Why Read Dusty Old Books?

One of the recurring questions about a Charlotte Mason education—and the use of living books—is why use so many “dusty old books.”

It is a reasonable question. Old books can be difficult. Their sentences may be longer. Their vocabulary may be unfamiliar, and even the typeface seems determined to make it more difficult. Their authors assume things about history, religion, culture, and human nature that a modern child may not immediately recognize, and they may use language or express assumptions that are jarring—or even offensive—to modern ears. But the age of a book itself is not the reason they are chosen.

Anne White, a longtime member of the AmblesideOnline Advisory, once addressed this criticism directly. If AmblesideOnline (AO) chooses Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, she explained, it is because the book is worth the challenge and because they have found nothing they prefer in its place. Elsewhere AO chooses much newer writers, such as Rosemary Sutcliff. The principle is not old is good and new is bad. As she put it, “We are not attempting to use old books because they are old books.”

That’s an important distinction.

There are plenty of bad old books. Time has produced dull books, saccharine sentimental books, shallow books, “doctored” moralizing books, and others that deserve to remain forgotten. There is nothing suspect about a book merely because its author is still alive; a contemporary writer may produce exactly the book that is needed. But a book should not be passed over merely because its language belongs to another century. In fact, that may be one of the reasons children need it.

The Present Is a Small Room

C. S. Lewis made a similar argument in his introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation. Lewis was writing particularly about theology, but his point reaches much further.

“Every age has its own outlook,” he observed. Every generation sees some things clearly and is unusually blind to others. The difficulty is that the assumptions of our own age rarely feel like assumptions. They simply feel obvious. Everyone around us shares enough of them that we scarcely notice they are there.

For Lewis, old books provide a necessary corrective. They come from people who had faults and blind spots of their own, certainly. Lewis had no romantic notion that earlier generations were wiser in everything. His point was almost the opposite: they made mistakes, but not necessarily our mistakes. And so we need what he called the “only palliative”: the “clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.” That is a compelling reason to give children books from many periods. 

A child who reads only books written in the intellectual atmosphere of the twenty-first century may encounter many different authors, characters, settings, and opinions while remaining inside one surprisingly narrow room. Modern writers disagree with one another, sometimes vehemently, but they still share language, assumptions, categories, and questions characteristic of our time.

Older writers open windows. 

They allow a child to meet people who do not begin where we begin. They notice different things. They take other things for granted. They may puzzle us, annoy us, delight us, or expose assumptions we did not know we possessed. This does not mean that the past becomes our authority simply because it is the past. Lewis was not arguing that either. Reading beyond our own age gives us something better than another authority to imitate: it gives us perspective.

Children Are Heirs

There is another reason, however, that goes even deeper into Charlotte Mason’s philosophy.

Mason wrote that “Every child is heir to an enormous patrimony.” She understood education partly as bringing a child into possession of an inheritance already belonging to him: relations with the natural world, with people, with ideas, with history, with art, with literature, with “what there has been in the past.” That changes the question we ask about an old book.

Instead of asking only, Could I find something easier for my child to read? we might also ask, What will my child be unable to read later if I never help him learn to read this kind of language now? That is not a small consideration. Our literary and intellectual inheritance was not written in twenty-first-century English. Shakespeare was not. Neither were Bunyan, Austen, Dickens, Douglass, Milton, Spenser, Donne, Swift, Burke, or the King James Bible. Even writers who seem comparatively accessible belong to linguistic worlds increasingly distant from contemporary prose.

We can, of course, translate, abridge, simplify, summarize, and explain all of them. Sometimes there are good reasons to do so. But if simplification becomes our normal response to difficulty, something subtle happens. Instead of giving children access to the inheritance, we gradually place intermediaries between the child and almost everyone who lived before his own time.

He can read about them. He can read someone else’s explanation of them. He can read their ideas recast into vocabulary and sentence structures already familiar to him. But he cannot quite meet them himself.

Lewis saw precisely this problem in his students. He found that they would choose a modern book about Plato rather than simply read Plato. Firsthand knowledge, he argued, was often not only more valuable but ultimately more intelligible and enjoyable than the layers of commentary erected around it. 

There is something very Charlotte Mason-like in that insistence. Put the child in contact with the thing itself.

Language Opens the Door

There is another consequence of reading older books that is easy to overlook because it develops so gradually: children acquire the language necessary to read more books.

A steady diet of excellent literary language does more than expose children to beautiful prose. It acquaints them with the language through which they can encounter the great minds of humanity and therefore helps put them in possession of the inheritance Mason believed belonged to them.

This is important because reading ability is not static. We sometimes talk about a book as though it simply is too difficult for a child, rather than recognizing that the ability to read difficult books is itself something that grows. 

A child who regularly hears and reads complex sentences becomes less startled by complex sentences. A child who encounters unfamiliar words in meaningful contexts becomes more comfortable proceeding without understanding every word. A child who has met older constructions before recognizes them more quickly the next time. A child who has read Pyle is better prepared for the next difficult writer. And that writer prepares him for another.

