C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

I begin with a book that rivals in many ways the essay by Dorothy Sayers that got our educational renewal movement started. In fact, C. S. Lewis delivered these lectures (the Riddell Memorial Lectures were a series given over three nights at King’s College, Newcastle University on 24–26 February 1943) a good four years before Sayers (her paper was read at the Vacation Course in Education at Oxford University in the Summer of 1947). If you have read “The Lost Tools of Learning,” then you are well prepared to tackle these essays.

In three essays, Lewis mounts a defense of objective value in the face of moral subjectivism. He predicted the dystopian future we now live in where tolerance is the reigning virtue, despite the fact that we are not a very tolerant people, at least one wouldn’t think so when one reads comments on social media. This book provides a foundational rationale for the “classical” part of our movement. (This book pairs nicely with Mere Christianity, connecting the “Christian” part of our movement.) And yet it nicely goes beyond what we might consider a fixation on Western civilization as the sole or sufficient basis for a liberal arts education. We see this most prominently in his use of the Tao as representative of objective values based on natural law. What he is getting at transcends an East/West divide and demonstrates that values are meta-cultural.

Sample Quote: “This things which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. . . . The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.”

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Harper, 2000): 43-44.

I could see this book being valuable if you are a teacher or administrator. It is also well worth adopting in an upper-level humanities course.

If you would like an opportunity to delve deeply into this book, there is an upcoming event you might consider joining if you are located in the American mid-west. The Alcuin Fellowship will be meeting on March 30-April 1 at Clapham School in Wheaton. We’ll be reading The Abolition of Man and having rich discussion around the book in small groups. There are limited spaces available. You can register for this fellowship at https://www.alcuinfellowship.com/midwestern-alcuin-retreat-2023/.

Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher

Okay, so I reviewed this book in two posts back in the autumn of 2021. Jonathan is a good friend, and this is a good book. I keep returning to it because it offers such a compelling synthesis of Christianity with the liberal arts tradition. The wisdom of this book abounds, and we benefit repeatedly from the insights of a leading New Testament scholar. Yet, Pennington also puts the cookies on the bottom shelf, so to speak.

This book goes well with the previous selection, although it offers a more modern mix of metaphors and imagery. There’s a brilliance in being able to bring such individuals as Aristotle and Steve Martin together as Pennington does. I think you’ll find this is a volume that can speak to teacher and student alike.

Sample Quote: “Hence, as we have seen throughout this book, there is insight to be gained from what the philosophers said about all sorts of topics. We needn’t cut ourselves completely off from their wisdom. Rather, we can gather lumber from whatever trees are available as we build the Christ-shaped temple of our lives, with Holy Scripture as the building inspector. As Justin himself said, “Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians. . . . For all the writers [ancient philosophers and poets] were able to see realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted word that was in them. For the seed and imitation that is imparted according to capacity is one thing, and quite another is the things itself, of which there is the participation and imitation according to the grace which is from Him.”

That last part gets a bit complex, but the point is straightforward – any wisdom in the world is from God, who created all, but we Christians have the grace that enables complete understanding. This includes the grandest human philosophical question: What does it mean to live a whole, meaningful, and flourishing life? What is the wisdom we need for the Good Life?”

Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher (Brazos, 2020): 203.

Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers

My next selection moves away from the humanities and provides something for those STEM teachers among us. Having taught Geometry for several years, I have appreciated how Barbara Oakley spells out effective learning strategies for students. I myself was never a great math student, and diving into teaching math well over a decade ago required going back to the basics. Along the way I found that math itself is not particularly difficult, but it can be quite different than the kinds of learning that goes on in the humanities side of the curriculum.

Oakley bases her work in solid neurological studies. One of the key insights in her book is to “chunk” mathematical and scientific concepts. A chunk is a conceptual piece of information that is “bound together through meaning.” (54) That “meaning” bit is significant because there’s a sense of the personal importance. The chunk attracts information or ideas to it, providing for mental leaps as separate units of information bind together through neural networks.

She provides three steps to forming a chunk. First, you focus your attention on the information to be chunked. (57) She advises learning in a low-distraction environment, free from screens. One of the core concepts here is that old neural networks enable you to form new neural pathways. In other words, we build from the known to the unknown. In essence, we want to create these chunks off of ideas, concepts or information that we already know well.

