“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” the church father Tertullian skeptically asked. Tertullian was writing at a time in which church leaders were weighing the pros and cons of mining the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition for insights they could utilize in the development of a distinctively Christian philosophy.
Similarly, within the Christian classical school movement, some have asked, “What has Charlotte Mason to do with Dorothy Sayers?” In other words, can the pedagogical insights of the British educator Charlotte Mason be conducive for classical education today? Where is there harmony? Where is there discord?
While a full treatment of this question, and the subsequent questions I posed, would require more than a single blog post, I want to begin the conversation by highlighting one prominent interpretation of classical education and then dispelling of two myths that would suggest Charlotte Mason and the tradition are at odds. The interpretation of classical education I will highlight comes from Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education, which has become a seminal text in the Christian classical school movement.
A Paradigm for the Liberal Arts Tradition
To get started, let me first summarize Clark and Jain’s proposed paradigm for the liberal arts tradition. To be clear, I am not suggesting, nor do the authors, that this paradigm gets everything right about the western tradition of education. The history of education in western civilization spans millennia and cultures. It therefore encompasses a variety of thinkers and ideas that vary depending on their context and position within its development. Nevertheless, to suggest that there is no tradition at all is equally incorrect. Through careful study, we can observe some common threads present across time and place, which together bear witness to a single living tradition. It is precisely this rich heritage of education which Clark and Jain seek to uncover and illuminate for modern day scholars and practitioners alike.
The authors define the purpose of the liberal arts tradition in the West as follows: “Grounded in piety, Christian classical education cultivates the virtues of the student in body, heart, and mind while nurturing a love for wisdom under the lordship of Christ.” To unpack this purpose statement and help their readers keep the big picture in mind, they divide the paradigm into multiple categories—Piety, Gymnastic, Music, Arts, Philosophy, and Theology—or PGMAPT, for easy remembering. Let me briefly walk us through each category now.
Piety is the abiding love, gratitude, and loyalty members of a tradition share for their heritage. When fully realized, piety harnesses the heart and will toward a proper sense of duty for what has come before.
Gymnastic is the focused and intensive training of the physical body. As embodied souls, or ensouled bodies, humans must gain mastery of their physical bodies if they are to truly flourish in a physical world.
Music (not to be confused with the modern “subject” of music) tunes the heart to wonder, delight, and love. It forms the affections and moral imagination of the youngest students. Rather than focusing exclusively on instruments or singing, musical education is directed toward joyful engagement with reality.
The Arts refer to the Liberal Arts, both the Trivium (language arts) and Quadrium (numerical arts). Together they are to be understood as the tools of learning, the intellectual skills required to create and justify knowledge.
Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge about the world, understood in a threefold division: knowledge about humans, nature, and metaphysics. Together these divisions point toward a single unified and synthetic view of knowledge and reality.
Finally, Theology is the study of divine revelation, which is the culmination of knowledge in the western educational tradition. Theology provides the unifying framework for all the liberal arts and sciences.
The Learning Tree
Together these categories work together sequentially, resulting in a paradigm, or a comprehensive structuring, of the liberal arts tradition. To help their readers grasp this structuring, Clark and Jain liken it to a tree.
The roots of the tree are piety, for, without piety, a person would have no reliable map or compass for one’s purpose in life. Piety serves both as a launching pad and source of sustenance for one’s understanding and approach to a meaningful life. Next come Gymnastic and Music, located on the lowest part of the tree trunk, indicating that these categories begin during the earliest years in a child’s education. Physical development and self-control, for example, are crucial during this stage. What initially begins with basic head movement and rolling on the floor quickly turns into crawling, walking, and soon enough, running and jumping. Likewise, the minds of children are incredibly active and curious, seeking to absorb everything in their paths. Therefore, the right stories, songs, and art should be offered and assimilated for their moral imaginations to flourish.
With this foundation laid in the early years, training in the liberal arts occurs next. Not understood as stages in childhood development, but rather as dynamic tools of learning across grade levels, students learn how to use these tools as they engage with linguistic and mathematical content. The language tools have to do with all that is necessary to read and interpret a text, think critically, engage in discussion, and communicate both orally and in writing with eloquence. The number tools have to do with understanding the complex relationships between quantity, size, location, and shape, and then applying this knowledge toward practical outcomes.
