What made Charlotte Mason craft her curriculum around the subject of history? Why is the subject important for today’s students? Join us on the podcast for our discussion today as we begin our series on Charlotte Mason history lessons.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

History Rotation Diagrams

Video Explaining History Rotations

Episode 11: Why Study History

Episode 12: The Chronology of History

ADE on YouTube

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
Well, Charlotte Mason said, “next in order to religious knowledge, history is the pivot upon which our curriculum turns.” And so we turn from Bible lessons to the subject of history, which informs so much of the rest of the curriculum. 

Nicole
Absolutely. 

Emily
So, Nicole, would you start by telling us why Charlotte Mason thought that history was so important, this mainstay pivot of the curriculum? And that’s a very striking claim.

Nicole
It is. You know, next to religious knowledge. But once you understand how she approached it, I think it really makes sense. History in a Charlotte Mason education isn’t about memorizing names and dates. It’s about knowing people. It’s about understanding ideas. It’s about helping a child find their place in the world. I think it’s so cool. It’s not in an abstract way or a theoretical way, but seeing themselves as part of a long and living story. 

Emily
Yes. 

Nicole
Through history, our children are introduced to the full scope of human experience. They come to see the choices people have made, their courage, their failures, their faithfulness. And over time, they develop principles they can apply to their own lives. That’s the beauty of history. It quietly shapes the way we think and the kind of people we are becoming. 

Our children also live in a global world now, but that doesn’t guarantee understanding. And Miss Mason believed that every child should be given the opportunity to form relationships with people, she said, of all sorts and conditions, of all countries and climes, of all times past and present. This kind of history study doesn’t create pride. It creates humility, compassion, reverence, and a deeper sense of the duties and the joys of a full human life.

Charlotte Mason did call it the pageant of history. It’s a rich, colorful backdrop filled with the drama of real lives lived. A pageant isn’t a dry timeline. It’s just not. It’s color, it’s story. It captures the imagination. And when our children are given the right kind of books, rich with story and truth, they begin to picture themselves in those scenes. They connect to the characters and they grow in empathy. And this widens their understanding of the world. And as they grow, the scope of history grows with them, beginning with simple stories and expanding to layered global narratives, and that develops their understanding over time. As a pivot, history provides a natural rhythm for the rest of the curriculum. The literature, geography, art, and music can all be informed by the time period that the child is studying.

And that doesn’t mean that we’re building unit studies, just to note, or trying to force connections. We don’t have to do that. It simply reflects what Miss Mason called the natural and inevitable coordination of certain subjects. When a child reads a poem written during the same era they’re studying in history, they start to hear the voices that time more clearly.

We do have some hints in this section we’ve been reading in volume six about when things came in. But you have done so much research in this area and really had many things come to light. 

Emily
Yes, I still remember when I was poring over all the programs. I mean, it’s been 10, 11, 12 years ago now, and literally feeling like I audibly heard the Hallelujah Chorus. I could see her big picture.

Here, especially, I think we see the lack of details in volume six. I remember struggling for years and it wasn’t until we had the digital collection that we had that whole scope of programs of her curriculum, what she did, that we could really put it all together. We were all kind of fumbling in the dark trying to make sense of these little clues and hints. And we had a couple of programs here and there, but we didn’t see that whole big progression of a child’s education. So once we did, that just helped narrow it down. Yeah, we got all of those details and then we’re like she’s not told us anything wrong, it just was lacking the whole picture. 

Nicole
Right exactly. 

Emily
So as we began our podcast, actually it was right at the same time, we set out to answer what does Charlotte Mason history look like? We kept hearing conflicting things and people have very strong opinions because we know this is such an important subject. We had just those little glimpses but we were still left with how is this applied? What do we do?, especially as Americans or any other context other than her British children. What do we do? 

So in order to develop an understanding of one’s own place in history and to begin having an informed patriotism, which she talks about, Charlotte Mason students continually study the history of their own country. That may seem odd, like what? We don’t want to have this narrow scope. But that helps put our country into perspective. And when we have a deeper view, we don’t just get the glorified simple stories, right? Of the heroic times. We get the good, the bad and the ugly. And we can really see the trajectory of men’s thoughts. I’m using men in the human term here, men and women. 

So Form 1B, that is the first year of school. We call it first grade here in America. They start with the earliest history of their country. Mason called this the heroic age because she said it was best suited to the children because the story moves on broad, simple lines. This is the time before we have a continuous chronological written record of everything that’s going on in our country. We have maybe some isolated stories, there’s periods of darkness, we don’t know what’s happening everywhere in the country at the same time. 

