2022-05-19_An_Inspirational_Education_Story
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00:00:31.000 | The first day I taught my three children at home, I cleaned up the playroom and set up
00:00:34.680 | three desks. I hung an American flag at the front of the room and led them in the Pledge
00:00:40.640 | of Allegiance. I was shaking with nervousness. It was 1973 and my husband Jay and I had just
00:00:48.240 | done something radical. We had removed our children from school. I was terrified, which
00:00:53.740 | was ridiculous. After all, I was a state-certified teacher. I'd taught public school for six
00:00:59.040 | years. I'd taken post-graduate courses in education from Tulane University, the College
00:01:04.600 | of William & Mary, and the University of Virginia. One year, I'd managed 38 second graders from
00:01:10.380 | dawn till dusk. No lunch break, no recess break, and no teacher's aid. Yet, I was completely
00:01:16.600 | intimidated by those three little children, certain that I couldn't do an adequate job
00:01:21.000 | of teaching them myself. All my teacher education had brainwashed me. I was convinced that parents
00:01:27.280 | couldn't possibly teach their own children, certainly not at home. It had to be done in
00:01:31.620 | an institutional setting, run by professionals with their resources and specialized training
00:01:36.720 | and expertise. Unfortunately, the professionals had let us down. I wasn't a stranger to failures
00:01:43.160 | in the system. The last year I taught public school, I had in my sixth grade class two
00:01:48.000 | sixteen-year-old boys who had not yet learned to read. I'd never even heard of homeschooling,
00:01:54.700 | but I remember thinking, "If I ever have a child, he will know how to read before he
00:01:59.140 | goes to school. I will not have my son sitting in sixth grade unable to read." So, when my
00:02:05.520 | oldest child turned four, I said to him one day, "Bob, would you rather take a nap, or
00:02:10.440 | would you like to learn how to read?" He chose reading, not surprisingly, and I started him
00:02:15.960 | on the old-fashioned phonics I'd been taught when I was a child. I'd lie down with him
00:02:20.560 | on his little bed after lunch and work on his letters. Since I also had a two-year-old
00:02:24.800 | and a thirteen-month-old, I was always glad to lie down. We practiced vowels and consonants
00:02:30.200 | and sounded out new words that year. We called it "doing kindergarten." By the time my middle
00:02:36.080 | child was three, she wanted in. "Might I do kindergarten too?" she'd say, and I would
00:02:40.920 | boost her up and let her repeat the sounds after me. I was proud of myself. I was preparing
00:02:46.240 | my children for school. Kindergarten, when it came, was uneventful and purely social.
00:02:52.560 | Bob loved to play at school. At home, I went on reading to him and teaching him his language
00:02:58.160 | and number skills. But when Bob reached first grade, he didn't fit in. He already knew the
00:03:03.900 | material and he was bored. The school, a well-regarded private school, was cooperative and moved
00:03:10.440 | him into second grade. He was bored there too. The class was working on early reading
00:03:15.280 | skills and we'd already done that. The second graders didn't like him because he was a little
00:03:19.720 | upstart invading their turf. The administration moved him back to first grade, but now the
00:03:24.640 | first graders were hostile. He was a big shot who'd been thought worthy of second grade
00:03:29.600 | and they wouldn't play with him. They were jealous because he was well-prepared. So,
00:03:34.640 | here he was in first grade, already feeling that doing well in school made him unpopular.
00:03:40.520 | He started to change. He had been an excited, exuberant, curious child. Now he was a behavior
00:03:47.440 | problem. He stopped doing well in school. His papers had always been meticulously done,
00:03:53.720 | but suddenly his writing became sloppy. The teacher complained to us that Bob was always
00:03:59.680 | questioning her in class, and the bus ride to school was horrendous. The older kids made
00:04:04.840 | the younger ones sit on the floor, stole their lunches, and dirtied their clothes so they'd
00:04:09.040 | get demerits from the teachers at school. Every day, Bob got off the school bus with
00:04:13.920 | a handful of bad papers and he was either fighting mad or crying. At this point, Jay
00:04:20.220 | and I realized that we were spending most of our time with this child trying to undo
00:04:25.120 | what was happening to him when he was at school, and we were afraid that our second child,
00:04:29.720 | Susan, would go through the same metamorphosis. Susan had just started kindergarten, and the
00:04:34.840 | teacher was already protesting to us that she would be a social misfit because she wanted
00:04:39.880 | to read during free time instead of playing. We were experiencing firsthand the terrific
00:04:45.080 | leveling pressure applied in so many schools, the effort to smooth out the bumps by bringing
00:04:50.500 | well-prepared kids down to the level of the rest. This still happens in some schools.
