Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition

by Karen Glass

I will only briefly address the reinterpretation of the trivium as stages of child development, because this idea is actually a recent one without classical precedent. Dorothy Sayers presented the concept first in her 1947 essay/speech, The Lost Tools of Learning. Modern educators, looking for something better than our woefully inadequate progressive practices, have built her non-traditional ideas into an entire educational movement commonly called “neoclassical,” which distinguishes the newer idea of stages from traditional, historical classical education. Unfortunately, this view places the burden of rote memorization, often without understanding, upon young learners who would be better served by a relational, synthetic approach to knowledge. To know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies no more but only to retain what one has entrusted to our memory. That which a man rightly knows and understands, he is the free disposer of at his own full liberty, without any regard to the author from whence he had it, or fumbling over the leaves of his book. A mere bookish learning is a poor, paltry learning; it may serve for ornament, but there is yet no foundation for any superstructure to be built upon it. (Montaigne, Of The Education of Children) We have already discussed how the definition of grammar changed from the delightful study of literature to a dreary analysis of orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody. Using Dorothy Sayers’ essay, the definition of grammar has been...