CMP Review 2024-05-23

May 23, 2024

When I first presented my research on “Mason’s Program for Bible Lessons” in 2018, I included a note of hope. I quoted Eleanor Frost who in 1913 wrote that the teacher’s work is to “show [students] the way of personal study, that when the actual supervision of school days is over they may know how to continue Bible Study for themselves.”

I stressed that although Mason’s program from Forms I to VI is “full, exhaustive, [and] progressive,” we may not be able to cover the entire Bible with our children before they leave home. But there is another form after Form VI. It is the Form of Life. I said that in that form, our children may study whatever we missed.

Andrea Cunningham heard me and drew a sketch on the spot that captured this idea. I have kept it with me in faith all these years. My oldest had just graduated from Form VI, and I had yet to see where his relationship with Scripture would take him.

He’s now 24 and is a teacher. In our homeschool we never got to Isaiah, and although he has read the text, he’s never studied it. Now he wants to study it deeply.

“Dad, how about if we study it together?” He asked. We agreed on a time on Saturday mornings. I prepared for our first lesson with more than a little diligence. Our session together looked at lot like a Bible lesson in the Charlotte Mason method. We started with the text and he narrated. Then we went digging together, not trusting in our own lights alone, but inviting the counsel of scholarship and the community of God.

Now that my son is a teacher, he is more convinced than ever that “knowledge is not assimilated until it is reproduced.” After our meeting, he typed up his learning and reflections on Isaiah 1 and emailed the document to me. He plans to do this for every chapter. Of course I have gone on record saying that a Bible lesson has one narration and not two. But I gladly make an exception in this case. After all, this is not Form VI. This is the Form of Life.

@artmiddlekauff