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What do high school Citizenship lessons look like in the Charlotte Mason method? How do these lessons prepare children for the rest of their lives? On today’s podcast, we’re discussing these questions and more, so stay tuned.
ADE on YouTube *Video for this particular episode was lost, so on YouTube it is an audio recording only. Thank you for understanding; we will be back on video next week!
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 In Forms 5 and 6, so that’s high school, 10th, 11th and 12th grades, the subject of Citizenship changes titles, thankfully, because I won’t have to say it anymore, and it was called on the programs Everyday Morals and Economics.
Liz I was impressed with how you said magnanimity, and I was really glad that you had to say that.
Emily So Nicole, will you tell us what the subject now is going to cover at this level?
Nicole Yeah, the shift in title actually reflects the shift in focus a little bit from…well, we’ll just talk about that. So in Form 5, so this is grades 10 and 11…had to think about that for a minute. Students read the second book of Ourselves now, and they’re going to read that over the course of those two years. And here, Miss Mason takes the discussion of the personal character and responsibility to a more mature territory in a lot of cases, exploring the moral life, exercises of will and the individual’s place in the common good.
But alongside of Ourselves, students read works on political theory, economics and social responsibility, and I’m going to list a few of them for you, just as examples. Things that she assigned were The Crown of Wild Olive by Ruskin, The Rights and Duties of a Citizen by Maldon, The Economic World by Burns, The Duties of Man by Mazzini, or The Dawn of World Order by Smith and Garnett. Some years a third book was added, such as Bacon’s New Atlantis or Pope’s Essays on Man, Carlyle’s essays. We saw the essays also in our literature episodes.
Now in Form 6 students moved on to even more advanced work. Have y’all noticed that Plutarch is not in this list mentioned here? And they often read from two or three categories each term. In one group, they may encounter Plato’s Trial and Death of Socrates. There’s one called Education of the Young, Socratic Dialogs. And then another group, they studied works like the State and the Nation by Jenks, and Economics for the General Reader by Clay Everybody’s Business by Withers. And then occasionally you had a third book that included things like Boethius’ On the Consolation of Philosophy and Howard’s The Proper Study of Mankind, or Murray’s The Ordeal of this Generation. I love that title.
Liz You mean, other generations have had ordeals?
Nicole It’s worth noting that Miss Mason sometimes indicated that a certain upper form title should be borrowed from a library. I loved this point because it kind of acknowledged that not everything was available to her, either.
Emily Or maybe because, you know, her goal was that they would leave their education with a library, and maybe it’s a worthy book to read, but it’s not something you’re going to want to have on your library shelf.
Nicole Yeah. And she would say, Well, this one’s out of print, but go find it at the library. I loved that because it was like, No, this is a good book to read, go find it, you know. So that was good. So the lessons focused a lot on the discussion or reflection, rather than just narration alone. We’ll see in Composition you’ve got some tie-in there too.
Emily Yes, yeah, yeah. We really see that in their exams, or the exam questions that were set there. She is drawing a lot more in their composition from this subject than previously.
Well, the lesson format at this level is just twice a week for 30 minutes both times. So instead of having a shorter lesson for all these things, both of these take precedent, and Plutarch is gone, right?
The individual lessons are really structured like other book lessons, but there’s going to be more independence at this level. They’re going to be working a lot, reading and thinking and writing a lot more independently, and it should be a habit by now for them to start every lesson by recalling what they did. My husband is a wonderful example of this. He does it every time he picks up a read aloud, even if it’s been months. Let’s remember what’s been happening, you know. And so that can become a habit, and should be by this time.
And then they’re going to be doing reading and narrating. And most often it’s going to be written narration at this level, right? There are about three to four maximum books per day, book lessons per day, and they were to do at least…
Liz In all subjects.
Emily In all subjects, at least two, at least two narrations that were to be written each day. So really, the majority of their lessons are going to be written at this time.
Nicole Yeah.
Emily So the thing that you need to do as a teacher is to keep abreast of what they’re reading, because most of this work is going to be independent, right?
Nicole Right.
Emily We should have understanding sympathy, we should have ongoing discussion with them. I really like, not just maybe reading like, Oh, this is what they’re reading this week, but to have read and digested and thought about the book myself so that I can have formed thoughts already to have discussions with them.
Our objectives for these lessons, again, as we have been saying all along, is that Charlotte Mason’s quote, children gather that little code of principles which should guide their lives from these lessons. Everyday morals. That is what all of us, walking out every single day of our lives, right? Our moral code informs every decision that we make, every encounter that we have with people. So we’re giving them knowledge to fit them to live for the good of their neighbors in the world. Knowledge of themselves again, Ourselves is going even deeper than it did previously, knowledge of others and knowledge of government and living together.
And I really like the scope that you laid out for us. You’ll notice like, yes, there’s some ancient philosophy about government, the Socratic dialogs are all about, you know, what’s the good of the state for the state? How do people live together? And, you know, Socrates shooting down everything that gets brought before him. But then what it was, the one that you said, like this moment, the problem, or deal, the ordeal of this generation, ordeal of this generation, something like, things that are very…We should be balancing not just old, ancient things, but what’s in our cultural zeitgeist, what problems and ethical dilemmas are we grappling with as a society today? We should be spanning that both together.
So our teacher prep is to determine the amount of work to be accomplished in each lesson. So that’s going to be based on the material that we’re assigned, right? So we want to forecast so that they’re not reading too quickly or too slowly, maybe. Pre-read as possible, you know, as much as possible for ourselves to be able to enter into those discussions and then engage our students. We want to read their narrations, if they’re mostly writing them down and then have discussion. It doesn’t have to be in the moment right after the lesson at this age, right? They’re holding these thoughts, and that helps them, you know, apply things that they’ve read in their books to actual everyday life, right?
So for resources, just like Charlotte Mason assigned a bunch of different things, we assign a bunch of different things. So I don’t have a whole lot to show you today, but again, Riverbend press’ edition of Ourselves. This is book two, and so I like to present students with their own copy that they can keep, you know, and it’s a book…I think that’s probably the volume I’ve read the most of hers, and every time I come through, I get struck to the heart by some problem that I have that I need to
Liz It wasn’t really just written for kids.
Emily Right. And yes, to have that as a reference, we do like to assign economics texts, government now, like more inner workings of our federal government, primary sources. We get asked a lot about do they read the Constitution or the Magna Carta or the Federalist Papers, and this is a great place to put those kinds of things. And then one book that I really like, kind of fitting with Our Generation’s Dilemma, because it hits very close–
Nicole Our Generation’s Ordeal.
Emily Sorry…interesting that those two words are synonymous in my head. But Tim Keller’s Generous Justice, I think is very challenging, and I think it will challenge you, regardless of where you fall on the perspective of how we use our resources for community. But again, that is a huge part of how we live out and live in the world and in society, and primarily for Christian families, because he is taking his principles from scripture, but I love to assign that for 12th graders, just to really think practically and maybe question some of their assumptions. And, you know, get them thinking about these things that are really going to be front and center for the rest of their lives.
