"The Art of Living" - the purpose of education; a review and recommendation of "The Basis of National Strength" by Charlotte Mason

 There is no escape for us, no short-cut; art is long, especially the art of living.

- Charlotte Mason

…at its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

- Neil Postman

education

by Kilby Austin

this is a great crime

to get knowledge everywhere

and enjoy nothing

About this time of the year, “how-to” articles and curriculum catalogues hit the email boxes and snail-mail boxes of homeschooling parents. How to make a certain curriculum work for you, how to tweak (or not tweak) a schedule, how to include or cut out more subjects, how to be more classical, how to be more charlotte mason, how to teach from a state of rest or wonder or enchantment or whatever the buzzword of the week happens to be. These things may be fine in themselves, but I have learned that I have to limit myself to only a few that might be precisely helpful. If I read too many, I end up overwhelmed and start frantically tweaking what has worked well for us for years, only to un-tweak it a month into school. It’s just not worth it.

But summer is the time to prep and get ready for our next lap around the track, and for me, that means a reminder of the Big Picture and life-long goals. Even more so now because the end, while still a ways off, is nearer than not. I have spent roughly fifteen years stumbling my way through, and if things continue to go as they have gone, I only have five more left. We are entering the autumn of this long obedience. It feels a bit like A.E. Housman and his cherry trees. Five more years are little room…

This year, my big picture came from three directions. Charlotte Mason (of course), C.S. Lewis (again, of course), and Neil Postman (my kids are all rolling their eyes and saying, of course). These came together accidentally, or providentially, from a random “pick up and read” kind of summer. I picked up Mason and read this chapter (which I hope to convince you to read). A friend reminded me of Surprised by Joy, so I reread his education chapters. And I saw Postman’s The End of Education sitting on the shelf, so I read that. Turns out they agreed. I love when the people I respect echo each other. It is a way for me to confirm the truth in what they say. If people from different times and countries are saying the same things, I listen.

I am going to try to bring these three strands together for us, or at least for me, so that you and I can go forward into our school year, however it might look, with a Big Picture before us, striving for those far-off, life-long goals.

The Basis of National Strength

Near the end of volume six of Charlotte Mason’s A Philosophy of Education (available for free here) there is a chapter titled “The Basis of National Strength,” which was originally published as as a pamphlet in 1912. Because it is a cohesive whole and not a chapter relying on what has come before, it serves as wonderful bird’s-eye-view of her approach to education. If you don’t have the time to read all her volumes or any of her volumes, this is a good place to start to get the big idea. It is available for free on the AmblesideOnline website here and as a pdf here. Feel free to leave off reading my article and read Charlotte’s instead.

The article is split into six sections:

I – Knowledge

II – Letters, Knowledge, and Virtue

III – Knowledge, Reason, and Rebellion

IV – New and Old Conceptions of Knowledge

V – Education and the Fullness of Life

VI – Knowledge in Literary Form

Mason’s approach is more philosophical than practical at first, but in true Mason form she elegantly combines both in the final section of the article. Throughout the article she is asking foundational questions like “What is knowledge?” and “What is the good of knowledge?” and “What is the best method by which we acquire knowledge?” These are questions that all thoughtful teachers and parents will ask throughout their teaching careers or child’s educational experience. They are questions to mull over and consider regularly because they determine not only our angle of approach but our reason behind it.

A Reason for Education

This chapter in volume six is so worth reading, and maybe reading once a year about this time, because it provides a why, a reason for education, a reason large enough and strong enough to build an education on. Neil Postman, the insightful cultural critic of the late twentieth century, said:

"…to become a different person because of something you have learned – to appropriate an insight, a concept a vision so that your world is altered - for that to happen, you need a reason. A reason is different from a motivation. Within the context of schooling, motivation refers to a temporary psychic event in which curiosity is aroused and attention is focused. I do not mean to disparage it. But it must not be confused with a reason for being in a classroom, for listening to a teacher, for taking an examination, for doing homework, for putting up with school even if you are not motivated. This kind of reason is somewhat abstract, not always present in one’s consciousness, not at all easy to describe. And yet for all that, without it schooling does not work... To put it simply, there is no surer way to bring an end to schooling than for it to have no end.” 1

