Ep 11 | Getting to the Curriculum (Principle #13)
You’d think with all our knowledge about Mason’s principles it’d be easy to pick a curriculum. But the options seem endless and while they all claim to be some type of classical Mason curriculum, they’re all doing it a little bit differently.
What’s a mom to do?
Video Resource | Let’s get practical.
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Principle #13: In devising a SYLLABUS for a normal child, of whatever social class, three points must be considered:
(a) He requires much knowledge, for the mind needs sufficient food as much as does the body.
(b) The knowledge should be various, for sameness in mental diet does not create appetite (i.e., curiosity)
(c) Knowledge should be communicated in well-chosen language, because his attention responds naturally to what is conveyed in literary form.
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You know what’s a little overwhelming? Picking a curriculum.
You’d think that looking specifically at classical Charlotte Mason curricula would narrow it down but—
A Google search gives you a seemingly endless page of options. Instagram isn’t any better. Every scroll shows a new flat lay with a new volume for someone’s newest curriculum pick. Your friend chooses a program you’ve never heard of and the mom at the playground told you you have to join her co-op.
And they all say they’re classical or Charlotte Mason or Charlotte Mason-inspired or modern classical or neo-classical or classical Charlotte Mason or…
*Sigh*
Like I said, overwhelming.
With how far we’ve studied through Miss Mason’s twenty principles, we know that behind every educational philosophy, pedagogy, and curriculum is a working anthropology, a belief about what a child is, how they learn, and why we educate them.
The first twelve principles help explain the answers to those big questions. What is a child? A person who can only be motivated by the instruments of atmosphere, discipline, and life. How do they learn? Through a steady, varied diet of living ideas, which allows them to make connections and form relationships with the material face-to-face. Why do we educate them? First, it’s their birthright as those who bear the Divine Image. Second, to endeavor towards forming a whole person, whose mind and loves are rightly ordered and rooted in truth, goodness, and beauty.
You know what? I think knowing those answers makes the curriculum options a little less overwhelming. Maybe that’s why Mason pivots to curriculum and method for her next few principles. She knew the first twelve would help steer the ship into these troubled waters.
In the thirteenth principle, Mason makes a note about the syllabus for a child, once again driving home the point that all children deserve this type of education.
She says children need much, varied knowledge given in the well-formed language of literature.
She makes it sound so simple, doesn’t she?
So what I want to do today, to help make this principle—and the other twelve—something helpful when looking at curricula is to explain the differences between two methods of classical Mason instruction.
I hesitate to say methods because these distinctions will highlight deviations from Mason’s principles and the larger classical tradition.
My curriculum cards are already on the table. I gave you all the details last week on YouTube, but I want to help you make a confident decision about the curriculum for your family by teasing out the distinctions between the classical tradition and the neo-classical tradition, which are many, but I want to focus on something known as synthetic and analytic thought,
Now, you know I believe Mason is part of the larger classical tradition. While she’s not a perfect one-to-one with every ancient educational philosopher, she does maintain the spirit of the tradition, the ends of the tradition, and much of the form of the tradition. But to be fair, Mason was an educational progressive in her time. She was adopting new scientific thought into her methods, and, honestly, if you think Plato’s Academy is the perfect school from which to model all things, then, I admit, you won’t love everything about Mason.
But we’re talking about a tradition, a long conversation about formation and virtue, about the good life and personhood. We know these ideas and buzz phrases; they’re a comforting sound to our classical ears.
Or are they what’s confusing us?
When we start sifting through curricula, we can easily feel overwhelmed at the number of options using these phrases: wisdom and virtue; truth, goodness, and beauty; living ideas and logic and Latin. If they use these words, they must be classical or Mason or both, right? But then, why do they do things so differently? What is it that we’re looking for?
Well, let me introduce our first level of distinction: classical and neo-classical.
What you need to know is that curriculum groups don’t usually use these terms. Everyone pretty much uses classical, and they can do that because there isn’t a singular definition of classical education. Mason? She has her twenty principles; you know what you’re getting with her. But the classical tradition is so historic and so widespread, that people can pull a few classical concepts or methods and easily leave the rest while claiming to be classical.
