In a Charlotte Mason approach, our children are reading a lot of literature, and we are careful not to interpose ourselves between the student and the author. We want them to form their own relation with that author and the ideas that he or she presents. So what do you do when that child gets into high school, and they’re supposed to be studying the different genre and literary terms and themes and all of this fancy stuff about literature? How do you encourage that type of learning without stealing the joy from those great literary books? That’s what we want to talk about today. It’s possible. Joining me today is Richele Baburina.

Sonya: Richele, we’re going to talk literature today. Well, let’s back up a minute. With all of the good literary books that our children have been reading with a Charlotte Mason approach, why do they have to study literature as a course?

Richele: Wow, you open right up with a big question.

Sonya: That’s right; we’re going to cut right to it here. (laughs)

Richele: We’ll back up just a little bit, maybe to the beginning—and this is something I learned from you—the first time I saw you, you talked about goals in each subject; it’s like reading a map. If you know where you’re going, then you can know how to get there. And with Charlotte Mason, the goals in literature were for the child to enjoy reading and to appreciate good literature, to discern between the best…

Sonya: …and inferior. By giving them a steady diet of good literature over the years, we are heading toward that goal.

Richele: We’re heading toward that goal. Daphne Chapin, who was a Charlotte Mason-educated teacher, considered these: as they move up through the years, there is a widening of the field in literature. A widening of the field; and as a Midwestern girl, I always picture this tractor plowing a field. We’re reading aloud to them with enthusiasm, and they are telling back with the same enthusiasm, and then as they go on, they are now reading themselves, or we’re adding in some written narration, or they’re becoming more accurate in their retelling. So when we get to the high school years, they’ve had a good amount of years of developing these faculties or these powers within them. They’ve had their appetite, almost, I don’t know the word. It’s like stoking a fire, maybe, giving them an appetite for good literature. So now we’re just going to widen the field. This is going to help them appreciate good literature. Charlotte Mason said that we should choose, and this is in Ourselves, she said that we should choose our authors as carefully as we choose our friends. Now we want our students to be able to start discerning even more. They’re going to grapple—just like how we let them grapple with a math problem. They’re going to be going more in depth and they’re going to grapple with these living books, with some of the ideas presented. They’re going to be really kind of digging out: What is it that that author has to tell me? These characters are becoming their friends, and this is really an exciting time in their lives—and for us in our lives—to be able to have these great discussions with them.

When we get to the high school years, they’ve had a good amount of years of developing these faculties or these powers within them. It’s like stoking a fire, giving them an appetite for good literature. So now we’re just going to widen the field. This is going to help them appreciate good literature.

Sonya: As we are presenting potentially more complex literature, they’re going to be grappling as well. So let’s go through then, if we can, what would be the ideal literature discussion course that would be true to a Charlotte Mason approach, true to her principles, and yet still accomplish that goal that we are after?

Richele: Right, and as you said without killing the joy, but really just bringing it out even more, I think, just bringing out the richness of the book that they’re reading. So Simply Charlotte Mason has come out with Great Book Discussions, and they are amazing tools in this, in that they present everything that Charlotte Mason was presenting in those high school years and the student is now getting to know the author. So the book is put into context with kind of a living history or a living biography of the author and the time that the author was writing in. So that’s the first part. Now we are introducing the authors; where we might have been reading a book without a big introduction.

Sonya: Yeah, or just a short: this is what we’re going to read now. But in these high school years, now they’re going to dive into—kind of like what they’ve been doing with artists and composers all along—get to know the person behind that work. And as you say, putting it in historical context is a huge matter. It was important to Charlotte too.

Richele: Right, literature was part of building that tableau, that rich tableau of history, and I think she called it the beauty of the house of mind. And so literature is part of that. So we’re going to put it into context. If you’re comfortable using any devices, you could pull up some pictures, perhaps. Say, if you’re reading Jane Eyre, you can show Haworth Cottage, where the author lived, or the rectory in which she lived, or pictures of the moors, if your student has never seen the English moors, and that can actually enrich the reading that they’re about to do.

