Ep 12 | The Classical Tradition in the Early Years (Or, How ‘Bout Those Liberal Arts?)
For most people, classical education becomes synonymous with the liberal arts. The classical tradition, however, is larger than the liberal arts (great as they are) and, if you look closely, you’ll see your children need a few things before the liberal arts. What is this foundational work in the early years? Let’s talk about it.
Footnotes for this episode
John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, Father Francis Bethel
The Liberal Arts Tradition, Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain
The Great Tradition, ed. Richard Gamble
A Philosophy of Education, Charlotte Mason
Awakening Wonder, Sally Clarkson
The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis
“On Stories”, C.S. Lewis
“On Fairy-Stories”, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Republic, Plato
City of God, St. Augustine
Poetic Knowledge, James Taylor
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.
JOIN THE MOTHER-TEACHERS IN COMMON HOUSE
Join the 625+ 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!
READ THE TRANSCRIPT
Sitting at ballet the other night, I noticed a mom reading a small pile of beautiful picture books…to herself. This is one of my “mother-teachers in the wild” bingo card spots so I took a chance and asked if she homeschools. Of course she does. We did the customary homeschool introductions: How long? How many kids? What kind of schooling? And when I answered that we classically educate, her eyes opened wide and she asked, “Oh, the old books and Latin thing?”
—
Raise your hand if you can tell me what makes up a classical education. Are you, like my ballet mom friend, quick to think of specific subjects like Latin? Is it really old books? Do you know a few of the liberal arts? Or, maybe just the three used to replace the American elementary, middle, and high school names?
People think of a number of things when they hear the phrase classical education and that’s understandable. Part of the problem is we’re trying to summarize more than two thousand years of ideas and practices in a few sentences and part of the problem is no one agrees on a single definition. But as we’ve already discussed this season, there is a tradition here and we can understand it…as much as anyone can understand the depth, breadth, beauty, and magnificence of the ocean.
For most people, classical education becomes synonymous with the seven liberal arts. If you’re unfamiliar with them, they’re broken into the trivium and the quadrivium. The trivium includes grammar, logic, and rhetoric and these are considered the liberal arts of language. You may recognize them as the three stages in our modern classical schools. The quadrivium includes arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Not astrology which I sometimes accidentally say, making myself and my children’s education look suspect. But these are the liberal arts of mathematics. Together, these have historically been known as the seven arts or tools by which knowledge is fashioned.
But the classical tradition is more than the liberal arts and to even understand the right place of these tools of learning, we must hold a larger vision. Which, thankfully, many people smarter than me have done.
You see, the classical or liberal arts tradition is a full-orbed education, which seeks to cultivate and educate the whole person from birth. Our children are born persons, as Mason wrote, and part of this is the acknowledgment that they are born body and soul; indivisibly made and therefore in need of education for both body and and soul, and in the form proper for the spiritual, immaterial parts of them. The classical tradition has understood this, offering far more than only the liberal arts and, even more interesting for our particular seasons of life, offering a foundation in the early years for the liberal arts and the rest to come.
That’s where I want to go today: this early years’ preparation for the liberal arts tradition. For many classical philosophers, the principles of a formal education were to be followed from birth and formal education did not begin until eight or nine years old, which, yes, makes Miss Mason look like she’s jumping the gun at six but don’t worry, I’m going to bring them together and find the harmony present.
I’m going to point you in two directions to learn more about the full scope of a truly classical education after this episode. One is to John Senior, one of the creators of the Integrative Humanities Program at the University of Kansas in the 70s. His work was so wonderfully formational, the Very Important People shut it down. I’m not kidding. But read about him and you will be delighted to imitate such a teacher who was able to instill wonder in the pursuit of truth as we know it in Reality. I’ll link my latest read about him in today’s episode notes.
The second direction is to Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain, classical educators who wrote The Liberal Arts Tradition.
All three of these men give a clear picture of the breadth of a classical education beyond the grammar, logic, and rhetoric of our neo-classical schools and even beyond the seven liberal arts.
