One day in our family's past, this happened.
Read Charlotte Mason's exposition of the teaching of history, on pages 279-295 of Volume 1: Home Education.
Compare these early thoughts with her culminating meditation on the teaching of history in Volume 6: Towards a Philosophy of Education.
One thing that strikes me in my own reading of these passages is the way that Charlotte Mason has built on the notion of history as contributing to the student's "storehouse of ideas": that the animating significance of the study of history is not the accumulation of factual knowledge, but the accrual of larger truths which are embedded not only in the events and people of the past, but in the way their stories are told and retold. As in any other discipline in a child's education, history is ultimately a discipline not of facts, but of relationships.
Parents worry, not without some justification, about the accuracy of the books their children study. We don't want our children to learn "the wrong thing." But it's worth considering that any subject our children study is mediated to them through language: someone, some human person, is communicating whatever it is in his or her own words. We may have our oldest children study history through primary-source documents, the writing of people who were there, who witnessed events and knew people in a particular time and place in the past. But even those accounts were set down by human beings who were not omniscient, who could not see into the minds, hearts, and motives of others. And those human beings had their own biases, their own hangups, their own agendas to pursue. What we see of an event or person through their eyes is – as Saint Paul has it – through a glass darkly. Even when history most resembles direct reporting, we see not as if we ourselves were there, but through the window of the reporter's own mind. Inevitably, the account tells us as much about the reporter as it does about what actually happened. And this is, and should be, of intense interest to us. The fallible narrator is a reason to read a history book, not to close it.
This is what history is. It is not so much reported as recorded. Or, further, as the Catholic historian John Lukacs puts it, "History is not only the study of the recorded past; it is also that of the remembered past." Most of the history our children read, of course, is not eyewitness history, but history retold by a later writer looking back at the past, through his own personal and cultural memory. The meaning of the past to that writer, and his way of talking about it, is its own unique artifact. What history is, fundamentally, is as bound up with an interest in how it is retold, and by whom, as with what happened when.
Here is Lukacs again, articulating an idea which Charlotte Mason herself communicates, from the standpoint of the Catholic historian:
***. . . history is less than a science but also more than a science, because everything has its history, including science. It took me more than a decade of professional historianship to recognize this and put it in something like this way. Long before that I felt, and thought, that history was closer to art than to science, that, indeed history-writing was an art. But I outgrew that, too. Around 1958 the final crystallization formed in my mind, to the effect that the entire objective/subjective, science/art (and even fact/ fiction) antitheses were inadequate and outdated; that we have outgrown them; that knowledge, very much including historical knowledge, is neither objective nor subjective but personal and participant; that history is not only “an art, like all the other sciences” (Veronica Wedgwood's fine formulation) but a way of thinking, a now inescapable form of thought; and that the awareness and description of this may be my most important task.Before that, I knew something more directly related to my writing. This was that the historian, like the novelist, is plagued by the elusive nature of truth. Very early in life I learned in Hungary that it is possible to write a history in which every “fact” may be precise and yet the general impression of which may be—often deliberately—false. This happens because a “fact” does not exist in our minds except through its associations; because it has no meaning except through its statement; and because the statement of every fact depends on its purpose. History consists of words, not of “facts”----or, more precisely, of “facts” that are inseparable from (and even unimaginable without) words. (Remembered Past: On History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge. John Lukacs. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2005, pp. 652-653)****
What Lukacs articulates here is the idea that facts without their informing ideas – outside language, outside narrative – mean nothing. Again, this is precisely the idea that drives Charlotte Mason's insistence on living books for history as for other subjects. Knowledge, says the 20th-century Catholic Lukacs, in absolute concert with the 19th-century Anglican Charlotte Mason, is "neither objective nor subjective, but personal and participant (emphasis mine)."
Furthermore, Lukacs continues,
***. . . but I must insist on something else at this point. This is that this recurrent, and perhaps chronic, aspiration of mine has been involved with my interest in the inevitable overlapping of “fact” and “fiction” (in the sense, too, of the original Latin meaning of the fictio, that is, mental construction), in a kind of prose that may be found in the best of histories and in the best of novels . . . There is something more important. It involves that particular kind of imagination which is historical. I must leave aside the important argument that all imagination is, to a great extent, historical; as C. S. Lewis wrote, no one can imagine a wholly new color a a wholly new monster or a third sex, only a new combination of colors, or monsters, or of the two sexes that we already know. I must also leave aside the fascinating possibility—and some of its evidences—that in some cases human perception actually precedes sensation. In any event, imagination, like perspective, is not a only a consequence but an inevitable component of the act of seeing. (Remembered Past, pp. 655-656) ***
Though Lukacs is primarily concerned with imagination as an element in the best kind of text for history, I think we can't discount the role of imagination in the reader or hearer of that text. Here again we can think about the difference between fact and truth, in terms of what a text might give a student to learn.
