CMP Review 2024-05-09

May 9, 2024

In her volume School Education, Charlotte Mason draws a helpful distinction between “interests” and “relations.” “Interests may be casual, unworthy, and passing,” she notes. “Everyone, even the most ignorant, has interests of a sort; while to make valid any one relation, implies that knowledge has begun in, at any rate, that one direction.”

And so education is the science of relations, not the science of interests. And “he who has intelligent relations with life,” insists Charlotte Mason, “will produce good work.” And so “the object of education is to put a child in living touch with as much as may be of the life of Nature and of thought.”

In our homeschool we began the study of architecture with Architecture Shown to the Children, by Gladys Wynne. The goal was neither to scratch a passing itch of curiosity nor to achieve a mastery that could pass a certification exam. The goal was to form a relation that would last for life.

When the door opened unexpectedly for a trip to Europe, the seeds we had planted with living books on architecture and narrations consistently performed bore fruit in rich immersive experiences. With a demanding itinerary of 4 cities in 6 days, we saw firsthand the architecture of the Basilica Cateriniana San Domenico, the Duomo di Siena, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Santa Maria Novella, St. Peter’s Basilica, Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Santa Maria del Mar, the Cathedral of Barcelona, and the Temple of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

What we will never forget, however, is the church that we simply could not visualize from the pictures we saw in a book. The astonishing design of Antoni Gaudí that was the beacon of our trip. Here surely is one of those “whose souls become so filled with the Beauty they gather through eye and ear that they produce for us new forms of Beauty—in picture, statue, glorious cathedral, in delicate ornament, in fugue, sonata, simple melody. When we think for a moment, how we must admire the goodness of God in placing us in a world so exceedingly full of Beauty.”

@artmiddlekauff