Postman goes on to say that the thing supporting a lasting education is a transcendent narrative: “Our genius [as a species] lies in our capacity to make meaning through the creation of narratives that give point to our labors, exalt our history, elucidate the present, and give direction to our future. To do their work, such narratives do not have to be true in a scientific sense. … The purpose of a narrative is to give meaning to the world, not to describe it scientifically. The measure of a narrative’s truth or falsity is in its consequences. Does it provide people with a sense of personal identity, a sense of a community life, a basis for moral conduct, explanations of that which cannot be known? …Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has not purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.” 2

Charlotte’s last volume is the fruit of sixty years of educational experience as well as her consistent, interested, attentive observation of the nature of children from a range of socio-economic conditions. She has a deep appreciation for every child’s capacity for knowledge, and in this article, she not only lays down a convincing argument in favor of the potential in each child, but she provides us with this narrative we need and it is no less than what the human soul requires: providing an education that “should open life-long resources to [the student]… [and] would form part of the familiar back ground of his thoughts.” This is an education for the whole man for his whole life, and it is provided slowly, through years full of good books, time in nature, and time to play and follow interests.

A Materialist Education

“…if we let the people sink into the mire of a material education our doom [as a nation] is sealed.”

This statement comes at the end of the article, but I mention it at the beginning because it is a continual temptation, even as homeschoolers. What does she mean by “a material education”? She explains by example:

"We say, "What is the good of knowledge? Give a boy professional instruction, whether he is to be a barrister or a bricklayer, and strike out from his curriculum Greek or geography, or whatever is not of utilitarian value. Teach him to play the game and handle the ropes of his calling, and you have done the best for him." Now, here is a most mischievous fallacy, an assertion that a child is to be brought up for the uses of society only and not for his own uses."   (emphasis mine)

We know that education is more than making our children employable. We want to provide an education for them that widens their horizons and deepens their humanity. But we live in a culture that tends to talk about education as mostly and primarily a means for getting a job, hopefully a well-paying respectable job. Wide horizons and deeper humanity is a bonus, but can your kid get into a good school and find a good job? That is the litmus test of a good education. Speaking as the mom of two adults kids trying to figure out their next steps, I know how real this concern is. But is this a reason that will carry a boy or girl through their school years and into a life marked by the habit of learning? Will this make knowledgeable men and women? Charlotte and Postman both say no:

"It is for their own sakes that children should get knowledge. …The person who can live upon his own intellectual resources and never know a dull hour (though anxious and sad hours will come) is indeed enviable in these days of intellectual inanition, when we depend upon spectacular entertainments pour passer le temps."3 (emphasis mine)

Boy, does that sound familiar.

"If we knew…that all our students wished to be corporate executives, would we train them to be good readers of memos, quarterly reports, and stock quotations, and not bother their heads with poetry, science, history? I think not. Everyone who thinks thinks not. Specialized competence can come only through a more generalized competence, which is to say that economic utility is a by-product of a good education. Any education that is mainly about economic utility is far too limited to be useful, and, in any case, so diminishes the world that it mocks one’s humanity. At the very least, it diminishes the idea of what a good learner is."4 (emphasis mine)

It comes down to our humanity, it’s our humanity all the way down, when we think about education. Of course, we want our children to succeed and be able to provide for themselves materially, but that is a by-product of education. It will not endure as a reason to educate.

The first component of my big picture is, “Educate the person.”

A Chief Object of Education

“…personal delight, joy in living, is a chief object of education…”

A material education is not sufficient to meet the needs of the human soul, or even the human mind as Mason points out:

"…knowledge-hunger is as universal as bread-hunger…

"…for men and women of all ages, all classes, and all complexions of mind, Letters [books] are an imperative and daily requirement to satisfy that universal mind-hunger, the neglect of which gives rise to emotional disturbances, and, as a consequence, to evils that dismay us."