Sonya: The other thing that I love about these reading guides is that they fill in some of the cultural understandings that we are missing today. I mean Charlotte’s students would have known—we’ll use Jane Eyre as an example—would have known the relationship between a governess and her employer and where she was in the social standing and what was taboo and what was acceptable and how that all interplays with that story. But for us in America today, we don’t really understand those dynamics. So having those types of cultural notes has been so helpful.

Richele: They just serve to enrich the reading. And as homeschoolers, we know what forms are only because we are Charlotte Mason homeschoolers, but I remember in the cultural notes for Jane Eyre, it discusses that they’re called forms because the students in each what we call “grade” sat at a different type of a bench that was called a “form.” And that’s how we got the word “form.”

Sonya: Yeah. And I also like some of the words that are going to be unfamiliar to us. But it’s not stealing the joy from the reading—as when I had any kind of literary study in high school. It was, “Here are five pages of words to look up and write their definitions before you even get to start in on this.” And that’s not how the reading guides approach it. I love how it gives a short list, and they’re very unusual words.

Richele: They are. They’re not the kind that the student would get in context, which we usually allow them to do. But these are words that I remember thinking, “Oh, I do not know these words, and if I had just read the passage it could have meant five different things.” And so that is very, very helpful.

Sonya: And it just says, here’s the list of words; look up any that you don’t already know. It’s giving the student the respect of, “Maybe you already know these and that’s great; this is just as a tool to help you, not a requirement.”

Richele: Now there are a few other tools that the Great Book Discussions add to the literature reading and that is the book of mottos, or commonplace book, and the book of centuries. So if your student isn’t in the habit of adding things to those, there are prompts for that that are not overbearing, but they will just allow your student to remember, “Oh yes, I wanted to add that to my commonplace book,” or get your student in the habit of that. And that’s going to be something that they’ll end up treasuring for life and look back on; I look back on mine.

Sonya: And then there are the written narrations and the actual discussions. Let’s talk a little bit about what flavor those should have and how they look different in high school than when you’re doing literature readings and read-alouds in the younger grades.

Richele: Right. At this point, your student has had a lot of telling back. And with this, these are a lot of open-ended questions. These are questions that will… there’s no multiple choice. I’m going to really think upon these things. And a lot of times they’re going to bring out—I don’t want to say the moral, because it’s not as pointed as that—but they’re meeting some big ideas. And some ideas are things that, they’re not necessarily happy thoughts, but things that they’re going to run into in their own life, maybe. So, one example is to tell a day from beginning to end at Lowood School.

Sonya: In the Jane Eyre study.

Richele: In the Jane Eyre study. And that’s very big; it looks very different from today. They’re going to be doing a lot of comparing and contrasting. As a matter of fact, when Charlotte Mason was alive and they had the inspectors, the British inspectors, coming into their schools to look at how the students were doing, the main inspector actually had to write a different pamphlet for inspectors going into the Parents Union Schools, or the PNEU Schools, because they were different. The students would bring in what they already knew, maybe from different books they had read, and this inspector wanted the other inspectors to know that was okay. They’re going to be bringing in a lot of background that they already have. This is kind of a beauty of the Great Book Discussions; it allows the student to really share what he or she knows.

Sonya: So what about things like genre? That’s not something you can just discuss. It’s something you need to convey information. What’s the best way to do those types of learning activities?

Richele: This isn’t something that the student will just naturally—”I know! It’s called this.” So these are brought up in a very natural way. So we do discuss genre, and we can start by asking our students, because they may have run into this before, and you can ask them what are the different genres that they know. But then we’re going to discuss, say, in Jane Eyre, the gothic genre, and what does that mean? And then the student can be looking for that in their reading and can say, “Oh, this really points to the gothic genre in these four chapters; I’ve seen this,” or “I’ve seen that,” and it becomes a very natural part of the vocabulary.

Sonya: Yes. And in addition to genre, then, we’ve got literary terms like protagonist, antagonist, plot, setting, all of those terms. It seems like the best way to include those is very naturally. As part of the discussion, just as you would do with scientific terms, you just use them as you’re talking about it, and the context helps you determine what it means.

Richele: Yes. And we do this in the math books as well, where we’re using these terms naturally, and then the student begins to use them naturally as well.

Sonya: And if you need to, you give a very short explanation: this is what it is. But it’s just part of the conversation.

