Dr. Patrick Egan: Creating a Framework for Charlotte Mason in a Classical School

Classical Education

About the Guest

Patrick Egan is a founding director of Educational Renaissance and Academic Dean at Clapham School. He previously served as an administrator at Providence Classical Christian Academy in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned a B.Mus. in Music History and Literature from Illinois State University, an M.Div. and Th.M. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Patrick and his family spent three years living and studying in St Andrews, Scotland, where he earned a PhD from the University of St Andrews. In addition to his work within the classical Christian educational movement, he has also taught courses in New Testament and Biblical Greek at colleges and seminaries in the US and UK, currently serving as Visiting Instructor in New Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis. In 2016 Patrick published Ecclesiology and the Scriptural Narrative of 1 Peter. Patrick regularly writes on the intersection of classical education and modern research at educationalrenaissance.com.

Show Notes

Dr. Patrick Egan forms a framework of classical tradition for today with Charlotte Mason studies. Dr. Egan opens this episode with a brief history of Clapham school and its values pointed towards The Good, The True, and The Beautiful. Their discovery of Charlotte Mason is interesting. Adrienne asks Dr. Egan to share about their application of classical methods aligning to the work of Charlotte Mason. He also discusses Charlotte Mason’s brilliance on the epistemology of how a child learns. He points towards Charlotte Mason’s anthropology of a child and how it can influence our pedagogy while complimenting the telos of a classical education.

Some Topics and Ideas in this Episode

• They discuss the importance of the Spanish Chapel fresco called “Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas”, and its impact on Mason’s understanding of a Christian liberal arts education.
• How does Charlotte Mason fit into the tradition?
• If we did not have the Dorothy Sayer’s essay, could Charlotte Mason have been the force that awakened the classical ed movement?

Resources and Books & Mentioned In This Episode

"What is a Learner?: Reading Charlotte Mason through Aristotle’s Four Causes" by Dr. Egan

Education Renaissance Podcast with Dr. Egan: https://educationalrenaissance.com/podcast/

https://www.wilberforceschool.org/

https://amblesideschools.org/category/bill-st-cyr/

Plato's Dialogues

St. Augustine's Confessions

Lost Tools of Learning, by Dorothy Sayers

The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home, by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise

Fresco: “Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas”, circa 1365. Fresco. Florence, S. Maria Novella, Cappellone degli Spagnuoli (Spanish Chapel), left wall. Charlotte Mason on the Spanish Chapel fresco,

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.

The books that Dr. Egan wished he had read sooner:

A Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason (6th volume)
The Abolition of Man, by C.S Lewis

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