What our minds hunger for is knowledge, not just information. Knowledge is acquired through sustained attention toward an interest. We come to know through experience, either through the senses or the imagination, and appropriate to ourselves what we have learned so that it becomes a part of us in a very real sense. It is a mysterious thing. It is why your child can’t remember their multiplication tables but could give a three hour lecture on the flora and fauna of the Zelda universe or the activity of the ants in the nest outside.

Knowledge comes through many avenues. That is why Charlotte Mason moms like to quote her “large and varied feast” phrase as a perfect picture for what we are trying to do each day. We lay out dishes of information, prepared as well as we can find, and we let the kids’ minds do the work of digesting and assimilating the bits of learning into knowledge.

In this chapter, Mason says that.

"…knowledge is not a store, but rather a state that a person remains within or drops out of."

That is an incredible shift in perspective. It is not a thing to acquire as much as it is a state of being. We want to train our children in the way of knowledge so that when they grow older they do not depart from it, as she gives a very familiar example of:

"His degree taken, he shuts his books, reads the newspapers a little, perhaps a magazine or two, but otherwise occupies himself with the interests of sports, games, shows, or his employment. What is to be done, we wonder vaguely, to secure to this average boy some tincture of knowledge and some taste for knowledge?"

And why does it matter that we do secure our students with this taste? Because “joy in living is a chief delight of education.” Our years of schooling are too confined and too short to allow for learning all the wide world has to offer. “We are so made,” she writes, “that every dynamic relation, be it leap-frog or high-flying, which we establish with Mother Earth, is a cause of joy.” Every connection we make is a source of life for us, and that is more important than a source of making a living.

The next brush stroke in the Big Picture: “Educate the person for their own sakes and for their life-long enjoyment.”

What is Knowledge?

“…seeing that we all think as we have been brought up to think, our education is at fault.”

• What it is NOT

I love the way Charlotte can take complex topics and make them approachable. She is a careful, ordered thinker, and she helps her readers to think well, too.

'If knowledge means so much to us, "What is knowledge?" the reader asks. We can give only a negative answer. Knowledge is not instruction, information, scholarship, a well-stored memory.”'

It is also not reason, and this might hit home more for us:

"…a fatal error to think that reason can take the place of knowledge, that reason is infallible, that reasonable conclusions are of necessity right conclusions. Reason is a man's servant, not his master; and behaves like a good and faithful servant…and brings logical demonstration of any premise which the will chooses to entertain. But the will is the man, the will chooses; and the man must know, if the will is to make just and discriminating decisions. …a man's reason brings certain infallible proofs of any notions he has wilfully chosen to take up.” There is no escape for us, no short cut; art is long, especially the art of living.” (bold emphasis mine)"

We educate to inform the student’s art of living. This comes from introducing him to great thinkers and writers of the past. As Charlotte writes in the first section of this chapter, “…culture begins with the knowledge that everything has been known and everything has been perfectly said these two thousand years ago and more.” Lewis talks about his in his introduction to St. Athanasius’ Incarnation of Christ. Reading old books is necessary, not just because we can hear different concerns or get a different perspective, but also so we can see how alike we are, that their concerns and our concerns are often the same. It provides a larger perspective for us. We recognize that we are not that new and not that original, and this steadies us. We see that some concerns are so bound up with what it means to be human that we find them in every age. We develop “the habit of conceiving…life” beyond ourselves. We recognize our brethren from across the millennia and our understanding of what it means to be human deepens.

Knowledge is also not learning:

"…knowledge and what is known as "learning" are not to be confounded; learning may still be an available store when it is not knowledge; but by knowledge one grows, becomes more of a person, and that is all that there is to show for it."

Is there any better proof of knowledge than to become “more of a person”?

• What it IS, or is like

"...knowledge is not a store, but rather a state that a person remains within or drops out of."

