Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition

by Karen Glass

Narrowly focusing on the seven liberal arts alone—or worse, only a few of them—is part of the error that brought the classical tradition to its knees in the face of science and analytical thinking. When the concept of scientific thinking and analysis came to be seen as a superior approach to knowledge than the older, traditional approach of synthetic knowledge, classical thinkers capitulated. Rather than holding fast to synthetic thinking, they recast the study of the trivium into an analytical model. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric can be used analytically, of course, but when the synthetic use of reading and understanding wise authors was sacrificed to developing “thinking skills” and analyzing the minutiae of grammar, the heart of classical learning was gone.