Together the liberal arts of language and number are the tools of learning that equip a student to think independently and dynamically. And while the training in these skills includes the transmission of some knowledge content, the focus is on honing skills that they may then go on to utilize in their own pursuits of knowledge down the road. Philosophy, the pursuit of wisdom, consists of all the subjects, or fields of knowledge, that one can study, such as chemistry, biology, economics, history, or literature. Philosophy, as the domain of all knowledge, is located at the highest point on the tree trunk, indicating that if a student has made her way up to this point, she is now ready to begin the real work of the tree: bearing fruit. This feature of the illustration is crucial for it reminds us as educators that the ultimate purpose of education is not mere knowledge, but virtue formation and the cultivation of desire directed toward the good, true, and beautiful.
And where does theology belong on the tree you might ask? Interestingly, theology itself is not located in any one particular place on the tree, but instead is situated above the tree. This unique positioning communicates that knowledge and understanding of the Triune God transcends all the other categories of education.
Dispelling Two Myths about Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition
Now that I’ve sketched out Clark and Jain’s comprehensive interpretation of the liberal arts tradition, I want to now dispose of two myths that question whether Charlotte Mason’s educational principles fit within the tradition.
The first myth is the simplistic notion that while Charlotte Mason emphasizes ideas, classical education focuses on something else entirely: facts. While it is true that Charlotte Mason greatly emphasizes the power of ideas, it is not accurate to say that classical education, or the liberal arts tradition more broadly, focuses on facts. The popularization of this viewpoint is, of course, understandable. The birth of the classical Christian school renewal movement began, in some ways, with Doug Wilson’s interpretation and application of the Trivium as he understood medievalist Dorothy Sayers to be explaining it. According to this treatment of the Trivium, the elementary years should focus exclusively on fact memorization as a way of honing the liberal art of grammar.
Recently, however, this view of grammar has been shown to be insufficient and inconsistent with the liberal arts tradition. The liberal art of grammar, as it would come to be shown, has more to do with reading and interpretation of language rather than fact memorization, and, additionally, was never historically confined to a particular stage in childhood development. So the idea that classical education necessarily elevates facts over ideas isn’t historically accurate and therefore not essential to the liberal arts tradition. More and more classical schools today are moving away from this approach, in fact, while retaining Sayers’ fundamental insight that young minds can and should be intellectually challenged appropriately.
The second myth I wish to dispel is that Charlotte Mason elevated, above all else, the cultivation of a love for learning, while classical educators prioritize academic rigor. In response to this myth, let me say that Charlotte Mason was indeed passionate about awakening the minds of children to real knowledge. She believed that each child was a person made in the image of God, and, therefore, parents and teachers are limited to certain methods for raising and teaching these young scholars. She was deeply committed to educating children in a way that is befitting of their personhood: morally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically.
But this conviction is in no way incompatible with an academically rigorous education. In fact, it is reasonable to argue that this high view of children warrants an academically rigorous education properly defined. Children are not be treated as mere cattle on a farm or products on an assembly line. They enter this world with immense potential to think, create, explore, write, observe, perform, analyze, and more. As a result, the sort of work we give children to do in the classroom ought to activate and strengthen these capacities to the limits of each child’s potential. Charlotte Mason herself pokes fun at the sort of educational environments that are free of hardship, adversity, and genuine challenge. Humans, as it turns out, thrive in the face of challenge and experience real joy when coached to achieve excellence.
Now, to be sure, Charlotte Mason did question the usefulness of grades and competition as tactics for motivating children to learn. Stemming from her view of human minds as living and hungry for knowledge, she firmly believed that knowledge itself ought to be the reward for the worthy work of learning. Interestingly, the strength of intrinsic motivation for learning has been confirmed in recent literature. For example, in David Pink’s Drive, the author shows that modern research has revealed that for worthy tasks, like learning, intrinsic motivation is more powerful for long-term gains and sustained achievement. So although Charlotte Mason was careful to not permit motivators often associated with academic rigor to enter her classrooms, there turns out to be good reasons, which are actually a,menable toward academic rigor, for doing so.
Hopefully I have whet your appetite for the possible harmony Charlotte Mason and the liberal arts tradition may share. In my next article, I will continue the conversation through providing some specific examples, such as narration (download Jason’s eBook here), habit training (download Patrick’s eBook here), and nature study from Charlotte Mason’s pedagogical practices that fit within Clark and Jain’s PGMAPT paradigm. For now, I encourage educators today who are interested in synthesizing these inspiring approaches to education to step back into their classrooms and give these ideas a try!