Living Books. These two words are almost synonymous with a Charlotte Mason education. In today’s episode we begin our discussion of Literature in a Charlotte Mason curriculum and try to get to the heart of how she used living books in literature lessons.
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
And today we are turning our attention to the subject of literature as we work our way through volume six, chapter 10 and discuss a Charlotte Mason curriculum this season. We have prepared a season 11 reading schedule for you that you can find linked in our show notes if you’d like to read along with us and stay up to date with us. We invite you to do that because it is so important to read Charlotte Mason’s words for yourself.
So today we are talking about literature. And when I think of what a Charlotte Mason education is, I usually first think of living books. I think that’s the case for many, many people. It was a common refrain that we used to see. What are we? What’s the answer? Living books. Yes, oh yes. Just like “Jesus” is the Sunday school answer, “living books” is the Charlotte Mason answer. So literature is a subject, of course, that is entirely made up of books and Charlotte Mason was very particular about what books children read for their literature or as they’re called in the very earliest years, “tales” or “reading” lessons. These books she said must furnish the mind with ideas because children take hold of beautiful images clothed in beautiful words. Living books give them a real sense of other times, places and others’ lives that give scope to their imagination. It entertains and delights them all the days of their lives. So she’s talking to us too.
Liz
Yeah. Thank goodness.
Emily
And books help us all as persons form fair judgments and opinions. Charlotte Mason said, we probably read Shakespeare in the first place for his stories. Afterwards for his characters, as we go on reading this world teacher, lines of insight and beauty take possession of us and unconsciously mold our judgments of men and things and of the great issues of life. Probably not a lot of us would include Shakespeare in what we think of as living books, but it definitely is what Charlotte Mason thought of. So we’re trying to orient ourselves to what she was after.
In a nutshell, literature is the means by which people are educated. So we could say it is the core of the curriculum, but that seems like what we’ve been saying about every subject we’ve gotten to so far.
In volume one, Charlotte Mason admonishes teachers that we have two duties. We are to see that every child acquires the habit of reading and two, that he does not fall into slipshod habits of reading. So we fail in the first of these duties when we underestimate what the child is capable of and we give him twaddle or books that talk down to him. But when given excellent books, children learn that knowledge is supremely attractive and reading is delightful.
I would say slipshod habits include inattention, and also careless enunciation. So our mind working on the book can be a slipshod habit, but also how we read. As with all lessons, we read materials once and we ask the children to narrate and that helps strengthen their attention. So that’s how we accomplish this duty. But they also learn to read beautifully. The words are beautiful in and of themselves.
And for these reasons, Charlotte Mason said that he should have no book which is not a child’s classic in the early forms, and his literature throughout his education are classics suitable for reading at any age.
Nicole
I’m just thinking it’s such a lofty thing compared to what I grew up with. So I want to share this whole progression, what it looks like when a student begins at the very beginning in form one, first grade, and then goes through high school. And really, we read living books for all subjects, right? But we really are talking about literature, which has kind of very specific things. These are not just any old book, right?
Okay, so in Form 1, so that’s grades 1 through 3, everything begins with a story. First comes the fairy tales and the fables, all read aloud. And the second and third year of that Form 1, grades 2 and 3, Pilgrim’s Progress is added and the first heroic myths appear, all of them taken slowly, all of them narrated. The aim is really delight, even though some of those books, I just already listed a book you might think is little hard.
Okay. Then we go to form two. So grades four to six. And now the timeline or our timetable is granting a little bit more space. And the menu expands – Shakespeare arrives this point. One play every term. And Shakespeare stays for the rest of their school life.
A friendly English literature survey and a mythology spine run alongside Sir Walter Scott already here. And a steady diet of ballads and narrative poems. Children begin to read in character and they handle more of their books on their own at this point.
Okay, then they get to Form 3, so grades 7 and 8. And the same pillars hold, we’ve got Shakespeare, a literature spine, and we have Age of Fable, but the supporting works grow stiffer now. There is an occasional essay that shows up at this point for the first time. We have travel and historical novels that help widen perspective. The students now narrate most readings in writing as well as some oral narrations. I think at that point we almost have to remember to get those in.
Then form four, grade nine, we’re just gonna start high school and still every strand in this is rising a notch. Some of the Shakespeare shifts to tragedies and late histories at this point. Scott is gonna yield to the longer Waverly novels. Essays are added and poetry selections move from the narrative ballads of earlier years to later Victorian pieces. With the start of high school work, the students add a commonplace book. So they’re kind of collecting some of their favorite striking passages and things like that.
Okay, form five, that’s grades 10 and 11. The list of assigned books, as I saw it, actually shortens just a little bit.
Emily
Because the books are longer.
Nicole
Because the books are much longer. And much denser, we would say. One verse drama. Notice I didn’t say Shakespeare. One verse drama still anchors a term, yet only in the programs that we have only one in three is Shakespeare now and the rest are Greek tragedies or renaissance plays like Edward the second. A modern verse, a modern verse, anthology sticks with them as part of their daily poetry and Scott now only appears once a year making room for Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell and other authors and essays now show up every single term.
And then in Form 6, so this is grade 12, their final year, their expectations even peak more, the drama still anchors every term, but now the Greek tragedy really dominates and Shakespeare drops to what we could see from the programs one in every four…this is where Shakespeare shows up. Essays or reflective prose are assigned every term and poetry anthologies appear almost always. There’s also now once a year an epic classic such as Paradise Lost, Dante, Chaucer. And I think at this time students are doing a little bit more silent narrations and things like that. The idea is that all of this has become a habit for their life.
So they’ve really gone over these 12 years from listening to reading to reading it all, from fairy tales to world classics. But really, we see over all those years that verse drama, every term, daily poetry, literature chosen to shadow the period of history except in Form 1. We talked about that in our last series. And what Charlotte Mason said, the steady assurance that each small guest assimilates what he can. And by graduation the student has lived with the best authors of the past and present and has practiced attentive reading and thoughtful response. And Miss Mason would say, he’s begun to think like a true citizen and a statesman in the best sense. I love that part.
It really is so wild to watch the progression she had in mind. That she actually, we take this from the programs. We know what she was assigning and what she had in mind for the scope of a child’s whole education. It’s just, it’s massive. It’s just wild.
Liz
Which was actually, when I was thinking about this topic, the very words that came to mind were the world of literature is vast, it is immense. And just that Charlotte Mason concentrates on the most outstanding works and authors and poets and plays. And the tying together of the literature and the history, I think. It just enhances both of those subjects tremendously. In literature, we find the thoughts and the ideas expressed by men in different times and places. And we discover they also have a lot in common with us.
Basically, in literature, a child’s world explodes or expands to include a lot more than he would have ever considered or met with in his own home or his own town or his own country. I think it introduces them to not just what people have done, but how they thought and how they felt and what motivated them and basically who other people were. And I don’t think there’s any area or pursuit in life that would not benefit from a rich lifelong love affair with literature.
And I just love the way she carefully constructs things. You might think your second grader is dealing with some tough things, but it will toughen him up for the next level until what Nicole was amazed at in high school is not any harder for them to bear at that age than it was when they were seven.
Emily
Yeah. And all of that, I think, shows why Charlotte Mason thought that literature was our great teacher and that we have much to learn from books.
If you want to know what these principles for literature look like and actual lessons for your children, please join us the next few weeks as we explore each level of literature lessons. You might also like to listen to our older episodes on literature and poetry, numbers 36 and 236. You can find links to those episodes and the reading schedule that I mentioned today in the show notes. Thank you for listening today as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.