Nicole Yeah, you can’t really consider that any of these books that I listed are just like, go along books. They are books to challenge.
Liz Yeah, and they’re not necessarily all appropriate for today.
Nicole Yeah right.
Emily Yeah right, yes. And I do think like with just the problems facing our generation, to think about them through a biblical lens, and then what that looks like, because it’s often not what we’ve grown up assuming.
Liz And we have found many good resources for economics, too.
Emily Yeah. So would you like to tell us any challenges or questions that you get…
Liz I think just some things to think about. You know, sometimes at this age, some students are prone to push back. Why do I have to do this? On the other hand, I would have to say – especially boys, but girls too, no stereotype types here – just really, actually take a great interest in a lot of these things. They’ve heard people talking about all these big ideas, and now they’re starting to grapple with it themselves and in the book Ourselves. What I really like is all those moral dilemmas they’ve been faced with in Plutarch and in their novels and everything else. She brings it home to them and gets them thinking about what it really means to lie or to obfuscate or to shirk your responsibilities. And she talks a lot about their will and their conscience, and I think it’s excellent for them to understand their own motivations and what they need to be.
But I think especially in these last couple of forms of school, their high school years is where we start to see the fruit from all the previous forms come together. They have been evaluating characters and history and literature, weighing those against their own values all this time and that they’ve been exposed to all this rich literature, and so now their challenge is to bring their own ideas to bear. What are they going to do in their own lives? And I think this comes out a lot in their essays and compositions. We can be encouraging them to some of the ideas they’ve gotten from Citizenship, to include those in some of the topics that they’re given to write.
Nicole And don’t you think that at this level, you know, you really try to impress the point that if we could read these books, we would be a huge blessing to our children, because these are really philosophical books and challenging, not just challenging in, Can I read this?, but challenging in I’ve got to chew through this and think about it. And I was just thinking that maybe this would be a really good area to have a group of kids who are also the same age, and to once a month or once a term, meet and be able to discuss some of these wonderful ideas.
Liz Yeah, that’d be wonderful.
Emily We are so glad you joined us for the discussion today. Next week, we will conclude our Citizenship series as we answer the most common practical questions that we hear about this subject. Thanks for joining us as we continue to spread the Feast of the Charlotte Mason method.
Is Plutarch all there is to Citizenship? Not at all. Middle school students in Forms 3-4 take up the definite study of their local, state, and national government, as well as turn their attention upon themselves to learn how they are capable of engaging the world and their neighbors. Tune in to the podcast today to hear more.
*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 Well, Charlotte Mason tells us that “children familiar with the great idea of a state in the sense not of a government, but of the people learn readily enough about the laws, customs and government of their country learn too with great interest something about themselves, mind and body, heart and soul, because they feel it is well to know what they have in them to give to their country.”
Nicole, can you share with us what Charlotte Mason used to give children these ideas?
Nicole Yes. In Forms 3 and 4, they continue with Plutarch, which was begun just for two years before this. And most of the time, the same Life was assigned from Form 2A through Form 4. So fourth grade through ninth grade. Sorry, fifth grade through ninth grade.
Again, with those omissions. Only occasionally do we see a different Life substituted in Form 3 or 4. I’m just not sure that that’s really necessary. I think in my home school room, I think we’re good to just all stick together.
Alongside Plutarch, students began reading the first book of Charlotte Mason’s book, Ourselves, that she wrote to the children. And then they read that book over the course of three years. So a small amount every week in that. This book maps out human nature and its noble possibilities and its weaknesses so that students can better understand their own character and the part it plays in the common life of their community. It’s something we recommend for moms too.
Liz Yeah, we all need that.
Nicole Charlotte Mason also assigned Form 3 students, so these are your seventh and eighth grade students, an additional book that explored the workings of society and the responsibilities of the individual within it. These included titles such as Social and Industrial Life, The Golden Fleece, Household and Citizen, Who’s My Neighbor? So while the exact book varied over the years, the goals remain the same with that. And we..I’ll tell you what we used in a minute.
In Form 4, they continue this work with additional books, including such as The Citizen, Days to Remember, The English-Speaking Nations. I don’t know how you say…is it Helles the Forerunner? Or Sesame and Lilies. Again, this deepens their students’ sense of history, culture, civic identity. So instead of using those options, there’s a lot of things there I guess you could pull from. But in Forms 3 and 4, we suggest the Young Citizen Reader by Paul…
Emily …Reinsch. I don’t know how you say it.
Nicole This has been updated by Lisa Ripperton.
Emily Of Yesterday’s Classics.
Nicole Of Yesterday’s Classics, yes.
Emily And we make that change why, Nicole?
Nicole Because Charlotte Mason originally scheduled a book similar to this in Form 1A…
Emily 2A
Nicole 2A. I keep doing that. In 2A, but in our five-day timetable we just did not have room for that second lesson in that grade level so we have pushed that book up to this level.
Anything you want to say about that?
Liz Also because this is geared more to Americans, right?
Emily Well, yes, we update because we, of course, need these are to give their ideas about their local community, state and federal government.
Liz That are different from the UK.
Emily Absolutely. So we do need a resource that is applicable. We, yes, instead of doing the variety that she did at this age, we’re giving that foundation that they did not get into a that they would have in her programs. Yeah.
Nicole So also later in the programs, there was a new element that appeared in Form 3 and 4 called Life and Its Beginnings by Webb. And I just mention it because people often write me and ask about health class. I always tell them, I really think Ourselves covers everything that would be needed in health class, but I thought it was interesting that this was here.
Emily That she saw that more in Citizenship.
Nicole Yeah. Yeah, so that was interesting. So yeah, that’s and it maybe is important to note that was way later, well after Charlotte Mason was gone.
Emily So yeah, I guess we think of health as more of a science adjacent subject. But she considered more of…yeah because we have duties to keep our body in good order to help the citizens around us.
Nicole And really she talks about you know, the things that maybe are listed more crassly if you look at what are the health requirements for a high school or a young age. She really does cover them. But in a much more…
Emily …holistic.
Nicole Yes!
Liz Sophisticated.
Emily Yes, exactly.
Nicole Purity and exercise…
Emily It’s actually quite astonishing what…and the Victorian era we think of as so silent on this that I was impressed when I read it. I was like, she’s really getting into these issues.
Well, OK, so that’s the big picture of what these three grades would be studying. And we discussed how we tweak what we assign. But the format is one 30-minute lesson, which we suggest using for Plutarch because that’s such a meaty lesson. And then one 20-minute lesson. But you’ll notice there’s, you know, a Citizenship reader and Ourselves. And so really those, since they’re read over three years, have such small amounts each term, you can alternate weeks with those in that 20-minute lesson. That works out really well. And we do, well, I’ll mention it later, but we do have a forecast that shows how very doable that is.
So the individual lessons, again, are very similar to other book lessons. We recap the previous lesson at the beginning, we want to, as a teacher, arouse their interest in what they’re about to encounter. They read and narrate and discuss. And just a note, I’ve said this before, but Plutarch is always read allowed to the students so that we can make those suitable admissions. The only exception would be an edition that was already formatted with them.
