Are you lacking confidence in choosing your Charlotte Mason curriculum? In today’s podcast we are talking about what a Charlotte Mason curriculum isn’t by examining the principles Miss Mason gave us, so we can spread the feast of a living education with confidence.
Listen Now:
Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)
ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List
Episodes on the curriculum:
- Episode 193: The Interdependence of a CM Curriculum
- Episode 266: The Utility of the Charlotte Mason Method
- Episode 280: The Simplicity of the Charlotte Mason Method
Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…
Liz
…Liz Cottrill…
Nicole
…and Nicole Williams.
Emily
And all season, we are considering a Charlotte Mason curriculum. And we invite you to read along with us from chapter 10 of volume 6. You’ll find a link to the reading schedule in the show notes.
Last week we discussed the five principles that are the foundation, in Charlotte Mason’s own opinion, of a true Charlotte Mason curriculum. And from these, Charlotte Mason believed that there is an inherent principle, or “natural law”, she calls it, that should govern the choice of our students. So we must give them the knowledge that is due to them.
And that knowledge must be various because they are born persons with desires to know about all kinds of things and ideas, and education is really their building of relationships in as many directions as possible…and that each person is capable of getting this sort of knowledge especially when it is taken in in a literary form and learned through narration.
But Charlotte Mason had some further cautions for us about what a curriculum is not or should not be. And first, she says it is not utilitarian.
Nicole
She really begins this section by turning many of our educational assumptions on their heads. So one of the things she points out here is that an education that’s built on preparing for exams leaves the child, she said, “less intelligent and less informed, except perhaps” – she gave a caveat – “in Latin and math.” So that’s what all of us came from, right? That was our education. And she’s saying that actually is a problem. And it really flies in the face of our modern instinct to evaluate education based on test scores. But she really warned that that impoverished the children. So we can’t do that.
But then, yes, she takes aim then at a deeply rooted idea of educating children for their future prospects, like their future job. And in particular, she talked about educating the boys to gentlemanly pursuits or towards the traits, one or the other. But you know, we do a very similar thing because in schools today, children are required in the ninth grade to choose what career they intend to go in so that their coursework can be aligned around that. And she just said, the education we offer is too utilitarian, like you said.
So when we-
Emily
Utilitarian meaning useful, right?
Nicole
Right, right. So when we reduce a child’s education to what is useful, it doesn’t serve, like maybe it’s serving, we think it’s serving a practical end, but it’s not honoring the whole personhood of that child.
Emily
I think about the end of volume six, it’s actually in the second book that has a whole, well, letter – I think it was originally published in the Times of London – about the scope of continuation schools. And she was advocating that we need to give these trades people something to think about. So that while they’re doing their factory job, so that they’re going to have a mental stimulation they can think about, oh, the novel that I was reading last night, or the new thing that I’m learning.
Liz
Otherwise, what is the purpose of Latin or Shakespeare? We think, well, they’re never going to use that. That is a utilitarian way of thinking.
Emily
Yeah. And I do really see this every single year with Charlotte Mason educators. We may be convinced that children are born persons and we need to spread this wide feast, but I think at the root, and it’s probably because of our own education and just really our society at large, we still have so much fear that they’re going to actually be able to get into college.
Nicole
Right.
Emily
Because if they don’t get into college, they’re not going to get a good job. And so it really, really is so saturated into us, isn’t it?
Nicole
It is. I was thinking the same thing. Fear. It’s fear. And it’s that we are looking at these young people and we are thinking, how are you going to support yourself? We’re not having faith that we got there, but we can give them something so much better than we had and they will get there too.
Emily
Well, next Charlotte Mason said a curriculum is not or should not be selectively chosen. And this also steps on a lot of our toes, think. She said that it doesn’t cater to utilitarian subjects, just as you were talking about, Nicole, so that they can get good jobs when they grow up, right? But it also doesn’t cater to our children’s likes and dislikes. These are the emails…
Liz
Or our dislikes. Yes, yes. Or even their whims. You know, like they have an absolute interest in this. Our natural desire is to want to feed that, especially home educators.
Nicole
Right.
Emily
We think this is one of the positives about this. But Charlotte Mason said, “spread an abundant and delicate feast in the programs and each small guest assimilates what he can. All sit down to the same feast and each one gets according to his needs and powers.” So our children, they don’t know what they’re going to love.
I think about myself. You know, I went to a liberal arts college and had to take multiple classes I never would have signed up for otherwise and found some abiding interests to this day that I love. So we don’t, they don’t know what they want really, especially putting the reins in your six year old’s hands, who likes to study all about, I don’t even know what, you know, nothing that’s good for him, right?
But also rooted in this is she admonished us that we don’t know what God is preparing them for, right? We can’t see into the future, how each person is going to find their use in the world, like she says. And so we are instead giving them this wide and broad feast that is not selected to each child. It’s the same feast for all the children as she said, right? And that is enabling them to build relationships in as many directions as physically and humanly possible for each of them, right? And then that also helps them expand their horizon and relate to others who don’t necessarily have the same ideas and interests and vision of life. Charlotte Mason says, “it is a wide programme founded on the educational rights of man. Wide, but we may not say it is impossible, nor may we pick and choose and educate him in this direction, but not in that. Our part, it seems to me, is to give a child a vital hold upon as many as possible of those wide relationships proper to him.”
So a Charlotte Mason curriculum is going to be a vital cohesive whole, right? Every single practice or how to do each kind of lesson, every single lesson flows out of these fundamental principles that she has laid out for us. We can’t just choose isolated subject curriculum. How I’m using “curriculum” is how we normally think about it, but subject material, right? Like we can’t say, I’m going to do this for math and this for grammar and this…and if it’s not coming from a Charlotte Mason philosophy, the philosophy is an applied philosophy, the principles have to flow out into the practices. She says “there is no part of a child’s work at home or at school without an informing principle underlying it”.