00:04:56.500 | Just this year, the best private preschool in our area agreed to stop teaching four-year-olds
00:05:01.360 | beginning reading skills. Kindergarten teachers in the local public schools had complained
00:05:06.080 | that the children turned out by this preschool were bored in kindergarten because they already
00:05:10.080 | knew the material. The schools demanded that the preschool quit turning out such well-prepared
00:05:14.880 | five-year-olds so that all the kindergartners would start at the same level of ignorance.
00:05:20.080 | I was appalled when the preschool buckled and went back to teaching colors and "social
00:05:25.480 | skills." Back in 1973, no one had told me to stop teaching phonics to my preschoolers,
00:05:31.360 | and we didn't know what to do with these academic misfits I had managed to produce.
00:05:35.400 | So we took our two school-age children to a psychologist in the local mental health
00:05:39.600 | system. He tested both of them, and I found out what my careful preparation for kindergarten
00:05:45.080 | had done. Bob, the second grader, was reading on a seventh grade level. Susan, the kindergartner,
00:05:51.320 | was reading fifth grade material. Psychologist called us into his office afterward. "Listen,"
00:05:56.640 | he said, "if you keep those children in school, they are going to become non-learners.
00:06:01.000 | They're bored to death. You've got a teacher's certificate. Why don't you take them out
00:06:04.800 | of school and teach them yourself?" This had never occurred to us. After all, education
00:06:10.520 | was the domain of schools, and these were our children. We didn't know anyone else
00:06:15.880 | who was homeschooling. The whole idea was odd and radical, and we weren't even sure
00:06:21.480 | it was even legal. Virginia law was fuzzy on this point.
00:06:26.200 | But we had no other choice. The local public school was a terrible environment socially,
00:06:30.760 | and test scores ranked our county at the bottom of the state year after year. The private
00:06:35.400 | school had been our solution. So, quaking in my boots, I set up the desks and the American
00:06:41.160 | flag and started to teach my children at home. I worried the whole time. I worried that my
00:06:46.000 | children weren't going to get into college. I worried that the school system was going
00:06:49.600 | to come and take them away from us for neglect and truancy. I worried that their social development
00:06:54.240 | would suffer. I could tell you the stories of all three children, but I want to focus
00:06:58.980 | on my older daughter, Susan, because we've had the chance to work and speak together
00:07:04.000 | and to reflect on what I did right and wrong in her education.
00:07:08.920 | As I write this, Susan is 35, happily married and the mother of four, three boys and a girl.
00:07:15.880 | She went to college at 17 on a full scholarship, awarded to her for being a national merit
00:07:20.840 | finalist. She worked summers for a good salary as secretary for a legal firm. Her college
00:07:26.120 | chose her to spend a term at Oxford as a visiting student. After college, she completed a Master
00:07:32.240 | of Divinity, a three-year theological degree, and then a Master of Arts in English Literature.
00:07:38.380 | She reads Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and French. She has a thriving career as a writer.
00:07:44.120 | She has published novels and nonfiction books. She writes for several journals and periodicals,
00:07:49.200 | and she has started her own small press. She is pursuing her doctoral degree in American
00:07:53.860 | Studies and teaches literature and writing at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
00:07:59.160 | As I look back on the education I gave her, I can see that it follows a pattern that has
00:08:03.380 | mostly disappeared from public education.
00:08:07.000 | To begin with, I filled her head with facts when she was small. I taught her to read early
00:08:11.680 | and kept books everywhere in the house. We had books for presents and rewards, and I
00:08:16.240 | was known at the local public library as "the lady with the laundry basket" because I took
00:08:20.480 | my children in every week and filled a laundry basket with their books. On each library visit,
00:08:25.840 | I had them check out the following books. One science book. One history book. One art
00:08:31.520 | or music appreciation book. One practical book (a craft, hobby, or how-to). A biography
00:08:37.720 | or autobiography. A classic novel (or an adaptation suited to age). An imaginative story book.
