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It's more than just a ticket. The first day I taught my three children at home, I cleaned up the playroom and set up three desks. I hung an American flag at the front of the room and led them in the Pledge of Allegiance. I was shaking with nervousness. It was 1973 and my husband Jay and I had just done something radical.

We had removed our children from school. I was terrified, which was ridiculous. After all, I was a state-certified teacher. I'd taught public school for six years. I'd taken post-graduate courses in education from Tulane University, the College of William & Mary, and the University of Virginia. One year, I'd managed 38 second graders from dawn till dusk.

No lunch break, no recess break, and no teacher's aid. Yet, I was completely intimidated by those three little children, certain that I couldn't do an adequate job of teaching them myself. All my teacher education had brainwashed me. I was convinced that parents couldn't possibly teach their own children, certainly not at home.

It had to be done in an institutional setting, run by professionals with their resources and specialized training and expertise. Unfortunately, the professionals had let us down. I wasn't a stranger to failures in the system. The last year I taught public school, I had in my sixth grade class two sixteen-year-old boys who had not yet learned to read.

I'd never even heard of homeschooling, but I remember thinking, "If I ever have a child, he will know how to read before he goes to school. I will not have my son sitting in sixth grade unable to read." So, when my oldest child turned four, I said to him one day, "Bob, would you rather take a nap, or would you like to learn how to read?" He chose reading, not surprisingly, and I started him on the old-fashioned phonics I'd been taught when I was a child.

I'd lie down with him on his little bed after lunch and work on his letters. Since I also had a two-year-old and a thirteen-month-old, I was always glad to lie down. We practiced vowels and consonants and sounded out new words that year. We called it "doing kindergarten." By the time my middle child was three, she wanted in.

"Might I do kindergarten too?" she'd say, and I would boost her up and let her repeat the sounds after me. I was proud of myself. I was preparing my children for school. Kindergarten, when it came, was uneventful and purely social. Bob loved to play at school. At home, I went on reading to him and teaching him his language and number skills.

But when Bob reached first grade, he didn't fit in. He already knew the material and he was bored. The school, a well-regarded private school, was cooperative and moved him into second grade. He was bored there too. The class was working on early reading skills and we'd already done that.

The second graders didn't like him because he was a little upstart invading their turf. The administration moved him back to first grade, but now the first graders were hostile. He was a big shot who'd been thought worthy of second grade and they wouldn't play with him. They were jealous because he was well-prepared.

So, here he was in first grade, already feeling that doing well in school made him unpopular. He started to change. He had been an excited, exuberant, curious child. Now he was a behavior problem. He stopped doing well in school. His papers had always been meticulously done, but suddenly his writing became sloppy.

The teacher complained to us that Bob was always questioning her in class, and the bus ride to school was horrendous. The older kids made the younger ones sit on the floor, stole their lunches, and dirtied their clothes so they'd get demerits from the teachers at school. Every day, Bob got off the school bus with a handful of bad papers and he was either fighting mad or crying.

At this point, Jay and I realized that we were spending most of our time with this child trying to undo what was happening to him when he was at school, and we were afraid that our second child, Susan, would go through the same metamorphosis. Susan had just started kindergarten, and the teacher was already protesting to us that she would be a social misfit because she wanted to read during free time instead of playing.

We were experiencing firsthand the terrific leveling pressure applied in so many schools, the effort to smooth out the bumps by bringing well-prepared kids down to the level of the rest. This still happens in some schools. Just this year, the best private preschool in our area agreed to stop teaching four-year-olds beginning reading skills.

Kindergarten teachers in the local public schools had complained that the children turned out by this preschool were bored in kindergarten because they already knew the material. The schools demanded that the preschool quit turning out such well-prepared five-year-olds so that all the kindergartners would start at the same level of ignorance.

I was appalled when the preschool buckled and went back to teaching colors and "social skills." Back in 1973, no one had told me to stop teaching phonics to my preschoolers, and we didn't know what to do with these academic misfits I had managed to produce. So we took our two school-age children to a psychologist in the local mental health system.