And that’s kind of what happened in the United States.
So back in the 80s and 90s, there was a re-birth of classical education. Dorothy Sayer’s essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning” became the battle banner of a new educational movement. Now, I love many things about this essay. It was Sayers who pushed me through the classical wardrobe from which I never want to return. But an essay that offers a good critique of modern education and some interesting observations about child development and the trivium does not a classical education make.
If you’ve not read it—and really, I think it’s worth your time—the basic premise is that the first three liberal arts known as the trivium could line up with three stages of child development. Sayers noted that children move through three obvious stages, which she gave tremendous names: the poll-parrot, the pert, and the poetic.
Don’t you remember being all three of those? I do.
The elementary years are a time when children are natural parrots. They remember things well and easily; they love repetition and singing; they need to put forth very little effort to memorize. And so, Sayers reasoned, we should line this up with the liberal art of “grammar” and have children memorize as many things as possible without worrying if they understood the things they’re memorizing, but just get ‘em in there like little pegs and we can loop back later to add more to the pegs.
Is your Mason alarm bell ringing? It should be.
Next come the perts, which, of course, are middle schoolers. They argue endlessly, they want to prove you wrong and be satisfied with their rightness. They challenge cause and effect and are generally difficult as they start to grow in independence. So, let’s teach them the tool of logic. Let’s equip them, in this time of life, to think critically and understand the why behind the facts they’ve committed to memory in the early years.
Once they become poetics, around the time of high school, we can then begin teaching the tool of rhetoric. Poetics are turning outward to the world, wondering about the meaning of life and who they are, how to make an impact, and aching to express themselves to others. So, teach them how. Show them how to craft sentences, speak beautifully and persuasively, to express something true and good about reality.
Systematized ages and stages. What’s not to like?
And so this idea took off. Schools were organized from this framework, and the trivium became a complete K-12 education based on the observations of a writer who never meant to create a curriculum of study but kicked off what we now know of as neo-classical education.
So maybe you know, in your gut, that that is not Mason. You know a child shouldn’t be presented facts without their informing ideas. Rote memory is not knowledge. Where is the personal connection? The narration? The meeting the greats face-to-face as a child?
If this is a flavor of classical education, then how can Mason be classical and what in the world am I supposed to look for in a curriculum?
Well, I’ll just say it now, the neo-classical movement is not classical in the larger traditional sense. There are bits and pieces in there, but it breaks from the norm in significant ways, and therefore, breaks from Mason too.
But how did it go so off-course, you may be wondering. It’s more complicated than I’m about to explain but fundamentally, the neo-classical movement took a hard turn away from the use of synthetic thought before analytic thought in the teaching method.
So, here we go: synthetic and analytical thought.
Have you ever been more on the edge of your seat?
I’m joking. This is actually fascinating.
Now a quick note here: Mason doesn’t actually use the phrase synthetic thought, but it is what she describes. People seem to get their underwear in a bunch over if Mason explicitly said something or not, but here at The Commonplace, I’m helping you get your bearings, to see the threads between everything so you’re able to move into more nuanced distinctions and definitions that educational philosophers like to philosophize about while we’re busy homeschooling our children.
So synthetic thought. The focus of synthetic teaching is putting things together to form a whole picture for a child. You want to introduce ideas and teach in a way that shows how knowledge is connected to itself, to man, and to God. This allows a child to meet, see, and understand an idea in a full, learned way that creates real knowledge in their minds.
We know Mason said you must offer ideas through stories and children must narrate in order to form real relationships and connections to learn. This is the only acceptable diet for a child’s mind. Synthetic thought is her concept of living ideas presented in literary language in a varied, whole curriculum. It’s principle thirteen. And fourteen and fifteen and twenty.
Synthetic thought ensures against confused fragmented facts and instead aims at harmony and wholeness in the mind of a child.
Once I walked into my door room and noticed my roommate rocking in her chair, kind of muttering to herself. You need to know my roommate was very smart. The type of person who was an English and Biblical Studies double major but earned a perfect score in physics. One of those.
Anyway, after watching her for a few seconds, I interrupted her to ask what in the world she was doing. She looked at me as if it was the most obvious thing in the world and said, “I’m connecting what I just learned to things I already know.”