00:08:44.720 | A book of poetry. They were allowed to choose the titles, but I asked them to follow this
00:08:49.440 | pattern. And they were also allowed to check out other books on any topic they pleased.
00:08:54.120 | Furthermore, I made Susan memorize. She could recite multiplication tables, lists of linking
00:08:59.840 | verbs, dates, precedents, and Latin declensions.
00:09:03.960 | As her thought processes matured, I taught her how to fit her knowledge into logical
00:09:07.920 | structures. I spent a lot of time with her in one-on-one discussion and interaction.
00:09:13.200 | We learned spelling rules, mathematics, and basic logic. We followed an unfashionably
00:09:18.640 | strict grammar book and diagrammed sentences of increasing complexity. We kept science
00:09:24.920 | notebooks and timelines so that we could organize her growing knowledge of facts into logical
00:09:31.040 | and chronological order. I taught her how to organize a paragraph, an essay, a research
00:09:36.960 | paper. She learned Latin grammar. She learned how to discipline herself to follow a custom-made
00:09:42.120 | schedule, balancing academics and personal interests like music and creative writing.
00:09:47.560 | And she continued to read every spare moment.
00:09:50.980 | As she moved into high school, I spent more time working on her skills in writing and
00:09:54.800 | expression. She wrote papers, book reports, and stories. She had a particular bent for
00:09:59.920 | this and also wrote two novels, although that wasn't a part of my curriculum. My plan
00:10:04.720 | did include allowing her to develop a specialty, some area in which she could deepen her knowledge
00:10:10.160 | in preparation for college and a career. She became interested in early British history
00:10:16.280 | and literature and taught herself Welsh and Gaelic. She loved practicing the piano. She
00:10:24.360 | also started working part-time, and we spent an hour every day studying for her SATs, using
00:10:29.560 | test preparation books to review reading skills, logical constructs, English vocabulary, and
00:10:35.040 | mathematics. She scored 740 on the verbal section of the SATs, 630 on the math, and
00:10:41.040 | this was before the new adjusted scoring came in.
00:10:44.880 | Our mailbox was filled with college catalogs. She finally chose a school where she'd been
00:10:49.320 | offered a presidential scholarship based on her standardized scores. In her freshman year,
00:10:54.080 | she was given the chance to test out of several survey courses by taking the college-level
00:10:58.380 | examination program examinations. She took the whole battery, just for fun, and was awarded
00:11:03.720 | over 30 hours of college credit. After college, she made a perfect score on the verbal section
00:11:09.080 | of the graduate record exam and did her graduate work at William & Mary on full scholarship.
00:11:14.840 | I didn't know until later that I had followed the pattern of classical education called
00:11:19.200 | the trivium. I did know that what I was doing worked.
00:11:24.320 | Susan will write about the trivium in the next chapter. It's the classical theory
00:11:28.320 | of education which organizes learning around the maturing capacity of the child's mind.
00:11:32.920 | It no longer exists in public education. I didn't learn by this method when I was educated
00:11:38.460 | in the county public schools back in the 40s and 50s, but I was raised by elderly relatives
00:11:43.560 | who had been taught by classical methods popular before the turn of the century. Mimi, as I
00:11:48.760 | called her, had only finished 8th grade in a one-room schoolhouse, and Uncle Luther hadn't
00:11:53.600 | even gone that far. But by 8th grade, Mimi had learned Latin and algebra, and Uncle Luther
00:11:59.640 | had learned advanced practical mathematics and how to think and write. They taught me
00:12:04.520 | to read before I ever went to school. The first grade teacher was our neighbor, and
00:12:08.760 | when she heard that Mimi was drilling me in phonics, she made a special trip over to warn
00:12:12.860 | us that I'd be ruined for life if Mimi used such an outdated method. Mimi was undaunted,
00:12:18.840 | and when I did enter school, I was put straight into second grade because of the skills I'd
00:12:22.000 | already acquired. When I came home from school in the evenings, Mimi and Uncle Luther sat
00:12:26.760 | me down and made me learn. Mimi would point at the lists in the books, multiplication
00:12:31.680 | tables, parts of speech, and say, "Memorize those." "But the teacher said we don't have
00:12:36.300 | to memorize them," I protested. "We just have to be able to use them." "I don't care what
00:12:41.120 | the teacher says," Mimi insisted. "These are things you have to know." I had been trained
00:12:46.400 | to be obedient and disciplined, so I memorized the lists, even though memorization was difficult
00:12:52.080 | for me. I learned my algebra and grammar. I went on to college and a professional position.