And then Miss Drury, who followed Charlotte Mason over the House of Education. She tells us that Ourselves is read “to herself by each girl in forms three to four without comment.” And it’s, I should make two notes here. The “girl” in Form 3-4, because at this age in England at the time, boys were going into university or trade school. And so her amazing programs were for girls. It’s just incredible that she valued their minds so much at that time.
But “without comment”, because we don’t want to insist on the moral for the child, you know we don’t want to apply that to our own child. This book is dealing with the sacred inner workings of a person, and so we need to give the students space to wrestle with that on their own.
The objectives for Citizenship lessons at this time. Charlotte Mason tells us that children gather that little code of principles which shall guide their lives. So that’s what we’re after. We’re aiming to give them these principles that they will use for the rest of their lives to make their decisions. So our objectives should be to give knowledge that’s fit to fit them to live for the good of their neighbors and for the good of the world. That knowledge covers knowledge of themselves, Ourselves being the primary text for that, knowledge of others, Ourselves is very informative of that, but then we have, you know, far distant others like Plutarch and thinking about what challenges lie in when we think about society and that comes through the Citizenship reader, so they’re getting knowledge of the government and what it means to live together in society.
As far as teacher prep, again, I’m going to, well, if you need a longer discussion of this, you can go back and listen to our Form 2 episode if you haven’t. But you need to pre-read Plutarch. It is very challenging, I think, for us who have not grown up with this kind of education to jump right into that and read it cold in turkey or whatever we would want to say, you know, just first upon first opening the book. “Open and go” is not Plutarch. We should not have that desire for such a thing.
I think it’s helpful to forecast the lessons because otherwise we’re gonna like these books that are meant to be savored and really mulled over in small chunks if we just used how much time we had we would probably cover them way too quickly and so really looking at okay this book is spread out over three years, how much do I really need to read in a single lesson? And then I would say your other teacher prep is be ready for discussion because this is where the rubber meets the road and your kids are grappling with things that they never really had to grapple with before, you know, as they’re developing their opinions.
Nicole And at this form level, they’re having higher thinking.
Emily Yes, so true.
Nicole At this level, they’re really going to be seeing some things that they maybe wouldn’t have seen.
Emily Exactly.
As far as resources, Ourselves…you can get any Charlotte Mason edition, but I really like these and because they are such a personal thing, this is something my family has done, is we’ve gifted volume one only to our Form 3 students and then when they get to Form 5, when they start reading, they can read book two. But Riverbend Press has published very…
Liz Nice quality.
Emily These are going to endure time. There’s sewn bindings and in a nice hardcover edition and then having the books individually bound is such a nice thing. So this is something that I hope they will keep with them and take with them for their lives.
Here is The Young Citizens Reader that we were mentioning for American students. Obviously if you live in another country, you’re going to have to find a Citizenship book, but it’s helpful to look at the table of contents and this really covers all the things that Charlotte Mason’s British citizen reader does, but for American students. And this is reprinted by Yesterday’s Classics. We have created Citizenship breakdowns, which do the forecasting for ourselves and the Citizenship reader for you if you want to save some time preparing.
And then I mentioned a lot of our Plutarch resources in our previous episode, but very briefly Anne White’s guides are very helpful, especially for teacher prep. And then the Heritage Press edition of Plutarch’s Lives by Thomas North. Thomas North’s translation is the preferred translation of Charlotte Mason and many others.
Nicole Preferred by Charlotte Mason.
Emily Preferred by Charlotte Mason, thank you. And I also mentioned multiple historical atlases that really help with the study of Plutarch. So if you are interested in looking at those, you can check the show notes for links that we’ll just put in, but you can also go see examples by listening to our last episode on Form 2.
Liz You know I think with that young citizens reader, I thought, my goodness, my kids are, this is going to be really dry and boring. I was always surprised at how interested they were in it, you know, because they…they’ve never thought about why do we have running water and electricity turning on in our house because those don’t talk about utilities and you know the mail systems and all those kind of things and just being aware of the difference between one town and another and how they decide to do things. Anyway I just thought I’d put that plug in there because honestly local government plays a much more intimate part of our lives.
Emily And we can actually do things to affect change for us and our neighbor.
Liz And this is probably just reinforcing what you guys have already said but by seventh grade, children are beginning to be more introspective and aware of their body image and observe health and unhealthy people, you know, in their lives and wonder. They start having a lot of thoughts that they don’t necessarily share. And I just love how Charlotte Mason kind of steps in as their silent aunt who gives them little counsels, you know, about what to think about for their future and all potentials that they have as a person, because my goodness you know at that age a lot of children struggle with thinking how am I ever gonna cope with this stuff I don’t think I can do it and I just think it’s beautiful how she presents such an amazing picture of what they’re becoming as they grow up because that’s a hard stage you know to move from being a kid to being an adult.
Emily Yeah.
Liz Yeah sometimes I think I’m still in it. And I just like that she doesn’t serve it up to them as like lectures, you know, it just tells little stories and just gets the ideas across.
I think the biggest stumbling point at first with kids is the unfamiliarity, she uses kind of this analogy of your body, your person as a country. And she calls it Mansoul, which I think she took from Bunyan’s book, The Holy War, which by the way, it really helped me to get more into Ourselves when I actually took the time to read The Holy War.
But anyway. She just gives this perspective of your whole person – all the realms and spheres of your life like there are so many different aspects to a country. Definitely don’t try prying out. I think Emily, you pointed this out really good, but children like to have their independence and they like to have their own personal thoughts. And I think even their written narrations are maybe not necessarily any of your business, I guess.
Emily Yeah. I actually, with my son, his narration notebook has all of narrations from all different subjects, just one after the other, except Ourselves is a separate one. And I wanted it to be more like a journal for him to reflect on and I’m not even reading it yet. Like I feel like I need permission to read his grapplings.
Liz And I, you know, there’s so much value in writing self-reflection and yeah, I just, would tell my kids to write it as a diary entry and I promised them that I would not sneak, peek, poke or snoop, whatever.
I think that this whole area of the book of Ourselves, it’s read really slowly over five years altogether, but in these forms they’re just getting through the first book, the first half. But I think it’s inspiring to them as a person in a way that social media will never be. She gives such an awareness of their being made in the image of God and their relationship to their creator. I think that is what it’s most valuable for.
Nicole And in previous episodes, we’ve talked about literature and Charlotte Mason pulls a lot of those characters that they may have read into this book, too.
Liz Yeah, especially in book two. But she basically starts with their outer self and works her way inward. So by the time they get to the end, they’re talking about their heart and I mean, their conscience and their will and those kind of topics.
Emily Yeah. And one other practical question you might have if you’ve got, you know, a seventh and a ninth grader and your ninth grader, like most of the time we have a new student coming into a book we just have them jump right in, and I would say Ourselves is not that book. It should be read sequentially from the beginning through the end and because it is personal to really read on their own right. So don’t combine those lessons.
