Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition

by Karen Glass

Human understanding is marvelously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses. One asking Socrates of what country he was, he did not make answer, of Athens, but of the world. —Montaigne

I do not have wisdom. I want to know, but I do not yet know.

Our education should help us remain in an intellectual state of knowing that there are things we do not know, because as soon as we shift from a sense of not-knowing to a sense of knowing (like the classic “know-it-all”), we are no longer open to further instruction.

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

Our educational system of grades, prizes, contests, tests, and “My child is an honor student” bumper stickers has a tendency to make educational efforts more a matter of performing well than of achieving wisdom. 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 discovered not only that they were destitute of wisdom, but that they believed themselves to be possessed of it; so that he was wiser than they, though wholly ignorant, inasmuch as he was conscious of his own ignorance.

Plato

“Nothing is worse than those who have made some little progress beyond the first elements and on the strength of this are filled with a false idea of their knowledge.”

It is by no means a taking of our place among our fellows according to a given scale, some being above us by many grades and others as far below. There is no reference to above or below in the humble soul, which is equally humble before an infant, a primrose, a worm, a beggar, a prince. (Parents and Children, p. 283)

The journey to wisdom is the journey of a lifetime, unlike a trip to Rome. If we want to learn and grow—and if we want our pupils to learn and grow outside the schoolroom and beyond the years of formal schooling—we must all come to recognize humbly that the goal is yet before us and there will always be much to learn.