00:12:58.040 | I was the only girl in my high school class to graduate from college. When I had children
00:13:02.180 | of my own, I used Mimi's method and found that the three-part process of memorization,
00:13:07.160 | logical organization, and clear expression put them far above their peers.
00:13:11.920 | In the middle of this century, Dorothy Sayers, author and creator of Lord Peter Whimsey,
00:13:16.880 | told an audience at Oxford University that education had given up on the trivium and
00:13:22.240 | was now running on what she called the "educational capital." We no longer teach our children
00:13:28.200 | the process of memorization, organization, and expression, the tools by which the mind
00:13:34.120 | learns. The leftover remnants of those methods have carried us through several decades of
00:13:39.280 | schooling without catastrophe. I made it through public school at the top of my class because
00:13:43.760 | my guardians taught me from what they had learned. But sooner or later, the capital
00:13:48.560 | gets used up. My own children were faced with teachers who brought them down to the level
00:13:53.200 | of the class, teachers who thought it was more important to teach social skills than
00:13:57.140 | academic subjects, textbooks that had abandoned grammatical rules and mathematical logic in
00:14:02.800 | favor of scattershot, incidental learning. They were surrounded by peers who considered
00:14:07.840 | anyone good at learning to be a geek. They spent seven hours every day sitting in desks,
00:14:13.840 | standing in lines, riding buses, and doing repetitive seat work so that their classmates
00:14:18.700 | could learn what they already knew. I wanted something better for them. As I've watched
00:14:23.920 | home education develop over the last two decades, I've become convinced that any dedicated
00:14:28.520 | parent can do what I did. My own education didn't stretch to Latin or Gaelic or Calculus
00:14:34.360 | or Computer Science or Art, but my children learned all of these things. With the help
00:14:38.980 | of resources and support groups now in place throughout the country, and with the principles
00:14:43.480 | we'll give you in this book, you can provide your child with a classical education at home,
00:14:48.680 | even if you've never glanced at Latin or Logic. You can do what my guardians did, and
00:14:53.640 | on your own time teach your child the basic skills she may not be learning at school.
00:14:58.720 | Your young student may need particular help in math, science, reading, or writing. Even
00:15:03.360 | the best and most diligent teacher (I speak from experience) is often prevented from giving
00:15:09.120 | necessary individual attention by the growing size of her class. If you use the resources
00:15:14.880 | we've collected in this book and invest in some one-on-one time with your child, you
00:15:19.640 | are capable of educating him. When I taught school, I was convinced that parents couldn't
00:15:24.680 | teach their own children. But 25 years later, I can look back and say, the experiment was
00:15:30.920 | a success. I was the best teacher my children could possibly have had because I was their
00:15:37.520 | parent. I happened to have a teacher's certificate, but during my years of homeschooling I learned
00:15:43.200 | more academic material, more about how to manage individual relationships with children,
00:15:48.340 | and more about how to teach than I did in any of my teacher education courses. Teacher
00:15:53.400 | education courses gave me a great deal of good information on how to manage large groups
00:15:58.200 | of children. I needed that in schools, but a parent doesn't need it to teach at home.
00:16:03.640 | I happened to have a college degree, but in the 25 years since I first became involved
00:16:09.240 | with the home education movement, I've seen parents who only finished high school lead
00:16:13.280 | their children successfully through 12th grade, and I've watched those children thrive in
00:16:17.880 | college. You shouldn't be afraid to take your child out of school, if necessary. This is
00:16:23.320 | a radical step for most parents. It means a change in schedule, in priorities, in lifestyle.
00:16:30.320 | And apart from academic concerns, many parents ask, "What about my child's social development?
