Ep 01 | Wait, is Charlotte Mason Classical?
On your first Google search, it seems like a classical education is pretty different than a Charlotte Mason education. The former seems like hard memory work; the latter involves a lot of watercolor nature journaling. But in this episode, we’re going to explore the what and how behind these education methods. Spoiler alert: a Charlotte Mason education is classical. Come find out why!
Episode Notes
Continuing Education Picks
The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis
For the Children’s Sake, Susan Schaeffer Macaulay
The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis
The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, Alan Jacobs
Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs
What is Classical Education? | Ep 40, Classical Stuff You Should Know
“The Lost Tools of Learning,” Dorothy Sayers
Classical Heavyweight Picks
The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education, Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
Hey Google. Find me a quiz to tell me what type of homeschooling mom I am.
_____
So the way I usually tell people I learned about classical education is that I stumbled across Dorothy Sayer’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” And that’s a respectable start. But what I don’t usually tell people is how I found that essay.
I Googled “quiz to find out what type of homeschooling mom you are.”
No really, I did.
It was one of those late nights when I had 22 tabs open and was feeling completely overwhelmed, so I figured there was probably a quiz somewhere on the internet. And I was right. It exists.
I’m not telling you to go take it, but I am telling you that is how I discovered my top score was classical educator, My second top score: a Charlotte Mason educator.
And I didn’t really score on anything else.
So when I searched those two options, it seemed to me like they were, in fact, two options. Two different methods of homeschooling. Two different ideas. And I’m guessing some of you also think they’re different ideas.
Which is why when I wrote out the podcast’s show intro, I purposely used the phrase a classical Charlotte Mason education. I didn’t want the classical mom or Charlotte Mason mom to pop over the podcast thinking I wasn’t talking to them.
Because, yes, I’m talking to you.
On your first Google search, it may seem like they’re wildly different, but they’re actually not. I am willing to argue that a Charlotte Mason education is a classical education.
And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
So, leave behind your Google quizzes and come with me.
To get at the root of an education method, you have to look beyond the why of education. Why do we educate? To teach a child. Yes, of course. What you really need to look at is the what and how.
You see, all education methods have a working anthropology, which is just a fancy way of asking: What is a person? And how do they learn?
These two questions are very intertwined, and if you’re a mom, you already know this. You have a working anthropology: it comes out in things like how you speak to a child or how you answer their questions. Are you didactic or do you invite them into a big idea? Do you welcome them into your home as children or do you treat them like short, bad adults?
We’re constantly answering these questions in motherhood, and just like mothers answer these things differently, so do education methods.
But classical and Charlotte Mason methods answer these questions in similar ways. When you dig a little, you see they have the same answer to the what and how about education. Of course, they work themselves in some different ways, but it’s like any living principle, right? They’re born from absolute truths but the ways in which they’re worked out allow for personality and preference and even whimsy.
I think Charlotte Mason clearly articulated the heartbeat of classical education in a way that no other educator has. She had a way of understanding a natural law or biblical principle and bringing it into the everyday realities of teaching children, making big ideas really practical.
So let’s look at how she explained the what and how.
Her first principle is “Children are born persons.” It means they’re whole: they have a soul, a mind, and a body. That’s what they are.
And a soul feeds on living ideas. That’s how they learn. It’s a law of education.
Children are born persons and there are understandable laws for how they learn.
It sounds pretty obvious, but these two statements really shake things up.
The modern man has been set on separating facts from their living ideas pretty much since Descartes in the name of efficiency and progress. Even now, we can see the efficiency language of computers seeping into education as children are talked about like machines.
What is the measurable output? Score? Statistic? How do we produce something utilitarian? Why do you go to school? To get a job to fill a need in the system.
To treat a person as a machine is to reduce the person from a born person with a mind to a brain that just needs those handy facts. That’s not a high view of man, and it certainly doesn’t respect the image of God in each child or the way a person learns. It also has terrible consequences; it starves the soul of what it needs.
It’s kind of like with plants. You could say that your plant will serve its purpose and produce what you need if you put it in a dark place in a bucket of chocolate. You have that option. But the what and how of plant life are set in the laws of nature. A plant needs sunlight, water, and good soil. Chocolate is going to starve it. And a child is the same way. There are principles of education that you can ignore if you want to, but the truth still stands: a child needs living ideas to grow into what they’re supposed to be.
Born persons are made in the image of God, so they’re made to become like an image.
The classical tradition has called this the ideal type. The Greeks and Romans fell short on this; they were looking for the ideal type and got pretty close with their thoughts on virtue. They understood the need for a just life to have a good life. They knew you couldn’t chase whatever whim you had or what you thought might make you happy, but instead, you had to order yourself to an objective standard of goodness that was outside of your own wants. They got close, but they didn’t make it all the way.
It was the Christian classical educators who were able to connect that final piece. They were able to say that Christ is the ideal type. He is the Logos, which is the unifying principle of all things, meaning the thing holding all things together in harmony and wholeness.
Jesus is the embodiment of virtue, of all truth, goodness, and beauty--the only perfect man who met the standard and the only one to help us grow in that image.
When we think of what an education is supposed to form you towards or what it’s supposed to make you like, we look to Jesus and say this is what you need to be.