Second, you need to understand the basic idea (58). She differentiates the initial moment of understanding – the “aha!” moment – from the kind of understanding where you can close the book and test yourself on the problem. This is very much the way narration works. Being able to bring forward the formula, the steps, or the process in mathematics demonstrates that the idea is understood.

Third, you need to connect the basic idea to a context (58-59). In other words, a student needs to know when, say, apply the Pythagorean theorem, and when not to. She likens the chunk to a tool, “If you don’t know when to use that tool, it’s not going to do you a lot of good.” (59)

Chunking is not only valuable in mathematics, but across the curriculum. You can chunk historical concepts or literary terms. Chunking can be a pathway toward integration as we allow that chunk to attract more and more concepts to it. I think this is similar to Charlotte Mason’s expression about ideas, “Ideas behave like living creatures––they feed, grow, and multiply.” (Charlotte Mason, Parents and Children, 77)

Sample Quote: “A synthesis – an abstraction, chunk, or gist idea – is a neural pattern. Good chunks form neural patterns that resonate, not only within the subject we’re working in, but with other subjects and areas of our lives. The abstraction helps you transfer ideas from one area to another. That’s why great art, poetry, music, and literature can be so compelling. When we grasp the chunk, it takes on a new life in our own minds – we form ideas that enhance and enlighten the neural patters we already possess, allowing us to more readily see and develop other related patterns.”

Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers (Tarcher Perigee, 2014): 197.

What I like about this book is that her strategies are not simply about how to test better to get good scores on tests or entrance into college, etc. Instead, she sees how this can be a pathway to deep meaning in life through acquired skill, and how an individual can achieve creativity in multiple domains of knowledge through accumulated competence. The quote comes from a section entitled “Deep Chunking,” which segues nicely to our next book.

Cal Newport, Deep Work

Associate professor of computer science at Georgetown, Cal Newport not only delivered a best-selling book, but coined a phrase that has become part of the cultural parlance: “deep work.” In many respects, this is a counterpoint to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows inasmuch as Newport accepts the premise that the internet has made us shallow and then goes on to propose a solution by going deep through focused attention. The book is designed in an interesting way. Newport begins by spelling out three ideas that get at the “why” of deep work. Then the second part of the book spells out the “how.” Here I want to focus on the first part.

Newport’s first two ideas interact with the new economy centered around knowledge work: deep work is valuable largely because it is rare. This points to a “market mismatch” where talented individuals who are able to produce knowledge that is deep. His third idea is that deep work is meaningful. This is an idea that riffs on the metaphorical meaning of the word “deep.” When our work connects to something of the human experience, there’s a depth of character that has intrinsic value. I like how Newport develops the concept of craftsmanship as a sacred practice.

Sample Quote: “Once understood, we can connect this sacredness inherent in traditional craftsmanship to the world of knowledge work. To do so, there are two key observations we must first make. The first might be obvious but requires emphasis: There’s nothing intrinsic about the manual trades when it comes to generating this particular source of meaning. Any pursuit – be it physical or cognitive – that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.”

Cal Newport, Deep Work (Grand Central, 2016): 88-89.

As our skill increases, our sense of the meaning we are generating also increases. One gets plugged into the creative impulse that is part of our own imago Dei createdness. Now this is a point that is likely remote from Newport’s thinking, but his use of the word “sacred” points in this direction. Newport goes on to explain his second key observation that to access this deep meaning, we must embrace deep work as the portal to cultivating our skill.

One of the reasons why I recommend this book is that it has provided a framework for understanding how our educational renewal movement – perhaps counterintuitively – gives our students a strategic advantage as they enter the new economy. By encountering the deep ideas of the great works our students get connected to a level of depth not present in the school system. Many of our schools feature intense instruction on writing and rhetoric, which is essential to the knowledge work Newport describes as so rare and valuable. Graduates from classical schools are well trained to do deep work. So, by reading this you can cultivate the habit of deep work in yourself and your students.

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, They Say / I Say

My final selection is a textbook ostensibly for college writing. This year I adopted this title for our junior rhetoric class. It is full of practical advice for writers learning how to build effective arguments in academic writing. We are using the fifth edition, which came out in 2021, but any of the editions that have come out since the original 2006 edition features most of the same contours.