He tested both of them, and I found out what my careful preparation for kindergarten had done. Bob, the second grader, was reading on a seventh grade level. Susan, the kindergartner, was reading fifth grade material. Psychologist called us into his office afterward. "Listen," he said, "if you keep those children in school, they are going to become non-learners.

They're bored to death. You've got a teacher's certificate. Why don't you take them out of school and teach them yourself?" This had never occurred to us. After all, education was the domain of schools, and these were our children. We didn't know anyone else who was homeschooling. The whole idea was odd and radical, and we weren't even sure it was even legal.

Virginia law was fuzzy on this point. But we had no other choice. The local public school was a terrible environment socially, and test scores ranked our county at the bottom of the state year after year. The private school had been our solution. So, quaking in my boots, I set up the desks and the American flag and started to teach my children at home.

I worried the whole time. I worried that my children weren't going to get into college. I worried that the school system was going to come and take them away from us for neglect and truancy. I worried that their social development would suffer. I could tell you the stories of all three children, but I want to focus on my older daughter, Susan, because we've had the chance to work and speak together and to reflect on what I did right and wrong in her education.

As I write this, Susan is 35, happily married and the mother of four, three boys and a girl. She went to college at 17 on a full scholarship, awarded to her for being a national merit finalist. She worked summers for a good salary as secretary for a legal firm.

Her college chose her to spend a term at Oxford as a visiting student. After college, she completed a Master of Divinity, a three-year theological degree, and then a Master of Arts in English Literature. She reads Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and French. She has a thriving career as a writer.

She has published novels and nonfiction books. She writes for several journals and periodicals, and she has started her own small press. She is pursuing her doctoral degree in American Studies and teaches literature and writing at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. As I look back on the education I gave her, I can see that it follows a pattern that has mostly disappeared from public education.

To begin with, I filled her head with facts when she was small. I taught her to read early and kept books everywhere in the house. We had books for presents and rewards, and I was known at the local public library as "the lady with the laundry basket" because I took my children in every week and filled a laundry basket with their books.

On each library visit, I had them check out the following books. One science book. One history book. One art or music appreciation book. One practical book (a craft, hobby, or how-to). A biography or autobiography. A classic novel (or an adaptation suited to age). An imaginative story book. A book of poetry.

They were allowed to choose the titles, but I asked them to follow this pattern. And they were also allowed to check out other books on any topic they pleased. Furthermore, I made Susan memorize. She could recite multiplication tables, lists of linking verbs, dates, precedents, and Latin declensions. As her thought processes matured, I taught her how to fit her knowledge into logical structures.

I spent a lot of time with her in one-on-one discussion and interaction. We learned spelling rules, mathematics, and basic logic. We followed an unfashionably strict grammar book and diagrammed sentences of increasing complexity. We kept science notebooks and timelines so that we could organize her growing knowledge of facts into logical and chronological order.

I taught her how to organize a paragraph, an essay, a research paper. She learned Latin grammar. She learned how to discipline herself to follow a custom-made schedule, balancing academics and personal interests like music and creative writing. And she continued to read every spare moment. As she moved into high school, I spent more time working on her skills in writing and expression.

She wrote papers, book reports, and stories. She had a particular bent for this and also wrote two novels, although that wasn't a part of my curriculum. My plan did include allowing her to develop a specialty, some area in which she could deepen her knowledge in preparation for college and a career.

She became interested in early British history and literature and taught herself Welsh and Gaelic. She loved practicing the piano. She also started working part-time, and we spent an hour every day studying for her SATs, using test preparation books to review reading skills, logical constructs, English vocabulary, and mathematics. She scored 740 on the verbal section of the SATs, 630 on the math, and this was before the new adjusted scoring came in.

Our mailbox was filled with college catalogs. She finally chose a school where she'd been offered a presidential scholarship based on her standardized scores. In her freshman year, she was given the chance to test out of several survey courses by taking the college-level examination program examinations. She took the whole battery, just for fun, and was awarded over 30 hours of college credit.

After college, she made a perfect score on the verbal section of the graduate record exam and did her graduate work at William & Mary on full scholarship. I didn't know until later that I had followed the pattern of classical education called the trivium. I did know that what I was doing worked.