He’s also a key to how we learn. Jesus was the word made flesh, and both the classical tradition and a Charlotte Mason education rely heavily on literature. “Words make worlds,” as Sarah Clarkson says. As image bearers, we need story. It’s something God wrote into us and what we’ve been written into. We were made, ultimately, for the living idea of God’s story, and that’s why a soul needs living ideas in education.
But what does this look like? How do facts and living ideas work?
I ran into what I think is a helpful example over here in my house. We have family rules that we jokingly call the Kernmandments. Each one is learned alongside the scripture that supports it, but we usually just say the rule to get the basic point across. One I say a lot is, “Kernels don’t have pity parties, “ because, another family rule, “Kernels are on God’s team.” It’s really easy for me to quip the pity party rule off to a child. You can see a pity party coming a mile away. It’s the fact or instruction within the larger idea. It’s needed, but it doesn’t do anything to capture my kids’ imaginations on the why behind the pity party. Which means I might get obedience, but I’m not necessarily getting hearts that turn from pity parties.
It happened accidentally one day when instead of saying the pity party rule, I looked at one of my kids and said, “You’re acting very Eustace Scrubby.” That child stopped in their tracks and stared at me. I had sparked the moral imagination.
If you don’t know, Eustace Scrubb is the cousin of the Pevensies in The Chronicles of Narnia. He debuts in Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a rotten little fella. He whines, he’s selfish, he studies only facts, and he’s terrible at adventures because he lacks imagination. He is, in every respect, a shadow of a true boy. It isn’t until later, when his dragon-y heart causes him to turn into an actual dragon that Aslan gets to work on his disordered heart, eventually changing him into a proper boy with a respect for and love of goodness.
But before that, he’s terrible, and my kids know it. Eustace Scrubb is a living idea, an embodiment of vice, the king of the pity party. And, of course, no one wants to be like a Scrubb.
Especially not at my house. My kids fight battles for Aslan and Narnia all day every day. To say they’ve been impacted by Lewis’ stories is an understatement. These Kernels have been formed by Narnia. They want to be like Peter and Lucy and Reepicheep with all their little hearts, and they do not want to be like Eustace Scrubb.
Don’t have a pity party is something they need to know, but it’s the living idea of a selfish boy who became a dragon that’s turned their souls towards truly wanting to be what’s good.
That’s the power of story. And that’s why the classical tradition and Charlotte Mason are so picky about the books chosen for students. You can’t just pick up anything and offer it to a child; you need to find the best idea because you’re shaping and showing a child what they should be aiming for in what they love, how they think, and what they do.
And actually, we should go there: the idea of choosing the best for what you share with your children from books and ideas.
Charlotte Mason thought that repeated truths by many people had the mark of authenticity, and a lot of what she pulled from came out of the Great Conversation of the classical tradition. We read old books and think about old ideas because there’s wisdom to be shared. People have always been building on the thoughts before them just trying to make them better. I think it was Aquinas that said grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it, meaning grace continues to reveal truth. Someone fact-check me on that quote, I’m off my notes. But, anyway, the point is that looking back was how we learned for most of history.
Now, a quick history lesson, because I just can’t help myself. Before the Enlightenment, people moved very slowly into the future. My favorite way of understanding this had been the idea that people walked backwards into the future, because they were facing the past. Looking back was how you learned about God and human nature, and that was your best indicator of what would happen in the future. After the Enlightenment, there was only the future to look towards, and the future was bright! It was without sin! Without barriers! You could just look inside your own little precious heart and aim for whatever you wanted in the future.
Even way back then, Disney’s watered-down existentialism was already pumping. It was a small hop, skip, and a jump to the things we hear today: you do you, follow your heart, chase your dreams, you are your own hero. Or as that Queen Elsa so poetically said about herself, “You are the one I’ve been waiting for all of my life.”
Uggghh, guys, when I heard that that was the exact moment Elsa was banned from my house.
Because born persons were. not. made. to look within for virtue and wisdom or to be fed dead ideas. We were made to look out to God and his truth, and your ordinary—dare I say, commonplace—education must be built around that. This is how we learn and this is how we’re formed.
Charlotte Mason and the classical tradition believe that God has made his world make sense and we can make sense of it. That’s where these principles of education come from: from God’s revelation about himself and his world. So you can, and I’d even say have a Christian duty, to teach your children in a way that honors and respects them as born persons.
If we’re going to feed the soul, train the mind, and teach how to live it all out, we need to remember the what and how.
Children are born persons with souls. And souls need living ideas to grow.
These are the foundational elements of a classical Charlotte Mason education. I think Miss Mason was the best mouthpiece for a classical education. She saw the heartbeat of the tradition and made it accessible to every child.
So, from here on out, I’m not going to say a classical Charlotte Mason education. It’s a real mouthful for me, and probably a real earful for you. Please don’t think I’m drawing a line between the two like my Google quiz did to me. We’re all aiming in the same direction with the same foundational principles. And like any good thing, we’re going to work it out in various ways.
Now I’ll be back in two weeks, and we’re going to talk about how a soul grows up. What does it look like in the early years to feed your children living ideas through your home’s atmosphere and habits? And why is it that they love repetition and memorizing things so much?
I hope you’ll join me here at The Commonplace.
