What in the world is a Plutarch lesson, and why is Plutarch an important part of a Charlotte Mason curriculum? Join us in today’s podcast episode to learn about upper elementary Citizenship lessons and learn why this ancient biographer plays a crucial role.
Listen Now:
Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)
ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List
Stories from the History of Rome by Beesly
Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. by Thomas North (Heritage Press)*
Anne White’s Plutarch Project (Amazon or free on AmblesideOnline.com)
Atlases mentioned:
- Ancient and Classical Geography*
- Rand McNally’s Atlas of the Ancient World, ed. by RR Palmer*
- Muir’s Historical Atlas of Ancient Medieval and Modern*
- Digital map resources at Grammaticus.co
Episode 178: Plutarch Immersion
*for out of print – OOP – or difficult to find books, try BookFinder.com
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
“An essential feature of the PUS program is the use of Plutarch’s lives of Greek and Roman soldiers, patriots, statesmen to give the heroic impulse to the citizen life. Plutarch’s lives therefore are read aloud to the second, third, and fourth forms.” This is what Miss Drury, Charlotte Mason’s second in command, tells us. But how do we help children approach this somewhat daunting book or lesson?
Nicole, can you share with us what Charlotte Mason assigned for Citizenship in Form 2, which is grades 4 through 6?
Nicole
Yeah. So in form 2B, which remember B is for beginners, so this is fourth grade, Citizenship begins with a single 20 minute weekly lesson using stories from the history of Rome by Mrs. Beesly. That’s what Charlotte Mason had assigned. These lively accounts give students an early understanding of civics through the lens of Roman history, offering both examples of leadership and cautionary tales.
Emily
Lots of cautionary tales.
Liz
And kids love this book, I rarely hear anything negative at all.
Nicole
Lively is the word. And then in Form 2A, that’s grades five and six, so these are your upper Form 2 students. Advanced. A for Advanced. Our schedule assigns one 30-minute lesson in Plutarch’s Lives. This is their first sustained study of statesmanship, where they see leaders facing difficult decisions, balancing personal judgment with the will of the people, you know, which way we’re going to go, and trying to act for the good or sometimes the harm of their communities. Lessons are read aloud, like you said, and with careful omissions, always. And narration allows students to process and reflect on both the events and the characters behind them. I found when we’ve talked in previous episodes about the questions at the end, this is such a good spot for that.
Now Charlotte Mason’s original timetables included a second weekly lesson for the Form 1A students.
Emily
2A.
Nicole
Sorry, 2A students. For the Citizen Reader by Arnold Forrester. So Charlotte Mason had six days of school and we only have five and when we condensed that we did have to lose that one lesson. So we’ve just saved that time slot for Form 3 and are using a similar book at that time.
Throughout Form 2, the emphasis is still on the inspiration, helping children admire what is noble and recognize the weight of their civic responsibility by gradually building the background that will give them context as they go forward in their education.
Emily
So that first year, they don’t dive right into Plutarch. I have found in my own home, and I think you as well, both of you, I found that reading Stories of the History of Rome, it is such a different mindset than we have today, right? To live for your state over your individual is just so foreign, but that is the highest ideal of Roman Citizenship, right? And so that kind of sets the groundwork, lays the groundwork for Plutarch. Don’t you think it helps us get into that frame of reference? It’s a good introduction.
Well, as Nicole has said, have one Plutarch or one excuse me, one Citizenship lesson per week and in Form 2B, 20 minutes is very ample and then that bumps up in 2A to 30 minutes. And as Nicole said, you know, in adapting from the six day week that Charlotte Mason had when we scaled our timetable, this is the only subject that we had to actually do a significant chop to to get everything to fit into five days. But we do feel that there is ample time to cover all of the material and the scope of ideas that are presented in Citizenship without doing that in Form 2A.
So the individual lesson format, what you will do as you come to either the Stories from the History of Rome by Beesly or a Plutarch lesson is really going to be similar to other book lessons. There’s going to be some recap at the very beginning of what happened or what we’ve read last time to connect the links in the chain as Charlotte Mason said, of our previous knowledge, because it’s read once a week, so it’s a whole week ago, to what today’s lesson is going to be. We also want to arouse their interest for the day’s lesson. I think this is crucial in Plutarch, particularly. Miss Jury tells us that writing new names on the board is very helpful. And so even having them up there as you are reading aloud, they’re kind of seeing, that’s how you say or how you spell Alcibiades or whatever…Demosthenes, whoever we’re talking about, but really helping fix those and get them a little peg when they come back. Yeah, we were talking about that person.
It is not necessary, I should say here, to define every unfamiliar term. There’s going to be a plethora of unfamiliar terms in Plutarch. There’s no need to do that. If they ask afterwards, what did that mean? you can absolutely supply them, but we don’t need to do that in advance of the lesson. But maybe talk about one very interesting or key concept, a little talk before the lesson to help them connect to it.