"The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was passed on June 17, 1930," is a fact. What can a person's mind do with that fact? Not much, other than try to hang onto it and spit it back out on command. What does it mean? In and of itself, not much, which makes it that much harder to hang onto.
Now consider this:
As King Alfred was running away from the Danes, he took refuge in the cottage of a poor woman. She was baking some cakes on the fire and asked the king to mind them for her. But, distracted by thoughts of the battle and what he might do next, he forgot to watch the cakes, so that they burned. When the woman returned and saw the blackened cakes, she gave the king a terrible tongue-lashing, which he bore in meekness, never letting on to her that he was the king to whom she should bend her knee.
This, as it happens, is my own off-the-cuff retelling of this famous anecdote. Certain things about that story, as I remember it, stand out to me, chiefly the king's humility, which I always find so lovely and noble. I am sure that this impression colors my telling of the story; my own imagination enters in here. But more than that, there is room for a child, reading this story (in any retelling), to form an imaginative image of King Alfred, not simply as a figure on a timeline, but as a human being who lived, breathed, and was, and whom we remember for some good reason.
Note, too, that I have stopped short of telling the child what to think about King Alfred. I've only noted his position, and the woman's mistake. I'm trusting the child to form a good imaginative impression; he doesn't have to be told how to think, any more than he benefits from being told what to think. If I said, "And so we see that King Alfred was a humble man, and we should all try to be like him," then I would first be insulting the child's intelligence, by not allowing him to come himself to the same conclusion, but I would also be reducing the whole meaning of the story to a potted little takeaway, closing off any other avenues of interest that it might inspire. I would be shutting down the whole imaginative element, in other words, which Lukacs calls "an inevitable component in the act of seeing." I would be, in essence, teaching a child to have tunnel vision.
This also is why I have worried far less about whether the history my children read is "Catholic history," at least in the sense of "always about how the Catholic Church is true and good." I KNOW that the Catholic Church is true and good, which is a knowledge I can't help communicating to my children. It's the knowledge that animates my whole life. But what has seemed important to me in their history learning has been that it be interesting and well told, by writers who do have some notion of concepts like courage and humility, betrayal and depravity, as universal human potentialities, not limited to any one religion, culture, or people. It is, as Charlotte Mason says, a source for their "storehouse of ideas," a personal and participatory exploration of human experience.
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Here the Ambleside Online Advisory explain their own translation of Charlotte Mason's programmes into a workable outline for home education. Even if you don't use AO, as I have not, the "why" behind their decision-making is always useful in terms of illuminating the principles behind Miss Mason's approach to teaching history.
Mater Amabilis has done something similar in setting up the following rotations for history, for U.S. families:
Level 1 (grades 1-3):
National History: United States or Britain
World History: Bible history, Ancient Egypt
Level 2 (grades 4-5):
National History: Britain or United States (alternating with L1)
World History: Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome
Level 3 (grades 6-7):
National History: United States or Britain (alternating with L2)
World History: Western Civilization, Ancient to Modern
Level 4 (grade 8):
National History: 20th Century United States
World History: 20th Century World
Current events are also a focus in this level
Level 5 (grades 9-10):
National History: Britain
World History: Ancient-Renaissance
Level 6: (grades 11-12):
National History: United States
World History: Early Modern-Current Day
As you can see, regardless of which curriculum you choose, one fundamental element of Charlotte Mason's approach to history is that it is studied in multiple strands simultaneously, through slow reading over an entire two- or three-year level. This may look complicated to juggle, but in practice it really isn't. Typically, in Mater Amabilis, each book you're reading for a strand of history is scheduled to be read twice a week.
So, say in Level 2, for example, you're reading, simultaneously, Our Island Story for National History, and Famous Men of Greece for World History. I might schedule Our Island Story for Monday and Wednesday, and Famous Men for Tuesday-Thursday reading. I found it refreshing, myself, to alternate: never too much of any one book for any stretch of time. My children had no trouble retaining what we had read, even given the back-and-forth. We covered an enormous amount of history – as Miss Mason says, this method "multiplies time" – and never had a year when we felt stuck in a less-appealing historical period, which I think helped everyone feel that though they might like one period better than another, they liked history as a study overall.
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A word about the use of older texts, with what we might call "outmoded" outlooks:
Remember that, as Lukacs says, knowledge, "very much including historical knowledge," is "personal and participant." Anything we know is going to be mediated through the fact of our own personhood – we're not omniscient ourselves, and see and understand in necessarily limited ways – and the personhood of whoever is imparting knowledge to us.
