Some books which have comprised part of a syllabus
Principle 12 of Charlotte Mason's 20 Principles establishes that education is, which is to say that it consists in, the "Science of Relations." That is, when we speak of learning, we speak of a cognitive process wherein the mind connects with "things and thoughts" and assimilates those "things and thoughts" into itself. We can think of falling in love as an analogy: when you fall in love, the presence of this new person in your life reorders your life and all your other relationships. You see everything now in the light of that new love – including yourself. A good healthy love is a light, not a darkness. It is an expanding of your world, not a contraction. Loving and being loved, you find that your capacity for love grows, which of course is the basis for happy marriage and family life.
This is the kind of thing our minds – our whole lives – are made for. Now, naturally, like any metaphor, this metaphor of human love breaks down somewhat as a figure for human learning. On the level of the human love relationship, we're meant to be monogamous. So perhaps a better metaphor would be that of falling not into romantic love, but into friendship. There, we're not monogamous, though our best friendships are as intense in their own ways as romantic relationships are. We think of our various friendships, on their various levels, as enriching us, especially by their diversity. We love our friends, their voices, their perspectives, even when – maybe especially even – they are not our own. To live in an echo chamber, only with people who agree with us and are just like us, would be an impoverishment. We'd be even more impoverished, mind and soul, if we loved no one at all. God made us to exist in relationship, ultimately because our relationships with other people, and with the entire created universe, lead us into the deeper relationship with Him. It is for this, finally, that we exist. In His infinite generosity, God gives us our capacity for relationship, the giving and receiving of love, and all the joys and graces that accrue to us through that capacity, as our way to Him.
So perhaps ideas like friendship, or community – or better yet, the Body of Christ – provide better paradigms for what learning is than the idea of romantic love. Certainly the idea of the Church, the Body of Christ figures the kind of thing Charlotte Mason means when she speaks of a "full and generous curriculum," as in Principle 11, and may give us some useful imagery to fall back on as we look at Principle 13, which reads as follows:
In devising a SYLLABUS for a normal child, of whatever social class, three points must be considered:
(a) He requires much knowledge, for the mind needs sufficient food as much as does the body.
(b) The knowledge should be various, for sameness in mental diet does not create appetite (i.e., curiosity)
(c) Knowledge should be communicated in well-chosen language, because his attention responds naturally to what is conveyed in literary form. (source)
I suppose we might balk, these days, at the idea of "a normal child." What, after all, is a "normal child," we might ask – neurotypical? abled? What does she mean by this?
First of all, I'm not sure we do ourselves a favor when we react to the vocabulary of earlier ages as if the writer might have chosen our own more enlightened and nuanced vocabulary and has just chosen not to do so. Our tendency, unfortunately, in this cultural moment, is to shut down our whole receptive apparatus and refuse to hear anything, because word choices which would not have been choices at all, in the same way, for a given writer, push the wrong buttons for us. I really think that in charity, for one thing, as well as for the good of our own minds and souls, we need to push past that initial reaction: to say not, "Oh, clearly she's saying X," but "What actually might she mean to say, that I can hear?" We might conclude that she's saying something we don't need to hear, but at least we'd be concluding after examination, instead of leaping to that conclusion and closing the book on both the writer and our own willed ignorance.
ANYWAY. I think here that she's simply acknowledging that the NORM – and to develop a coherent vision for education, you do have to establish some norms or benchmarks – is for a child of any background to have a basic human hunger to learn, via the formation of relationships. Everything we've been saying about the mind in Principle 9 and Principle 10 is what is normal to human beings, though of course there will inevitably be variations on that theme. The human mind is an objective reality, in other words – there's not the reality of your child, and the reality of my child, and the reality of that other child over there, each reality with its own set of truths. As Catholics, we simply don't believe reality works that way. There are not multiple realities or truths, any more than there are multiple gods. There is one God (in Three Persons), and what is real exists in Him. So, our starting point is that there is a reality of the human mind, an objective norm, even as human beings, made in God's image, are as infinite in their variety as God Himself is, all within Himself.
I think that's all she really means to say here. She's not being ableist, or any kind of -ist. She's simply being Christian. As a Christian, a believer in the existence of objective truth, she's saying: this is true, and within this truth there is plenty of room to accommodate whatever particularities a given child might exhibit.
Having dispensed with that first sentence, and hopefully gotten ourselves past any hangups we might have about the word "normal" – what is it, actually, that comprises this syllabus based on the acknowledged norm of the human intellect?
1. The syllabus consists of a lot, because it assumes that the child wants to know a lot. Mind you, we have already established that it's impossible to know everything, so a syllabus isn't constructed with that end in mind, to stuff the child full of information. But it presumes that there is much to find out about – the created universe in all its fascination and variety – and that a child will naturally hunger to find out about it.
This is the answer, I think, to that classical dictum, Non multum, sed multa. Not many, but much, in other words. Some contemporary classical curricula take this aphorism to mean that a syllabus should be extremely . . . lean, I suppose you might say, though in what particular way a syllabus is lean varies from curriculum to curriculum. Charlotte Mason, in concert with Thomas Aquinas, might respond: the whole point of learning is to get to know God, who expresses Himself in all there is for human beings to know. God himself is much, not many. In our syllabus we are simply offering the child the muchness of God, as He manifests His goodness and glory in all these deeply interesting ways.
2. Variety provides refreshment. On a purely pragmatic level, not being stuck with the same small menu day in and day out means less burnout.
This is why, for example, in Mater Amabilis we always study two strands of history – world and national – and three in high school, with the addition of a strand of Church history. Nobody likes every period in history equally. Among my own children, I have one medievalist, one Cold War enthusiast, one military historian with a particular interest in World War I, and one who is partial to the ancient Greeks. They have all passed through strands of history that they liked less than other strands, and strands that they have liked more. But nobody has really come away feeling that they don't like history, as a subject, and I think that one reason for this is that nobody has been stuck with one period in history for an entire year.
Variety also means that even if you dislike a given book in the syllabus, that one book doesn't come to stand for learning, altogether. Usually the one book doesn't even represent the whole subject: that's the beauty of using a spread of living books for science, for example, rather than a standard textbook. It's a lot harder to decide that you hate school altogether, or that you hate biology as a subject, when what represents those things is a tapestry, rather than a monochrome, a color you either like or you don't.
3. What sets us apart from God's other creatures is language. Our reason and our language are functions of each other – we can think and know because we have the capacity to mediate experience through language. It is no accident that Jesus Himself is the Word made flesh. Given all this, naturally how we assimilate ideas is through language, and the best way for us to access those ideas, in order to assimilate them, is through the most excellent language available to us, via living books. Therefore, the syllabus enacting the "full and generous curriculum" which is the proper response to the hunger of the child's living mind, consists of living books.
It still remains to articulate what the child is to do in response to the syllabus of books set before him. Again, remember, as previous principles have established, learning is the child's work, not the teacher's. The teacher's chief work is to set the syllabus of ideas before the child, and to facilitate his work. The next Principles will walk us through these processes.