Karen Glass > Quotes

“Educational trends and fads tend to drive the practices of teachers and schools, making education seem like a frantic pursuit to keep up with something new. If we change our focus from what is new to what is universally true, we invite a more peaceful approach into our educational”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education

“Thou hast set my feet in a large room; should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking—the strain would be too great—but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. We cannot give the children these interests; we prefer that they should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not,—how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education—but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him? (School Education, pp. 170–71)”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education

“There is nothing we can know about language or literature or art or music or physics or chemistry or engineering that does not have its source in God’s own law and truth for the universe. All knowledge is connected because it springs from a single source, and that source is God.”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education

“We have looked at three things that will never appear on a transcript, and yet are vital to the classical tradition of education. First, the primary purpose of education is wisdom and virtue, and every part of the program should serve to teach learners how to think and act rightly. Second, humility is vital to the pursuit of virtue because it keeps us teachable. Third, our approach to knowledge should be relational, synthetic, so that we develop a foundational understanding of the unity of knowledge and our own place in the universe.”
― Karen Glass, Classical Considerations: Charlotte Mason's Links to the Classical Tradition

“Because the Spirit is the source of all kinds of knowledge, no pursuit of knowledge—even electronics or car repair or cooking—is wholly apart from Him. This particular relationship is possible because we are persons, and we have both a spiritual aspect that is reached by ideas and a physical aspect that works and acts and creates in the world.”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education

“Narration is the foundation of teaching writing in Charlotte Mason’s methods. It builds a child’s vocabulary; it teaches him to order his thoughts; it accustoms him to writing on all manner of topics.”
― Karen Glass, Encore Series Collection: Books 1-3

“Because a person is a spiritual being, he needs a relationship with the Spirit who is also the Creator—this forms the most vital aspect of education.”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education

“Miss Mason referred to this as the “Great Recognition” that educators are called upon to make—that all knowledge is unified and arises from a common source. This is the ultimate relationship that “binds all things to all other things.” Because all knowledge comes from God, we cannot say that some things we learn are sacred and other things are secular, or apart from God. We must be careful not to allow those distinctions to be made.”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education

“Analysis encourages us to break things down, and while there is a role for it with mature thinkers, it does not foster relationships. Miss Mason wrote: We have analysed until the mind turns in weariness from the broken fragments. (Philosophy of Education, p. 166)”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education

“As we learn to care about various things—things of the natural world or personal virtues such as honesty—our feelings will motivate us to act because of what we know. In this way, knowledge becomes virtue in a person’s life.”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education

“It is summed up in three commandments, and all three have a negative character, as if the chief thing required of grown-up people is that they should do no sort of injury to the children: Take heed that ye OFFEND not—DESPISE not—HINDER not—one of these little ones. (Home Education, p. 12) The negative character of those statements is echoed by this principle that urges us to allow no separation. If education is the science of relations, and if all things are bound to all other things, then we should not hinder a child’s thinking by allowing an element of separation to be introduced into his education. We must not allow a child to believe that intellectual pursuits are one thing and spiritual pursuits are of another kind altogether.”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education

“In order to remain whole as persons, we must appreciate the wholeness of knowledge. Our nature craves after unity. The travail of thought, which is going on to-day and has gone on as long as we have any record of men’s thoughts, has been with a view to establishing some principle for the unification of life. Here we have the scheme of a magnificent unity. We are apt to think that piety is one thing, that our intellectual and artistic yearnings are quite another matter, and that our moral virtues are pretty much matters of inheritance and environment, and have not much to do with our conscious religion. Hence, there come discords into our lives, discords especially trying to young and ardent souls who want to be good and religious, but who cannot escape from the overpowering drawings of art and intellect and mere physical enjoyment; they have been taught to consider that these things are, for the most part, alien to the religious life, and that they must choose one or the other; they do choose, and the choice does not always fall upon those things which, in our unscriptural and unphilosophical narrowness, we call the things of God. (School Education, pp. 154–55)”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education

“Faith Is Required to Act upon an Idea. Miss Mason rejected the receptacle view of the mind and embraced the analogy that the mind is a living, spiritual entity that is hungry and must be fed in order to grow and thrive. Mere data will not satisfy that hunger.”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education

“We do not list “humility” among our school subjects or put it on a transcript, but that is actually the little secret of classical education. The things that make it truly classical, truly worthwhile to pursue, aren’t school subjects at all, but principles that add depth and cohesion to everything we study in all areas of the curriculum.”
― Karen Glass

“One popular trend in education is to emphasize “STEM” subjects to such a degree that science, technology, engineering, and math dominate a child’s school career. There is nothing wrong with those studies, but if a child has no time to read poetry and stories, to experience art and music, to delve into history and learn to appreciate the heritage of the past, we have violated the principle that education is the science of relations. A person wants to know about many things and a child needs broad exposure to all kinds of knowledge, especially in the younger years. That wide exposure lays a good foundation for specializing later--in a STEM subject or anything else.”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education

“This idea of all education springing from and resting upon our relation to Almighty God is one which we have ever laboured to enforce. We take a very distinct stand upon this point. We do not merely give a religious education, because that would seem to imply the possibility of some other education, a secular education, for example. But we hold that all education is divine, that every good gift of knowledge and insight comes from above, that the Lord the Holy Spirit is the supreme educator of mankind, and that the culmination of all education (which may, at the same time, be reached by a little child) is that personal knowledge of and intimacy with God in which our being finds its fullest perfection. (School Education, p. 95)”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education

“nothing intellectually true can be unspiritual. Miss Mason believed in the sacredness as well as the unity of all knowledge: All knowledge, dealt out to us in such portions as we are ready for, is sacred; knowledge is, perhaps, a beautiful whole, a great unity, embracing God and man and the universe, but having many parts which are not comparable with one another in the sense of less or more, because all are necessary and each has its functions. (Philosophy of Education, p. 324)”
― Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony: Charlotte Mason and the Natural Laws of Education