And so we have to realize that really every resource, every material out there already has some kind of educational philosophy. You can’t help having an educational philosophy. And we have already seen how deeply rooted the one we’ve been brought up in is, and still even affects us even after we’ve been convinced to go a different direction. Charlotte Mason’s curriculum programs are integrated in deep ways. I think we even do a disservice when we pick and choose from different Charlotte Mason “curriculum”. Right? Because each curriculum out there is a whole subject of study and it’s trying to accomplish these things that she laid out for us, right? Did you have something you wanted to add?
Liz
Well, I’m just thinking about our online classes and co-ops that often clash too.
Emily
I have known even, you know, different local schools…and students really pick up on it, especially if they’ve been educated in a Charlotte Mason way. They know that the curriculum itself is respecting them as persons. And when they are forced to do maybe a more textbook approach for some subjects, they feel it and can resent it, right? So just keep that in mind as you’re jumping around, even from year to year, you’re missing that whole feast, because it’s not just within a year of a child’s education that’s cohesive. It’s the whole scope of their 12 years or however many they’re being educated at our homes.
As Miss Kitching, who was Charlotte Mason’s, well, she was her right hand woman, actually. And then she became her successor for the Parents Union School. She wrote, “every book and every subject has a niche to fill. It cannot stand alone, nor can it be omitted from the program without weakening the whole organism.” She’s not even talking about omitting a whole subject like Swedish Drill, which I did for a year, guys. She’s talking about even every single book in the curriculum, that program that was sent out, was so vital to the work of the whole.
So that is daunting. It seems like, OK, I don’t have as much leeway as I thought I had. I’m wondering also, I look at those curriculum programs and there’s like 20 some subjects on there. How in the world are we supposed to accomplish all of this?
Liz
This is why we call it a feast. And we’ve already warned you that we say the food terminology a lot because it’s a great analogy with Charlotte Mason. But you just think of a big banquet table that has all kinds of delicious things, and some things maybe don’t look so great, but then when you eat them, you’re like, I want some more of that. So the wide curriculum might be 20 or more subjects. And that does seem daunting to us because we can only wrap our mind around maybe three or four things at a time.
But it is all possible because it’s taken in in small doses. It’s because of the short hours that they have, limited time every morning. And there’s no homework afterwards. But she said that the short lessons and especially the use of narration multiply time, right? In fact, she says in one place, it quadruples the time the teacher has to cover a subject with a student or present it. And a lot of it is based on the fact that narration means the child is building the habit of attention. So full attention, no time to dawdle, no time to dilly-dally causes a lot more learning. They’re always listening to the reading or reading with the expectation that at the end of the reading, they must narrate or tell back what they understand.
And we accomplish this with a time-table, right? Because there’s no way to get through 10 or 12 subjects in two and a half or three hours every day without having a guide. I think of it as the curbs on the road or the traffic signs that help keep pointing you in the right direction. This is where you turn. I actually just said to a mom yesterday, the time-table is kind of like our GPS for school.
Emily
Yeah, it is for sure. And Charlotte Mason said in her first volume, when she’s literally talking about the habit of attention, that the time-table is the very first principle of education upon which a well-ordered school room is built. And so, like we mentioned, the principles that Charlotte Mason talks about are not confined to her short synopsis. There are principles throughout her volumes.
Another teacher, actually, Charlotte Mason wrote a paper called “Education Theory” and that was the first part and then Miss Drury wrote “Practice” and in that paper she said “a time-table punctually adhered to is one secret of the carrying out of the program in its great variety, partly explains its efficacy.” She’s talking about the variety of the time-table. Not only is it keeping us to those short lessons “Yep. Oh Bible’s done. We move on to the next thing in it.” You do feel like that all day long but that is giving the child’s brain a break, right? To attend to something that is like a listening lesson is a different kind of mental faculty or mental process than to attend to their math lesson. And so just by switching frequently to various subjects, various mental skills, it gives their brain breaks and it doesn’t over fatigue them. And that enables them to, for two and a half to four hours, depending on their age, really focus on the thing, the lesson at hand.
Liz
And no one, not even an adult can focus for even as long as 30 minutes straight. So this is just being respectful of a child’s young mind. Attention is developed over time. They don’t have long attention, but we can make powerful use of the short amount that they do have if it is full of really good things. And basically, she said, every lesson with a living book must be narrated and a lesson without a narration is wasted. So they have that expectation and that helps them pay attention and then the narration helps them absorb what they’ve just taken in.
Emily
So when we’re talking about short lessons, some of them are as short as about 10 minutes and some of them are as long as 40 in the highest forms. So that’s still a shorter lesson than any of our high school classes, right? And those 40 minute lessons for high schoolers, they still have some short lessons in between there to help vary their time. So when we think about what a Charl Mason curriculum is not, it’s not going to be sitting at your math lesson until it gets done, regardless of what the time-table says.
Liz
We’re moving with the clock and the clock marches on whether we like it or not.
Emily
And it’s going to have various, every day is going look different. It’s going to have these short lessons and we’re going to require narration, not fill in the blank worksheets, right? So those are some markers to look at.
Emily
Thanks for joining the conversation today. If you’d like to go deeper on any of the topics that we touched on today, we have some episodes that you might like. Numbers 193, 266, and 280 talk about the cohesiveness of a Charlotte Mason curriculum. We have an episode on habit training, episode number 168, and specifically on the time-table, if you’re wanting to develop the habit of attention. The time-table episode is 264.
And next week, we are going to begin our series on Charlotte Mason Bible lessons as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.