Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition

by Karen Glass

Charlotte Mason makes reference to Montaigne as one of the classical writers on education who influenced her own opinion about teaching history, as well as the Lives of Plutarch, which were always featured in the PNEU programs. In this conversing with men, I mean also, and principally, those who only live in the records of history; he shall, by reading those books, converse with the great and heroic souls of the best ages. ‘Tis an idle and vain study to those who make it so by doing it after a negligent manner, but to those who do it with care and observation, ‘tis a study of inestimable fruit and value; and the only study, as Plato reports, that the Lacedaemonians reserved to themselves. What profit shall he not reap as to the business of men, by reading the Lives of Plutarch? (Montaigne, Of The Education of Children)