Thanks for tuning in today. We have links in the show notes for all the resources that we have discussed this week. We hope you’ll join us next time when we will finish our look at Citizenship lessons in high school as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.
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.
*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.
The study of Plutarch’s lives is a distinctive part of a Charlotte Mason curriculum. But why did she insist on reading these verbose biographies of ancient Greek and Roman leaders? In today’s podcast we’ll discuss the principles of the subject of Citizenship and learn why Plutarch is relevant for today’s students.
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 We hope you’ve had a wonderful holiday break and enjoyed the conference talks from Morgan and Cathy that we’ve shared over our break. As we continue our series through a Charlotte Mason curriculum, we hope you’re reading along with us and deepening your understanding of the Charlotte Mason method. And you can find our reading schedule to keep up with us in our show notes.
This month we’re turning our attention to Citizenship, a subject that Charlotte Mason believed was crucial to developing our children’s moral imagination. So we thought we would take some time at the beginning of our series to talk about why Citizenship is so important in its place in the whole curriculum as a whole.
Charlotte Mason believed that Citizenship as a subject was crucial to developing a child’s moral compass. In fact, her ultimate goal for education was for a child to grow up to be a magnanimous or generous-hearted citizen of his own country and beyond, to see his purpose not to live for himself but to serve God and his neighbor. Essentially that’s what it means to be a good citizen in her definition.
So students begin to get their ideas of Citizenship from many of their lessons in Form 1. Charlotte Mason tells us that these ideas come most notably from their Tales and Fables, which is their Form 1 Literature, and also History, especially biography. And of course, their Bible lessons.
And then as they move into formal Citizenship lessons, which begin in upper elementary or we would say Form 2, grades four through six, their ideas become more definite. She said, “What to avoid and how to avoid it is knowledge as important to the citizen, whether of the city of God or of his own immediate city, as to know what is good and how to perform the same.” And that is what she thinks they get out of Citizenship lessons.
So they explore these ideas. They weigh actions and consequences of other men through the literary form of their school books, which are a far better teacher than our exhortations, our lectures, because they’re inspiring them to live up to the highest ideal and they see that objectively or through another person’s life without that immediate push on them from us.
Liz And you’re saying we’re not super inspiring as parents.
Emily Or maybe they just tune out our things. Because, what do you know mom? But here we have – this is written in a book.
Liz Yeah, more authority.
Emily Yeah, Charlotte Mason says children familiar with the great idea of a state…in the sense not of a government, but of a people. So when you hear that word “state”, think she means the people of a nation. Children learn readily enough about the laws, customs, government of their country. They learn too, with great interest, something about themselves, mind and body, heart and soul, because they feel it as well, to know what they have it in them to give to their country.
So Nicole, would you now tell us a little bit about the practical details of what this looks like across their whole education, like 1st through 12th grade?
Nicole Yeah, for sure.
In Form 1, there is not a separate Citizenship lesson on the timetable, but as you said, the work is already beginning through their History readings, tales, fables, stories of great men and women, and the children are first drawing conclusions about what makes a good leader at this age, a good neighbor, a good citizen, and they’re beginning to see the relationships between their personal character and the good of the community, or at least somebody’s personal character and the good of the community.
And then when they reach Form 2B, so that’s fourth grade, Citizenship is given its own time slot on the timetable. The lessons are still rooted in story, though at this point they’re learning historical accounts of Rome. And now we’re intentionally asking them to notice why certain choices matter. Maybe we’re having conversations at the end of the lessons. And they begin to connect dots between leadership and decision making and the flourishing of a community. They’re also introduced to the structure of local government because a worthy citizen not only understands their nation’s history but how their community is organized.
Now as they move into Form 2A in fifth grade their ideas grow deeper and this is where we get Plutarch, he finally takes center stage, and the moral and political challenges of statesmanship become more complex. The students at that point are learning to discern motives and way actions and see that decisions are rarely simple, and they learn to value proportion, seeing the needs of the whole before the desires of the individual.
Then in Form 3 and 4, so that’s grades 7 through 9, we expand this vision. And alongside Plutarch, students began reading the first book of Ourselves, where they’re introduced to kind of a map of human nature, its noble possibilities, and its vulnerabilities, where things can go awry. And this self-knowledge is essential to true Citizenship because it teaches our personal character and that that is part of our public contribution.
Emily Yes, what we do and think and act as individuals has a bearing on society as a whole.
Nicole Absolutely, for good or bad.
Emily Exactly.
Nicole So Charlotte Mason also assigned books that introduced them to social and industrial life and economics and responsibilities. We’re going to talk more about that in our episodes on the individual forms.
So then in 5 and 6, the subject name changed to Everyday Morals and Economics and the work becomes both philosophical and practical. And just as a side note, Plutarch is left off at this point. We’re going on to new things.
Emily Remind us what grades Forms 5 and 6 are.
Nicole Oh, yes. Grade 10 through 12. The last three years, they continue reading Ourselves. But now they’re reading book two of Ourselves, which is a little more in depth.
Emily And direct.
Nicole Yes. And they’re also looking at works that teach them about political thought and ethics and economics. The aim here really is to equip them to enter adult life and to think clearly and act justly and to contribute wisely and not just in the voting booth but in all ways that Citizenship shapes their community. So yeah, I mean just a big span.
Emily Yeah and really we start with the ideal, they’re getting these ideas very generally, they become more definite, then they become applied to themselves, and then they can become practical to their place in what country they live in, the laws that prepare them to move out and to live.
Nicole And even the city, I mean the local government, things like that. What does this look like in your church and your home?
Emily Yes, exactly. So, mom, you speak with hundreds of Charlotte Mason parents and I’m sure you have some challenges, people pushing back like, but really is this important? or whatever. Would you share with us some of their common questions, or hesitations maybe even?
Liz Yeah and I think part of why this feels like an unnecessary or unfamiliar subject is sort of what you were saying Nicole about learning to think beyond “me”, which is a challenge in our particular culture at this time because we’re very individualistic in our thinking. And I think we forget that children are learning a lot of these things incidentally, what did she say, “by the way”, because from birth children are learning about the people around them and what it’s like to live in a family group and then they meet outsiders and that extends their ideas, whether it’s the store clerk or neighbors, friends, families, coaches, sports teams, what it’s like to operate together and how order is maintained and how to cooperate and respect others to value and to live under an authority, actually.
And as they grow up, they become interested in who rules and how, and their concern starts to, you know, I think we see this in even older elementary children. They become concerned about character and morals of people around them in society. They hear about things that are going on and how…there are arguments about how to preserve liberty and justice for others and those kinds of things. They observe problems and they pick up on our inconsistencies. They have, especially I think by the time they’re approaching adulthood as teenagers, they’re interested in government. Children have seen mailmen and garbage collectors and all kinds of different institutions that we have and take for granted, but as they get older they start to wonder how does all this work and where did this come from?
But they have been internalizing all these standards from their history and literature like you said from day one of school, or should I say day one of reading in general, and all along they’ve been forming opinions and they’re being challenged about right actions and choices of people and that all goes into their learning about how to be a responsible citizen I think.