John Senior used five modes of knowledge to describe the tradition:
Gymnastics
Music
Liberal arts
Science
Practical science
Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain use six:
Piety
Gymnastics
Music
Liberal arts
Philosophy
Theology
By just hearing those lists, you see an overlap and right placement of the liberal arts as a necessary mode of knowledge, as tools of learning, but not the only thing needed. And why do you think that is?
Well, generally speaking, the liberal arts deal with the mind–and we cannot only educate a mind. Not if we’re following the classical spirit. We must include the body and the chest.
Remember our dear CS Lewis’s Abolition of Man from earlier this season? When we use Plato’s understanding of the tripartite soul (meaning we have the rational mind, the spirited chest, and the appetitive belly), we must educate in a way that touches each part of those and the body. Yes, the body’s training is important and we see this from the ancient Greek idea of gymnastics through to Mason’s Swedish drill.
There is no child without the whole soul and the body; so the liberal arts are not enough.
And that takes me back to the lists from these three gentlemen. If we think about what is most needed in the early years of life and schooling (so, let’s say the years before nine-ish), our focus is really on three things: piety, music, and gymnastics. Only from a rich poetic soil can a child truly understand knowledge in later years and benefit from the gift of the liberal arts.
This means your primary focus with your younger children is a homegrown education in wonder by introducing them to what is Real through delight in commonplace moments and things.
Is that not the happiest thing you’ve heard this week? It is for me.
Hearing things like our season captain idea—that we must conform our children’s souls to Reality—sounds weighty—because it is—but to learn this ancient path is walked within delight in the commonplace things is a relief and an encouragement.
As we know, Charlotte Mason’s concern is ultimately how much the child cares. St. Augustine’s concern is ordinate loves. Plato’s concern is to love what is beautiful. And to touch the heart, a mother must first create a sense of wonder.
Through wonder, a child learns to take his rightful place in God’s order: as an encounterer. To create a lifelong love of learning about and a responsibility to protect the things of God: whether that be the woods or arithmetic.
It’s during this time that we mother-teachers have a unique influence in forming the imaginations of our children. And, of course, wonder feeds the imagination and vice versa. The wild and wonderful thing about the imagination is it isn’t taught didactically. No one sits and explains to a child how one wonders; it’s a non-cognitive instruction that happens through the images we take in and contemplate whether through story, art, song, screen, or embodied experience. It’s from the imagination and intuition that a child learns to make judgments about what is good and what is beautiful in the early years. And what is good and beautiful is what the chest defends and pursues, meaning these early years are forming the child’s image of the good life and they will, generally speaking, pursue this non-cognitively and cognitively throughout their lives. It’s important but, again, it’s not didactically instructed.
No set of flashcards or virtue workbook is going to impart a rich imagination of what is good and beautiful to a child; it must be built through the atmosphere, habits, and inspiring ideas of their early years. When we make judgments about what is good, we’re dealing with ethics. And when we make judgments about what is beautiful, we’re dealing with aesthetics. So when we make a rational final decision on one of these things, we’re understanding with our minds what has already been formed by our chests.
This is known as poetic knowledge and it must come before any sort of didactic knowledge or understanding. Through this pursuit, you introduce your child to Reality with delight which invites them into an imitation of what is good and beautiful in an affective, not rational, way.
So, how do you do this? What about all of that Mason curricula you have in the closet? Do we need to throw out the timetables?
No, you’ll find it’s probably a great bit of what you’re already doing in your practice of a classical Mason life.
Let’s explore our three pegs: piety, music, and gymnastics.
Piety. Not a common word in our time and place but I think it’s best understood as a right love and fear of God and man. Historically, it signified the duty, love, and respect owed to God, parents, and communal authorities—meaning those of the past and the present. Cultivating piety meant cultivating faithfulness in relationships and tradition; belief before knowledge.
It’s been a bit since I butchered some Latin so here we go: Credo ut intelligam. “I believe that I may understand”; this was the cry of the medieval philosophers, showing that piety is a prerequisite for understanding. But we already knew this as the Proverbs tell us: The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.
Then to teach piety is to build a home that incarnates piety in the three instruments of education available to us. We know this, right? You can put the inspiring ideas before the child but if the home atmosphere is awful and the habits form away from God, then the ideas will have a harder time inspiring in a meaningful way.
