Ep 19 | All of Education is Sacred (Principle #20)
For many of us, education is a thing outside of the sacred. We certainly know God made the world and the things in it, but school is something that’s done…over there. It’s just reading, writing, and arithmetic. If we want a Christian education, we need to add a Bible class and maybe a catechism. But what if I told you education is Christian if it’s true, harmonious, and whole? It’s time for Mason’s twentieth principle and for me to tell you why I’m always talking about truth, goodness, and beauty.
Discussed in today’s episode: The Triumph of Saint Aquinas
Video Resource | Let’s get practical.
JOIN THE MOTHER-TEACHERS IN COMMON HOUSE.
Join the mother-teachers in Common House (It’s like a Patreon, but better.) where we think deeply and learn together through full courses, bonus minisodes, monthly Q+A video calls, resources, and more!
LEAVE A REVIEW
Would you like to help other new-to-homeschooling moms wrap their hands around the ideals and principles of a classical Charlotte Mason education? Leaving a podcast rating and review can do just that.
READ THE TRANSCRIPT
Principle #20: We allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual and 'spiritual' life of children, but teach them that the Divine Spirit has constant access to their spirits, and is their Continual Helper in all the interests, duties and joys of life.
_____
Every few years, a new educational idea pops onto the scene. It usually promises a certain utopia of higher test scores, equitable outcomes, or preparation for the “real world of jobs”. It’s replaced by a new educational idea soon after which offers the same promises and so on.
You see, one of the underlying problems in our conversations about education is that we, as moderns, only believe the future holds promise. It sounds wrong to our ears if someone recommends pulling math books out from the 1980s. We need new books, new methods, new screens. New is better, so they say.
I know I hammer the Enlightenment pretty regularly around here, but before the Enlightenment man moved slowly into the future while facing the past. He learned from what came before: what had people done, what were the outcomes, how had they been formed, and were people better or worse off? They looked for what usually happened because we are people who are and act and expect what is usual or common. We can look to the past and reasonably guess what will happen if we apply the same ideas to people now.
Which is why the past is such a gift. And why I’m healthily suspicious of anything new. It’s not just me who holds this opinion (that would make me nervous to be the only one). C.S. Lewis said, “Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
So the question that we’re really getting at in this long season of educational principles and the question we’re not really asking in our modern day is: At what place do we want our children to be?
____
In the early 1900s, Mason was trying to bring her own about-turn. She realized they were on the wrong road, trying to implement new educational ideas and methods that would only take them farther in the wrong direction. She looked at the first generation of graduates and realized This is not where we want to be.
So she did an about-turn, looking back to the medieval understanding of knowledge.
For Mason’s time, and our time, people understood knowledge as a bit of this and a bit of that, a little here and a little there, things of shreds and patches with yawning gaps between. Classes present information in a fragmented way, isolating the things of one from any other discipline. Your history is separate from your chemistry is separate from your literature.
I think that sometimes we follow behind the banner of educational progressivism because we’re too far removed from a real understanding of education. We think that we go to school to learn what we need for a job and life in a civilized society. We believe that learning math is just a numbers thing and you can do that as well at public school as a Christian school. It’s just math. The same is true for learning the big facts of history or the laws of physics. They don’t need Bible verses and, honestly, most of us aren’t going to be nuclear physicists, so physics isn’t really that important.
All of this shows our disconnect from the commonplace view of education as understood for centuries. It shows our personal experience. It shows our utilitarian underpinnings. It shows our unrecognized secular-sacred divide.
Mason did an about-turn to the medieval period because they held a clearly defined and understood whole view of education in God’s world; they knew where a man needs to be at the end of his education.
____
I don’t usually ask you to do this, but will you pull up today’s episode notes? There’s a direct link in your podcast app. I’ve included a painting called The Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas and it’s important for this next part of the episode. I’ll also just tell you now: I’ll be explaining the painting in more depth in this week’s Bonus 5 in Patreon. Come join us! patreon.com/thecommonplace
Okay, did you pull it up? No, really. Did you?
____
There’s this painting in Florence, Italy, titled The Triumph of St. Aquinas and it stretches across a wall in the Spanish Chapel of Santa Maria Novella. Did I see it, you ask, when I lived in Florence?
No, I didn’t. And I don’t want to talk about it.
But Mason visited it and saw in it the fullness of Christian learning. Or, can I say learning as a Christian? And that distinction will be important later in this principle.
So, at the top, you have the dove, the Holy Spirit, descending down in Pentecost. You see the cardinal virtues and the Christian graces, followed by the prophets and apostles, followed by the seven sacred sciences and—are you ready for this?—the seven liberal arts of classical education. Each of those is represented by its captain in the world. The sciences have men like St. Augustine and St. John of Damascus but the liberal arts show the likes of Aristotle, Cicero, and Euclid.
This painting was, for Mason, a moment of great recognition, and she said that parents need to have a similar moment when they realize the magnificent idea that all knowledge comes from above and is given to minds that are prepared to receive it—whether Christian or pagan.
All seven liberal arts of classical education, every fruitful idea, every original conception, be it in geometry or grammar or music, is directly from God.
I’ll let Mason say it herself:
Many Christian people rise a little higher; they conceive that even grammar and arithmetic may in some not very clear way be used for God; but the great recognition, that God the Holy Spirit is Himself, personally, the Imparter of knowledge, the Instructor of youth, the Inspirer of genius, is a conception so far lost to us that we should think it distinctly irreverent to conceive of the divine teaching as co-operating with ours in a child’s arithmetic lesson, for example.