00:16:36.000 | Doesn't he need peers?" Children need friends. Children do not need to be surrounded by large
00:16:41.800 | groups of peers who inevitably follow the strongest personality in the crowd. The question
00:16:47.800 | for any parent is, "Do I want my child to be like his peers, or do I want my child to
00:16:53.320 | rise above them?" Finally, if you're accustomed to sending your child to school every morning
00:16:58.160 | and allowing the professionals to worry about what he learns and how he learns it, the idea
00:17:02.440 | of supervising an entire education may overwhelm you. I sympathize. When I started, I was convinced
00:17:08.920 | I could never do it. But if you feel your child is being short-changed in school, we
00:17:13.840 | can give you a plan to fix that. In this book, not only will we introduce you to the Trivium
00:17:18.360 | Method, but we'll give you resources to carry it out, and a plan for the entire 12 years
00:17:23.080 | of school. I discovered that home education has a great advantage I knew nothing about
00:17:27.520 | when I started. Home education teaches children to learn, and eventually to teach themselves.
00:17:34.680 | By the time my children were 12 or so, I did less and less actual teaching. I supervised,
00:17:40.660 | I discussed content with them, I held them accountable, I graded, I bought books and
00:17:46.120 | organized coursework. But by early high school, they had been trained in the methods of learning.
00:17:51.560 | From this point, they began the process of educating themselves, with some help from
00:17:55.440 | tutors and correspondence courses. As adults, they continued to educate themselves, to widen
00:18:01.600 | their intellectual horizons. Certainly, this should be the first goal of education.
00:18:10.160 | What I've just read you is the prologue written by Jessie Wise in the excellent book co-authored
00:18:19.520 | by Jessie Wise and her daughter Susan Wise Bower, called "The Well-Trained Mind, A Guide
00:18:25.520 | to Classical Education at Home." I hope that essay inspires and encourages you based upon
00:18:33.000 | what is possible.
00:18:34.720 | A personal look at classical education. Susan, I loved going to school at home. As a high
00:18:41.320 | school student, I would get up in the morning, practice the piano for two hours, do my math
00:18:45.720 | and grammar lessons, finish off my science, and then devote the rest of my school day
00:18:50.100 | to my favorite subjects, history, ancient languages, and writing. Once a week, we all
00:18:55.720 | piled into the car and drove around to music lessons, math tutoring sessions, library visits,
00:19:02.120 | college classes. On weekends, we went to athletic meets, my brother's bicycle races, the horse
00:19:08.280 | shows my sister and I trained for, and rode in. But I was nervous when I went away to
00:19:13.000 | college. Although I had done well on standardized exams, I never really sat in a regular classroom,
00:19:20.360 | facing inflexible deadlines. I was used to taking tests from my mother. I shouldn't
00:19:25.240 | have worried. I tested out of 30 hours worth of college courses. By my second semester,
00:19:30.120 | I was taking 400 level courses. I had a host of strange skills. I could diagram sentences.
00:19:37.640 | I could read Latin. I knew enough logic to tell whether an assertion was true or faulty.
00:19:43.920 | And I was surrounded by 18-year-olds who couldn't write, didn't want to read, and couldn't
00:19:48.720 | reason. I worked in the peer tutoring center for two years, tutoring English composition
00:19:54.440 | and Greek grammar. I found myself teaching fifth grade grammar to college students. My
00:20:00.880 | peers came in because they were getting failing grades in composition. I discovered that they
00:20:06.360 | couldn't tell the difference between fragments and run-on sentences. Students of Greek came
00:20:11.660 | in because they were having trouble translating. They couldn't identify nouns and verbs or
00:20:16.200 | tell me what the difference was. This college was small and non-exclusive. But the problem
00:20:23.040 | is universal.