But this is the thing I think is most misunderstood. This is not just a collection of hero stories, right? Charlotte Mason was adamant that this is a consecutive chronological study. We’re not jumping around here and there. We are talking about the earliest history of our nation and that it is read in a consecutive way.

So she called the heroic age the time before “authentic history” began. So we have the Heroic Age and we have Authentic History. And so these stories include maybe some more mythical or legendary details. We have those in our own country, even though those are a lot nearer the present time than the ones that they were telling in Britain for her students. But it is that time before the continuous written record. 

So what this looks like in America is the time as Europeans were making contact. We have anthropological studies of the people who lived here before Europeans made contact but we didn’t have any written record from them, so we can only make anthropological assumptions about what was happening in the country. And we have a little bit. So we include those as we can, but really the records that we have that are going to give us that consecutive chronological narrative are from the contact with Europeans who came to explore and then settle. So that’s the first year of school.

And then form 1A, which students were in for two years, second to third grade. They’re continuing a chronological study and that goes up to the present time. So, it’s Charlotte Mason, that was the same book. We don’t have a great option for that. I’ll talk more about that in subsequent episodes. But in her school, that was just the first part of the same, we would call it a history spine, or the same book that looked at the whole history of the nation. So it’s not isolated tales.

Okay, so that’s form one. Then as they move into form two, so this is the upper elementary years, they’re in form two for three years. The first of those years, they’re going to have a deeper look at their country’s history starting again from the earliest recorded history through the present. They’re going to cycle through that in four years. And they’re going to add a second stream of history. Now we’ve come up with the same stream because it’s just something we see that’s descriptive of what Charlotte Mason did. She had multiple…

Liz
It’s the flow.

Emily
Yeah, it is. And that there’s three streams ultimately moving side by side. So they’re going to start their second stream and that is to add the history of a neighboring country. And this, she said, should be contemporary, be the same time period as what they’re studying in their own country so that they get a bigger perspective. We have a very different perspective of the events leading up to the Revolutionary War than British people do, right? Particularly those living at that time. 

And so we’re going to talk later in our form two episode about how to choose that neighboring country. But in a nutshell, it is a country that has strong cultural and political significance. So in England, that was France, even though there were much closer countries, even on the same island, there were some distinct countries at the time. And I would argue that for us in America, despite where we live, because of our, not only the founding documents, our governmental structure, and who controlled us when we gained our independence, but also because of our shared language and a lot of cultural things and continuing alliances…and those all match up with what England and France have. 

Liz
It just has the most influence on our lives. 

Emily
Yes, so I would argue that is England for us. It’s not our closest neighbor like Canada or Mexico. They have a very similar history of exploration and exploitation by people coming here. But all of those things go into making our Neighboring Country. 

And they can start that first year with the earliest history of that country and that’s the only departure from studying those things hand in hand at the same time. So that’s an option, you don’t have to, but it’s a good option. 

So then in Form 2a, which is fifth and sixth grade (the upper two years of that form) through Form 3, they’re continuing that four-year cycle through their own country’s history, and then they’re definitely lockstep, contemporary chronological history of their close neighbor’s country. But they add in a third stream, and that is the study of ancient history, which of course cannot be contemporary with our modern stream. And it’s a cultural look. So she would look at different cultures in the ancient Near East and then the culture of Greece and then the culture of Rome, for example, instead of trying to cut a sliver of time across all of those cultures. So we get a bigger picture of their scope. 

And then as they move into Form 3, they’re even adding current events. So not only are they getting their modern time, which could be as long ago as a thousand years, and their ancient time, they’re also getting the very current present-day history that is being made right now. 

So then as they move into high school, as we call it in America, Forms 4 through 6, they’re going through their last rotation of history. And Form 4 is what we would say 9th grade, Form 5 is 10th and 11th, Form 6 is 12th grade. They advance onto more stiffer books, which with Charlotte Mason, we look at the easier books that she used and think they’re pretty stiff. But for her students, they were even stiffer, a look at their own country. So now we’re getting into motives and ideas and really wrestling through those things that make the events happen.

The neighboring country instead of just one country, it’s going to expand to all of Western civilization. If you’re in the West, I guess that would be different if you’re in a different context. And then they go through another look at ancient history. And she said there was actually less time for that, so they just got a broader overview of it. And then they continue their current events. So really, it’s four streams of history going hand in hand.