Emily You know, one objection, maybe I hear a lot about how Charlotte Mason thinks about this subject or some of the ideas is her whole idea about the the state. You know, it’s right in the early parts of Home Education. So if people start at volume one, they start reading it. Especially, I think this is probably a pretty niche idea for American conservative homeschooling families. We see State capitalized and we think, but I’m not raising my child for the State.
So I would just push back or challenge you to think about what is she exactly meaning? She tells us, I’m not talking about the government, I’m talking about the people. And for better or worse, we live in a society. And I do think this is rooted in the two great commandments, right? We serve God by loving our neighbor, right? We love God by loving our neighbor.
Liz And we were created as social beings and we live in community and we’re not going to be able to avoid that.
Emily Yeah, and I think as homeschoolers, we have a extra hurdle that we have to help our children overcome in that their whole education is tailored to them, what time they wake up, often is maybe even if we enforce it as a family, it’s not just them, but it’s a very small group of people. And really, I think these ideas are helping them to think bigger and that they are not just living for themselves, but living. They have to die to themselves, as we’re called to do, but to consider the needs and wishes of others around us.
Nicole And I think that Mason isn’t just putting it in like, let’s not, let’s be humble. It’s more like, let’s look at how this really plays out. When somebody makes this decision, here’s what happens.
Liz How does it affect all those people?
Nicole Inspiring tales of like, ooh, I don’t want to be like that one. I want to be like this.
Liz Yep.
Emily And then I think the key about Ourselves, which I know we’ll talk about in subsequent episodes, but to really see your potential and not just like, this is going to happen or not or I can obey these laws or not but what good do I have in me to contribute to the bettering of the people around me?
Liz And how the effects of one poor choice can influence many many people.
Emily That’s so true. Yeah. So there is a lot of room for our children practicing the consequences of many actions through these books and not just in the subject of Citizenship, but as she said, in their other biography and literature as well. So I hope you’re excited to join us for the rest of our series on Citizenship.
Thank you for joining our discussion today. You might like to go back and listen to our earlier episodes on Citizenship and Plutarch, particularly episodes 27 and 29. We did those a long time ago. You can find links to those as well as any resources in the show notes. As we continue to discuss a Charlotte Mason curriculum this season, we invite you to read along with us in chapter 10 of volume six. Next week, we’ll be looking at the specifics of Citizenship lessons in form 2, grades four through six, or upper elementary school. We hope you’ll join us as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.
Today’s podcast episode is part of our occasional series, Voices from the Conference. We use these episodes to highlight one of the speakers or ideas that came out of last year’s conference. Today Cathy McKay will be sharing her plenary talk “Distinguished Difficulties” with us. Enjoy!
Emily Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and today’s episode is part of our occasional series, Voices from the Conference. As you probably know by now, we at A Delectable Education host a virtual conference in February of each year, hopefully bringing some inspiration and encouragement to what is notoriously a dark stretch in the homeschooling year…at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere.
A few years ago, a worldwide pandemic forced us to move to the online format, and we discovered some benefits we wouldn’t have otherwise. Not only are Charlotte Mason educators from all over the world able to join us due to the virtual platform, so many have personally written to share how they wouldn’t ever be able to get away for a conference or retreat except online.
We are so grateful to be able to pour into the broader Charlotte Mason community in this way, however, we know that many are still not able to participate, and even those that do always long for something more and that brings us to the Voices of the Conference series. We use these episodes to highlight one of the speakers or ideas that came out of last year’s conference. We hope you enjoy this little taste of conference and getting to know one of the speakers. We would love to have you join us at the next ADE conference in February.
Today Cathy McKay will be sharing her plenary talk “Distinguished Difficulties” with us. Enjoy!
Cathy Well, hello, I’m Cathy McKay. Welcome to my library. My library’s in my backyard and my backyard is in Australia.
I share this with my husband Steve. We’ve been married 23 years and we are so glad to have our six children, five sons and a daughter. The eldest is 20 and the youngest is seven. We’ve been homeschooling for about 14 years now and it’s been the last eight years that we have been growing into the Charlotte Mason Method, incredibly helped by her. And Charlotte Mason’s help to us only continues as our children grow out of homeschooling into their independence and young adult life. It really is an education for all of life.
I’m also so grateful for the work of Emily, Liz, and Nicole over the years through their podcast and this conference to help us grow in our understanding of the philosophy and method and how to do it. I’ve been part of this conference in one way or another for the last few years since it began and I am very grateful. It is such a privilege to share this time speaking about these ideas with you now.
Before we start talking about distinguishing between our difficulties, let’s look at the conference blessing together. These are the words that God gave the priest Aaron to speak his name and his blessing over the people of Israel, and through the Lord Jesus, we get to enter into that blessing also.
The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
And together we say amen.
Well, I love long-term gardening, perennial landscape planting, the kind of gardening where you frame a view, where you have a three dimensional space that you are working toward with different levels of plant growth, contrasting foliage and textures, harmonious tones. It’s not a produce garden that needs turning over every few months, but something where the planting takes years to grow into itself. But the beginning of this kind of gardening is really demoralizing.
You start with rather miserable plants that are awkwardly spaced because they need to be spread out so they’ve got room to grow, and it can take several years before they fill that space. So it doesn’t always look good when you’re beginning. And some plants need to be established when they’re dormant – deciduous trees or roses. And so you go to a whole lot of work to prepare a garden bed and then you plant a leafless stick in the ground. You’re tempted to add in some high interest, high impact things of immediate visual impact. But those things tend to be a waste of money in that long term perennial sort of garden. And they undermine the vision that you are holding for the long term.
A friend comes to visit ’cause they know how hard you’ve been working, but there’s not much to see. There’s a lot of mulch, a lot of empty space and some leafless arboreal skeletons. It can take a few years before it looks any good. But in these early stages, the biggest risk comes when those bare dormant leafless trees capture the imagination of sword fighting children. And I have a family of boys who make swords and all their friends come over. There might be 40 of them at a time and they’ve all got swords. Children mistake dormancy for deadness and they go to war. It happens every time I plant a tree and every winter thereafter. It’s amazing that any of them survive.
It’s only as we begin to understand more about the nature of a deciduous tree that we can understand where there is hidden vitality, where there is freshness just about to break through with the next season’s growth, life in what looks modest. It requires understanding, imagination, patience and humility. And I wonder if we tend to encounter our work as mothers and educators in the same way. We’re easily discouraged by smallness, the spaces not yet grown into, the dormancy. We want the fresh and living way, but we’re prefer that it look and feel like a well-established mature garden. When we don’t understand the nature of growth, we can misdiagnose our difficulties.
There are some very strong maternal desires that we have – the desire for reassurance and confidence, the desire for simplicity, and the desire for things to feel better. We are doing a hard job and we want to be enjoying ourselves more, and we want to feel like what we are doing is legitimate. We also want our kids to be enjoying themselves more, not always for their own sakes, but sometimes because that’s when they’re easier to be with. They’re more enjoyable to homeschool when they are enjoying what they’re doing. I know of plenty of moms like me, when we want things to feel better, when we want to tune out from the difficulty. When we’ve hit a hard moment in a morning lesson, we pick up our phone, we go and do the easiest thing we can think of, which is we start to scroll, often hiding in the bathroom with a block of chocolate. Then we see the families whose lives look like lives we want, people who seem to be having a much better time than we are. We see pictures of how we wish we felt.
