60-day returns • free shipping on USA orders $129+
I’m often asked, “Is Charlotte Mason classical?” Homeschoolers can debate that question all day. Here’s my take on it: If by “classical” you mean appreciating and using classic literature; cultivating good character; focusing on what is good, true, noble, and beautiful; and spreading a wide feast that includes art and music and poetry and Shakespeare and time in nature, I would agree that a Charlotte Mason approach does include those characteristics.
But if by “classical” you mean an approach that is based on the trivium for school-age children, I would have to disagree. Charlotte Mason is not trivium-based. There are some foundational differences between those two approaches. (If you’re not sure what a trivium is, check out Five Flavors of Homeschooling.)
If you have decided to move from a trivium-based type of classical homeschooling to more of a Charlotte Mason approach, you may find that you need to shift your thinking in a few areas.
I want to share three tendencies you might want to watch for if you are switching from a classical approach to a Charlotte Mason approach. Keep in mind that the word classical means different things to different people. Depending on your definition of a classical education, you may experience some, all, or none of these tendencies. These are just areas in which I’ve received the most questions over the years from homeschoolers who are making a transition from a trivium-based classical approach to a Charlotte Mason approach.
tendency #1: focusing on facts over ideas
The first tendency is that you might find yourself focusing on facts without their informing ideas. It’s interesting that the Charlotte Mason approach is almost the opposite of a trivium-classical approach when it comes to facts vs. ideas. Charlotte Mason encouraged us to focus on giving the student living ideas, and the facts will come with them. She believed that it is the ideas that take up residence in the inner court of a person’s mind and heart, and once they are established there, they keep watch for any related facts and invite them in. Whereas the grammar stage of a trivium approach, as I understand it, focuses on giving the student facts to memorize in preparation for ideas that will come later. It’s been described to me as driving in pegs of facts that the ideas will eventually be hung on.
Do you see how those two approaches are opposite? One moves from ideas to facts; the other, from facts to ideas. So if you are switching to a Charlotte Mason approach, you may need to completely flip your thinking, especially in those younger grades, and put the main focus on the ideas, not the bare facts. Yes, a Charlotte Mason approach includes memory work but that memory work is based on ideas. For example, your student will be memorizing poems and Scripture passages—content that feeds her mind with ideas. But fact memorizing—such as math facts or grammar definitions—are not required until the student has personally explored and become familiar with the ideas and concepts behind those facts. Again, depending on what type of classical education you have been doing, you may need to make that mental flip.
tendency #2: moving too quickly
Tendency #2: You might have a tendency to move too quickly. When you feed your student a feast of ideas, you need to give him time to digest them. Time to process deeply, to ponder fully, to live with an idea—that is what educates the whole person. Be cautious of moving too quickly through a topic, just skimming the surface. Chances are, when you move quickly, you are just sharing pertinent facts.
Remember, the focus is on living ideas. Schedule time to linger with a historical person through a living biography. Plan to spend lots of time getting to know the ideas that ruled that person’s life, not just the bullet points of what he is famous for. Allow several weeks to live with one artist’s or one composer’s or one poet’s work and the ideas that he or she was communicating through that work. Don’t speed through history; take your time and really get to know those fellow human beings who walked this earth before we did.
tendency #3: emphasizing logic over character
And then, tendency #3 is based on a classical education’s emphasis on logic and reason. One whole stage of the trivium—the dialectic stage—is focused on logic and reason. Yes, we need to teach our children to think logically and to use reason. But Charlotte Mason cautioned us about the danger of emphasizing reason more than character and principles. You see, we can reason ourselves into or out of anything if we want it badly enough. Reason cannot be entirely depended upon because it can be swayed by a person’s desires and ambitions. We may logically know that our budget is “this” amount, yet we can find ways to talk ourselves into going over that budget if we really want something.
Yes, we need to teach our children to think deeply and well, but perhaps more importantly, we need to make sure we are instructing their consciences and giving them timeless principles that will help guide their thinking on the right path. Principles are unchanging, core truths that can be depended upon regardless of how a person feels or what he wants. It is the principles that inform and instruct the reason. In a Charlotte Mason approach, the emphasis is upon helping our children grow in those principles—governing their wills and their reasons with solid truth.
We should to teach our children to think logically and to use reason. But Charlotte Mason cautioned us about the danger of emphasizing reason more than character and principles.
So those are three tendencies that come to mind that could pull you off a Charlotte Mason path. Again, some of them may apply to you and some may not, depending on what type of classical education you have experienced. Now let me give you three quick tips to help you stay on a Charlotte Mason path. These tips are true regardless of the approach you’re coming from, but they reflect many conversations I’ve had with trivium-based classical homeschoolers.
tip #1: view your child as a whole person
The first tip is just a reminder to view your child as a whole person, not as a mind in a particular developmental stage. Yes, keep that child’s developmental capabilities in mind—don’t expect him to be able to do something that he cannot do yet—but remember to look past the skills he may or may not have and to see him as a whole person.