00:20:24.840 | Ten years later, I taught my first semester of university classes at the College of William
00:20:29.040 | and Mary in Virginia. William and Mary, which still holds to the model of classical education,
00:20:35.080 | is selective about admissions. The students in my literature classes had high grades,
00:20:40.120 | high test scores, lots of extracurricular credits. I had 60 students my first year and
00:20:45.560 | taught two sections of major British writers, 18th and 19th centuries. Jonathan Swift to
00:20:51.760 | Arthur Conan Doyle in one fell swoop. I spent the beginning of the semester teaching remedial
00:20:57.760 | English to these freshmen. My first hint of trouble came when I assigned Wordsworth's
00:21:02.960 | ode "Intimations of Immortality" and gave a reading quiz. As I collected the test, I
00:21:09.040 | saw that Wordsworth's title had been thoroughly mangled. "Intimissions" or "Intimimations"
00:21:16.080 | or "In-intimissions." "Didn't any of you learn phonetic spelling?" I asked. Most of
00:21:22.240 | them shook their heads. Well, I already knew that phonics tends to be unfashionable, so
00:21:28.360 | I decided to be merciful. After all, I thought, they can always run a spell checker on their
00:21:33.400 | papers. I told them to write a four to six-page paper comparing two of the poems we'd covered,
00:21:40.000 | or comparing one of the poems to a modern work. No footnotes necessary, no research
00:21:44.480 | into scholarly articles required. Almost at once, the email started to flood into my electronic
00:21:50.480 | mailbox. "Professor Bower, I never wrote a paper on a poem before and I don't know
00:21:54.280 | where to start." "Professor Bower, I want to write on 'The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,'
00:21:58.680 | but I don't think I can say enough about it to fill up four pages." "The Rhyme of
00:22:02.680 | the Ancient Mariner" has enough metaphor and philosophy in it to provide material for
00:22:06.400 | a doctoral thesis. "While thinking about my paper topic, I've realized that I have
00:22:11.280 | no clue as to what I should write on." "Professor Bower, I'm completely lost. I only have delusions
00:22:16.920 | of correct paper topics." The papers, when finally turned in, contained a few gems, but
00:22:23.920 | the majority were badly written, illogical, and full of grammatical errors. And with a
00:22:29.720 | few exceptions, my privately educated students struggled right along with the public school
00:22:33.800 | graduates. They labored to put a thesis into words. They sweated and complained and groaned
00:22:39.920 | trying to prove it, and they didn't know whether they'd proved it or not when they
00:22:43.360 | got to the end of their paper. I spend time talking to these freshmen and sophomores in
00:22:47.880 | my office. They're bright, lively, energetic, interesting kids. They have ideas and passions
00:22:54.680 | and philosophical problems and social concerns and creative aspirations, but they've been
00:22:59.520 | done a great disservice. Their schools gave them few tools. Their minds are filled with
00:23:04.920 | the raw materials needed for success, but they're having to dig with their hands. I
00:23:11.240 | was ahead of them when I was their age, not because of superior mental abilities, but
00:23:15.840 | because I'd been equipped with a closet full of mental tools. My mother taught us the way
00:23:20.600 | she'd been taught at home. Our education was language-centered, not image-centered.
00:23:29.120 | We read and listened and wrote, but we rarely watched. She spent the early years of school
00:23:35.600 | giving us facts, systematically laying the foundation for advanced study. She taught
00:23:41.260 | us to think through arguments, and then she taught us how to express ourselves. This is
00:23:46.640 | the classical pattern of the trivium, the three-part process of training the mind. The
00:23:51.880 | first years of schooling are called the "grammar stage," not because you spend four years
00:23:56.900 | doing English, but because these are the years in which the building blocks for all other
00:24:01.280 | learning are laid, just as grammar is the foundation for language.
00:24:06.480 | In the elementary school years, grades 1 through 4, the mind is ready to absorb information.
00:24:13.520 | Since children at this age actually find memorization fun, during this period education involves
00:24:19.140 | not self-expression and self-discovery, but rather the learning of facts, rules of phonics
00:24:25.720 | and spelling, rules of grammar, poems, the vocabulary of foreign languages, the stories
00:24:31.360 | of history and literature, descriptions of plants and animals and the human body, the
00:24:35.800 | facts of mathematics, the list goes on. This information makes up the "grammar" for
00:24:41.520 | the second stage of education. By fifth grade, a child's mind begins to think more analytically.
00:24:49.280 | Middle school students are less interested in finding out facts than in asking "why?"
00:24:54.360 | The second phase of the "classical education," the "logic stage," is a time when the child
00:25:00.000 | begins to pay attention to cause and effect, to the relationships among different fields
00:25:04.280 | of knowledge, to the way facts fit together into a logical framework.