The central idea of the book is that effective argumentation begins with a good understanding of what others have said before venturing into an expression of one’s own beliefs. They posit that “working with the ‘they say / I say” model can also help with invention, finding something to say. In our experience, students best discover what they want to say not by thinking about a subject in an isolation booth but by reading texts, listening closely to what other writers say, and looking for an opening through which they can enter the conversation.” (xviii). As classical educators, we are very aware that the great books tradition is all about the great conversation. How better to take advantage of the plethora of books we read than by utilizing that conversation to initiate new pathways for our students to explore based on the “they say / I say” model.

Another feature of this book is how it utilizes templates. The authors recognize the liability of training students to use templates. “At first, many of our students complain that using templates will take away their originality and creativity and make them all sound the same.” (13) But through practice and instruction, students begin to see how there is a basic structure to how good argumentation works. Even after initial exposure to these templates, we can analyze academic writing to identify not only the basic “they say / I say” structure, but also finer points of perspective, argumentation, and analysis. For students raised on the 10-sentence paragraph and the five-paragraph essay, this approach to templates builds on earlier types of templates.

Students are able to practice utilizing two major questions as they work through this book. There is the establishment of relief (using an idea from sculpture), between what you are proposing and what others might say. Students begin to become sensitive to the question, “Oh yeah, who says otherwise?” The other question that students learn to become aware of is the “so what?” or “what difference does this make?” set of questions. For students in junior rhetoric, this is excellent training for the work they will accomplish the following year during senior thesis. The essential skills students learn in this book are critical analysis of sources, summary of conventional viewpoints, handling controversial topics, and expressing the application and consequences of one’s point.

One chapter I really appreciate is the chapter on revision. For many students, revision amounts to identifying typographical errors and eliminating the teacher’s red marks. Well, the approach taken by the authors provides a handy guide to how to make substantial revisions to an essay.

Sample Quote: “One of the most common frustrations teachers have – we’ve had it, too – is that students do not revise in any substantial way. As one of our colleagues put it, “I ask my classes to do a substantial revision of an essay they’ve turned in, emphasis on the word ‘substantial,’ but invariably little is changed in what I get back. Students hand in the original essay with a word changed here and there, a few spelling errors corrected, and a comma or two added. . . . I feel like all my advice is for nothing.” We suspect, however, that in most cases when students do merely superficial revisions, it’s not because they are indifferent or lazy, as some teachers may assume, but because they aren’t sure what a good revision looks like. Like even many seasoned writers, these students would like to revise more thoroughly, but when they reread what they’ve written, they have trouble seeing where it can be improved – and how. What they lack is not just a reliable picture in their head of what their draft could be but also reliable strategies for getting there.”

Gerald Graff & Cathy Birkenstein, They Say / I Say (Norton, 2021): 149.

After this introduction, which describes what many a teacher has felt, the authors provide guidance on how to make substantial revisions to an essay. The chapter on revision concludes with an excellent revision checklist. Students regularly run into the same frustrations we have with revision. They have a sense that they could express their thoughts in a better, more sophisticated way, but they are unpracticed in how to excavate their own writing with a view to finding the veins of gold, let alone finding the weaknesses to correct.

Conclusion

Hopefully this list of books to read in 2023 will inspire you to dig into some different areas where you can become a more inspired and skilled educator this year. There are tons of other books I could have recommended, and you likely have some of your own that are top of your list.

Even more essential than reading the selection of book listed here is building the habit of daily reading. Even a little bit on a daily basis begins to accumulate to a significant amount of input into your life. With lesson planning, grading, meetings and family life, it can be difficult to carve out time to read. Steven Covey talks about how important it is to “sharpen the saw.” For us educators, reading is one of the best ways for us to cultivate the joy of learning we want to inspire in our students. So whether it’s these books or others that spark interest in you, take a moment even now to read.

The post The Habit of Reading: Five Book Recommendations for 2023 appeared first on .

