Book Review: Consider This

Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition

I just finished a small book by Karen Glass (a founder of Ambleside Online) on the relationship between Charlotte Mason and classical education, so thought I’d fire my notes off in a cheeky midweek email.

Consider This was an easy and enjoyable read (only 120 pages or so), and I agreed heartily with almost all of it. I would recommend it for anyone who wants an introduction to classical education, even if they are not especially interested in Charlotte Mason. Glass lays out the heart of a classical education with more simplicity and clearness than I have yet encountered in any other book. She looks past the “how” of ancient and medieval education and gets to the heart of the “why,” portraying a vision of a timeless educational principles that can be enfleshed differently according to place and time. It would be a great book for you if something more comprehensive like The Liberal Arts Tradition seems too daunting.

The core argument of the book is that the vital elements of a classical education are virtue, humility, and synthetic knowledge.

The classical goal of education - virtue

Glass argues that the historic purpose of education is virtue, for which she borrows David Hicks’ definition: “the habituation of the mind and body to will and act in accordance with what one knows.” In other words, virtue is right knowledge which begets right action.

She quotes Quintilian, Milton, and Aristotle to support her point. The desire for virtue is something that medieval Christian educators readily appropriated from the ancients, and were able to bring that aim to its full potential because, “while philosophy instructs, [Christianity] both instructs and enables,” (Charlotte Mason, Formation of Character.)

“…both the reasoning must be true and the desire right, if the choice is to be good, and the latter must pursue just what the former asserts.”

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.

The posture of education - humility

Glass identifies humility as the first step toward virtue. She quotes Quintilian and Socrates, saying that there is no one so insufferable as the one who has learned a little, and so thinks he has learned everything.

Classical humility is recognising that God, one’s own self, and all reality external to the self exist independently to our minds and our desires. Once we come to terms with an objective reality outside ourselves, we can then ask God for wisdom.

Further, humility is the recognition that anyone can learn from anyone and anything, be it “infant, a primrose, a worm, a beggar, [or] a prince,” (Charlotte Mason, Parents and Children).

The content of education - Synthetic knowledge

Glass describes what Mason calls “synthetic thinking,” which has more commonly and recently been termed “poetic knowledge” by James Taylor in a book by the same name. Synthetic thinking is simply the belief that all knowledge is connected like a living organism rather than sterile subjects separated into neat “subject” bins. It assumes that all areas of knowledge have relationships to each other, and we in turn are able to form relationships with them.

Synthetic knowledge is not merely the subject matter, Glass argues, but a pedagogy of presenting knowledge in a relation manner - namely through literature and first-hand experience of the natural world.

“In the same way that a [analytically] dismantled apple gives us no taste for apples, so a dry compendium of analyzed data, cut loose from the context that makes it meaningful, gives us no taste for history, and so on for every other are of knowledge we might name.”

Karen Glass, Consider This, p.38

The content - The Trivium

I have already written on Charlotte Mason and the Trivium, and was pleased to find that Glass seems to be on the same page.

The content - A note on Latin

Glass outlines Charlotte Mason’s thoughts on Latin and Greek, which of course have an important place in classical education. I liked what she had to say, and have lots of thoughts on the subject, which I have been squirrelling away into a draft article entirely dedicated to the subject. TBC.

So, is Charlotte Mason classical?

For those who care, Glass argues that yes, Charlotte Mason can be considered a part of the classical tradition because she recognised virtue as the aim of education, extolled humility as the necessary posture, and, most importantly, employed a synthetic approach to knowledge.

She clarifies that Charlotte Mason did not label herself as classical, and distinguished her philosophy from what people in her own day would have meant by the term classical (namely a heavy emphasis on Latin and Greek), but read widely and drew heavily from classical educators from Plato to Montaigne to John Ruskin.

My own thoughts

I especially liked this book because it combats what I have noticed seem to be common pitfalls of institutionalised classical education – namely vainglory, elitism, and weaponised logic.

Vainglory

Vainglory is “the conceit of knowledge without the reality.” It is the opposite of humility. It means you know a lot about a lot of different things, but don’t actually really know anything. When armed with a “grammar stage” arsenal of facts coupled with training in logic and rhetorical expression, it is all too easy to amplify one’s knowledge into something much grander than it really is.

Elitism

Focusing on excellence and academic rigour at the expense of forming real relationships with knowledge can leave less academic students behind.

The Logic Weapon

Glass details Charlotte’s wariness of “the way of reason,” as a tool which may sometimes be employed, but must not be confused with objective truth. A crafty student can logic their way to any conclusion they please, and logic divorced from virtue often becomes a bludgeon for beating slower thinkers into confusion and submission.

“For this reason it is well we should make children perceive at a very early age that a man’s reason is the servant of his own will, and is not necessarily an independent authority within him in the service of truth.”

Charlotte Mason, Formation of Character.

If you found this outline helpful I would still encourage you to read the book, as there were several rabbit trails outside the main argument that were very worthwhile. It was also a very helpful companion to Mason’s Vol. 6 in particular.

In other news, I’m hoping to have another round of picture book recommendations this weekend, so stay tuned for that!

Cheers.