Susan will write about the trivium in the next chapter. It's the classical theory of education which organizes learning around the maturing capacity of the child's mind. It no longer exists in public education. I didn't learn by this method when I was educated in the county public schools back in the 40s and 50s, but I was raised by elderly relatives who had been taught by classical methods popular before the turn of the century.

Mimi, as I called her, had only finished 8th grade in a one-room schoolhouse, and Uncle Luther hadn't even gone that far. But by 8th grade, Mimi had learned Latin and algebra, and Uncle Luther had learned advanced practical mathematics and how to think and write. They taught me to read before I ever went to school.

The first grade teacher was our neighbor, and when she heard that Mimi was drilling me in phonics, she made a special trip over to warn us that I'd be ruined for life if Mimi used such an outdated method. Mimi was undaunted, and when I did enter school, I was put straight into second grade because of the skills I'd already acquired.

When I came home from school in the evenings, Mimi and Uncle Luther sat me down and made me learn. Mimi would point at the lists in the books, multiplication tables, parts of speech, and say, "Memorize those." "But the teacher said we don't have to memorize them," I protested. "We just have to be able to use them." "I don't care what the teacher says," Mimi insisted.

"These are things you have to know." I had been trained to be obedient and disciplined, so I memorized the lists, even though memorization was difficult for me. I learned my algebra and grammar. I went on to college and a professional position. I was the only girl in my high school class to graduate from college.

When I had children of my own, I used Mimi's method and found that the three-part process of memorization, logical organization, and clear expression put them far above their peers. In the middle of this century, Dorothy Sayers, author and creator of Lord Peter Whimsey, told an audience at Oxford University that education had given up on the trivium and was now running on what she called the "educational capital." We no longer teach our children the process of memorization, organization, and expression, the tools by which the mind learns.

The leftover remnants of those methods have carried us through several decades of schooling without catastrophe. I made it through public school at the top of my class because my guardians taught me from what they had learned. But sooner or later, the capital gets used up. My own children were faced with teachers who brought them down to the level of the class, teachers who thought it was more important to teach social skills than academic subjects, textbooks that had abandoned grammatical rules and mathematical logic in favor of scattershot, incidental learning.

They were surrounded by peers who considered anyone good at learning to be a geek. They spent seven hours every day sitting in desks, standing in lines, riding buses, and doing repetitive seat work so that their classmates could learn what they already knew. I wanted something better for them. As I've watched home education develop over the last two decades, I've become convinced that any dedicated parent can do what I did.

My own education didn't stretch to Latin or Gaelic or Calculus or Computer Science or Art, but my children learned all of these things. With the help of resources and support groups now in place throughout the country, and with the principles we'll give you in this book, you can provide your child with a classical education at home, even if you've never glanced at Latin or Logic.

You can do what my guardians did, and on your own time teach your child the basic skills she may not be learning at school. Your young student may need particular help in math, science, reading, or writing. Even the best and most diligent teacher (I speak from experience) is often prevented from giving necessary individual attention by the growing size of her class.

If you use the resources we've collected in this book and invest in some one-on-one time with your child, you are capable of educating him. When I taught school, I was convinced that parents couldn't teach their own children. But 25 years later, I can look back and say, the experiment was a success.

I was the best teacher my children could possibly have had because I was their parent. I happened to have a teacher's certificate, but during my years of homeschooling I learned more academic material, more about how to manage individual relationships with children, and more about how to teach than I did in any of my teacher education courses.

Teacher education courses gave me a great deal of good information on how to manage large groups of children. I needed that in schools, but a parent doesn't need it to teach at home. I happened to have a college degree, but in the 25 years since I first became involved with the home education movement, I've seen parents who only finished high school lead their children successfully through 12th grade, and I've watched those children thrive in college.

You shouldn't be afraid to take your child out of school, if necessary. This is a radical step for most parents. It means a change in schedule, in priorities, in lifestyle. And apart from academic concerns, many parents ask, "What about my child's social development? Doesn't he need peers?" Children need friends.

