What has Charlotte Mason to do with classical education?
In my first blog in this series, I began exploring this question through a close reading of Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education. In this book, Clark and Jain offer a paradigm for understanding classical education as it exists within the broader liberal arts tradition. According to these thinkers, the purpose of classical education is to cultivate virtue in body, heart, and mind, while nurturing a love for wisdom under the lordship of Jesus Christ.
This is a comprehensive purpose statement to say the least. It intentionally steers clear of several pitfalls, many of which modern education notably falls into. For example, it conceives of human beings holistically as embodied minds, hearts, and souls. This is a refreshingly biblical anthropology in contrast to naturalistic materialism on the one hand and dualistic platonism on the other. While naturalistic materialism fails to take seriously the immaterial components of a person, such as the soul, dualistic platonism makes the equal but opposite mistake of maligning the body in favor of some transcendent immaterial reality.
Another advantage of this purpose statement is that it rightly identifies the cultivation of virtue as a central aim in the educational endeavor as opposed to mere information transfer or workplace preparation. We live in a world today that is driven by hyper-efficiency and economic productivity, which has its benefits, but all too often has led to corruption, corporate scandal, and, over time, moral decay.
Finally, this statement underscores that nurturing a genuine love for wisdom–practical knowledge geared toward moral and upright living–is fundamental for what philosophers call the good life. Life is a complex journey, full of ups and downs, and it often demands hard decisions of its pilgrims. Students need all the wisdom they can gain in order to make this journey successfully.
To help educators follow and fulfill the purpose of classical education, in this blog, I want to hone in on three specific elements of a Charlotte Mason education that will aide them along the way. The three elements are:
- A Broad and Liberal Curriculum
- Shaping the Affections
- Habitudes of the Body
Together these three elements illustrate that Charlotte Mason can and should be properly situated within the liberal arts tradition as a proponent for educating the whole person.
A Broad and Liberal Curriculum
One of the hallmarks of a classical education is that it is “liberal,” that is, geared toward cultivating a rich intellectual life. In the Greco-Roman world, elite members of society were often provided a liberal education with the expectation that they would need to think, behave, and govern their estate or province in a virtuous and effective manner. A liberal education can be contrasted with one geared toward vocational training, that is, the practical know-how for doing a particular job. In our modern context, examples may include electric wiring or HVAC. Of course, this work is essential for society to function today. I don’t have a problem with electricians or HVAC technicians; if I did, I’m not sure how long I would make it through these midwestern winters!
In Charlotte Mason’s day, the choice between liberal education and vocational training was pressing. There remained discernible class distinctions in society, but the industrial revolution opened the door for more children to be educated than ever before. The question thus became: which form of education would they receive? A liberal education or vocational one?
Charlotte Mason was convinced that all children could learn, regardless of social class or ability, and therefore insisted on providing the most intellectually nourishing education available. Interestingly, her conviction was not merely theoretical; it was tested through time and experience. In her preface to her six-volume series on education, Mason writes, “Eight years ago the ‘soul’ of a class of children in a mining village school awoke simultaneously at this magic touch [of knowledge] and has remained awake…. It may be that the souls of children are waiting for the call of knowledge to awaken them to delightful living” (Preface, xxv). The British educator had seen first hand that even children of the working class, which were often prejudiced against as intellectually sub-par, could find their minds awakened through a liberal form of education geared toward serving its students pure and unadulterated knowledge and fostering intellectual vitality.
What is the essence of a liberal education? According to Charlotte Mason, a broad curriculum composed of the best books, art, music, science, and history available. In her chapter on the three instruments of education, she concludes,
“All roads lead to Rome, and all I have said is meant to enforce the fact that much and varied humane reading, as well as human thought expressed in the forms of art, is not a luxury, a tit-bit, to be given children now and then, but their very bread of life, which they must have in abundant portions and at regular periods. This and more is implied in the phrase, ‘The mind feeds on ideas therefore children should have a generous curriculum’.”(Towards a Philosophy of Education, 92)
Here Mason is adamant that “humane reading,” that is, books pertaining to the humanities such as literature and history, are not add-ons to the curriculum, but the very “bread of life” for a child’s education. These books, especially living books full of ideas, provide the sustenance for a rich intellectual life. And while vocational training is certainly of value, it does not provide students with the tools for a vibrant intellectual life.
