Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition

by Karen Glass

It is almost universally agreed that the beginning of classical study is grammar, but grammar meant something very different to the Greeks and Romans, and even the later Renaissance educators, than it does to most teachers today. We tend to think of grammar as the study of the structure of a language—how the various parts of speech are inflected or ordered to create meaningful sentences. But this is not precisely what the ancient educators had in mind when they spoke of grammar. Quintilian remarks almost casually, “Let us assign to each calling its proper limits, and let ‘grammar’ or ‘literature,’ to give it its Latin name, recognize its boundaries.” (Institutes of Oratory) Quintilian equates grammar—a word with Greek origins—to literature, a Latin word. If we have learned any Greek and Latin roots, we can see that gram and lit both mean “letter,” and call to mind that slightly antiquated expression for someone who was classically educated—“a man of letters”—that is, a man well-read in great books. 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. But Quintilian does not limit the study of grammar to merely learning how to read. He understands it to continue to the level of reading with comprehension, w...