The family that spends all day in deep leather couches with floor to ceiling bookshelves and a dog that doesn’t stink, or the homesteading family carefully shaping sourdough on bespoke kitchen benches with a litter of puppies next to the antique stove and wearing hand sewn linen frocks. Or we see the adventurous world schooling family, the family who have no home, the wilderness wanderers. They’re tanned, they’re toned, they’re together all the time without the burden and paraphernalia of a stationary life.
Over the top of these gorgeous images are words. Words about feeling a certain way about kids falling in love with learning, falling in love with books, falling in love with reading words about how childhood needs to be a time of wonder or play, imagination, wildness, freedom, words about interest led learning about education being fueled by children’s curiosity. Words telling us that children need to be released from exertion so that they can be free to pursue their passions. Words about how mothers will be so much happier and at ease if we just give in and give up the things that are difficult, the dead things like philosophy and method and narration and schedules and effort. These gorgeous cliches plant doubt with one hand and offer false hope with the other. They cause us to interpret our difficult feelings as a sign that we’re doing it wrong, that we are ruining our kids and wasting ourselves, that the effort is unnecessary or worse, harmful. At that moment we’re tempted to drop the books, the lessons, the schedules, the expectations, the ideals and the principles. Insta-educational philosophy tells us that discomfort is not part of the Fresh and Living way.
When we are struggling, it is so easy to find someone in our pocket waiting to tell us what we want to hear. That things will get better if we just quit the stuff we don’t like. That things will be better if we give into our feelings and give into our children’s feelings. We put our trust in a mum whose influence comes not from her sound principles, not from decades of experience, but from her excellent taste in wallpaper, from her on point branding, from her beautiful palette, from her teaching what our itching ears want to hear. This longing we have to feel a certain way about our life and this expectation that we ought to feel a certain way, that we need to keep changing things up until we get the feeling we want, these undermine our ability to be thankful about what is happening in our families. They also steer us off the path to finding the real solid mature joy.
Cliches tempt us to think that a living joyful education is only happening when we have certain feelings, that it can be gained apart from difficulty, that happiness can be gained by distilling just the beautiful parts of life by honing in on the enjoyable. But Charlotte Mason says happiness comes of effort, service wide interests, and least of enjoyment. And when people put enjoyment even of beautiful things in the first place, and indeed in place of all else, they miss the very thing they seek and become in feeble in body and fretful and discontented in temper. From Charlotte Mason’s perspective, the cliched advice to reduce our lives to only the beautiful and enjoyable parts, the parts we and our children are excited about, is bad advice. It’s a failure to recognize the nature of things. If we do that, we’ll miss the very thing we are longing for when we’re hiding in the bathroom with chocolate and Instagram.
Today we are going to look at some of the cheap easy comforts on offer to us. We are going to think about how to distinguish between the different kinds of difficulties that we face. And then we’re going to look briefly at some better ways of finding refreshment.
So why do we love cliched educational maxims? Well, we latch onto cliches because they meet our desire for simplicity. They are easy, succinct ideas, not well thought out principles, and they usually do say something true. They appeal to something we care about. We want our kids to enjoy good things, to love learning, to have a childhood of wonder or play, imagination, wildness, on freedom. We want them to be interested and invested, setting forth the tendrils of their mind in many directions. So when we see someone offer one of these things in easy words, we are attracted to that. We look for easy words, giving us an easy way to something we want, and a cliche will usually take one good thing, one of the things we want, and make it the whole.
The cliches we are barraged with, even when they quote bits of Charlotte Mason, end up running in contradiction to what she says. The cliches distort our sense of proportion. Ms. Mason writes often of how when we lose proportion, we are susceptible to all sorts of trouble physically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and psychologically. If we build our lives only around what comes naturally to us and our children, we grow flaccid. If we only go for the things which look impressive now, we’ll miss the bigger, slower going trees.
Let’s talk about falling in love because the most common cliche that we take as a given is that our children need to fall in love with learning, fall in love with reading, fall in love with books. And in an education that is based on living books it sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? It’s hard to argue with the goodness of children having an appetite for reading. There is something about the child’s desire to read that might show some awakening, some appreciation for things unseen. It can be a sign of a growing in a life. It’s good that our children always have some avenue of wholesome enjoyment and self-contained, independent, inexpensive occupation open to them. These are good gifts to welcome. But is it also perhaps that we love the idea of our children falling in love with things because it sounds simple and effortless. After all, we’re desperate to have a life that gets the good results but feels easier along the way. Something that looks alive and thriving right now.
Is it because our children are easier to manage and they’re easier to homeschool when they aren’t resistant? Is it partly about what is pleasant and convenient to us? Is it partly about our sense of security and accomplishment? After all, our skeptical friends and family can notice and applaud when a child shows an enthusiasm for books. We want some sign that this risky, costly, difficult choice to home educate is working. We are in a hurry to taste fruit. We want the ease and assurance of having our children besotted with the things we require of them.
And yet this cliche is the most common source of anxiety that I find among my friends and amongst the moms who come to my library. We take on this idea, this benchmark, that our children need to fall in love with what they’re doing – with reading, with learning, with books – that anything less than infatuation is a sign of deadness. We go to war with the leafless tree.
Now the books we’re giving them and the things we are doing might well be dead, but they might not be. It’s possible that we are offering living books and a living method, but that the child’s relationship with that knowledge is still dormant or yet to even germinate. The key is for us to understand more, to understand more of the Charlotte Mason method and to understand more about our children, and then we can tell the difference between dormancy and deadness.
Several worried moms I’ve spoken to are concerned that usually their mid middle grade sons are too busy playing outside or making things in the shed to wanna come in and read for leisure. But these moms, once we start talking or acknowledge that the sons do enjoy stories they read aloud together as a family, they are reading good books as part of their morning lessons. And so this cliche, this thing this, this aspiration for a certain feeling is undermining good homeschooling mothers’ confidence in what they’re doing. They’re not seeing the richness of what is actually happening for their children because they, they think that something more intoxicating is meant to be on the horizon. The cliches keep causing moms to undervalue the goodness. It undermines their confidence when all that’s missing is a feeling.
CS Lewis in Letters to an American Lady writes this. Now it might cause us to blush a little, but I think he makes an excellent point for context. Jack is writing to this woman when she’s going through a time when she seems to feel that God is not near her. Louis writes: “The act which engenders a child ought to be and usually is attended by pleasure, but it is not the pleasure that produces the child. Where there is pleasure, there may be sterility where there is no pleasure there, the act may be fertile. And in the spiritual marriage of God and the soul, it is the same. It is the actual presence, not the sensation of the presence of the Holy Ghost, which begets Christ in us. The sense of the presence is a super added gift for which we give thanks when it comes.”