In my first blog in this series, I began exploring this question through a close reading of Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education. In this book, Clark and Jain offer a paradigm for understanding classical education as it exists within the broader liberal arts tradition. According to these thinkers, the purpose of classical education is to cultivate virtue in body, heart, and mind, while nurturing a love for wisdom under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

This is a comprehensive purpose statement to say the least. It intentionally steers clear of several pitfalls, many of which modern education notably falls into. For example, it conceives of human beings holistically as embodied minds, hearts, and souls. This is a refreshingly biblical anthropology in contrast to naturalistic materialism on the one hand and dualistic platonism on the other. While naturalistic materialism fails to take seriously the immaterial components of a person, such as the soul, dualistic platonism makes the equal but opposite mistake of maligning the body in favor of some transcendent immaterial reality.

Another advantage of this purpose statement is that it rightly identifies the cultivation of virtue as a central aim in the educational endeavor as opposed to mere information transfer or workplace preparation. We live in a world today that is driven by hyper-efficiency and economic productivity, which has its benefits, but all too often has led to corruption, corporate scandal, and, over time, moral decay.

Finally, this statement underscores that nurturing a genuine love for wisdom–practical knowledge geared toward moral and upright living–is fundamental for what philosophers call the good life. Life is a complex journey, full of ups and downs, and it often demands hard decisions of its pilgrims. Students need all the wisdom they can gain in order to make this journey successfully.

To help educators follow and fulfill the purpose of classical education, in this blog, I want to hone in on three specific elements of a Charlotte Mason education that will aide them along the way. The three elements are:

1. A Broad and Liberal Curriculum 
2. Shaping the Affections
3. Habitudes of the Body

Together these three elements illustrate that Charlotte Mason can and should be properly situated within the liberal arts tradition as a proponent for educating the whole person.

A Broad and Liberal Curriculum

One of the hallmarks of a classical education is that it is “liberal,” that is, geared toward cultivating a rich intellectual life. In the Greco-Roman world, elite members of society were often provided a liberal education with the expectation that they would need to think, behave, and govern their estate or province in a virtuous and effective manner. A liberal education can be contrasted with one geared toward vocational training, that is, the practical know-how for doing a particular job. In our modern context, examples may include electric wiring or HVAC. Of course, this work is essential for society to function today. I don’t have a problem with electricians or HVAC technicians; if I did, I’m not sure how long I would make it through these midwestern winters! 

In Charlotte Mason’s day, the choice between liberal education and vocational training was pressing. There remained discernible class distinctions in society, but the industrial revolution opened the door for more children to be educated than ever before. The question thus became: which form of education would they receive? A liberal education or vocational one?

Charlotte Mason was convinced that all children could learn, regardless of social class or ability, and therefore insisted on providing the most intellectually nourishing education available. Interestingly, her conviction was not merely theoretical; it was tested through time and experience. In her preface to her six-volume series on education, Mason writes, “Eight years ago the ‘soul’ of a class of children in a mining village school awoke simultaneously at this magic touch [of knowledge] and has remained awake…. It may be that the souls of children are waiting for the call of knowledge to awaken them to delightful living” (Preface, xxv). The British educator had seen first hand that even children of the working class, which were often prejudiced against as intellectually sub-par, could find their minds awakened through a liberal form of education geared toward serving its students pure and unadulterated knowledge and fostering intellectual vitality.

What is the essence of a liberal education? According to Charlotte Mason, a broad curriculum composed of the best books, art, music, science, and history available. In her chapter on the three instruments of education, she concludes,

“All roads lead to Rome, and all I have said is meant to enforce the fact that much and varied humane reading, as well as human thought expressed in the forms of art, is not a luxury, a tit-bit, to be given children now and then, but their very bread of life, which they must have in abundant portions and at regular periods. This and more is implied in the phrase, ‘The mind feeds on ideas therefore children should have a generous curriculum’.”(Towards a Philosophy of Education, 92)

Here Mason is adamant that “humane reading,” that is, books pertaining to the humanities such as literature and history, are not add-ons to the curriculum, but the very “bread of life” for a child’s education. These books, especially living books full of ideas, provide the sustenance for a rich intellectual life. And while vocational training is certainly of value, it does not provide students with the tools for a vibrant intellectual life.