This means, for one thing, that the authority of any text is going to have its limitations, because it is produced by humans who are not omniscient. It's unreasonable, though a lot of us do precisely this, to expect that our child can simply sit down with a book and imbibe everything he needs to know. We expect this particularly when we're confronting a subject about which we ourselves feel personally ignorant: "I can't teach history. I need the book to tell us the facts. I need to be able to trust the book."
But the book – in this case the history book – is not a magisterium, and is not meant to be. It's not a prescription for what and how to think, and it's not meant to be. It would be dangerous, in fact, if it were, and a danger to our children if we taught them to receive it that way. "Just read the book and believe whatever it says?" No thanks.
A living book, instead, is one half of a conversation, one half a relationship. The other half of the conversation and the relationship is the reader. You don't have to know much about history to be an engaged reader, and to model this for your young children as you read aloud to them, so that they can learn to be engaged readers themselves: people who enter personally and actively into a reading, as participants not spectators, people who ask questions and volunteer arguments in response to what they read.
Many of the books which Charlotte Mason curricula employ in their syllabi are older books, from the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the 1920s or 30s. There are reasons why these programs use these older books, rather than more "up-to-date" models:
Many older books tend to be better written, in terms of presenting challenging vocabulary and complex syntax. They are better models of written language, and it is good for children to internalize their language.
More older history texts have a single author, a known person with whom the student can form a relationship as he reads, than newer textbooks tend to.
More older history texts tend to be written by people who consider themselves unambivalently to be heirs of a Christian civilization, whether they themselves are Catholic or Protestant, and to value Christian virtues like courage, generosity, and humility. They assume a universal understanding of good and evil.
As Catholics, the historian Christopher Dawson has said, our relationship with the past is fundamentally a positive one. We are people who value tradition. Our default setting is to assume that we can learn from the people of the past. Our relationship with the saints of the Church presents the obvious example, but by virtue of that same default setting – which is not our mainstream culture's current default setting at all, a fact of which we should not cease to be aware – we should assume that historians from the past have something valuable to give us as well.
Does this mean that we, or our children, necessarily imbibe viewpoints we don't agree with? I really don't think so. If I can have Thanksgiving dinner with people whose views sometimes contradict my own – and I do, every year – then surely I can sit down with a book that occasionally presents views that are not my own and see through those views to something of value. If I can love people I disagree with – and I not only can, but Christ tells me I MUST – then surely I can cope with difficult passages in a history book, assuming that the person who wrote it was basically a person of good will. And if I'm supposed to teach my children to love their neighbor, too, not selectively, just the neighbors they agree with, but ALL their neighbors, then coping with the history book seems to me to be a valuable lesson on all kinds of levels, as indeed a history lesson is meant to be.
Ways that I have coped with things in history books that I don't like:
When the issue is language, as in terms used to describe members of other cultures, and I was reading aloud to young children, I often just edited the word out as I was reading. Often I just replaced whatever it was with "people." VERY occasionally I would use that language as part of the lesson, in which case I would include a heads-up in my brief preparatory remarks: "You're going to hear a word that we don't use, for very good reasons. It's a word that offends against the dignity of the human person. Sometimes, unfortunately, people lack the kind of relationship with people different from themselves that would make them not want to use this kind of word to describe them. It's good sometimes to know what those words are, so that we know what NOT to say."
When the issue is language, as described above, and the child is an independent reader, I would include basically the same kind of preparatory remark in notes for the child to read before reading the assignment.
When the issue is something that seems to offend against our faith – a negative portrayal of a saint (Charles Dickens REALLY didn't like Saint Dunstan for some reason), or a glowingly positive portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I, without mention of the persecution of Catholics that took place during her reign – I might again include something about this in my preparatory remarks or notes before the reading. I might ask the child to listen or be on the lookout for these things, and to consider, first of all, what's really true. Is any person on this earth (even a saint, during his/her earthly life) ALL good and without sin? Is any person on this earth ALL bad? After considering that people are usually more complex than an author might make them out to be, I might further suggest, in my preparatory remarks, that the child also remember that the author is a person. Everybody has heroes and villains in their own mind. And usually we have reasons why we admire or don't admire someone. I would ask the child to think about WHY this writer might admire one person in history, but not another. Or think some event was glorious, but another event a catastrophe.
I also have done, and encouraged my children to do, more research, with me or on their own, depending on their age. If we can find out what really happened, or at least another account that might shed some light, it's good to try. All of this is part of being an active participant in the study of history, rather than a passive receptacle.
All these things, it seems to me, are what help children grow in discernment, and I have honestly appreciated the opportunities for learning and growth which the books we have read have presented.
More thoughts on the subject of bias in history books.