Miss Charlotte Mason, classical educator

Tuesday  around evening time  Mystie

Quotes from volume 6 of Charlotte Mason’s “Original Home Schooling Series,” Philosophy of Education:

[Education should] qualify their children for life rather than for earning a living. As a matter of fact, it is the man who has read and thought on many subjects who is, with the necessary training, the most capable whether in handling tools, drawing plans, or keeping books. The more of a person we succeed in making a child, the better will he both filfil his own life and serve society. (p. 3)

history, poetry, philosophy, proved the salvation of a ruined nation [Prussia after Napoleonic wars], because such studies make for the development of personality, public spirit, initiative, the qualities of which the State was in need, and which most advance individual happiness and success. On the other hand, the period when Germany made her school curriculum utilitarian marks the beginning of her moral downfall. (p. 5)

Now, no one can employ leisure fitly whose mind is not brought into active play every day; the small affairs of a man’s own life supply no intellectual food and but small and monotonous intellectual exercise. Science, history, philosophy, literature, must no longer be the luxuries of the ‘educated’ classes; all classes must be educated and sit down to these things of the mind as they do to their daily bread. History must afford its pageants, science its wonders, literature its intimacies, philosophy its speculations, religion its assurances to every man, and his education must have prepared him for wanderings in these reaslms of gold.

A well-known educationalist lately nailed up the thesis that what children want in the way of knowledge is just two things — How to do the work by which they must earn their living and how to behave as citizens. This writer does not see that work is done and duties performed in the ratio of the person who works: the more the man is as a person, the more valuable be his work and the more dependable his conduct. (p. 76)

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.” (p. 111)

A knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic is no education and no training but merely the elementary condition of further knowledge. (Paterson, qtd. in Mason, p. 120)

[A liberal arts University's] implicit contention is, given a well-educated man with cultivated imagination, trained judgement, wide interests, and he is prepared to master the intricacies of any profession; while he knows at the same time how to make use of himself, of the powers with which nature and education have endowed him for his own happiness; the delightful employment of his leisure; for the increased happiness of his neighbors and the well-being of the community; that is, such a man is able not only to earn his living, but to live. (p. 121)

Special teaching towards engineering, cotton-spinning, and the rest is quite unnecessary for every manufacturer knows that given a ‘likely’ lad he will soon be turned into a good woekman in the works themselves. [...] boys from [vocational training schools] are employed rather on the off chance that they may turn out intelligent and apt than for what they know beforehand of the business. [...] [So we continue in] absolutely eschewing all money-making arts and crafts. (p. 123)

But we are slow to learn because we have set up a little tin god of efficiency in that niche within our private pantheon which should be occupied by personality [personhood, individuality]. [...] We shall find, in the words of a well-known Swedish professor that “just as enrichment of the soil gives the best conditions for the seed sown in it so a well-grounded humanistic [humanities] training provides the surest basis for a business capacity. (p. 125)

All this and I’m not yet halfway through with the book.

And, I particularly, as an English major and not a classicist, enjoyed this quote:

But, it will be argued, the subject matter of a University education is conveyed for the most part through the channel of dead languages, Latin and Greek. Our contention is that, however ennobling the literature in these tongues, we cannot honestly allow our English literature to take a second place to any other, and that therefore whatever Sophocles, Thucydides, Virgil, have it in them to do toward a higher education, may be effected more readily by Milton, Gibbon, Shakespeare, Bacon, and a multitude of great thinkers who are therefore great writers. (p. 124)

Latin may be on my syllabus list, but it is there as a precursor to logic. I buy into the learning grammar through Latin and learning ordered thinking through Latin claims, but I have yet to be convinced that fluency should be the universal end goal.

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