In the classical tradition, a student read and discussed some of the books Mason has in mind as part of their broader trivium training, the language arts of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. In addition, they would receive training in the quadrivium, which were the numerical arts. Together, the seven liberal arts equipped students to pursue scientia (knowledge) of the three major domains of knowledge–God, humanity, and nature. Following this tradition, Mason goes on to explain her curricular program in terms of this three-fold division.

So if one central aspect of classical education is the cultivation of the life of the mind, Charlotte couldn’t agree more. Her insistence that children read from a broad and liberal curriculum fits right in with the broader liberal arts tradition. In particular, her recommended practices of narration, transcription, dictation, and recitation all cultivate a healthy intellectual life for the child, regardless of upbringing, social class, or ability.

Shaping the Affections

Classical education is not only focused on cultivating the mind, however. As I explained in my first blog in this series, a particularly important element of education in the liberal arts tradition is tuning the heart to desire, that is, long for, what is good, true, and beautiful. Clark and Jain identify this as “musical education,” which is not to be confused with the modern subject of music related exclusively to instrumentation and singing. A student that possesses head knowledge but has no joy or love for what she has learned is missing the mark. Rather, her educators are missing the mark. When this happens, the very future of what it means to be human is at stake. 

At least, that’s what C.S. Lewis thought. In The Abolition of Man, the “abolition” Lewis speaks of with regards to humanity occurs when the affective element of education is lost. When education is reduced to either scientific analysis or subjective interpretation, the awareness of objective morals and values deteriorates. Knowledge either becomes exclusively scientific, pushing moral claims to the margins, or subjective, rendering value judgments as relative to the individual. What’s left is a race of humanoid imposters, inhabiting the earth with swelled heads and diminished chests.

In order to avoid this pitfall which Lewis believed the modern world had fallen into, education must have an affective impulse. That is, it must seek to shape the desires, intuitions, and moral imagination of the student. It must lead her into joyful engagement with reality and form value judgments about what is objectively true, good, and beautiful. 

Charlotte Mason sought to do precisely this through the various “studies” her students engaged in during their lessons. For example, Picture Study was an opportunity for students to discern and appreciate pictorial beauty in such a way that would stir their very hearts. Mason writes, “It is of the spirit, and in ways of spirit must we make our attempts” (Towards a Philosophy of Education, 214). Her students would gather around a piece of art together, study it intensively, tell back in detail, and share inspiring ideas about it. And to be clear, the task of appreciating beauty was not an optional activity in Charlotte Mason’s mind, nor was it rendered to the realm of subjective feeling. She writes in the fourth volume in her series, “Here again, I would urge that appreciation is not a voluntary offering, but a debt we owe, and a debt we must acquire the means to pay by patient and humble study” (Ourselves, Volume I, 103). In other words, the objective beauty manifested in art demands something of us morally. Children must therefore be exposed to this beauty, study it intently, and let it stir the affections for a second course.

The same is true for fables and poetry. Charlotte Mason writes, “A child gets moral notions from the fairy-tales he delights in, as do his elders from tale and verse…. Most of us carry in our minds tags of verse which shape our conduct more than we know” (Ourselves, Volume II, 10). Through the reading and reciting of poetry, the minds of students take in certain ideas and reject others. Parents and teachers need to be conscious of the tales and poetry they read children, and see the vast potential they have to form the moral imaginations and intuitions from a young age.

Finally, just as beautiful art, fables, and poetry have the capacity to shape the affections, so does music. Educators today tend to divide children pretty early on as musical and non-musical. Either the child has rhythm or she doesn’t. Or we ask her at far too young of an age, “Do you enjoy music? Would you like to study it?” As if a small child of five can make such a weighty decision! But Charlotte Mason was insistent that music appreciation no more requires the ability to play an instrument than Shakespeare appreciation requires the ability to act (Towards A Philosophy of Education, 218). 

The key to cultivating an affection for musical beauty is to present lavish amounts of it before children, give them tools for understanding its various forms, and exhort them to listen attentively to the beauty of the ear. For as Charlotte Mason puts it, “Many great men have put their beautiful thoughts, not into books, or pictures, or buildings, but into musical scores…” (Ourselves, Book I, 34). When the practice of listening to beautiful music occurs regularly and with due attention, the hearts of students are shaped to know, identify, appreciate, and grow an affinity for it. 