Children do not need to be surrounded by large groups of peers who inevitably follow the strongest personality in the crowd. The question for any parent is, "Do I want my child to be like his peers, or do I want my child to rise above them?" Finally, if you're accustomed to sending your child to school every morning and allowing the professionals to worry about what he learns and how he learns it, the idea of supervising an entire education may overwhelm you.

I sympathize. When I started, I was convinced I could never do it. But if you feel your child is being short-changed in school, we can give you a plan to fix that. In this book, not only will we introduce you to the Trivium Method, but we'll give you resources to carry it out, and a plan for the entire 12 years of school.

I discovered that home education has a great advantage I knew nothing about when I started. Home education teaches children to learn, and eventually to teach themselves. By the time my children were 12 or so, I did less and less actual teaching. I supervised, I discussed content with them, I held them accountable, I graded, I bought books and organized coursework.

But by early high school, they had been trained in the methods of learning. From this point, they began the process of educating themselves, with some help from tutors and correspondence courses. As adults, they continued to educate themselves, to widen their intellectual horizons. Certainly, this should be the first goal of education.

What I've just read you is the prologue written by Jessie Wise in the excellent book co-authored by Jessie Wise and her daughter Susan Wise Bower, called "The Well-Trained Mind, A Guide to Classical Education at Home." I hope that essay inspires and encourages you based upon what is possible. A personal look at classical education.

Susan, I loved going to school at home. As a high school student, I would get up in the morning, practice the piano for two hours, do my math and grammar lessons, finish off my science, and then devote the rest of my school day to my favorite subjects, history, ancient languages, and writing.

Once a week, we all piled into the car and drove around to music lessons, math tutoring sessions, library visits, college classes. On weekends, we went to athletic meets, my brother's bicycle races, the horse shows my sister and I trained for, and rode in. But I was nervous when I went away to college.

Although I had done well on standardized exams, I never really sat in a regular classroom, facing inflexible deadlines. I was used to taking tests from my mother. I shouldn't have worried. I tested out of 30 hours worth of college courses. By my second semester, I was taking 400 level courses.

I had a host of strange skills. I could diagram sentences. I could read Latin. I knew enough logic to tell whether an assertion was true or faulty. And I was surrounded by 18-year-olds who couldn't write, didn't want to read, and couldn't reason. I worked in the peer tutoring center for two years, tutoring English composition and Greek grammar.

I found myself teaching fifth grade grammar to college students. My peers came in because they were getting failing grades in composition. I discovered that they couldn't tell the difference between fragments and run-on sentences. Students of Greek came in because they were having trouble translating. They couldn't identify nouns and verbs or tell me what the difference was.

This college was small and non-exclusive. But the problem is universal. Ten years later, I taught my first semester of university classes at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. William and Mary, which still holds to the model of classical education, is selective about admissions. The students in my literature classes had high grades, high test scores, lots of extracurricular credits.

I had 60 students my first year and taught two sections of major British writers, 18th and 19th centuries. Jonathan Swift to Arthur Conan Doyle in one fell swoop. I spent the beginning of the semester teaching remedial English to these freshmen. My first hint of trouble came when I assigned Wordsworth's ode "Intimations of Immortality" and gave a reading quiz.

As I collected the test, I saw that Wordsworth's title had been thoroughly mangled. "Intimissions" or "Intimimations" or "In-intimissions." "Didn't any of you learn phonetic spelling?" I asked. Most of them shook their heads. Well, I already knew that phonics tends to be unfashionable, so I decided to be merciful. After all, I thought, they can always run a spell checker on their papers.

I told them to write a four to six-page paper comparing two of the poems we'd covered, or comparing one of the poems to a modern work. No footnotes necessary, no research into scholarly articles required. Almost at once, the email started to flood into my electronic mailbox. "Professor Bower, I never wrote a paper on a poem before and I don't know where to start." "Professor Bower, I want to write on 'The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,' but I don't think I can say enough about it to fill up four pages." "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" has enough metaphor and philosophy in it to provide material for a doctoral thesis.

"While thinking about my paper topic, I've realized that I have no clue as to what I should write on." "Professor Bower, I'm completely lost. I only have delusions of correct paper topics." The papers, when finally turned in, contained a few gems, but the majority were badly written, illogical, and full of grammatical errors.