In the classical tradition, a student read and discussed some of the books Mason has in mind as part of their broader trivium training, the language arts of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. In addition, they would receive training in the quadrivium, which were the numerical arts. Together, the seven liberal arts equipped students to pursue scientia (knowledge) of the three major domains of knowledge–God, humanity, and nature. Following this tradition, Mason goes on to explain her curricular program in terms of this three-fold division.
So if one central aspect of classical education is the cultivation of the life of the mind, Charlotte couldn’t agree more. Her insistence that children read from a broad and liberal curriculum fits right in with the broader liberal arts tradition. In particular, her recommended practices of narration, transcription, dictation, and recitation all cultivate a healthy intellectual life for the child, regardless of upbringing, social class, or ability.
Shaping the Affections
Classical education is not only focused on cultivating the mind, however. As I explained in my first blog in this series, a particularly important element of education in the liberal arts tradition is tuning the heart to desire, that is, long for, what is good, true, and beautiful. Clark and Jain identify this as “musical education,” which is not to be confused with the modern subject of music related exclusively to instrumentation and singing. A student that possesses head knowledge but has no joy or love for what she has learned is missing the mark. Rather, her educators are missing the mark. When this happens, the very future of what it means to be human is at stake.
At least, that’s what C.S. Lewis thought. In The Abolition of Man, the “abolition” Lewis speaks of with regards to humanity occurs when the affective element of education is lost. When education is reduced to either scientific analysis or subjective interpretation, the awareness of objective morals and values deteriorates. Knowledge either becomes exclusively scientific, pushing moral claims to the margins, or subjective, rendering value judgments as relative to the individual. What’s left is a race of humanoid imposters, inhabiting the earth with swelled heads and diminished chests.
In order to avoid this pitfall which Lewis believed the modern world had fallen into, education must have an affective impulse. That is, it must seek to shape the desires, intuitions, and moral imagination of the student. It must lead her into joyful engagement with reality and form value judgments about what is objectively true, good, and beautiful.
Charlotte Mason sought to do precisely this through the various “studies” her students engaged in during their lessons. For example, Picture Study was an opportunity for students to discern and appreciate pictorial beauty in such a way that would stir their very hearts. Mason writes, “It is of the spirit, and in ways of spirit must we make our attempts” (Towards a Philosophy of Education, 214). Her students would gather around a piece of art together, study it intensively, tell back in detail, and share inspiring ideas about it. And to be clear, the task of appreciating beauty was not an optional activity in Charlotte Mason’s mind, nor was it rendered to the realm of subjective feeling. She writes in the fourth volume in her series, “Here again, I would urge that appreciation is not a voluntary offering, but a debt we owe, and a debt we must acquire the means to pay by patient and humble study” (Ourselves, Volume I, 103). In other words, the objective beauty manifested in art demands something of us morally. Children must therefore be exposed to this beauty, study it intently, and let it stir the affections for a second course.
The same is true for fables and poetry. Charlotte Mason writes, “A child gets moral notions from the fairy-tales he delights in, as do his elders from tale and verse…. Most of us carry in our minds tags of verse which shape our conduct more than we know” (Ourselves, Volume II, 10). Through the reading and reciting of poetry, the minds of students take in certain ideas and reject others. Parents and teachers need to be conscious of the tales and poetry they read children, and see the vast potential they have to form the moral imaginations and intuitions from a young age.
Finally, just as beautiful art, fables, and poetry have the capacity to shape the affections, so does music. Educators today tend to divide children pretty early on as musical and non-musical. Either the child has rhythm or she doesn’t. Or we ask her at far too young of an age, “Do you enjoy music? Would you like to study it?” As if a small child of five can make such a weighty decision! But Charlotte Mason was insistent that music appreciation no more requires the ability to play an instrument than Shakespeare appreciation requires the ability to act (Towards A Philosophy of Education, 218).
The key to cultivating an affection for musical beauty is to present lavish amounts of it before children, give them tools for understanding its various forms, and exhort them to listen attentively to the beauty of the ear. For as Charlotte Mason puts it, “Many great men have put their beautiful thoughts, not into books, or pictures, or buildings, but into musical scores…” (Ourselves, Book I, 34). When the practice of listening to beautiful music occurs regularly and with due attention, the hearts of students are shaped to know, identify, appreciate, and grow an affinity for it.
