During the month of October, I’m posting brief reviews of some of my favorite books from the past couple of years: those that really touched my heart, gave me a new perspective, taught me something, or were just plain fun. Hopefully you will be inspired to add something to your to-read list. 🙂
Karen Glass, one of the Ambleside Online Advisory members, has spent years studying both Charlotte Mason’s writings and many other authors who wrote on education, both ancient and modern. Having wavered between classical education and Charlotte Mason’s methods for years, wondering how to combine them (or if they were compatible), I was eager to read her brand-new book, Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition. I bought the Kindle book last Friday, and finished it on Monday! In this book, she demonstrates that the “why” behind both the ancient tradition of classical education and Charlotte Mason’s philosophy are the same – to train students in virtue, humility and a holistic (she uses the term “synthetic”) way of looking at the world. These are ideas I have encountered in other articles and books, such as Norms and Nobility, but she shares them in a fresh and very readable way, showing how Charlotte Mason’s methods are a practical outworking of the classical tradition. For example, she shows how reading and narration train children in the classical arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric. Her explanation of the importance of a “synthetic” education helped me understand the discomfort I have intuitively felt for the methods of narration and analysis employed by some of the grammar and writing curricula I have tried to use. And she has inspired me to get back to Charlotte Mason’s own words and pick up my copy of A Philosophy of Education again. 🙂