“[Knowledge] is passed, like the light of a torch, from mind to mind, and the flame can be kindled at original minds only. Thought, we know, breeds thought; it is as vital thought touches our minds that our ideas are vitalized, and out of our ideas comes our conduct of life. … The direct and immediate impact of great minds upon his own mind is necessary to the education of a child. Most of us can get into touch with original minds chiefly through books; and if we want to know how far a school provides intellectual sustenance for its scholars, we may ask to see the list of books in reading during the current term. If the list be short, the scholar will not get enough mind-stuff; if the books are not various, his will not be an all-round development; if they are not original, but compiled at second hand, he will find no material in them for his intellectual growth. Again, if they are too easy and too direct, if they tell him straight away what he is to think, he will read, but he will not appropriate. Just as a man has to eat a good dinner in order that his physical energies may be stimulated to select and secrete that small portion which is vital to him, so must the intellectual energies be stimulated to extract what the individual needs by a generous supply, and also by a way of presentation that is not obvious. We have the highest authority for the indirect method of teaching proper to literature, and especially to poetry. The parables of Christ remain dark sayings; but what is there more precious in the world's store of knowledge?
"How injurious then is our habit of depreciating children; we water their books down and drain them of literary flavour, because we wrongly suppose that children cannot understand what we understand ourselves; what is worse, we explain and we question. A few pedagogic maxims should help us, such as, "Do not explain." "Do not question," "Let one reading of a passage suffice," "Require the pupil to relate the passage he has read." The child must read to know; his teacher's business is to see that he knows. All the acts of generalization, analysis, comparison, judgment, and so on, the mind performs for itself in the act of knowing." (bold emphasis mine)

We must allow room for the mind to “perform for itself the act of knowing.” This might be one of the most difficult parts of Mason’s method for parents to accept. We want to provide our kids with a better, richer, more interesting education that we did (or at least, those of us who are products of the typical public school do). We don’t want them to waste time like we did. We see almost infinite potential in them and we want them to tap into that. And yet, as Charlotte so often points out, education is ultimately the responsibility of the person educated. Her statement, “… there is no education but self-education,” holds true. Our children are born persons, not buckets, and just as we resisted attempts to be filled like an empty pail when we were kids, so to do our children. It’s in their nature as it is in ours. Most of us are contrarians to some degree. Most of us dislike being told what and how to think and will usually run in the opposite direction just because someone tried to dictate our thoughts to us. Should we really be surprised to find that our children are just as human as we are?

Narrations are a helpful way of seeing how much the student has swallowed during his reading - indeed, I think narration is the only reliable measure of learning - but it can take weeks or months, or even years, to see if his mind has transformed the learning, the information, into knowledge. In my experience, this comes about at unexpected moments when the student makes a connection and says, “Oh! I see what so-and-so was saying now.” That moment of connection is, I believe, the moment when information becomes knowledge. It is now his own, a part of him in a very real, transcendent way.

"…we perceive that knowledge and the mind of man are to each other as are air and the lungs. The mind lives by means of knowledge; stagnates, faints, perishes, deprived of this necessary atmosphere."

And as the man’s mind lives, so lives the nation. Hence the title of this chapter.

In section II, Mason writes,

"…the necessity incumbent upon us at the moment is to inculcate a knowledge of Letters. Men and their motives, the historical sequence of events, principles for the conduct of life, in fact, practical philosophy, is what the emergencies of the times require us to possess, and to be able to communicate. These things are not to be arrived at by any short cut…but are the gathered harvests of many seasons' sowing of poetry, literature, history. The nation is in sore need of wise men, and these must be made out of educated boys." (bold emphasis mine - and obviously girls are included, too)

The next part of the Big Picture is: “Educate the person for their sake and for their life-long enjoyment, providing quality food for the mind and trusting their mind to take the knowledge they need.”

Education and the Fullness of Life

“…there is not one period of life, our school days, in which we sit down to regular meals of intellectual diet, but that we must eat every day in order to live every day.”

