Even before I published Consider This, and more so since I’ve seen the response to it, I have sensed that the Charlotte Mason community is “growing up”—wanting to move beyond “how do I do this?” to explore the deeper ideas in Charlotte Mason’s writings. We are in for a marvelous treat.

My long-time friend and colleague (fellow AmblesideOnline Advisory member) Anne White has written a book—Minds More Awake— that is going to delight, edify, and nourish those hungry for “more.” Hence, my suggestion to make a little room on your bookshelf, because you are going to want to read this. More than once.

I have been privileged to read an early manuscript, and it felt like sitting down with a wise, experienced homeschool mom who has kept her own mind awake but never lost touch with the nitty-gritty day to day details of life. So, while she delves deeply into ideas that will refresh and encourage, she can grab the nearest kitchen appliance as an illustration, or remark, “that reminds me of seventh-grade shop class,” and add a layer of meaning to every children’s book you can remember.

Go read all about it, and do make a little space on the shelf. It will be so worth it.

I imagine readers of Consider This reaching the end of the book and thinking, “I wish there was more information here about how to actually do this.” Especially with regard to developing synthetic thinking, which is such a paradigm shift for many of us.

I am happy to be able to say that there a few resources you can look to for further ideas and concrete suggestions. One of those is The Living Page: Keeping Notebooks with Charlotte Mason by Laurie Bestvater.

Since the beginning of 2015, I have slowly been working my way through this book, taking pleasure in each sentence or reference that reinforces the ideas in Consider This. It isn’t remotely surprising that this is so, since Ms. Besvater and I have learned at the feet of the same great teacher.

The Living Page deals primarily with the various notebooks that Charlotte Mason either suggested or actually incorporated into her teaching methods. However, The Living Page is much more than that. It is actually an invitation to partake fully of a synthetic understanding of life and relationship. Ms. Bestvater recognizes the timeless nature of Charlotte Mason’s ideas, and the necessity of not merely doing what Charlotte Mason suggested, but understanding why it is important.

Keeping personal notebooks was a reflection of Charlotte Mason’s respect for children as persons. Ms. Bestvater has much to say about the way that notebooks allow a child to make personal connections with knowledge. Education is the science of relations, and many delightful pages are devoted to developing the way in which Charlotte Mason’s notebook practices allow children a comprehensive and consecutive way to establish those relations.

One doesn’t have to use the term “synthetic thinking” to discuss the idea. In fact, few people do, which is why it’s not a bad idea to begin learning to recognize the concept in whatever form it appears.

…if Mason says or does it, there is a specific reason. Looking at her pedagogy closely, one does not see a cobbled together educational grab-bag but a cohesive philosophy, a unity generating an elegant method that supports human learning in the most profound ways. (The Living Page, p. 38)

Ms. Bestvater quotes this passage from Ourselves (Book I, p. 37) with special emphasis:

…we begin to understand that we too are making History, and that we are all part of the whole; that the people who went before us were all very like ourselves, or else we should not be able to understand them. If some of them were worse than we and in some things their times were worse than ours, yet we make acquaintance with many who were noble and great, and our hearts beat with a desire to be like them.

Ms. Bestvater understands synthetic thinking very well, including the link it plays in affecting actual behavior and actions, and she leads us through Charlotte Mason’s use of notebooks to show us one very powerful way in which that synthetic understanding of the world, and life, and ourselves can be developed. She reminds us again and again that the notebooks are part of this important process, not merely products.

Speaking of the history timeline and notebooks used by Charlotte Mason, she says,

It is designed to support sorting and relationship, connection, observation, and meditation. (p. 54).

Without any deliberate collaboration, Consider This and The Living Page dovetail beautifully. There are not so many contemporary books on education that support and encourage synthetic learning that we can afford to overlook even one of them.  This is not a book to be missed. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so, and if you read it before you read Consider This, I recommend reading it again and paying particular attention to the way that “paper postures” can play a vital part in helping our students develop the synthetic, relational knowledge of life that Charlotte Mason desired for all of us.

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Education is the science of relations, says Charlotte Mason. Children are born persons, she asserts.

In his book Liberal Education, Mark Van Doren (who perhaps never heard of Charlotte Mason), suggests the same idea, as well as echoing her thoughts about a person’s responsibility to understand and govern his soul.

The individual has no relation to anything except the state or society of which he is a member, and to which he is relative. But the person is not a member. He is the body of himself, and as such is always to be understood as an end, not a means. As a ruler, he has first ordered his own soul. As the ruled, he likewise orders his soul. And this is something which he is unique among creatures in knowing how to do, even though he may never do it perfectly.(Liberal Education, p. 39, emphasis mine)

The powers of the person are what education wishes to perfect. To aim at anything less is to belittle men; to fasten somewhere on their exterior a crank which accident or tyrants can twist to set machinery going. The person is not machinery which others can run. His mind has its own laws, which are the laws of thought itself. (Liberal Education, p. 40)

I was giving some thought recently to the links between Charlotte Mason and the classical educators and I was startled to realize that actually only a few steps lie between Charlotte Mason and the educators of the classical world. Many centuries separate Charlotte Mason, who has not yet been dead for 100 years, and Plato and Aristotle of Greek or Quintilian and Augustine of Rome.