00:25:09.480 | A student is ready for the "logic stage" when the capacity for abstract thought begins
00:25:13.900 | to mature. During these years, the student learns algebra and logic, and begins to apply
00:25:20.240 | logic to all academic subjects. The logic of writing, for example, includes paragraph
00:25:26.000 | construction and support of a thesis. The logic of reading involves the criticism and
00:25:31.160 | analysis of texts, not simple absorption of information. The logic of history demands
00:25:37.680 | that the student find out why the War of 1812 was fought, rather than simply reading its
00:25:42.560 | story. The logic of science requires the child to learn the scientific method.
00:25:48.600 | The final phase of a classical education, the "rhetoric stage," builds on the first
00:25:53.360 | two. At this point, the high school student learns to write and speak with force and originality.
00:25:59.520 | The student of rhetoric applies the rules of logic learned in middle school to the foundational
00:26:03.340 | information learned in the early grades, and expresses her conclusions in clear, forceful,
00:26:08.200 | elegant language. The student also begins to specialize in whatever branch of knowledge
00:26:12.400 | attracts her. These are the years for art camps, college courses, foreign travel, apprenticeships,
00:26:18.560 | and other forms of specialized training.
00:26:21.840 | A classical education is more than just a pattern of learning, though. First, it is
00:26:26.880 | language-focused. Learning is accomplished through words, written and spoken, rather
00:26:33.680 | than through images (pictures, videos, and television). Why is this important? Language
00:26:39.640 | learning and image learning require very different habits of thought. Language requires the mind
00:26:44.880 | to work harder. In reading, the brain is forced to translate a symbol (words on the page)
00:26:50.760 | into a concept. Images, such as those on videos and television, allow the mind to be passive.
00:26:57.680 | In front of a video screen, the brain can "sit back" and relax. Faced with a written
00:27:02.720 | page, the mind is required to roll its sleeves up and get to work.
00:27:06.320 | Second, a classical education follows a specific three-part pattern. The mind must be first
00:27:12.040 | supplied with facts and images, then given the logical tools for organization of those
00:27:16.880 | facts and images, and finally equipped to express conclusions.
00:27:21.480 | Third, to the classical mind, all knowledge is interrelated. Astronomy, for example, isn't
00:27:28.400 | studied in isolation. It's learned along with the history of scientific discovery,
00:27:33.080 | which leads into the Church's relationship to science and from there to the intricacies
00:27:36.960 | of medieval Church history. The reading of the Odyssey allows the student to consider
00:27:42.720 | Greek history, the nature of heroism, the development of the epic, and humankind's
00:27:48.000 | understanding of the divine.
00:27:51.180 | This is easier said than done. The world is full of knowledge, and finding the links between
00:27:55.940 | fields of study can be a mind-twisting task. A classical education meets this challenge
00:28:02.280 | by taking history as its organizing outline, beginning with the ancients and progressing
00:28:07.520 | forward to the moderns in history, science, literature, art, and music.
00:28:12.900 | We suggest that the twelve years of education consist of three repetitions of the same four-year
00:28:19.200 | pattern. The ancients (5000 BC – 400 AD), the medieval period through the early Renaissance
00:28:26.360 | (400-1600 AD), the late Renaissance through early modern times (1600-1850), and modern
00:28:34.660 | times (1850-present). The child studies these four time periods at varying levels, simple
00:28:41.080 | for grades 1-4, more difficult in grades 5-8 when the student begins to read original sources,
00:28:47.600 | and taking an even more complex approach in grades 9-12 when the student works through
00:28:52.040 | these time periods using original sources (from Homer to Hitler) and also has the opportunity
00:28:57.960 | to pursue a particular interest (music, dance, technology, medicine, biology, creative writing)
00:29:03.240 | in depth.
00:29:04.680 | The other subject areas of the curriculum are linked to history studies. The student
00:29:08.300 | who is working on ancient history will read Greek and Roman mythology, the tales of the
00:29:12.800 | Iliad and Odyssey, early medieval writings, Chinese and Japanese fairy tales, and, for
00:29:19.080 | the older student, the classical texts of Plato, Herodotus, Virgil, Aristotle. She'll
00:29:25.640 | read Beowulf, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare the following year when she's studying medieval
00:29:31.120 | and early Renaissance history. When the 18th and 19th centuries are studied, she starts
00:29:35.680 | with Swift (Gulliver's Travels) and ends with Dickens. Finally, she reads modern literature
00:29:41.640 | as she is studying modern history.