Are we not also still so removed from this idea?
We know that we can use math “to the glory of God” but do we think of math as soul-forming? If we did, would that change where we want to be and how we get there?
Mason thought so.
In her 20th principle, she’s not really saying anything new, she’s just saying it more directly. There is no part of your child’s education that is not scared. Knowledge is a beautiful whole, a great unity, that embraces God and man and universe through its many parts, each with its own functions.
We know that all truths are God’s truth and that the “secular” subjects are just as sacred as the religious ones. Our children don’t live in two different worlds of school and church or study and faith. Whatever our children do—when they read, sing, experiment, balance equations, play an instrument, or serve in the community—God is always with them and the Holy Spirit is teaching them the reality of God’s world and love.
Because of this, Mason would say that it’s not for a person to choose, “I will learn this or that” and leave out the rest. Likewise, it’s not for a curriculum maker or a mother-teacher to choose to leave things out. We aren’t at liberty to limit a child to less than a whole field of knowledge.
We have to lay the feast.
I think this is a hard one for us to swallow. Generally speaking, we, as western, post-Enlightenment Americans hold pretty individualistic views about our life. You do you. You’ve got the freedom to decide. It’s you and Jesus and that’s all that matters.
But we’re all under the authority of a Divine Master who ordered his world to be a certain way, who made people to learn and love and embody in certain ways. We don’t get to call the shots; we can choose to submit to the natural laws of God’s world, which include every part of education, or we can press on with our own designs.
We can fragment knowledge. We can treat children like mind buckets. We can toss out the arts in one fell swoop. We can draw the secular and sacred line.
If this sounds like the playing field majorly changed, I know. Mason’s 20th principle is the one that, for me, erased the idea that there were many other options available for education. I had hemmed and hawed about children being born persons and the science of relations, thinking that maybe I could fill in the gaps of some other educational philosophies.
But this is the one where Mason shoves you through the door of the wardrobe. She pushes you out of the cave away from the shadows and into the light to learn to see clearly.
The half-offerings will no longer do. This is about reality. This is about where want children to be at the end of their education, at the end of their lives.
If education is fully under the authority of God—which it is, as we see in that painting and know since all truth is God’s and we are in his world—but if education is fully under the authority of God, then it is Christian insomuch as it submits to his design.
This is one of the most exhilarating parts of diving into educational philosophy.
At least for me, it is.
I used to think that a Christian education was having a Bible class in the schedule, a school worship service on Wednesday mornings, and a stricter dress code. It was popping a Bible verse into your essay on Napoleon and talking about intelligent design in every chemistry class. It was banning books with magic and the greek gods.
I actually saved a quote from Brandy Vencel a while back on this very thing. She says:
“Oh, how far we have fallen from a thoroughly Christian vision of education and of study. We sit around in fear, worrying about the gods in mythology, or the magic in fairy tales, or the mere idea of pagans like Plato or Plutarch possessing any wisdom, because our vision of education is too small, and we fail to see that God has always and ever been upon the throne, and that every word of wisdom echoes His great thoughts, regardless of whether the person speaking them ever recognizes the fact or not.”
This is why I’m always talking about truth, goodness, and beauty. Or, at least, one of the reasons. “Every word of wisdom echoes His great thoughts, regardless of whether the person speaking them ever recognizes the fact or not.”
All truth, all goodness, all beauty is his. That’s the point of The Triumph of St. Aquinas. Nothing in God’s world exists apart from him. Everything that is true or good or beautiful is his. Calculus and botany and grammar are the things of God and by studying and doing them well, we become more like God. Reality is without a secular and sacred divide. And we want our children to be in reality.
So what then is Christian education? Or, like I said earlier, what is education for the Christian? It submits to the design of God’s world which, as we’ve discussed all year, makes sense and we can make sense of it. Education for the Christian submits to the reality we actually live in: God’s kingdom with its order and way of life.
A true education is to treat a child like they are a full person with mind, spirit, and appetite in need of truth, goodness, and beauty as they are found in God’s world. It’s to labor faithfully, knowing a child’s character is not set as good or bad but can become virtuous through education. It’s to cultivate a respect for authority and a teachable spirit without manipulating a child’s will by using atmosphere, discipline, and life to teach them to know what is good, to love it, and to reproduce it. A true education is one of living ideas, the only food proper to nourish the mind and give life to the image bearer. It’s to allow the child to make connections with knowledge through natural relationships with a wide variety of things presented in well-chosen language and beautiful form. It’s engaging all parts of the mind through narration which touches the rational, imaginative, judging, and affective parts of the child. It’s showing the child his soul is a gift and it is his duty to strengthen his will to accept that which is good for his soul and to reject that which will darken it. It is to give him stories and examples worth imitating and to point, always, to Christ who is the ideal type for every person. It’s to learn to recognize truth, goodness, and beauty wherever they are found and allow them to form your thoughts, loves, and actions towards God.
Education requires all of this because there is not a single part of creation over which Christ does not cry out, “Mine!”
I’ll see you guys in two weeks.
Want (more of) the good stuff?
Join the mother-teachers in Common House (It’s like a Patreon, but better.) where we think deeply and learn together through full courses, bonus minisodes, monthly Q+A video calls, resources, and more!