It’s easy to compartmentalize education and start to focus only on certain skills, such as reading, writing, or arithmetic skills. But Charlotte Mason would gently remind us that education is about helping each child to grow in all areas of life—mental, social, emotional, and spiritual. And that growth transcends developmental labels. Even young children work hard at communicating their thoughts well; that’s not something reserved for the rhetoric stage. And sometimes even young children come up with astoundingly logical arguments before they reach the dialectic stage. And we can all—even older students and adults—we can all learn a lot from a good story. So I encourage you just to be aware of how much a trivium-based approach might have influenced your thinking and to seek to look at each student as a complete person, with a mind, a will, emotions, character, habits, and tendencies that need guided growth—at every age.
tip #2: feed your student’s mind, don’t just exercise it
Focus on feeding your student’s mind, not just exercising it. There’s a big difference. It’s easy to focus so much on exercising the mind that we neglect to feed it. The mind feeds on ideas, which brings us back around to that big difference between dry facts and living ideas that we talked about earlier.
You might find it challenging to make this transition, since feeding the mind does not often leave a paper trail. When you exercise the mind, you usually have something that shows how well that mind did on the exercise. You might have a timed math quiz or a word-search puzzle or a worksheet with blanks to fill in. But feeding the mind is a different matter. In a Charlotte Mason approach, some subjects are included simply to nourish your child’s mind and heart with a wholesome feast of ideas and then give him time to digest those ideas. Picture study, for example, does not need to become a lesson in art criticism. It can be just a beautiful picture to savor and ponder over the next few days. Poetry can just be enjoyed, rather than dissected and analyzed. That doesn’t mean that we require nothing of the student. The methods used in a Charlotte Mason approach do require the student to put forth effort. But the wide variety of subjects will give your student a wonderful balance of enjoyment and effort, feeding and exercising. And balance is important.
tip #3: help your student find his own personal writing voice
Tip #3 is quite specific, but again, it reflects many conversations I’ve had with classical homeschoolers. This tip is Help your student find his own personal writing voice. It seems like writing composition is a big deal in a trivium-classical education. Often even young children are required to do a lot of writing. But Charlotte Mason took a different approach.
Let me try to explain. When you think about writing, there are really two distinct aspects involved: the author’s voice and the form of the writing. Of the two, a good writing voice is harder to cultivate. Once you have developed your voice and style, you can adapt to different formats pretty easily. But cultivating that writing voice is what takes the most time, and it requires freedom to experiment and lots of encouragement.
Charlotte focused on developing each child’s individual voice in the elementary and middle grades. And she started by allowing the young students to practice their individual voice orally, so the effort of handwriting and spelling and punctuation and all of that wouldn’t become a hindrance to capturing their thoughts and expressing them. That’s why she used oral composition in the younger grades. We call it “oral narration.”
Young students practice handwriting during handwriting lessons and use oral narration in the other subjects. They’re still doing the mental work of capturing and organizing and expressing their thoughts, but without the additional distractions of writing them down. Once their handwriting is more fluent and well established, then they begin to write some narrations. But once again, the emphasis is on allowing each student to experiment and to find his or her own personal voice.
It isn’t until high school that the student receives formal composition instruction. By that time the student has had several years to discover, experiment, and cultivate his own writing voice. The composition lessons simply help to smooth out any rough edges and to give the student experience in applying his style to different formats. It’s a different philosophy, a different approach, and there are good reasons behind it. So try not to panic or push your student into writing too soon. Be careful of requiring him to write in specific formats or to follow a set of formulas so his writing sounds exactly like everybody else’s. Instead, give him time to absorb a wide variety of great authors’ styles in his reading and to practice finding his own voice through lots of oral and written narration—years of time. Format can wait until high school; focus on the writing voice.
Whether you have used a more traditional classical approach or a trivium-based approach, I think you and your children can enjoy and value many aspects of a Charlotte Mason education. There are so many philosophies and methods available, and we have so much freedom as homeschoolers to find and use the ones that fit our families best. At the end of the day, the important thing is not necessarily the name that you attach to your homeschool approach. Sometimes labels can be helpful, but sometimes they can become confusing. The important thing is that you are doing your best to help your children grow in all areas of personhood, to keep their love of learning alive, and to feed their minds with good, loving, noble ideas that will influence who they are becoming. And that is an excellent education by any name.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Podcast (podcastv): Play in new window | Download