Habitudes of the Body
So far I have shown how deeply Charlotte Mason cared for the mind and heart of her students, but how about the body? An education that addresses the whole person will certainly take into account the physical component. This rings true in classical education. Clark and Jain provide a helpful glimpse of physical education in the liberal arts tradition through what they call gymnastic education.
Gymnastic education focuses on cultivating inherent physical abilities in humans such as strength and dexterity. Jason writes, “In ancient Greece the gymnasium for adults (or the palaestra for youth) was a set of public buildings devoted to physical exercises and contests.” It was here that students came to educate the part of themselves that was uniquely physical. This is such a crucial component of classical education and it is a travesty when it is neglected, not least because physicality is part of God’s good creation. And it will be part of the new creation as well. Let me say just a bit more about this theological notion.
God did not create humans as embodied creatures accidentally or temporarily. Scripture is clear that in the eschaton a new heaven and new earth will arrive to replace the old heaven and old earth (see Revelation 21). This new earth will consist of an earthly city, complete with physical roads, gates, walls, and a golden street. This city will be inhabited by saints with resurrected bodies and ruled by a resurrected King. So if physicality is not inherently evil or temporary, but a gracious gift of God that is a component of what it means to be human, then we need to take special care to cultivate the inherent abilities in our physical bodies. Here’s where Charlotte Mason’s emphasis on habit comes in.
Charlotte Mason taught that education is a discipline and here she means the discipline of habit. As humans, we do not make every decision or perform every action at the conscious bidding of the will. Instead, our brains catch on to repeated behaviors over time and offload these behaviors from will to habit. Eventually, through practice, these actions become second nature to us.
A great example of habit on peak display in my own life is my ability to effortlessly drink water from a glass cup (impressive, right?). I don’t (fully) consciously perform the complex physiological maneuver of extending my arm, closing my hands around the cup, bringing it to my lips, opening my mouth, and swallowing. Through time and experience, it has become habit. Charlotte Mason taught that habits, when trained properly, function as rails for the good life. There are habits of mind, such as attention, habits of heart, such as kindness, habits of soul, such as reverence, and habits of body.
Habits of body can range from sitting up straight in a chair to holding the pencil correctly to doing neat work on a page. In other words, the training of physical habits doesn’t only apply to shooting a basketball or doing a front handspring. They are called upon whenever a routine action is habituated. Of course, the training of good physical habits takes effort. But the fruit is worth the labor! Charlotte Mason writes, “We admire the easy carriage of the soldier but shrink from the discipline which is able to produce it” (Towards a Philosophy of Education, 101). Later she writes,
“Consider how laborious life would be were its wheels not greased by habits of cleanliness, neatness, order, courtesy; had we to make the effort of decision about every detail of dressing and eating, coming and going, life would not be worth living.” (103)
Here she emphasizes that habits exist to make the good choices of the will easier and these choices often have both a cognitive and physical dimension.
In short, Charlotte Mason was clearly a proponent of training the physical body. She embraced the physical aspect of humanity and envisioned its potential given proper training. In School Education, she writes, “In all matters of physical exercise it is obvious to us that–do a thing a hundred times and it becomes easy, do a thing a thousand times and it becomes mechanical, as easy to do as not” (105). The road to a flourishing physical life entails self-discipline, self-control, and self-restraint through habit, both at home and at school. When these half-moral, half-physical “habitudes” become automatic, it is just as easy to do them as to not. These habitudes then free up our minds, wills, and bodies to focus on tasks amenable for a thoughtful and considerate life in community with others.
Conclusion
In this two-part series, I have attempted to demonstrate that the educator Charlotte Mason is rightly understood as a member of the broader liberal arts tradition of education. The practical resources she provides teachers seeking to educate within this tradition should not be unduly neglected. Her emphases on a liberal curriculum, heart-shaping lessons, and the discipline of habit entail a treasure trove of insight for whole-person education. If you are a teacher at a classical school or home-schooling parent, I can’t encourage you enough to give her techniques a try. Where to begin?
Check out Jason’s free eBook on narration, which he is developing into a full length book with the Circe Institute, expected publication this summer.
Or see Patrick’s free eBook on habit training to go more in depth on Charlotte Mason’s practice of training students in the habitudes of the body.