Education is for life. It is a life, and it is a large part of what makes life worthwhile. As a Christian, with the narrative of Scripture making every part of my life – even eating and drinking – an opportunity to bring glory to the Almighty God, education is uniquely special. “If we believe that knowledge is the principal thing,” Charlotte writes, “that knowledge is tri-partite, and that the fundamental knowledge is the knowledge of God, we shall bring up our children as students of Divinity and shall pursue our own life-long studies in the same school.” (emphasis mine)

This doesn’t mean we preach sermons or bring everything back to Jesus in a way that is forced or contrived. Education is also an atmosphere, Charlotte says. If we are Christians, if we live for Christ and to know Him and enjoy Him, then our kids won’t need us to make every connection to Him explicit. Indeed, we should not. When we do, we take away opportunities for our children to connect for themselves what they are learning to what they know of God. We take away an opportunity for information to become knowledge. We need to trust that the Holy Spirit will do that work in them. Charlotte often mentions in her volumes the role of the Holy Spirit as the Teacher of our homeschool. This is why getting living knowledge from the dry bones of information is such a mystery, why we can’t come up with any kind of formula to make it happen. It is the Holy Spirit working in us. It the common grace of God, His kindness to all people, that this happens in every mind that wants to learn, not just Christian ones:

"The scholastic mediaeval mind, probably working on the scattered hints which the Scriptures offer, worked out a sublime Filosofica della Religione Cattolica, …the magnificent idea that all knowledge (undebased) comes from above and is conveyed to minds which are, as Coleridge says, previously prepared to receive it; and, further, that it comes to a mind so prepared, without question as to whether it be the mind of pagan or Christian; knowledge, in this light, is no longer sacred and secular, great and trivial, practical and theoretical. All knowledge, dealt out to us in such portions as we are ready for, is sacred; knowledge is, perhaps, a beautiful whole, a great unity, embracing God and man and the universe, but having many parts which are not comparable with one another in the sense of less or more, because all are necessary and each has its functions." (emphasis mine)

The Big Picture takeaway: “Educate the person for their sake and for their life-long enjoyment, providing quality food for the mind and trusting their mind to take the knowledge they need and trusting the Holy Spirit to do His work.”

The Legacy of Letters

“…letters, primarily, are the content of knowledge…”

Charlotte makes an excellent case for books as the primary means of education in this article and throughout her volumes, especially in the early chapters of volume six. But rather than quoting that, I bring as a witness one beloved author who spoke clearly on the value of books in his own development:

"I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons, I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.” C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

And here:

"I was a younger son, and we lost my mother when I was a child. That meant very long days alone when my father was at work and my brother at boarding school. Alone in a big house full of books. I suppose that fixed my literary bent." 5

Notice that it was Lewis’s independent interaction with books that “fixed” his “literary bent” without any help from teachers or curricula or reading programs, etc. No apparatus was needed other than available books and a curious mind. We know he had extensive schooling, even enjoyed learning when he was under the tutelage of William Thompson Kirkpatrick,6 and that he went on to become a teacher himself, but for all that, Lewis rightly recognized that it was his own private interaction with books that formed his taste.

We are not all raising Lewises. I can’t say for sure yet, but so far it is looking like none of my kids will become Oxford dons. And that is fine. As Charlotte says in this chapter, one of the problems with the English public school of her day was its focus on scholarships and making scholars, to the point of leaving “the average boy” (for whom Charlotte is advocating in this article) in the dust. We know that some of our kids will live ordinary lives, working ordinary jobs, unseen by most of the world for most if not all of their lives. We hope that however their lives go, it is lived to the glory of God. I truly believe that one thread of glory in an ordinary life is seeing and enjoying all the goodness that surrounds us. How else can we fulfill the mandate to “give thanks always for all things,” or appreciate that “He has give us all things freely to enjoy”? A healthy soul includes a mind awake and attentive to the world around it, ready to appreciate and enjoy what it experiences. This doesn’t come just through books, but books are a large part because words are the vessels through which ideas are communicated and shared and spread from mind to mind:

