Why did Charlotte Mason think that the Bible was the most important subject in a child’s school lessons? What portions of the Bible are appropriate for children to read? And why should I include Bible as a lesson if our family already does regular Bible reading or devotions? In today’s podcast we are tackling these questions and more as we look at the Bible as a school subject in the Charlotte Mason curriculum.
Listen Now:
Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)
ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List
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
This season, we are exploring a Charlotte Mason curriculum and we invite you to read along with us from volume six of chapter 10. Check out the reading schedule in our show notes to follow along. Today we are beginning our series on Charlotte Mason Bible lessons.
So Charlotte Mason categorized all knowledge that was due to a child in the Charlotte Mason curriculum in three areas. She called it knowledge of God, knowledge of man, and knowledge of the universe. And she opens up this section of chapter 10 by saying that it is knowledge of God that is “most important, indispensable, and most happy making”. She calls knowledge of God a “firstborn affinity”, recognizing that every person is born wanting to know God. In fact, she says, “he is a child of God whose supreme desire and glory it is to know about and to know his almighty father”. So this knowledge, she believed, comes directly from the Bible, a literary form like we’ve been talking about. And it was actually from the Bible that Charlotte Mason derived her code of education, what gave her the foundational ideas of her philosophy. She found it in the Gospels summarized in: “let the little children come to me, offend not, despise not, and hinder not one of these little ones”. And she tells us that the most fatal way of despising the child is to overlook and make light of his natural relationship with Almighty God.
So as we’ve been talking about, education is the science of relations. It’s his duty to build relationships in as many directions, and all children have it in them and desire to know. And so that, since this is their primary desire to know God and to know about him, she wanted to give them the Bible.
She says that we should fill their imaginations with pictures, their minds nourished upon the words of the gradually unfolding story of the scriptures. And so she encouraged us to read full translations, not story Bibles, not retellings, because she thought that those talk down to children, that even six year olds were very capable of taking in ideas from the Bible itself. And I would have to agree with that after watching many students, not just my own children, come to their Bible lessons and just be fed.
She believed that Bible lessons were their chief lessons. And so they were the first lesson of the day. She thought that unconsciously or subconsciously taught them that they were the most important thing. It’s the only thing on the timetable that is consistent across the week, right? And so that they would look on them as their most important lessons. And the ultimate goal of Bible lessons is that students would know the Bible and having studied the word closely would know God and also how to seek him for the rest of their lives. Wonderful.
Nicole
It’s so huge.
Liz
Talk about a seed planted.
Emily
So, Nicole, why don’t you tell us about the normal way in which we learn about the Bible, not in a Charlotte Mason curriculum.
Nicole
Well…
Liz
Here and there and anywhere, right?
Nicole
Here and there, family devotions, just little…little scraps kind of of it over time, maybe through our Sunday school lessons and things like that.
Emily
And so against that, what is the whole scope of what my lessons look like for a Charlotte Mason?
Nicole
Totally different. So this is really interesting, the way that Charlotte Mason very deliberately lays out this subject over the course of all of the years of their schooling.
So in forms one and two, and that is six years, that’s grades one through six, they begin with the teacher reading to the student, the narrative portions of the Old Testament and the synoptic gospels in the New Testament. And these are the like, foundational. They’re just great foundational stories – creation, the patriarchs, the Exodus, the life of Christ. And that this is really meant to stir wonder in the child and kind of get these stories in them. And we’re going to go into more detail in each individual episode, but I just want to point out that the students would do this twice. They would read through these things two times, which really, when you think of the developmental level of your first grader compared to your sixth grader there’s so much wisdom in that.
And then in forms three and four, which is your grade seventh, eighth and ninth, they’re really starting to have some independence here. And with that in mind, she wanted them to start reading for themselves. This was not a group activity anymore. They did use a resource, however, which we’ll talk about later that allowed them to read it with omissions because in form one and two, the mom would make admissions where it was necessary or the teacher who was teaching. But now those are made for them so they can just work and deal with the material directly. So at this time, they walk through the narrative chronologically again with the addition of the prophets. So they are adding to that. And then in the New Testament, they are reading Acts and John.
But lest you think that they are going to leave out the synoptic gospels, this is where they start using a resource that is really special. They’re introduced to The Savior of the World. And The Savior of the World is poems that Charlotte Mason wrote, and it’s used in conjunction with a harmonized version of the gospels. And so they are slowing down, they are really dealing with each of those stories that they’ve learned for years, but now they’re really slowing down and dealing with them more deeply.
