“’Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life’––is perhaps the most complete and adequate definition of education we possess. It is a great thing to have said it; and our wiser posterity may see in that ‘profound and exquisite remark’ the fruition of a lifetime of critical effort (Charlotte Mason, Parents and Children, p. 33).
In this series, I have been exploring Charlotte Mason’s notion that education should be approached through a trifold lens of atmosphere, discipline, and life. Stemming from her view of children as persons, Mason argues that we are limited to three and only three tools to educate. All others encroach in some way or another upon the inherent dignity of the child.
She writes,
Having cut out the direct use of fear or love, suggestion or influence, undue play upon any one natural desire, emulation, for example, we are no longer free to use all means in the education of children. There are but three left for our use and to each of these we must give careful study or we shall not realise how great a scope is left to us.
Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 95
In the first installment of this series, I took a closer look at what Mason calls the instrument of atmosphere. I explained that for the British educator the goal is to cultivate an environment of learning for persons: one oriented toward relationship, order, and natural beauty. From a classical perspective, we can say that cultivating an atmosphere in this vein is a foundational step for passing on a Christian paideia.
In the second installment, I explored the instrument of discipline. Here I underscored the importance of training students in good habits as opposed to promoting mere behavioral compliance. While behaviorism focuses on reproducing particular external behaviors through systems of reward and punishment, habit training aims at the heart. Through the repeated practice of good moral habits, children develop virtuous character and the strength, with God’s help, to choose good over evil.
In this third and final installment, I will examine Mason’s notion that “education is a life.” For those unfamiliar with Charlotte Mason, the term “life” could conjure up a few different meanings. Does she mean one’s practical, or everyday life, in the sense that learning should become part of a child’s daily experience? Could she mean “life” in the sense that formal education cannot be contained within the perimeters of a physical classroom or schedule of lessons? Or does she mean “life” in the sense that real education is oriented toward the holistic flourishing of the child, during the school years and beyond?
In this article, I will aim to demonstrate that all three aspects described above are present in Charlotte Mason’s broader notion that our educational efforts ought to be oriented toward feeding the life of the child’s mind. The mind is not a blank slate to be inscribed with the thoughts of others nor is it a receptacle to be filled with atomized pieces of information. Rather, the mind is a living, even spiritual, entity that requires sustenance through ideas encountered in books, art, music, and nature. When the mind is fed probably, the whole child receives the intellectual, spiritual, and moral nourishment to lead a life of flourishing.
The Mind of a Person
Like the first two articles in this series, I will begin this discussion with Charlotte Mason’s notion that children are persons. This is the foundational premise upon which the entirety of her philosophy hangs. Children begin their formal education with a pre-existing intellectual appetite as well as thoughts about how the world works. They are eager to engage, explore, discover, and learn, long before they are led to do so in the classroom or homeschool.
While a conventionally modern analogue for the human mind is a blank slate, Mason compares the mind to an organism– an active and living thing that requires sustenance to continue living. She writes,
The mind is a spiritual octopus, reaching out limbs in every direction to draw in enormous rations of that which under the action of the mind itself becomes knowledge. Nothing can stale its infinite variety; the heavens and the earth, the past, the present, and the future, things great and things minute, nations and men, the universe, all are within the scope of the human intelligence.
Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 330
Here we see the sheer breadth of the human’s ability to explore, discover, and understand. The mind longs to truly know and insofar as it can continue to find knowledge, it lives on.
The Transformative Power of Knowledge
For Mason, it is important to note that knowledge takes on a transformative role as it becomes part of a child. Now, in contemporary society, we have become all too accustomed to the idea that truth is subjective and, therefore, relative to the individual. This generates mass confusion and the ultimate breakdown of rational dialogue as people speak of “my truth” or “your truth,” as if facts change based on who believes them.
However, as Christians, our foundation for truth is Christ himself . Our epistemological framework for knowledge is God’s transcendent nature, which is immutable. As a result, we can believe with confidence that ultimate truths about reality do not change; they are objective, or outside of us. True knowledge, then, is when people believe believe what is actually true (and have some warrant or justification in this belief).
When Mason emphasizes that knowledge must become part of a child for true learning to occur, she does not mean in the subjective sense that prevails in our culture. Rather, she is emphasizing the transformative power of knowledge. Karen Glass offers a helpful analogy to explain this phenomenon:
If you go to the cupboard looking for sugar and sugar is there, the cupboard is functioning as it should. If you ask a question and a child can produce the correct answer, you might assume that education was successful. The child “learned” the correct answer to the question. But what if that is entirely the wrong picture, and education is not about producing correct answers to drear questions? What if the mind is a hungry, living entity and not a receptacle at all? The cupboard is unaffected and unchanged by the presence of the sugar and other items within. It produces them upon request, but it remains exactly as it was before. So it is with children who dutifully produce the right answers but are unmoved by what they know.