The room grows.

This is quite different from deliberately choosing obscurity or congratulating ourselves because a book is difficult. Difficulty is not a virtue in itself. Neither is antiquity. Furthermore, removing every linguistic difficulty before a child encounters it can have an unintended result. We make today’s reading easier while making tomorrow’s reading harder.

Eventually the student reaches adolescence or adulthood and finds that whole shelves of books are technically written in English, but are too difficult for him to read. He is faced with a door that is locked to him because he was never given the key. 

What About Offensive Language?

There is another reason older books are increasingly set aside: they sometimes contain language, assumptions, or descriptions that our modern ears recognize as offensive.

The most obvious example is the racial slur commonly referred to as the “n-word.” Some parents understandably recoil from putting a book containing that word into a child’s hands. Others argue that any book containing it should simply disappear from children’s reading altogether.

But here too, removing the difficulty can remove something else with it. A word does not appear in a historical work in a vacuum. Sometimes its presence reveals something about the character speaking it. Sometimes it reveals something about the society being portrayed. Sometimes it confronts us with ugliness that actually existed. Sometimes an author uses language that was commonplace in his own time but which we now recognize more clearly as degrading.

Children need help learning to distinguish among those things. If every older book is cleaned of everything that offends modern ears—or abandoned altogether because it cannot be cleaned easily—we may protect children from encountering a word while also preventing them from encountering the history in which that word had meaning.

That is a real loss.

There are horrors in history that become much easier to sentimentalize when all the evidence of human ugliness has been removed. A student who encounters slavery, segregation, racial prejudice, or other forms of injustice only through modern summaries is once again receiving the past through an interpreter. Sometimes the older source itself allows him to hear how people actually spoke, what they believed, what they excused, what they opposed, and how others suffered under those beliefs.

This does not mean every child should hear every word at every age. Parents and teachers can filter as they read aloud for younger children, or they may simply substitute another word. They may omit a word that would distract a young child from everything else in the passage. With an older student, they may decide that the word itself is important enough to discuss: Why is this word here? Who is saying it? What does it tell us? Why do we not use it now? Does the author share the speaker’s view, or is he showing us something about the speaker?

Those are acts of judgment, not censorship by formula. There will also be books a parent or teacher decides are simply not worth the trouble. Not every historically interesting book deserves a place in a child’s education. Again, the question is not whether something is old, offensive, difficult, or comfortable. The question is what the book offers and whether the encounter is worth having.

But we should be cautious about teaching children, even inadvertently, that they can understand the past only after someone in the present has made it acceptable for them. Part of becoming an educated reader is learning to encounter ideas and language one does not approve of without either absorbing them uncritically or fleeing from them altogether.

A child who learns to do that is not less able to recognize evil. He may become more discerning and better able to recognize it.

Difficulty Is Not the Same as Inaccessibility

Perhaps this is where we most need confidence in children. 

A child does not need to understand every sentence of a worthwhile book in order for the encounter to be worthwhile. Adults do not read that way either. We miss allusions. We pass over unfamiliar words. We misunderstand things and discover them later. We return to books after ten years and suddenly see what had been invisible the first time. A great book is often larger than our present capacity to receive it.

Charlotte Mason’s answer was not therefore to reduce every book to the child’s current vocabulary. She trusted the child’s mind to work. That does not mean giving children books they are simply not ready for. There is wisdom in choosing the right book at the right time. There is also room for context, conversation, maps, pronunciation help, and the occasional explanation.

But there is a difference between supporting a child as he engages with difficult language and replacing difficult language so that he never learns to engage with it. This is why a young child struggling through Pyle is not necessarily evidence that something has gone wrong. The child may be doing exactly what we hope education will teach him to do: stretching toward something he could not previously reach. The point is not to make a child struggle for the sake of struggle, but to help him grow into books that are worth the effort.

A Wider Room

We read old books because the world is old.

Human beings have been telling stories, asking questions, making discoveries, governing nations, composing poems, arguing about justice, thinking about God, falling in love, raising children, going to war, making foolish choices, repenting of them, and trying to understand what it means to be human for a very long time. Our children belong to that whole human conversation.

We would never want them to read only old books. They were born into this century and should know its voices too. But neither should they be trapped inside it. If we educate them only in the language of the present, we may inadvertently make much of the past inaccessible to them. What looks like kindness—protecting them from difficult vocabulary, unfamiliar syntax, or books that require sustained attention—can become a kind of deprivation. Because these books are theirs. The language is theirs. The history is theirs. The ideas are theirs to encounter, examine, challenge, enjoy, and pass on.

So yes, some of the books on a Charlotte Mason education list are dusty and old. We don’t choose them for the dust. We choose them because, after the dust is blown away, there is still something there worth giving to our children. And because we want them to grow up able to open the books for themselves and pass on the inheritance.