Ep 00 | Welcome to Season Three
If I can give you a captain idea for this season, for all that’s to come, it would come from my dear St. Jack, or, as you might know him, C.S. Lewis. He once wrote, “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality.”
This is classical education.
And it’s on the other side of the wardrobe. Let’s go.
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth itself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it.
Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn’t come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out—single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.
“Glory be!” said the Cabby. “I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I’d known there were things like this.”
_________
Maybe you remember that at the beginning of my home education journey, nearly seven years ago, I Googled to see if there was some type of quiz to learn what kind of homeschool mom one is.
I can confirm that such a quiz exists.
While I took it as a light-hearted way to battle my growing sense of overwhelm at the number of educational philosophies present online, it did actually give me two paths forward.
Do you want to guess how I scored on that quiz? How did you know? Yes, I scored as a classical educator and a Charlotte Mason educator.
And this is where our journey this season begins.
Ask Google to tell you what Charlotte Mason education is and, for a machine, it can do a pretty good job. Mason’s 20 principles are explained and explored through six volumes of nearly two thousand pages which define and give form to her philosophy.
Ask Google to tell you what a classical education is and it’s a real hit or miss.
Here’s a sample:
Classical education seeks to produce students who possess a lifelong passion for learning, who are effective thought leaders, and who communicate logically and persuasively.
Classical education follows the grammar, logic, and rhetoric stages of a child, beginning with a memorization-based foundation to build a solid understanding across the core literacies and subject areas.
Classical education is rooted in Greek and Latin, and the great books.
Classical education is a “back to basics” education.
Classical Christian 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.
How is any mother-teacher, new to the classical Mason world, supposed to know, at first take, which of these is true? How many of these catch the spirit of the tradition?
Well, she can’t. Not really. But that’s okay because when you’re headed on a journey into unknown lands, everyone needs a Virgil. Or, you know, a philosopher, guide, and friend.
In this season of The Commonplace, I hope to serve as your Virgil. We’re going to get our bearings in classical education: its heights, its breadth, its depth; which, when understood as the spirit of the tradition, stretches above, below, around, and is the heartbeat of the life of virtue and wisdom.
Oh, yes. Classical education is more than ages and stages; more than grammar, logic, and rhetoric; more than elite college-prep schools.
If I can give you a captain idea for this season, for all that’s to come, it would come from my dear St. Jack, or, as you might know him, C.S. Lewis. He once wrote, “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality.”
How to conform the soul to reality.
This is the aim of classical education and the aim, I’m guessing, of you, my fellow mother-teacher. We’re aiming beyond just learning numbers and letters (although those are good gifts); we’re aiming for harmony between the soul and Reality.
Okay, I know. This sounds a little outside of conventional education talk. It sounds a little weird even to most modern Christian ears. But what I want you to know, right now, is that education used to focus on how it formed a person in a transcendent world. What did it look like to live in relationships with a world layered with the natural and the supernatural? Namely, in Christian speak, what does it look like to live in recognition of and submission to God’s design in all things?
In math. In natural history. In fairy tales and language. In beauty. In service. In worship. In repentance. In Christ.
Classical education is about taking one’s God-given place in the cosmos. We have to learn how to move to the symphony of truth, goodness, and beauty; how to see the love of God in all things; how to find the harmony between God, man, and knowledge; how to love the right things in the right way at the right time; how to love the Logos himself.
It’s about becoming men who are fully alive and live in a way that matches the vision of God.
Now, doesn’t that sound a wee bit familiar after our year with Miss Mason?
Join me this season as we enter this classical world. We’ll learn about the liberal arts and how they free a man. We’ll explore the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty and how they meet the needs of the tripartite person. We’ll meet the pagans and the Christians who’ve entered the Great Conversation in the pursuit of wisdom and virtue. We’ll get our bearings together.
When I set out to learn more about classical education after that Google quiz, I had no idea what I was about to fall into. Like Digory and the crew watching Narnia burst forth from the darkness, I watched a new world come into view. There is an other-worldliness in the spirit of the tradition, a long-forgotten union between the material and immaterial, the natural and supernatural; the logos, ethos, and pathos of a person.
It’s embodied.
It’s incarnational.
It’s sacramental.
It’s living.
It makes us, like the Cabby, want to be better men.
And it’s my favorite thing to talk about.
So, consider this my formal invitation to you, to come with me through the wardrobe. There’s a whole classical world on the other side and I’m ready to throw open the doors.
I’ll see you in two weeks.
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