Richele: And so, rather than the student having a separate reference book, the Great Book Discussions reading guide has a little reference section to help you with that.

Sonya: And we can use these one-on-one with a student. So the scenario would be, the student would read the assigned chapters—there’s a reading guide, a schedule in the books—they would read the assigned chapters that form a cohesive component of the plot. We’re not interrupting every chapter, it’s just, “Here, this is one section of the plot. Read these chapters, and then we’re going to discuss the characters and the things you see happening. And here are the cultural notes to help you through,” and all that. We have these great discussions, we have the narration prompt, and then you read the next section and go on from there as you work your way through the book. I can understand how that works one-on-one. I have not used it in a group setting. You’ve used it in a group setting, right?

Richele: Yes.

Sonya: How did that work?

Richele: It works really well. First of all, you know when you have a book club or co-op, you can really go off into some rabbit trails? This can help bring some focus back to the book. And so we are coming together and we’re going to discuss what we have read at home at that point. And again, the discussion questions, you don’t have to use them all, because you could start with one, and it could open up this wonderful discussion that you don’t want to put an end to. And so, that’s kind of how it works there. Or the students can be, or the participants in a book club, say we can be discussing together some things that we might not have understood, or, Mary brought up this point and I hadn’t even considered that before.

Sonya: So being able to pick and choose the discussion questions at your leisure, at your discretion, is another great bonus to that. Now with your book club, was that high school students or was that adults?

Richele: No, that was adults. And that’s what I really like about these, because these didn’t come out when my children were in high school and I would have dearly loved that. It would have saved me a lot of time and work. And the actual questions are very rich and thoughtful. They’re thoughtful questions that allow us to think even further upon something that we might have brushed over before in our reading. And, as we said before, because we want our children to appreciate good literature and to make this a habit of good reading for life; I think that this really helps adults as well, who we might not have had this type of an upbringing, to really begin to think critically about what we’ve read.

Sonya: But without stealing the joy from the reading itself. And I love the last component in each of the guides, where it takes something that Charlotte mentioned and makes it very practical and real and “let’s do this.” Charlotte talked about how students should be able to discern, I think she talked about the line between strong will and weak will in the characters of the books that we are reading. And reminding them that strong will does not necessarily mean forceful. It means someone who has the strength to choose to do what’s right even when it’s hard versus a weak will is just driven by emotions and desires. And so that very last section gives the students, the adults, whoever’s using this, the opportunity to look at a few key characters in the book and decide on which side of the line each one falls. Did you use that with your adults?

Richele: Yes. And I have to say, because my students had already graduated, I think this is perfect also for using in a co-op. With high schoolers, they can come together and also discuss this, because we do, as Elsie Kitchen said, “we drink at the same fount of humanity.” And so, to be able to look at these characters in the light of where they fall, and it can change, right? And people are redeemed in these books. So that’s a great section. That’s nothing we did in high school. I’m glad that more people now have this opportunity, though, to look at the will.

Sonya: I think that making those types of distinctions—strong will, weak will—that is really going to help the students and us think through character. And all of those ideas and points that Charlotte wanted us to pull out of books without it being a sermon, right?

Richele: Actually, I brought a quote that relates to that. And it’s from Ourselves. So in this, Charlotte was talking to the students. And she said, “One must read to learn the meaning of life… The characters in the books we know become our mentors or our warnings, our instructors always; but not if we let our mind behave as a sieve through which the whole slips like water.”

Sonya: That is so easy to do sometimes when we’re reading, especially if we get into the habit of binge reading; just go, go, go, go, go, go, but never stop to consider, never stop to think about what we have read.

Richele: And Charlotte encouraged the parents, as well as students, to narrate to themselves what they read, especially at night when our head is on the pillow, to narrate back what we have read.

Sonya: The narration is such a critical part of it, but then adding on these wonderful discussions with other people who are learning from the same—drinking from the same place, as you mentioned—that just adds a whole other richness to these wonderful literary studies.

Richele: And it’s something we can do for life.

Sonya: Yeah, we don’t have to only do it with our high schoolers, we can keep going as adults. I love it. Thanks, Richele.

Literature Discussions the Charlotte Mason Way

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