The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home, by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 2004)
I heard so many homeschoolers raving about The Well-Trained Mind that I had to read it for myself. Then the question became not why so many people love it, but why do I? One reviewer called this approach “ultra school-at-home”—which should have been enough to send me fleeing as from a thousand devils.
If I didn't loathe labels that place homeschoolers into boxes, the one I would be most likely to accept concerning our homeschooling philosophy would be "unschooling." So why would I enthusiastically recommend this book, in which the only reference to unschooling is negative and largely inaccurate? Why would I even read a homeschooling book that opens with the stated belief that homeschooling is second best to an ideal school system, and includes the line, "I set up the desks and the American flag and started to teach my children at home"?
Let me begin with my sympathetic feelings for the White Queen in Alice, who could believe “as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Just as I find no inherent contradiction between Attachment Parenting and my belief that babies need to spend a lot of time prone on the floor, so I see no reason why someone who passionately believes an unspoiled child hungers and thirsts for knowledge should not find much of benefit in the Classical Education model. One of the secrets to success with unschooling is knowing how to discover, discern, and extract from many sources that which is good.
What is commonly called the Classical approach has fascinated and appealed to me ever since I read Dorothy Sayers’ The Lost Tools of Learning. Despite the best (unintentional) efforts of one of the most popular present-day advocates of this approach, and of a private school of my acquaintance that attempts to follow it, to make this form of education appear repulsive, if I were homeschooling now I would find a way to synthesize these ideas, to offer my children the benefits of both unschooling and the Trivium. Impossible? Go ask Alice.1
Two aspects of The Well-Trained Mind make it particularly valuable:
- The authors have compiled an absolutely fabulous collection of ideas, recommendations, and resources. The reading lists alone are probably worth the price of the book.
- The book articulates one of the foundation stones of my unschooling educational philosophy: Children can achieve far, far more than is commonly expected of them, if they are given the opportunity and the encouragement our educational system commonly denies them.
I do want to point out an area in which I find The Well-Trained Mind to be deficient: mathematics. We used the Saxon math books from Math 54 to Advanced Mathematics (neither the earlier books nor calculus was available back then), and our experience was quite different from what the authors describe.
They state that parents need to teach the mathematical concepts in the Saxon books, that it is not a self-teaching program. We found that to be dramatically untrue. I can't speak for anything before Math 54, but beginning with that book the Saxon texts contain everything needed. Our children simply sat down with the books, read the material, worked the problems, and went on. This was a delightful contrast to other math texts that had left us bewildered because they assumed a teacher had already explained the concepts.
A grievous omission from The Well-Trained Mind's carefully laid out mathematics curriculum is any recognition that some students will be able to cover the material more quickly, although they do provide a revised sequence for students who might need to take a slower approach. Our children would have hated these math books if we had followed the official Saxon plan, which requires students to work every single problem. This would have bored them so seriously they probably would have developed an aversion to math, instead of the love they now have. We found that doing one third to one half of the available problems (carefully chosen to avoid missing concepts) was the right pace, and they flew through the books with joy. Saxon proponents who fail to acknowledge such an option do a disservice to both the publisher and the students.
Children who follow the path described in The Well-Trained Mind will receive a liberal arts education exceeding that of most college graduates, yet their mathematical knowledge will be little better than that of a typical college-bound high school senior. Not only is mathematics critical to many fields, but the mental skills developed in more advanced (post-calculus) courses should be an important part of the rhetoric stage.
1 For those who are too young or too old to have experienced Jefferson Airplane, this is not a reference to my mother-in-law.
Permalink | Comments
Category Random Musings
Because of the vaccine shortage, we abstained from our annual flu shots last year. Perhaps that was a good thing, because it encouraged us to avoid public drinking fountains, to be more careful with handwashing, and to make use of pocket vials of hand sanitizer when out among the hand-shaking public. (This was recommended by a physician friend whose specialty is infectious diseases. The alcohol-based formula is effective on both bacteria and viruses and, because of the way it works, does not promote resistance as anti-bacterial soaps do.)
It was thrilling to have avoided the flu without the vaccine, but we decided not to translate that excitement into presumption, largely because we will be with people this season to whom we particularly do not want to pass the illness. So we paid a visit to the county health department.
We discovered the health department as a source of immunizations one year when we tried to go to our doctor and discovered his office was no longer giving flu shots that year. That turned out to be a blessing! We've gone back to the health department ever since. Which of these two scenarios would you choose? (1) Go to the doctor, hang around for half an hour or so in a waiting room full of sick people, and hand over a $20 copay; or (2) go to the health department, wait five minutes, and pay $18!There are many reasons people won't talk about the cracks in the bridge, one of which is that our lives are too frantic. A deadly waterfall may be waiting for us downstream, but it takes all our energy and effort just to keep our boats upright in the rapids right now. Another is a shutdown from overstimulation. All news stories, from the tragic to the trivial, are presented by hyperventilating news anchors desperate to keep us from changing channels. Everything is of critical importance; every event is a crisis. And when everything is special, nothing is.
I used to be more negative about how much worse the world is than it was, until I realized I was cutting the feet out from under our children. This is their world, and they aren't negative about it; they think it's full of opportunity and promise. Realizing how bad things have become is a privilege and a sign of age.
Actually, I see lots of reason to hope, if, and it is a big if, we can hang on to our freedoms. We must allow nonconformity, permit people to take risks, and encourage innovative thinking. I am greatly encouraged by people I've seen who have said, "STOP!" to the world as it is, families who sacrifice much to gain more. Two parent, single income families. People who ride bikes and take public transportation by choice. Homeschoolers. Large families with small, homestead farms. Women who have rediscovered the joys of non-institutionalized childbirth. Men who turn down promotions to preserve family time. Families who dare turn off the television and eat dinner together. I speak only from my own experience—you can think of many more examples.
Of course you may say that Peggy Noonan is speaking of a larger arena, of presidents and world events, of large-scale cultural problems. And there's every possibility that her concerns may be the tsunami that sweeps away the families and the farms. But I believe that if we are to survive this crazy trolley ride, it won't be governments, schools, or megachurches that hold back disaster, but individuals and families taking a stand.
I would restate Neil Postman's excellent advice from The Disappearance of Childhood, given in response to the question, "Is the individual powerless to resist what is happening?"
The answer to this, in my opinion, is "No." But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modestly in their sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.
None the less, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition.In addition to setting us up on the Lime Daley server, Jon upgraded our blog software version, so there are some changes. Probably the first thing you noticed is how much faster the pages load. Note also the nifty search box to the right, and the fact that posts can now be assigned more than one category. One downside of the fact that the new version uses caching: sometimes you will need to reload the page (reload, refresh, depending on what your browser calls it) to be sure you are seeing the most up to date posts.
The transition went amazingly smoothly, thanks to Jon's prompt and diligent efforts, but we're still working out some minor details as I get accustomed to the new system, so please let me know if you notice any problems.
So...Lift Up Your Hearts! is back in business—please feel free to post and comment once again.