"The Greeks knew better than we that words are more than things, more than events; with all primitive peoples rhetoric appears to have been a power; the grand old sayings which we have scorned as inventions are coming to their own again, because, what modern is capable of such inventions? Men move the world, but the motives which move men are conveyed by words. Now, a person is limited by the number of things he is able to call by their names, qualify by appropriate epithets; this is no mere pedantic ruling, it belongs to that unfathomable mystery we call human nature; and the modern notion of education, with its shibboleth of "things not words," is intrinsically demoralizing. The human intelligence demands letters, literature, with a more than bread-hunger."(emphasis mine)

This life-long pursuit of knowledge for the joy of knowing benefits the student, of course, but also the community and the nation. Charlotte shows us that a nation of intellectually active and attentive persons is a strong nation. These are the people invested in their own lives and living in such a way that they become sources of life and service to others. These are the people who know and believe that “no man is an island,” but that a man’s well-being is bound up in the well-being of those around him:

"…we perceive that a person is to be brought up in the first place for his own uses, and after that for the uses of society; but, as a matter of fact, the person who "lives his life" most completely is also of most service to others because he contains within him provision for many serviceable activities which are employed in living his life; and, besides, there is a negative advantage to the community in the fact that the man is able to live on his own resources.
"But a man is not made up only of eyes to see, a heart to enjoy, limbs delightful in the using, hands satisfied with perfect execution: life in all these kinds is open more or less to all but the idly depraved. But what of man's eager, hungry, restless, insatiable mind? True, we teach him the mechanical art of reading while he is at school, but we do not teach him to read; he has little power of attention, a poor vocabulary, little habit of conceiving any life but his own; to add to the gate-money at a football match is his notion of adventure and diversion. …our fault, our exceeding great fault, is that we keep our own minds and the minds of our children shamefully underfed. The mind is a spiritual octopus, reaching out limbs in every direction to draw in enormous rations of that which under the action of the mind itself becomes knowledge. Nothing can stale its infinite variety; the heavens and the earth, the past, the present, and future, things great and things minute, nations and men, the universe, all are within the scope of the human intelligence." (emphasis mine)

Education helps our students connect what they are learning to their knowledge of God and of their neighbor. It is the underfed mind that cannot conceive of any experience beyond its own. It is the shrunken imagination that cannot imagine what it would be like to suffer or struggle like our neighbor or our friend, or even our enemy. Compassion is the product of a healthy imagination, and a healthy imagination comes from well-fed mind.

I absolutely love the picture of the mind as “a spiritual octopus, reaching out limbs in every direction.” This is the perfect image to end with. We have hungry minds to feed. And just as with our children’s bodies, our responsibility is to provide nourishing food and plenty of it. The action of the mind directed and empowered by the Holy Spirit will take care of the rest.

---

The Big Picture for this year: “Educate the person for their sake and for their life-long enjoyment, providing quality food for the mind, knowing that their mind will take the knowledge they need as the body takes nutrients from food, trusting the Holy Spirit to do His work of teaching and instructing in the inner man, and you will educate the person not only for his sake, but for the sake of the nation and beyond.”

This is a reason large enough and steady enough to build an education on. For me, this is the over-arching ideal that carries me through the tedious, the mundane, the new and unfamiliar. This is the perspective I want to carry into every educational effort, for the sake of my kids, myself, and the nation we live in.

The Yellow Books, Vincent Van Gogh

“He that hath the steerage of my course, direct my sail.”

With thanks to Kilby Austin for letting me use her haiku at the beginning of the article. I highly recommend giving her Substack a follow or a subscribe. Her poetry is excellent.

1

The End of Education

2

Postman outlines this need for a narrative in an excellent essay called “Learning Through Story,” available here: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1989/12/264-6/132674488.pdf

3

“to pass the time”

4

The End of Education

5

Lewis in a letter to Macmillan, quoted in The Narnian

6

This is a great summary of this teacher’s influence on his famous pupil https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2012/10/04/mentor/