And yet…these names which loom large in the history of education are not succeeded by generations and generations of similarly significant contributors. On the contrary, during the Renaissance, those who wrote about education supported their precepts by skipping most of the Medieval teachers and making reference to the ancient Greek and Roman educators. Milton, Montaigne, Comenius, and Erasmus, and in fact, every Renaissance-era educator I have read, supported their ideas by quoting the likes of Plato, Isocrates, or Quintilian, whose name virtually stands for excellence in education.

In other words, there is only a single step (albeit a rather long one) between the classical and Renaissance educators. When Charlotte Mason was forming her own ideas about education, she stepped over the Enlightenment educators such as Rousseau, Spenser, and Locke, and lifted much of her inspiration from the Renaissance educators. We know she borrowed Comenius’ desire for “a liberal education for all,” praised Milton for making magnanimity the object of education, and gleaned ideas about teaching directly from Montaigne. While she was familiar with her contemporaries, and acknowledged their contributions when she could, her active desire was for a second Renaissance–a return to the classical ideals, particularly a love of knowledge.

The task before us in setting in order the house of our national education is a delicate one. We must guard those assets of character which the education of the past affords us, and recover, if we may, the passionate love of knowledge for its own sake which brought about an earlier Renaissance. (Formation of Character, p. 381-82)

And that’s just one more step–from the Renaissance to 19th/20th century educator Charlotte Mason. So, while it might seem startling to link a modern educator who is rightly called a visionary and a reformer with ancient historical educators, it is in fact a fairly short chain of links–a few steps, and no more. Such is the history of education, and for the interested student (assuming one is already familiar with Charlotte Mason’s writings), there is no better place to begin than with the Renaissance-era educators. In them, we find the words of the Greek and Roman teachers, and a concerted effort to apply sound and Christian principles to what was (for them) modern education. We are doing the same thing today.

This is what Comenius hoped for, and I suspect it was what Charlotte Mason wanted to accomplish by making liberal education available to everyone:

If this universal instruction of youth be brought about by the proper means, none of these will lack the material for thinking, choosing, following, and doing good things. All will know how the actions and endeavours of life should be regulated, within what limits we must progress….all will regale themselves, even in the midst of their work and toil, by meditation on the the words and works of God, and, by the constant reading of the Bible and other good books, will avoid that idleness which is so dangerous to flesh and blood. To sum up, they will learn to see, to praise, and to recognise God everywhere. (The Great Didactic)

Have you ever heard Comenius dismissed as “not classical” because he is called “the father of modern education?” (I have.)

Since I have a strong presentiment that few people are going to read Comenius’ Great Didactic for themselves (although you can if you want to, and for free), I’m going to tell you the two reasons that he is so called. The first is because he suggested a rather arbitrary system of grades or levels for children to move through, in part because he began education with pre-school children, and so felt the need for a natural progression in difficulty as they moved up. A simple, practical idea, with nothing particularly sinister about it, and any educational program dealing with groups instead of individuals would need something similar.

The second reason is that he proposed education for all children–both boys and girls–and not just the wealthy. Now there’s a modern idea, but not one most of us would find objectionable.

And that’s it. Comenius’ view of education is profoundly Christian (which is why, I suspect, Charlotte Mason found his views so appealing), and most of what he has to say about education and its purposes would be tossed by modern secular educators. His views are also deeply classical, or liberal, so that Mark Van Doren writes of him in Liberal Education:

Thus Comenius, the title page of whose Great Didactic promised that it would set forth “the whole art of teaching all things to all men”–to “the entire youth of both sexes, none excepted.” It was a noble vision, and it has never been realized. We teach our entire youth, but we do not teach them enough.

Charlotte Mason shared Comenius’ vision for education for all, but she also wanted them to have the same kind of education Comenius wanted–a liberal education informed by Christianity.

Comenius objects to schools which pursue intellectual perfection but ignore virtue:

Can any one defend the condition in which our schools have been ? An hereditary disease, sprung from our first parents, pervades all classes, so that, shut out from the tree of life, we direct our desires inordinately towards the tree of knowledge, and our schools also, permeated by this insatiable appetite, have hitherto pursued nothing but intellectual progress.  (The Great Didactic)

Comenius shares Charlotte Mason’s opinion that the mind grows naturally when it is properly fed:

Education shall be conducted without blows, rigour, or compulsion, as gently and pleasantly as possible, and in the most natural manner (just as a living body increases in size without any straining or forcible extension of the limbs ; since if food, care, and exercise are properly supplied, the body grows and becomes strong, gradually, imperceptibly, and of its own accord. In the same way I maintain that nutriment, care, and exercise, prudently supplied to the mind, lead it naturally to wisdom, virtue, and piety).

And if we knew what Comenius really wanted education to accomplish, would we call him “the father of modern education?” Most modern educators consider even a mention of God to be taboo, unless it be to warn against those who believe in him. Comenius felt very differently.

The most useful thing that the Holy Scriptures teach us in this connection is this, that there is no more certain way under the sun for the raising of sunken humanity than the proper education of the young. Indeed Solomon…turned at length to the young and adjured them to remember their Creator in the days of their youth, to fear Him, and to keep His commandments, for that this was the whole duty of man (Eccles. xii. 1 3).

The next time someone tells you that Comenius is the father of modern education, remember that there are only two rather harmless reasons for that, and that in reality, it’s rather a shame that modern educators don’t pay a lot more attention to him than they actually do. If we had adopted his methods and ideas more fully, or even Charlotte Mason’s (they have much in common), modern education would be very different from what it actually is. And emphatically, much better.