One of my favorite bits from Lewis is that being in objective reality—which is what we are trying to show our children in these years—means things are owed certain responses. A waterfall is sublime and demands your wonder and veneration. That is the only proper response. Without this piety, we no longer pass on those proper responses as norms, leaving our children disinherited and without an anchor.
This is, of course, why we seem to be struggling to know which way is up or down in our current time. When we rejected the love of God and man and dismantled reality, we destroyed piety. How can one have proper responses if there is no such thing as objective reality which we know is God himself?
Piety begins as a love of God and man, the past and present rightful Authorities, but it must be lived out in word and action. It requires a strong will, taking up one’s cross, conforming to Reality as God has made it.
So you turn towards your home’s atmosphere: how do we relate to God, to one another, to things? Am I showing and teaching my children the debt owed to each of these? Then we look to our habits: am I showing and teaching my children to practices of the Christian life? Am I building meaningful and mundane habits that will set their norm to God’s reality or the kingdom of Self? Or, God forbid, the kingdom of Mom? And lastly, we look at the ideas present in our home: Do I give my children ideas worth beholding and becoming? Do they have living images to embody in their own worlds? Are they able to form the metaphors that will help them understand their circumstances in light of eternal truths?
This is the work of piety in the lives of young children.
And all of us. Can I go ahead and say that now? This is the focus of these early years up to nine-ish but this is part of the work of persons throughout life. Priorities may shift in different seasons of education but we all know we’re still trying to cultivate piety in ourselves, yes? Good.
So next we have music, and this isn’t referring to only music but rather the classical muses who were those that introduced a person to a joyful engagement with reality. Yes, this is the delight! So the muses introduce ideas through good stories, the stories of great men and deeds of the past, astronomy, geography, drama, poetry, the fine arts, natural history, observation of nature, singing, and acting. These are the ideas that educate mind and heart, touching on memory, imagination, virtues, and passions.
And you should hear the echos of the generous feast you lay before your children in the early forms of a Charlotte Mason education. You’re probably already doing this. Well done, you.
Plato believed that a musical education like this (along with the gymnastics) could bring the reason and passion into accord because harmony and rhythm could soothe and civilize the wildness of passion.
But that means we need to touch on gymnastics to have the whole picture. Gymnastics is a bit more obvious: it’s focused on training the body of a child and classically, this meant running, swimming, and wrestling. So if your children are prone to sprinting through the house, splashing like whales in the tubby, and wrestling one another into submission…they are very classical and you should be so proud.
But this rudimentary control of the body is not only seen in ancient Greece! No, we know even Charlotte Mason incorporated such exact training into her daily timetables through Swedish Drill, not to mention the training of a proper scout group (which if scouting is completely new to you, get ready for next episode).
This bodily training was not solely for the purpose of training the body as the body and soul are indivisible and to care or neglect one is to care or neglect the other. Physical discipline and training produce self-control; perseverance in difficult situations; patience and habits of hard work; and build metaphors in the imagination of struggling and overcoming.
As Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain perfectly summarize, “The disciplined training of gymnastics and the aesthetic, affective, and emotional training of music are foundational to the acquisition of both the moral and intellectual virtues. To fail to consider these, to cultivate them, we violate an educational principle: body and soul are united in such a way as to fail to cultivate one is to fail to cultivate the whole person.”
And so we see here what is really, always the point in classical education: we are forming the whole person in such a way as to cultivate virtue and wisdom.
And for the years in which most of us moms are in, this is done through the poetic: piety, music, and gymnastics. Of course, the liberal arts come and, of course, these modes of knowledge are neither separate nor systematic; we prioritize, build upon, flow between, and complement throughout them. But for the foundations of a rich soul and a life of learning, we must begin here.
Do not be misled into thinking the early years are for something labeled the art of grammar: where they are filled with information devoid of relationships and delight. Do not think that the liberal arts are divorced from delight; they are the tools of learning that continue the education of right loving in the form to fashion knowledge. Remember cultivating delight, imagination, wonder, and humility is holy work and begins on day one.
Want (more of) the good stuff?
Join 640+ 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!