Yeah, so overall I’ve hinted at it, but there were three four-year rotations overall, but it’s a total of an eight-year history cycle. And I think this is something that’s not recognized broadly. We get questions about this all the time, but that ancient stream is four years and it’s stacked on top of the four years for the modern stream. And they have to go in lockstep because when you get to the end of your modern stream, you’re at the beginning of where your modern stream picks up. And so you’re ready to cycle back and they all it’s a seamless chronological flow over eight years, but we covered every four. So the ancient ends up where the modern begins the following year. 

So again, Charlotte Mason lays this huge emphasis on chronologically progressive work. That is the underlying fundamental principle of history studies. So we aren’t picking and choosing what time period our kids are most interested in. If we’re jumping into this, we might want to start at the beginning, but if we have just studied maybe the 19th century we need to move forward. We need to continue the 20th century into the present because that chronology, until we get to the end of the current time and then we cycle back, that helps give them that vibrant understanding of the pageant of history. If we’re jumping all around you’re gonna be like me when I started organizing the library and going did that happen in the 1800s? When was the Middle Ages? You know, we just don’t have those things. 

So I know this is probably as clear as mud from this very general thing that I have and we have diagrams on our website that we’ve had for the last 10 years. But I have just recently made a video showing how your one child and then subsequent children move through the forms and that will be linked in the show notes. So from this wide feast of history, Charlotte Mason says, “we may not be able to recall this or that circumstance, but the imagination is warmed. We know that there is a great deal to be said on both sides of every question and we are saved from crudities in opinion and rashness in action. The present becomes enriched for us with the wealth of all that has gone before….we may not delay to offer such a liberal and generous diet of History to every child in the country as shall give weight to his decisions, consideration to his actions and stability to his conduct.” (6/178)

Liz
Wow, that’s so wonderful. 

Nicole
It is. 

Liz
You know, and it’s really common for us to not have ourselves had a chronological approach to history in our own education. It was often really piecemeal at best and inconsistent and scanty which is why Emily got lost. You know we just also had very superficial you know knowledge about anything.

So in our desire to improve this understanding for our own children and give them a better sense of the sequence of the centuries, we naturally think we should always start at the very beginning, right? And that is fine if you only have one child to consider, but suppose you’re starting with older and younger children altogether. Charlotte Mason said it was okay to start, as Emily’s pointed out, at any time as long as you’re always moving forward and when you arrive at the present, you return to the beginning. So it’s kind of like a merry-go-round. It doesn’t matter where you hop on, you’re going around full circle, right? So each child joins in where the older students are, all ages are kept together and they’ll arrive at the beginning, maybe at a different age, but they will receive the whole picture. In Charlotte Mason’s day, her whole school moved together every year forward. 

Emily
And by whole school, we’re talking 40,000 children across the British Empire. 

Liz
You know, another thing that sometimes concerns us is if your country of origin was a different one from where your children are growing up. And this focus in history should be of the child’s own, the country where he lives. But other nations’ histories can be studied a bit as they come into the geography lesson or they’re going to be encountered when that country has events that involve the country that was being studied in school. 

So it can also be studied, another country’s stream of history perhaps…as a family you could do it outside of regular lessons if you want to or when a student is older and has a lot more interest in the parents’ country of origin, they could study it. But Charlotte Mason really thought that a superficial glimpse, and I think you touched on this, of everything left us to make unfair judgments when a better grasp of the history of our own culture can give us more appreciation of the scope and the complexity of other cultures. So to learn one thing well now prepares us to want to know other things well and not be satisfied with little tidbits. And when we value our own rich history, we can comprehend how much other people groups in the world, other cultures, value their own struggles and accomplishments and heroes. 

Emily
Yeah, and I think that and that is another benefit of these streams. It’s not just even the one neighboring country that expands to Western civilization. We get the ancients, which are generally living very differently than we are today. And I think that helps expand our purview.

Liz
Full picture.

Emily

Thank you for joining our discussion today. You may like to go back and listen to our earlier episodes on history, particularly episodes 11 and 12. You can find links to those as well as all of our resources for the Charlotte Mason history rotation in the show notes. As we continue to discuss Charlotte Mason curriculum this season, we invite you to read along with us in chapter 10 of volume six. We have created a reading schedule so you can keep up with us.

Next week, we will be looking at the specifics of history lessons in Form 1, Grades 1 through 3, or early Elementary School. We hope you’ll join us as we continue to spread the feast with the Charlotte Mason Method.