While Charlotte Mason did not call herself classical (it had a different meaning during her lifetime) her ideas and methods follow solidly in the classical tradition. A devout Christian teacher and the head of a British teachers’ college in the 1800s, Charlotte Mason made it her life’s work to develop educational practices in light of God-given universal principles. As she said, “There are universal principles – absolute principles – that operate in the world and cannot be circumvented. We must live by them or suffer the consequences.” She worked to discover and apply these principles to educational pedagogy, and then implemented this pedagogy deeply rooted in the Christian faith in hundreds of schools, testing it over many years. And, as Christianity is the fulfillment of the truth, order, and being that the ancients were longing for, the Logos, Charlotte Mason’s works fall into the Classical tradition.

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. We hold, in fact, that great conception of education held by the medieval Church, as pictured upon the walls of the Spanish chapel in Florence. Here we have represented the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Twelve, and directly under them, fully under the Illuminating rays, are the noble figures of the seven liberal arts, Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Music, Astronomy, Geometry, Arithmetic, and under these again the men who received and expressed, so far as the artist knew, the initial idea in each of these subjects; such men as Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Euclid, whom we might call pagans, but whom the earlier Church recognised as divinely taught and illuminated.