Habitudes of the Body

So far I have shown how deeply Charlotte Mason cared for the mind and heart of her students, but how about the body? An education that addresses the whole person will certainly take into account the physical component. This rings true in classical education. Clark and Jain provide a helpful glimpse of physical education in the liberal arts tradition through what they call gymnastic education. 

Gymnastic education focuses on cultivating inherent physical abilities in humans such as strength and dexterity. Jason writes, “In ancient Greece the gymnasium for adults (or the palaestra for youth) was a set of public buildings devoted to physical exercises and contests.” It was here that students came to educate the part of themselves that was uniquely physical. This is such a crucial component of classical education and it is a travesty when it is neglected, not least because physicality is part of God’s good creation. And it will be part of the new creation as well. Let me say just a bit more about this theological notion.

God did not create humans as embodied creatures accidentally or temporarily. Scripture is clear that in the eschaton a new heaven and new earth will arrive to replace the old heaven and old earth (see Revelation 21). This new earth will consist of an earthly city, complete with physical roads, gates, walls, and a golden street. This city will be inhabited by saints with resurrected bodies and ruled by a resurrected King. So if physicality is not inherently evil or temporary, but a gracious gift of God that is a component of what it means to be human, then we need to take special care to cultivate the inherent abilities in our physical bodies. Here’s where Charlotte Mason’s emphasis on habit comes in.

Charlotte Mason taught that education is a discipline and here she means the discipline of habit. As humans, we do not make every decision or perform every action at the conscious bidding of the will. Instead, our brains catch on to repeated behaviors over time and offload these behaviors from will to habit. Eventually, through practice, these actions become second nature to us. 

A great example of habit on peak display in my own life is my ability to effortlessly drink water from a glass cup (impressive, right?). I don’t (fully) consciously perform the complex physiological maneuver of extending my arm, closing my hands around the cup, bringing it to my lips, opening my mouth, and swallowing. Through time and experience, it has become habit. Charlotte Mason taught that habits, when trained properly, function as rails for the good life. There are habits of mind, such as attention, habits of heart, such as kindness, habits of soul, such as reverence, and habits of body. 

Habits of body can range from sitting up straight in a chair to holding the pencil correctly to doing neat work on a page. In other words, the training of physical habits doesn’t only apply to shooting a basketball or doing a front handspring. They are called upon whenever a routine action is habituated. Of course, the training of good physical habits takes effort. But the fruit is worth the labor! Charlotte Mason writes, “We admire the easy carriage of the soldier but shrink from the discipline which is able to produce it” (Towards a Philosophy of Education, 101). Later she writes,

“Consider how laborious life would be were its wheels not greased by habits of cleanliness, neatness, order, courtesy; had we to make the effort of decision about every detail of dressing and eating, coming and going, life would not be worth living.” (103)

Here she emphasizes that habits exist to make the good choices of the will easier and these choices often have both a cognitive and physical dimension.

In short, Charlotte Mason was clearly a proponent of training the physical body. She embraced the physical aspect of humanity and envisioned its potential given proper training. In School Education, she writes, “In all matters of physical exercise it is obvious to us that–do a thing a hundred times and it becomes easy, do a thing a thousand times and it becomes mechanical, as easy to do as not” (105). The road to a flourishing physical life entails self-discipline, self-control, and self-restraint through habit, both at home and at school. When these half-moral, half-physical “habitudes” become automatic, it is just as easy to do them as to not. These habitudes then free up our minds, wills, and bodies to focus on tasks amenable for a thoughtful and considerate life in community with others.

Conclusion

In this two-part series, I have attempted to demonstrate that the educator Charlotte Mason is rightly understood as a member of the broader liberal arts tradition of education. The practical resources she provides teachers seeking to educate within this tradition should not be unduly neglected. Her emphases on a liberal curriculum, heart-shaping lessons, and the discipline of habit entail a treasure trove of insight for whole-person education. If you are a teacher at a classical school or home-schooling parent, I can’t encourage you enough to give her techniques a try. Where to begin?

Check out Jason’s free eBook on narration, which he is developing into a full length book with the Circe Institute, expected publication this summer.

Or see Patrick’s free eBook on habit training to go more in depth on Charlotte Mason’s practice of training students in the habitudes of the body.

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