Might we say that it’s not the sense of being in love with reading that matters most, but the reading itself? Isn’t it enough that our children actually read and read a great variety of worthy books steadily over time, than that they feel a certain way about their reading from the start? Children can form a meaningful relationship with a field of knowledge without being immediately and constantly infatuated with the books by which they gain entry into that field. Children can be nourished by words, by ideas, by beauty and stories, even if they don’t have a compulsive relationship with books. Pleasure doesn’t have to accompany every moment for there to be life-giving work going on.
Do we long for our children to fall in love with other basic human functions to fall in love with eating, to fall in love with sleeping, to fall in love with breathing? No. We make good provision for these things regardless of how our children feel about them. The same needs to go for books. The intellectual food that comes to us through books is a human necessity. We are spiritual creatures with an intellect that needs varied nourishment. How we feel about that food doesn’t change our need for it. Our responsibility as parents is not to conjure up a passion for reading, but that we ensure our children do read. Our job is to provide a voluminous and varied feast. Our children’s feelings about the feast will be as varied as the dishes on the table.
Well, Charlotte Mason is optimistic that we’ll nourish children will come to have a delight in reading and a living relationship with the knowledge that comes through living books, but that delight isn’t a necessary starting point. She comments on John Ruskin’s education in this way” “As for books, we are told how Ruskin grew up on the Waverly novels on Pope’s Homer’s Iliad, many of Shakespeare’s plays and much else that is delightful. But he does not give us an instance of the sort of thing we are looking for – the sudden, keen, insatiate delight in a book, which means kinship until he’s introduced to Byron.” She points out the sudden keen insatiate delight in a book. But note that Ruskin had a rich literary diet before that insatiate delight was quickened. Pleasure in reading is lovely, but there can be seasons of fertility apart from pleasure. It is a pleasure that children are trained up to sometimes gradually over time. It is what we are educating towards, and it is something which is quickened when we are not expecting it. It sprouts up much like happiness and friendship. It sprouts up when we are not watching, from soil of wide literary nourishment from sound habits and vital atmosphere.
When we prioritize how our children feel about reading rather than the reading itself, then we are vulnerable to shortsighted advice. Many folk encourage us to choose only the books which kids like and have a present enthusiasm for. They discourage us from exerting ourselves and from giving books that will require the children to exert themselves. They also promote a false confidence that if a child does have an infatuated reading behavior, if they sit and read for 16 hours a day that they’re doing well. The quiet danger of cheap cliches is that when our children are exceeding in one good thing, reading a lot or having a funnel sort of deep interest, we take false confidence and prematurely relax our provisions. I’ve been there myself. Long before I met Charlotte Mason, I felt like my work was done when my 7-year-old would sit and read all day and, unbeknownst to me, sometimes all night, I assumed that a child with a voracious reading appetite would grow to be a voracious reading adult and that there was nothing left for me to do but to leave that child undisturbed on the couch. Now what I didn’t realize is that my child wasn’t practicing the habit of reading. They were practicing the habit of doing whatever they felt like doing.
The cliches encourage us into the ease of just giving into what comes naturally giving into compulsive behavior. Disproportionate appetites doing one good thing at the exclusion of other good things. Disordered loves. In Ms. Mason’s volume Ourselves she helps young people and and their parents see the devastation that happens when a person allows one appetite to rule the whole kingdom.
So what happens when our children don’t feel like reading anymore? What happens when just doing what they feel like doing is applied to another activity 10 or 20 years down the track? It’s reasonable to expect that our children who aren’t besotted with reading, who don’t start out with this great bookish enthusiasm, but children who have the steady habit of reading every day as part of their morning lessons and their family culture, that they will develop a consistent habit of reading and of pleasure in meaningful reading over time. Ms. Mason helps us place not too much emphasis and weight on the child’s feelings in their early life about reading. We’re not meant to overinterpret their immature years. You can’t see the glory of 50 summers in a sapling.
Well, we have a range of difficulties as homeschool moms, and it is those difficulties that usually make us vulnerable to the shortsighted, simplistic cliched advice. So let’s spend some time distinguishing between the difficulties. Time and again, Charlotte Mason reminds us that true enjoyment, the sort of thing we are working towards in our education, can’t be gained apart from effort, both the child’s effort and the parent or the teacher’s effort. Our work is to put our children in touch with a whole wide world full of things. Things they haven’t yet come to be interested in, things they don’t yet know about, things they’re not yet enthusiastic about, things that are fresh and living, but perhaps still dormant to them. Contrary to most cliches, Charlotte says “this living education cannot be left to chance or to the child’s own immature powers.” If we are to fulfill our God-given responsibility towards our children, we cannot just follow the easy path of our child’s lead or the limiting path of our own maternal taste.
It is difficult to introduce new things to someone who isn’t yet interested in them. It’s difficult to make these provisions. It’s a wonder required of us and it often does not at all feel practicable. Both understanding the work and doing it are an effort. This is a difficult thing, but it is a difficulty and exertion that leads to ease and joy. These difficult efforts nourish the expansion of the child into the fullest expression of their personhood. This effort expands their capacity to enjoy, to enjoy both God and his world. Charlotte says, “in proportion to the range of living relationships we put in his way, will he have wide and vital interests, fullness of joy in living? In proportion as he’s made aware of the laws which rule every relationship will his life be dutiful and serviceable? As he learns that no relation with persons or with things animate or inanimate can be maintained without strenuous effort will he learn the laws of work and the joys of work?”
This fullness of joy is not the kind of cheap happiness which is bought by cutting out difficulty or by just going with the superficial immediate interests of ourselves and our children. This full kind of joy comes from understanding that all pleasures are connected to some kind of strenuous effort. We are working for joy. The full joy we’re educating up to isn’t a passive consumerist life of just doing what we feel like doing, but a life that expands and spreads vitality, giving goodness, service, and joy to others. It’s a life that is serviceable because the child has grown to have a sense of doing the right thing at the right time, not just whatever they feel like doing. Enjoyment that comes by cutting out effort is cheap, temporary, shortsighted, selfish, and foolish. Distilling life just into the easy, enjoyable parts reduces life and it reduces personhood. This necessary good life giving kind of difficulty is meant to be a feature of our everyday life.
It is the everyday work of overcoming inertia. Anything, even things we enjoy sometimes feel unappealing when we’re at the starting line. If we try to get rid of everyday effort and discomfort, we will be yoked, our children will be yoked, to an inert life. In home education, Ms. Mason says “there shouldn’t be a single day which passes without some kind of strenuous effort by the child.” That is how children grow strong. Both we and our children learn to overcome by overcoming. Pleasure is the fruit of that kind of difficulty. It is an effort which grows into enjoyment. It’s an experience of weakness which develops a power. It feels like death, but there is life breaking through.
