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.

I added a blog feature to my website, because blogs are understood to be a place to collect random thoughts that do not necessarily cohere. The blogs I like best might share a recipe, a book review, a meditation, and a political opinion, all in the same week. The most important rule of blogging, in my opinion, is that there are no rules. We have leave to be self-indulgent in a blog, although no one is obligated to read our musings.

I’m mentioning here a book that I have been reading slowly all year–Liberal Education
by Mark Van Doren. I’ll be honest–there aren’t enough copies of this book to go around. If you want to read it and find an affordable copy, be sure to snag it.

When I read books like this one, I find it affirming and reassuring to hear a university professor from the early 20th century articulating the same ideas and values that I find in Erasmus, Charlotte Mason, and that you will find in Consider This. Mark Van Doren is the younger brother of Charles Van Doren, co-author of How to Read a Book with Mortimer Adler.

This isn’t a review of the book, which I have not finished reading yet, although I’m past the half-way point. I just want to share few quotes for the sake of affirming those universal principles about education that matter to us all.

Charlotte Mason: “There is no education but self-education.”

Mark Van Doren: “This is not said often enough or firmly enough for the young to heed it. They can benefit by knowing that education is something they must labor to give themselves….Education is up to them as it was up to Socrates, Milton, Locke, and Lincoln.”

Charlotte Mason: “Education is the science of relations.”

Mark Van Doren: “As little attention as possible will be wasted on details of knowledge which the student is certain to forget. Such of them as point a principle need to be mastered; but then if a right relation is maintained between detail and principle, the detail will not be forgotten. It will become an item in the mind around which other details organize themselves as long as life lasts.”

For those of you who have already read Consider This, you will understand why I marked these ones:

“So much knowledge ‘about’ one thing or another, and never the tincture of wisdom.”

“Education is humble at center.”

And those are just from Chapter One. It gets better and better, and I will share more from it now and again.

*Links are affiliate links.

During launch week, I want to share a little of the story behind the writing of Consider This. It truly is the product of twenty years of learning.

The story starts with my first visit to a homeschool convention in 1994. I was already planning to homeschool using A Beka Books (yes, really), but I thought the homeschool convention would be fun, so I showed up with my two children, ages 3 and 9 months.

It was a small convention hall, but as a lover of books and reading myself, I gravitated toward the corner occupied by Lifetime Books and Gifts, then operated by Bob Farewell. I can only imagine what he must have thought about my browsing a homeschool convention with my preschoolers, but he handed me a copy of For the Children’s Sake with the injunction: “you need to read this book.”

I did. Thank you, Bob Farewell. (I still have that book.) It was the first time I’d ever heard of Charlotte Mason, but what I read in that book changed my ideas about education forever, and A Beka lost a customer. As soon as I could, I ordered the complete Original Homeschooling Series. And I started reading. And possibly you know what it feels like to jump into the series and wade through Charlotte’s Victorian prose?

How lucky for me that 1994 found us in the infancy of the internet. Using my computer I could do this new thing called “going online” and find people who shared my interests. I found people who were trying to read and understand Charlotte Mason, as I was, and I’m fervently convinced we all learned so much more than we ever could have done alone. Most of those ladies are mentioned in my acknowledgements, and some of them are my fellow Ambleside Online Advisory members.

Fast forward a few years, and I felt pretty comfortable with Charlotte Mason’s philosophy and methods. By then I was homeschooling and seeing the fruit for myself, and lots of reading and discussing had clarified the methods for me. I no longer found it hard to read and understand Charlotte Mason’s writing, and I had read through the whole series a couple of times.

The publication of books such as The Well-Trained Mind and Teaching the Trivium was creating a lot of interest in classical education in the homeschooling community, and I found myself, again and again, defending Charlotte Mason’s methods to those who thought that their children were in the grammar stage and needing to be memorizing facts instead of reading and hearing real books. I read the books in question, but the same thing that had made me read Charlotte Mason herself after reading For the Children’s Sake also made me go looking for the “original” classical educators after reading 20th and 21st century authors. Again, I was so lucky to have the internet as a source for reading Plato, Augustine, Erasmus, and others.

If I’m honest, I can only say that it was bewildering and confusing. I couldn’t find one clear, consistent definition of classical education. I couldn’t reconcile the modern practices with the historical ones. I couldn’t reconcile Dorothy Sayers with Quintilian. I could think of four different ways to define classical education, and I had no way of knowing which one was right. And then someone suggested that I read Norms and Nobility by David V. Hicks. Like For the Children’s Sake, it changed my ideas about education forever.

Norms and Nobility was a challenging book to read, but the vision of classical education involving mythos, logos, paideia, and the normative influence of an ideal resonated with what I already knew about Charlotte Mason. Classical education focused on character development? So did Charlotte Mason! Classical education was conducted primarily through literature? That’s a primary emphasis of Miss Mason’s philosophy, too! I realized then that Charlotte Mason’s methods were consistent with the classical tradition at a very foundational level. I knew that David Hicks thought so, too, because his bibliography included her book Philosophy of Education. Only later would I discover that the link with the classical past was deliberate on Charlotte Mason’s part.

I wrote quite a few articles, posts, and a newsletter to share what I had learned. It was then that those first “you should write a book” suggestions were tossed to me. But it was a busy season of life. I was homeschooling three children by then, and had another baby in 2004. Time—years of time, even—moves by quickly. I read few blogs, but the ones I did read often mentioned the link between Charlotte Mason and classical education, and I came to believe that what I had learned was now general knowledge.

Apparently, I was mistaken. In the past couple of years, some younger homeschooling moms convinced me that such a book was needed as much as ever, if not more. As I entertained the idea of tackling an actual book, another online friend starting writing and creating art that truly inspired me. It is a part of what helped me to focus and begin, and I want to share it here.

Sheila Atchley is in nearly the same season of life as I am (except she didn’t have a baby in 2004), and has begun using her multi-faceted talents in both art and writing to be a blessing to women, especially, who are “in the middle.” Her blog has been a blessing, and the print above (shared with permission) hangs over the desk where I worked on Consider This, as inspiration.

Earlier this year, I went away for a week and buried myself in a hotel room to write, with this view for inspiration.

After a week of intense writing, I spent many months fleshing out the book, and yet here at the end of the year, Consider This is already in the hands of readers.  It truly has been an amazing journey, and I’m sure this story gives you a glimpse into just how very honored I was that David Hicks agreed first to read the book and then to write a foreword for it. As my small addition to Charlotte Mason’s message goes out into the world, which contains nothing really new, but only brings into focus the links that were always there between her ideas and the classical tradition, I would like to imagine her nodding in satisfaction that we have “caught” her vision and are carrying it on.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Thank you, Bob Farewell. Thank you, David Hicks. Thank you, Sheila Atchley. And thank you, readers of Consider This. We’re part of the story together. Never stop learning.

(I love that when I looked up the website for Lifetime Books and Gifts to find the link above, For The Children’s Sake was featured on the front page. Bravo, Lifetime. Still sharing great books twenty years later…)

I’m giving away two signed copies of Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition! The giveaways start immediately, and run through October 24th.

Rafflecopter selected one winner (in the widget below), and I used a random number generator to choose a second winner from the subscriber’s list. Congratulations to Shananne and Kathy! I’ve emailed the winners for their addresses.

Thank you for participating!

I’m giving away another copy through Afterthoughts blog, but that one has ended and the winner has been announced.

Your copies will be mailed from Poland, because that’s where I am. Winners will need to allow 7-14 days after mailing for the books to arrive. Good luck to everyone!

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