In Vital Harmony, p. 67
Glass, in her exposition of Mason’s thought, makes the point well here that real learning ought to change a person. Mere information recall does not constitute true knowledge in whole-person education. While a cupboard is ambivalent to whether it holds sugar or not, a mind is transformed by the ideas it digests. You can gauge the nourishment of a child’s mind, not be how much they know, but by general indicators of life in general: eagerness, diligence, passion, and a zeal for growth.
Facts vs. Ideas
To truly feed a child’s mind, we must move beyond presenting them with mere facts or information. The instrument of “life” that Mason is referencing is the life of the mind fed on living ideas. To be sure, facts are important, and we want children to form true beliefs about God, creation, and humankind. The key is to present these facts within inspiring ideas that will feed a child’s soul, not merely fill a mental repository.
What is an idea? Charlotte Mason writes,
A live thing of the mind, seems to be the conclusion of our greatest thinkers from Plato to Bacon, from Bacon to Coleridge. We all know how an idea ‘strikes,’ ‘seizes,’ ‘catches hold of,’ ‘impresses’ us and at last, if it be big enough, ‘possesses’ us; in a word, behaves like an entity. If we enquire into any person’s habits of life, mental preoccupation, devotion to a cause or pursuit, he will usually tell us that such and such an idea struck him. This potency of an idea is matter of common recognition. No phrase is more common and more promising than, ‘I have an idea’; we rise to such an opening as trout to a well-chosen fly. There is but one sphere in which the word idea never occurs, in which the conception of an idea is curiously absent, and that sphere is education! Look at any publisher’s list of school books and you shall find that the books recommended are carefully dessicated, drained of the least suspicion of an idea, reduced to the driest statements of fact.
Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 105
In short, an idea is an aspect of knowledge that comes in contact with the mind, like two objects colliding in motion. Not all facts are ideas, but they become ideas when the mind assimilates and grasps knowledge for itself. This is why the teaching tool of narration is so powerful (you can read about its history in the classical tradition here). When we give children meaningful books to read and narrate, ideas are unlocked through the telling-back process. No two narrations are the same because no two minds are the same. Each mind will be drawn uniquely to distinct ideas even as they ideas remain grounded in objective truth.
Shedding light on how facts become ideas when they are integrated into a child’s broader base of knowledge, Maryellyn St. Cyr, of Ambleside Schools International, writes,
Facts are clothed in ideas. Facts are taught in relation to a vast number of things and integrated into a body of knowledge (part to whole). The learner assimilates this knowledge when it is reproduced or carries a meaningful connection. Learners can act upon information seen or heard through verbal and written narration, individual or cooperative relationships, or visual demonstrations of art and movement .
When Children Love to Learn, p. 103
Conclusion: Towards a Liberal Arts Curriculum in Ideas
For children to love learning and cultivate a vibrant intellectual life, they need more than an inspiring classroom atmosphere. They need to be taught a curriculum that is ideas-rich and be given opportunities to assimilate these ideas for themselves. Rather than pre-digesting knowledge as adults and transplanting it into bite-sized pieces for children to swallow like a pill, Charlotte Mason advises that we have children read living books with rich narrative content.
A classical liberal arts curriculum, complete with stories, poetry, music, art, and nature, is the key to nourishing a child’s mind in this way. The goal is not for students to recall every bit of information from their studies with scientific exactitude, but to provide avenues for their minds to latch on to a few select ideas that will change them forever. Coupled with the teaching tool of narration, educators will find that through ideas-rich education that children will learn more and retain more as their minds are awakened and inspired to truly know in the fullest sense possible.
How to begin? I will leave the closing word for Charlotte Mason herself:
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 to 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 and therefore children should have a generous curriculum.”
Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 111
I love this and everything you guys put out. I have one important request. Please stop calling narration a tool. It’s an art. These are big differences and they greatly impact the perspective of a parent and teacher. I’ve seen parents give up on it because they use it as a tool that’s “not working.” Quintilian says it’s an art, and in fact it’s the most important department of rhetoric, which we know is an art.
Thank you for your consideration. This matters greatly to the work I do with parents and teachers
Adrienne, thank you for engaging with our work. We refer to narration as a teaching tool or practice when viewing it from the perspective of the teacher. When Charlotte Mason calls narration an art, she is viewing it from the perspective of the student as artist. I (Jason) have shown narration’s connection to the liberal arts of language in A Classical Guide to Narration and A Short History of Narration, so I very much affirm that narration is a teaching practice that helps a student develop in his/her artistry with language. But for the teacher, it is a tool or practice by which the work of teaching is carried out, and in this context, it would be confusing to call narration an art, since it does not display the teacher’s artistry but the student’s. While I understand that the term ‘tool’ might connote to some parents the idea that it can be abandoned if it’s “not working,” that might depend on the nature of the tool. If you need to drive nails in, you don’t stop using a hammer because you are missing the nail. I find the term “tool” helpful, in addition to terms like “teaching practice,” because “tool” implies the need for the teacher to use it with skill. It also points toward pedagogy itself as a craft. Hopefully that helps you understand our reasoning!