And then we read and narrate. And for Plutarch, we are likely going to read shorter bits, just like when they were in first grade and starting to narrate. It is such a different style of writing, especially in translation into English. We’re going to take smaller chunks and ask for more frequent narration. And it’s good that this is a read aloud lesson, because I feel like that facilitates stopping more frequently for narration.
And we’ve said it three or four times already, but these are always read aloud by the teacher. Unless there was an abridged or not really abridged but a prepared student edition that had necessary omissions taken out, or “suitable omissions” as Charlotte Mason said. But that’s for us because there are lots of graphic and disturbing things that Plutarch includes that we probably aren’t going to include for our fourth through sixth graders or even up through ninth grade when they have it.
And then after the reading and their narration there is discussion. So we, like you were saying, lots of questions. Our kids should have questions. We should have questions to them about what they think about such a thing. This is where they’re getting these ideas, right? So as we encounter complex characters in Plutarch, and that is why he chose these people, is they are very complex. Take time to talk over their actions and their motives with your students. Sometimes their motives are bad and their actions seem good and vice versa.
And we want to let our students share their thoughts without telling them what they ought to think about it. Charlotte Mason does say, “now Plutarch is like the Bible in this, that he does not label the actions of his people as good or bad, but leaves the conscience and judgment of his readers to make that classification.” So if you get nervous about your children rightly interpreting whether something is good or bad, it’s really on the same level as the Bible when you read through judges like it is very clear these people who are supposed to be the people of God are making terrible choices and displeasing to the Lord. But the authors don’t come out and say that so we can trust that our children are going to see that justice clearly influence our guys they do in their Bible lessons.
So the objectives for a Citizenship lesson at this level is to inspire the child to live up to the highest ideals and their greatest potential. Also that they should begin to understand the challenges of statesmanship. Questions are hardly ever cut and dried, right?
Liz
No simple answers.
Emily
And also that they start to face the problem of good and evil. And you can really see why Charlotte Mason thought this particular subject was just imperative for students to be learning and grappling with these ideas as they’re developing their own moral character.
So as far as teacher prep, I think it is most important to read Plutarch ahead of time to yourself and to understand it before you try reading aloud to your…I remember mom, you asked me years and years ago to read to one of my brothers, my very young brothers, and so we just had a print copy and she would just hand it to me and be like, here, read this for this many minutes. And I would read and I’d be like, I have no idea what I’m reading. And that makes it more challenging for someone listening, right? You need to read ahead because you need to know what you’re going to admit. You also need to know what he is saying so you can make your expression fit that way.
I also think that good prep is to find some good maps. A lot of times people are going different places or you know in Rome there’s different groups of people warring and where they are just to help set this give them context in the setting of the story. For me I do review unfamiliar vocabulary and phrases that are not common. I don’t discuss those all with my students but I want to know so if they have a question I can answer and also to help me understand what he’s talking about.
And then also I try to come up with one or two discussion questions that I may or may not use depending on if they have some, but if it’s just crickets after I finish, then I want to ask and push into something. So I will jot a note to myself for those.
And then as far as resources, we have the Stories from the History of Rome by Mrs. Beesly that is in reprint. This is the Yesterday’s Classics edition. You see it’s not very long. And as mom said, this is a favorite, both my boys who have read it, it’s been the highlight of their week.
Anne White has also put together. Now we do have on our website a list of the Plutarch’s lives that Charlotte Mason assigned and they were a very finite list. What is it five years and there’s three. So there’s 15 out of the 40. Two of the lives are spread over two terms. So it’s 13 lives only. So Anne does cover some that Charlotte Mason never assigned. So you might want to consider that. They’re also available free online to download and print. But if you want them bound, you can get those on Amazon. And she does a great job. I always look at her guides for teacher prep for myself. She does a great job of even helping me kind of narrow in on what I might want to omit and vocabulary and describing things and also giving us dates for when various events happen.
Liz
And kind of what to focus on.
Emily
Yeah, and then one addition that we really love is this beautiful copy of Thomas North. And he is a little harder to understand than Dryden, but he is much more literary and this is what Charlotte Mason preferred as well as many authors. Like C.S. Lewis you know thought Dryden was an abomination and the North was just good. This is done by the Heritage Press you can still sometimes get these but they’re out of print. It’s a two volume, and again we’re only reading 13 of the lives that are in here. And no they don’t have to be read in a certain order and Charlotte Mason never assigned the comparison. He put two lives back-to-back and then compared so we don’t read those parts.