When we’re facing a hard run in our families or one of those mornings where you wanna quit on a lesson and hide in the bathroom in Instagram and chocolate, then perhaps it’s worth asking whether it’s hard because the children are actually in the long process of learning to overcome. Is it hard because we are faithfully training attention? Is it the difficulty of facing weak wills, our own weak will and our children’s weak wills, and strengthening our own will and helping them strengthen theirs? Is our difficulty the effort of helping our children learn the freedom of not being a slave to their feelings, the effort of helping them develop the muscle memory, the lived experience of choosing to do the thing they don’t feel like doing, and then finding the surprising pleasure that happens on the other side? The effort of helping them become rightly ordered, proportionate people, wise people. It is hard. Is our difficulty the effort of training up to the power of enjoying more, the sort of enjoyment we’re longing for. In the moments when we want to take our shortcuts through the cliches?
We need to see past our feelings in those hard moments. Like healthy natural childbirth, there is a kind of pain and labor that means things are progressing. If we can learn to see past our feelings, we’re better positioned to help our children do the same. When we can overcome our desire just to give up in the middle of a maths lesson, then we help our children see what it looks like to persevere. A hard morning is not necessarily a failing homeschool. It might be the family which is doing exactly the thing it was designed to do. So don’t misdiagnose that kind of difficulty. Don’t mistake dormancy for deadness.
But there is another kind of difficulty. It might be that we’re having a hard time because we are cramping our children. When we haven’t learned to exercise mastery in activity, we make things harder for ourselves and our kids. When we haven’t understood our children, when we’ve not understood the nature of the work or the principles by which we’re meant to fulfill our responsibilities, when we haven’t understood what each subject looks like from the acorn to the oak tree, sometimes things are difficult because we’re overtaxing our children and overtaxing ourselves. While the child is meant to experience some sort of exertion every day, we are not meant to allow any one part of the child’s person to be overexerted.
Sometimes things are difficult because in order to make it simpler for ourself, we’ve adopted resources or practices that are wooden and that lack vitality. We’ve signed up to something that meets one of our maternal needs for assurance or confidence or simplicity, but it doesn’t meet the actual needs of the child. And where there’s a lack of life, where there’s a lack of living ideas or living method, things will be harder than they need to be. It will not be the productive kind of difficulty. Sometimes our children, as Liz and Emily and Nicole have said, sometimes our children are rightly pushing back against a dead method.
Another reason we might feel like our work is unbearably hard is perhaps because we’ve not spent time understanding our own landscape. In The Secret World of Weather, Tristan Gully talks about how weather forecasts are given for a really large region, making true observations about what the weather system’s expected to do overall. The problem is we don’t experience the weather 200 feet in the ground, several hundred miles at a time. We are on the ground, we are in a particular spot. And the same weather system can feel very different depending on the physical geography around you. So the way that the weather interacts with one patch of earth will be different from what the same weather pattern does just a few minutes away. And in some ways I wonder if our bewilderment and difficulty with some of Ms. Mason’s principles and method happen because we don’t spend enough time understanding our own landscape, the physical geography of our own lives. The principles are true, but we might need to mitigate and allow for some features in our backyard, which absorb more radiant heat or funnel wind differently than in our friend’s yard 10 minutes away. Again, the solution is not to give up. It’s not to go for cutting corners and simplicity, but to understand more.
And understanding takes time. It’s a process. We need to be patient. It is normal to have to take time to figure it out. While we need support and we need to help each other learn and understand more, no one else can do the figuring out for us. We need to be willing to engage in that kind of difficulty so that we can get rid of the unnecessary kinds of strain.
The final kind of difficulties that we need to distinguish – other hard things that we cannot change. While there might be some earthworks we can do in our own landscape, while there are some things we can understand and improve in and increase our capacity for, there will be some provisions, some very hard things which the Lord God has ordained for us. The limited resources that God has allocated to our family, the trials we must persevere in, the tensions we have to live with, the things that we cannot fix. Some of these things make perfect execution of a Charlotte Mason method impossible, and we all have them. These are the things which thwart and frustrate our hopes, our ambitions, our plans. These things that we would never have chosen for ourselves are places where God’s gracious, wise, loving, abundant, holy, verdant provisions are proven in our weakness. These difficulties make it very obvious that any fruitful outcome in our family isn’t because of our cleverness and competence. It is all the Lord’s triumph. Every difficulty of any kind is a gift. It’s a reminder in a moment of time to lean hard on the living God because he is the only hero in his story. Our homeschool exists to display the glory of God and he’s supremely displayed when he enables the work we do get done, and when he covers over and provides in the absence of things that we can do.
Well, if we’re going to receive difficulty, instead of trying to run away to cheap comfortable cliches, how do we refresh so that we can persevere? How do we refresh in a way that sustains the work rather than undermining it? Perhaps the first step is to stop trying to get away from the hard things to adjust our expectations about what life is meant to be like. Life is harder, homeschooling, mothering is harder when we think it shouldn’t be. Things are more miserable and frustrating when we are trying to eliminate effort and get rid of difficulty, when we’re besotted with falling in love with everything. Don’t believe the lies that difficulty is damaging. We believe in a sovereign God who uses all things to achieve his glorious purposes. And every difficulty comes to us from his hands and he’s met with his provision.
The principles that make a Charlotte Mason education vital for our children need to be applied to us also. Short and varied episodes in our days. Instead of escape, we just need some change. We need variety to refresh. We need an increasingly connected life, an increasing connectedness with beauty, with story, with ideas, with art, with skills, with knowledge.
We need to have things to see and do and think about apart from our feelings. The more nourished we are, the more power we have to redirect our thoughts, to change our demeanor in our difficulties. Charlotte gives us an example of a person in the throes of discouragement.
She says, “the sameness of his duties, the weariness of doing the same thing over and over fills him with disgust and despondency and he relaxes his efforts. But not if he be a man under the power of his own will, because he simply does not allow himself in idle discontent. It is always within his power to give himself something pleasant, something outside himself to think of. And he does so, and given what we call a happy frame of mind, no work is laborious.”
We’ll have a meetup to talk about some of the concrete things we can plan to do so that the everyday expected difficulties when they hit, we know what to do with them. So sign up for the meetup if you wanna talk about how we can practically do some of these things.
Perseverance is done one moment at a time. Lewis says that every moment of suffering, the exact present never really is intolerable. It’s when we import meaning from the past and the future that it becomes unwieldy. So we need to learn how not to spiral, but how just to take one moment and use one moment of difficulty as a chance to depend and rely on the Lord. And of course, all the diversions in the world are useless if we don’t do the thing that really matters. To cry out the living God, to meet us with his strength and his provision in our difficulty, instead of trying to run away from it. It’s proximity to him that gives us peace.
Notice our conference blessing. It’s all about what God is doing. It’s he who blesses and keeps. It’s his face shining in favor, favor not secured by what we do or don’t do as a homeschooling mom, but favor, secured, guaranteed by the work of the Lord Jesus in our place. It is he who is gracious. It’s he who is giving us his goodness undeserved. It is his countenance we need, fellowship and union with him, which is provided, secured by the Lord Jesus and applied by his spirit in proximity to him. He gives us peace. And this blessing comes right in the middle of the difficulties. The Instagram, chocolate in the bathroom difficulties. Instead of running away, we get to run to him.