And then in forms five and six, they again are reading these full books of scripture, going back through, but as well as the prophets they’re reading the wisdom literature, they’re reading the epistles… Here they’re reading, it’s more volume and more depth. Where maybe some of those omissions happened in the lower forms, there are reading more of that. And then at that point, they are completing the whole of the New Testament and everything but four books of the Old Testament. So they are really getting this broad scope over the course of their education. At this age, too, in forms five and six – and again, this is 10th, 11th, and 12th grade – they’re exploring more complex theology at this point, the poetic expression through The Savior of the World, they’re still reading that. They’ve got commentaries and spiritual biographies, all kinds of things.
So I hope you can see that this is not a smattering of Bible or kind of an undirected list, but a very carefully considered journey through scripture through all these 12 years. She took really into consideration, Charlotte Mason did, the content that was appropriate for their age and the timing of that also. So yeah, 12 years and this slow and steady building. I think of it, I just had this mental picture as I was preparing this of these circles that kind of get bigger and longer and wider and that it just keeps growing on itself.
Emily
So I just, every time I think about her Bible Rotation, I just think it’s so brilliant. And I’ve seen how it is so appropriate at each level. Like things I would think, they’re not ready for that, that they just take in hand. And my goodness, the theological ideas that my kids bring up when we do Bible lessons, it’s my favorite. But I’m also quite jealous that it was taking my whole adult life to arrive at some semblance, probably not even as thorough, through my own study, and they’re going to leave high school…
Liz
Yeah, and it is not a haphazard a little of this and a little of that. She has a trajectory that she’s on and they’re learning the main stories first and upon that foundation they base all the rest of it because it’s a huge book. You talk about living books. This is the quintessential living book, right? And, you know, it is actually the most widely read book in all of history and it still is, all over the world. And it’s also been so influential in especially the Western civilization, but increasingly throughout the world. Even if you don’t believe in God or believe that this is the book that tells about him, you have to admit that the laws that you believe in, the human rights, all kinds of cultural ideas, proceed from this particular living book.
And I think that one of the things we have to understand is that this subject, it’s a school subject, okay? So this is independent from any other family participation with the Bible that you might have devotional or readings that your family does regularly.
Emily
All good.
Liz
All good. All essential. Keep on going. But the Bible lesson was a school subject. And so she is definitely making this a part of the curriculum. And it’s almost a curriculum in itself, as she says. And most of us, like Emily said, were much older to even begin to get a clue as to its inner workings. I think I was in college before I realized that Daniel knew who David and Joseph were. I had a lot of knowledge that was all scattered and mixed together, kind of like my public school education, actually. But the Bible speaks to every age. And by that, I mean every historic age. It has, for all time, spoken to men and individual ages from three-year-olds to 93-year-olds. You know?
Emily
Yeah.
Nicole
Charlotte Mason said that religion has two aspects, the attitude of the will towards God, which confused me a minute. We’ll look at that. And the perception of God, which comes from a gradual, slow growing comprehension of the Divine dealing with men.
So that first one, that the will’s attitude speaks to how the child sees themselves in relation to God. We’re thinking of reverence, obedience, humility. And these are all will-based. So that’s that first part. And then that second part is the perception of God that comes from primarily the stories and especially from the Old Testament. And Miss Mason, she really makes a bold claim with regard to this. She says the New Testament teaching not grounded in the Old often fails to produce a deep and personal thought of God.
Emily
I would so agree with that. I mean, I was much more familiar with the New Testament, but it seems like every Bible study I do is rooted in the Old Testament. And the more I am aware of the Old Testament, the more amazed I am at God’s patience and his long suffering and his faithfulness.
Liz
It’s one story.
Nicole
Right. And that’s really what she’s saying is without the history, without the poetry, without the struggle, without the long view of God’s dealing with man, we miss that panoramic picture of God and how he works in the world and how he works with us.
Emily
Yeah, that’s wonderful.
Thanks for joining the conversation today. Next time, we are going to begin to explore exactly how Bible lessons look in each set of forms, or as we would call them, grades or grade levels, in the Charlotte Mason Method. In the meantime, if you’d like to go deeper, we have previously recorded an episode on the Bible, and that is episode number 17. And you can find a link to that in the show notes, as well as our reading schedule. If you’d like to read along with us, we’ll have the page numbers that we’re going to be looking at very closely each episode we produce an episode this season.
Thanks for reading along with us as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.