She was finding the relationships between ideas, making them her own, forming knowledge that would not leave her after she took her final exam, but would impress upon her a more complete picture of God’s world.
This is synthetic thought.
Mason called this “furnishing the mind” and she insisted that this furnishing must be done before a child could ever think analytically in a proper sense.
We can’t analyze what we don’t know.
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Back to the episode.
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So let’s learn a bit about analytical thought.
I want to make it clear here that both synthetic and analytic thought are important and necessary in education. However, it matters in what order you pursue them.
Analytical thought is focused on taking apart the whole and teaching parts individually. The plan is to combine and add to them later to create full knowledge. The neo-classical movement thinks of this approach as placing fact pegs in the mind that can be used later to hang more information on. It doesn’t matter if a child understands the context or the fullness of a thing, just that they store a piece of it.
Do you remember my story from a few episodes back about my daughter knowing all 50 states by song but not having any clue what they were? If you missed that one, I’ll give you another example: chanting big moments in history without knowing the who, what, or why involved in the story or skip counting math facts without understanding how numbers relate to each other.
Sure, the child has some information in their minds, but is that knowledge? Have they developed any understanding? Care? And furthermore, does this approach of rote memorization in the early years honor the mind of a child?
Mason is firm that a child’s mind cannot be cultivated in individual faculties? You can’t just focus on memory and let the others lie fallow. You can’t focus on attention or imagination or connection singularly. They must all be brought to play together when learning: living ideas feed each of these parts of the mind, calling them to order together.
Asking a child to chant or repeat back a long list of facts that mean nothing to him is not learning. The attention wanes, interest and curiosity fade, the imagination sits asleep, and so nothing is truly learned or made the child’s own.
This is actually a huge deal.
When looking at curricula, this draws a sharp line between approaches. What is a person? How do they learn? What does it mean to teach in a way that honors the image bearer?
Like I said earlier, it’s difficult that there is no one working definition or single curriculum option for the classical tradition. But I want to give you the definition I’ve always loved from the CiRCE Institute to take with you as you wade through curricula:
Christian classical education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty by means of the seven liberal arts and the four sciences so that, in Christ, the student is enabled to better know, glorify, and enjoy God.
Here’s what has and continues to hold fast throughout the classical tradition:
We have a high view of man or the child.
The world is logocentric or makes sense and so we pursue the ideals of wisdom and virtue.
The western tradition ought to be preserved and passed on.
Learning is done through an integrated study of ideas-focused teaching and a high taste in literature and the arts.
I’m going to say that again but in Mason speak:
Here’s what has and continues to hold fast throughout the classical tradition:
Children are born persons.
Knowledge is held together to itself, to man, and to God and it is our duty to set the feet of children in the largest room possible so they can attend to and delight in God’s world.
High ideals, the motivation for what’s right, and a love of country and neighbor are to be cultivated in every child whose character can change and grow towards goodness.
A child’s mind needs ideas that bring life, not death, and these are best introduced through truth, goodness, and beauty in literature, arts, history, and science.
This is the classical tradition, the education for the whole person to set his feet in the whole world of God. Not all educational offerings are equal, and I know that’s an unpopular opinion in our society.
When you’re looking at curricula, look beyond the buzz words and labels. Search out what you know as your principles. These give you a firm foundation, really. If you’ve been following along this season, I hope you’re beginning to feel equipped as you step up to the first decisions of home education. You can look at a curriculum and ask: what does this say about what a child is? Do they think my children need ideas to furnish the mind? Or facts to learn as pegs? Do they invite my child to understand a whole or a fragment of something lovely? Is my child a person made to engage with God’s world face-to-face or a person with a bucket for a mind who needs to be told what is important without any context?
Synthetic learning—classical education—is about offering a child something they can love before taking it apart to study its many parts. As the tradition says, a child is nothing less than the Divine image, an icon of the invisible God. As Mason says, the person who bears the Divine image feeds on ideas, and so, always, firstly and forever, we must offer the whole reality of truth, goodness, and beauty.
I’ll see you guys in two weeks.
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