And then as far as other resources a classical ancient Atlas would be helpful. This is actually the one Charlotte Mason assigned, and you can still find used copies of it. It’s called Atlas of Ancient and Classical Geography. But there’s a couple others. This one also is out of print, but there are many editions – the Rand MacNally Atlas of the Ancient World edited by R.R. Palmer. These were produced for years and years and they’re ancient atlases so information doesn’t change totally much although sometimes I know excavations happen but they are chronological and there is lots of information about them as well. I just use this for even Ancient History in our History lessons. But so I look for ones that are published in the 1960s or earlier. Another one that was recommended to me that’s also very good is Muir’s Historical Atlas of Ancient Medieval and Modern. So I just kind of look for the best map.
There are there’s a whole website dedicated to Plutarch that a lot of home schoolers use called Grammaticus. He has links to some really excellent maps for Plutarch. And so I have some of ones that we use the most laminated and in a folder that I pull out so we can look at these things more closely.
Liz
And the maps are important because these people are setting up battle lines and fighting over areas. So it’s just good for them to have this picture in their mind what we’re talking about.
Emily
So, mom, what common questions do people have for lessons at this level?
Liz
One of the most basic ones, I think, is like, I just can’t pronounce all those names. You remember that? And I will just say, try to work it out so that you can at least just be consistent with yourself. I don’t think anyone from 2,000 years ago is going to put you on Facebook or anything for being inept. So just be you know, however, you guys want to say it.
Emily
And you can Google, I mean you can know like most common players that you’re gonna see and also the Anne White guides tell you here are the people that come up in those, so if you can pronounce those you’ll be good.
Liz
And you’ll get used to it is all I can say. It’s just like any foreign language, once you’re pronouncing it you start to get more comfortable.
I think it’s really important to think in this subject especially how, like every other subject, Mason always moves from the general to the specific. So they’ve had the stories and accounts of real individuals for years by the time they get here. And this is just a deeper inspection into individual characters, right? And their strengths and weaknesses. So the children can observe their wisdom and their failures and how people are at the mercy whole regions of people sometimes are at the mercy of their leaders.
Anyway, I know there are so many rumors about how hard Plutarch is and it produces a lot of anxiety. Sometimes in consults I say the word Plutarch and mothers literally gasp, you know, they’re like, no, I don’t want to do it. I think this is mostly due to our lack of exposure, don’t you? In our own education, it really is no more daunting than the prospect of teaching a six-year-old how to read or getting through math.
Emily
It might actually be easier than teaching some six-year-old how to read.
Liz
Yeah. So I think it does help, like you said, to make yourself more familiar. The lives in Plutarch are not really terribly long page-wise, right? I personally have sat for 30 to maybe 45 minutes and read through a whole life in an afternoon. Just to get familiar with the big picture, I’ve even suggested if you’re not inclined to do that, I do recommend it, but even looking up Wikipedia and getting a thumbnail sketch of the person so you have some general idea of who we’re gonna be talking about. Because this is gonna be all term, right?
And I think also it helps that it’s a weekly lesson. So you only have to prepare once a week and how many pages would you say you cover in a lesson, like maybe three?
Emily
Yeah, maybe.
Liz
Two and a half sometimes.
Emily
I was thinking about it is like chewing or eating an elephant one bite at a time
Liz
I was literally about to open my mouth and say that.
Emily
If we like took all of the actual reading aloud time and put it together in that 30 minute Plutarch lesson, it maybe comes out to 10 minutes. So there’s lots of time to do a setup, a lot of time for their narration and discussion afterwards.
Liz
And just like taking your kids for swimming lessons for the first time or anything new, they’re not usually as intimidated as we are and it’s really good to try to not let them in on all your insecurity about this. They’ve encountered old language already in Pilgrim’s Progress and a lot of the other things they’ve been reading so this is just the next step for them. It’s just not as scary of a proposition to them, especially if you don’t…you know. Anyway, I think that like you said, slow and just one paragraph at a time. Most of his paragraphs are pretty meaty with the narrations, multiple narrations. Just take it easy and work through the lesson as slow as you need to.
So anyway, I definitely think that for discussion at the end save five minutes at least. It’s so important.
Emily
And he…Plutarch goes on a lot of rabbit trails. And so if you are running short on time and thinking, I’m not going to get through this Life, you can make those omissions. They’re not all relevant to our purposes.
Liz
You might even, I used to sometimes make a note to myself that if we are running out of lesson time, there would be a couple of paragraphs that I would skip because it wasn’t really relevant to the story. It’s just an interesting side light.
Emily
Yeah. So keep in mind those lesson objectives that we have for what we want our children to wrestle with, which ideas you want to wrestle with, and that can also help you make more omissions if needed.
We hope you’ll feel more confident to give Plutarch a try after today’s discussion. Next week, we’ll be talking about the other important aspects of Citizenship that are added into Forms 3 through 4. In the meantime, please check out the show notes for links to the resources that we mentioned in this episode, including our previous episodes on Plutarch, number 27 and 178. The latter of those is a demonstration of a Plutarch lesson that Nicole gave with her two girls. So we hope you’ll join us next week as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.