00:29:45.200 | The sciences are studied in a four-year pattern that roughly corresponds to the periods of
00:29:50.100 | scientific discovery (biology, classification, and the human body) subjects known to the
00:29:56.200 | ancients, earth science and basic astronomy (which flowered during the early Renaissance),
00:30:01.720 | chemistry (which came into its own during the early modern period), and basic physics
00:30:06.560 | and computer science (very modern subjects). This pattern lends coherence to the study
00:30:12.420 | of history, science, and literature, subjects that are too often fragmented and confusing.
00:30:19.120 | The pattern widens and deepens as the student matures and learns. For example, a first grader
00:30:24.840 | listens to you read the story of the Iliad from one of the picture book versions available
00:30:29.340 | at any public library. Susan's experience has been that first graders think the Iliad
00:30:34.560 | is a blast, especially when Achilles starts hauling Hector's body around the walls of
00:30:39.120 | Troy. Four years later, the fifth grader reads one of the popular middle grade adaptations
00:30:44.760 | – Olivia Coolidge's The Trojan War or Roger L. Greene's The Tale of Troy. Four
00:30:51.180 | more years go by and the ninth grader, faced with Homer's Iliad itself, plunges right
00:30:56.200 | in undaunted. She already knows the story, what's to be scared of?
00:31:00.880 | In the chapters that follow, we'll show you how to follow this pattern for each subject,
00:31:05.400 | list the resources you'll need, and tell you where to find these resources.
00:31:10.680 | Classical education is, above all, systematic, in direct contrast to the scattered, unorganized
00:31:17.080 | nature of so much secondary education. Rigorous, systematic study has two purposes. Rigorous
00:31:23.920 | study develops virtue in the student – the ability to act in accordance to what one knows
00:31:28.980 | to be right. Virtuous men or women can force themselves to do what they know is right,
00:31:34.400 | even when it runs against their inclinations. Classical education continually asks a student
00:31:39.720 | to work against her baser tendencies – laziness, or the desire to watch another half hour of
00:31:45.040 | TV – in order to reach a goal – mastery of a subject. Systematic study allows the
00:31:50.780 | student to join what Mortimer J. Adler calls "the great conversation" – the ongoing
00:31:56.100 | conversation of great minds down through the ages. Much modern education is so eclectic
00:32:02.360 | that the student has little opportunity to make connections between past events and the
00:32:07.080 | flood of current information. "The beauty of the classical curriculum," writes classical
00:32:12.560 | schoolmaster David Hicks, "is that it dwells on one problem, one author, or one epoch long
00:32:19.360 | enough to allow even the youngest student a chance to exercise his mind in a scholarly
00:32:24.400 | way, to make connections and to trace developments, lines of reasoning, patterns of action, recurring
00:32:31.400 | symbolisms, plots and motifs." My mother struggled hard to give us the benefits of
00:32:36.600 | a classical education. She began to teach us at home in a day when few materials existed
00:32:41.640 | for home-educating parents. She had to create her own curriculum. We are going to lay out
00:32:47.000 | a whole plan of study for you – not just theory, but resources and textbooks and curricula.
00:32:53.200 | It's still hard work, we don't deny it. We'll give you a clear view of the demands
00:32:57.220 | and requirements of this academic project. But a classical education is worth every drop
00:33:01.640 | of sweat, I can testify to that. I am constantly grateful to my mother for my education. It
00:33:07.400 | gave me an immeasurable head start, the independence to innovate and work on my own, confidence
00:33:13.500 | in my ability to compete in the job market and the mental tools to build a satisfying
00:33:17.600 | career. In 15 years, I believe that my own children will say the same to me.
00:33:24.160 | And that concludes the prologue, A Person to Look at Classical Education, written by
00:33:28.020 | Susan Weis Bauer. This is the prologue from the excellent book, The Well-Trained Mind,
00:33:32.920 | a guide to classical education at home, by Susan Weis Bauer and Jesse Weis.