the salient points, and what merely illustration? What is the order or organization of this material? In other words—Where do I start, and what comes next, and next, until I come to the end? Quite unconsciously, a narrator will often make use of the vocabulary or turn of phrase used by the author, thereby appropriating them for himself.

In Charlotte Mason’s methods, the teacher is not the source of knowledge, doling it out to pupils in predigested form. The children are reading their living books and taking in knowledge for themselves. But the teacher must be the guide—the one who has gone before and laid out the program because he knows, as the children cannot, the best plan for proceeding.

The synthetic question that drove philosophical inquiry for centuries was “why?” and those who asked it were looking for an answer. As analytical thinking and utilitarianism began to dominate the world, the primary question became “how?” and those who asked it still believed that they could find an answer. As the unity of knowledge was fragmented into ever less-connected bits of information, the rhetorical question that has arisen out of despair and hopelessness is a cynical “why not?” and those who ask it assume there is no answer.

It should be the business of those who desire to educate in the classical tradition, or to give children a classical education, to find out first for themselves all that is meant by the classical ideal—to lay hold of synthetic thinking and a just conception of man and to pass that on to the next generation.

We should work to reclaim for ourselves a share in the classical tradition, not because we want to replicate the past, but because our present is in great need of virtuous men and women who understand the relationships that exist in our world and the value of a human soul.

Synthetic knowledge begins with relationships, with finding delight in a germinating seed, a pleasant rhyme, a storybook hero. That delight lays the foundation for a relationship

The initial delight in knowledge creates not only a desire for more, but an affection—love, even—for what is known. This is why synthetic thinking can be called “poetic knowledge,” because it involves the heart as well as the intellect.

The child who learns his science from a text-book, though he go to Nature for illustrations, and he who gets his information from object-lessons, has no chance of forming relations with things as they are, because his kindly obtrusive teacher makes him believe that to know about things is the same thing as knowing them personally; though every child knows that to know about Prince Edward is by no means the same thing as knowing the boy-prince. (School Education, p. 66)

Synthetic thinking, or poetic knowledge, begins with a relationship that creates an affection for the thing known. We cannot form relationships with or affections for facts or fragments, but with real, whole things.

philosophy merely instructs, while religion both instructs and enables.