High school, the Mason way: original sources, essays grown from narration, formal sciences with lab work, and literature read in great drafts. The student now largely manages their own timetable.
The morning now carries full high-school weight: Bible with a commonplace book, algebra or geometry, essay and composition work, two history streams that lean on original sources, a lab science, literature, a foreign language, and a rotating block for logic, government and economics, Plutarch, and the arts. Your role shifts from teacher to discussion partner and examiner.
Afternoons still matter — a real walk or physical work, instrument practice, a near-adult-level skill or handicraft, service or part-time work, and the student's own reading program, discussed at dinner.
The essay is narration grown up. The pattern: narrate in writing, then revise one narration each week into a shaped essay with a real introduction and conclusion. Style is caught from the term's authors far more than it is taught from a workbook. Alongside it, the commonplace book — where the student copies passages that strike them from any reading — becomes the seedbed of every future essay.
“Self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature.”
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