And with a few exceptions, my privately educated students struggled right along with the public school graduates. They labored to put a thesis into words. They sweated and complained and groaned trying to prove it, and they didn't know whether they'd proved it or not when they got to the end of their paper.

I spend time talking to these freshmen and sophomores in my office. They're bright, lively, energetic, interesting kids. They have ideas and passions and philosophical problems and social concerns and creative aspirations, but they've been done a great disservice. Their schools gave them few tools. Their minds are filled with the raw materials needed for success, but they're having to dig with their hands.

I was ahead of them when I was their age, not because of superior mental abilities, but because I'd been equipped with a closet full of mental tools. My mother taught us the way she'd been taught at home. Our education was language-centered, not image-centered. We read and listened and wrote, but we rarely watched.

She spent the early years of school giving us facts, systematically laying the foundation for advanced study. She taught us to think through arguments, and then she taught us how to express ourselves. This is the classical pattern of the trivium, the three-part process of training the mind. The first years of schooling are called the "grammar stage," not because you spend four years doing English, but because these are the years in which the building blocks for all other learning are laid, just as grammar is the foundation for language.

In the elementary school years, grades 1 through 4, the mind is ready to absorb information. Since children at this age actually find memorization fun, during this period education involves not self-expression and self-discovery, but rather the learning of facts, rules of phonics and spelling, rules of grammar, poems, the vocabulary of foreign languages, the stories of history and literature, descriptions of plants and animals and the human body, the facts of mathematics, the list goes on.

This information makes up the "grammar" for the second stage of education. By fifth grade, a child's mind begins to think more analytically. Middle school students are less interested in finding out facts than in asking "why?" The second phase of the "classical education," the "logic stage," is a time when the child begins to pay attention to cause and effect, to the relationships among different fields of knowledge, to the way facts fit together into a logical framework.

A student is ready for the "logic stage" when the capacity for abstract thought begins to mature. During these years, the student learns algebra and logic, and begins to apply logic to all academic subjects. The logic of writing, for example, includes paragraph construction and support of a thesis. The logic of reading involves the criticism and analysis of texts, not simple absorption of information.

The logic of history demands that the student find out why the War of 1812 was fought, rather than simply reading its story. The logic of science requires the child to learn the scientific method. The final phase of a classical education, the "rhetoric stage," builds on the first two. At this point, the high school student learns to write and speak with force and originality.

The student of rhetoric applies the rules of logic learned in middle school to the foundational information learned in the early grades, and expresses her conclusions in clear, forceful, elegant language. The student also begins to specialize in whatever branch of knowledge attracts her. These are the years for art camps, college courses, foreign travel, apprenticeships, and other forms of specialized training.

A classical education is more than just a pattern of learning, though. First, it is language-focused. Learning is accomplished through words, written and spoken, rather than through images (pictures, videos, and television). Why is this important? Language learning and image learning require very different habits of thought. Language requires the mind to work harder.

In reading, the brain is forced to translate a symbol (words on the page) into a concept. Images, such as those on videos and television, allow the mind to be passive. In front of a video screen, the brain can "sit back" and relax. Faced with a written page, the mind is required to roll its sleeves up and get to work.

Second, a classical education follows a specific three-part pattern. The mind must be first supplied with facts and images, then given the logical tools for organization of those facts and images, and finally equipped to express conclusions. Third, to the classical mind, all knowledge is interrelated. Astronomy, for example, isn't studied in isolation.

It's learned along with the history of scientific discovery, which leads into the Church's relationship to science and from there to the intricacies of medieval Church history. The reading of the Odyssey allows the student to consider Greek history, the nature of heroism, the development of the epic, and humankind's understanding of the divine.

This is easier said than done. The world is full of knowledge, and finding the links between fields of study can be a mind-twisting task. A classical education meets this challenge by taking history as its organizing outline, beginning with the ancients and progressing forward to the moderns in history, science, literature, art, and music.

We suggest that the twelve years of education consist of three repetitions of the same four-year pattern. The ancients (5000 BC – 400 AD), the medieval period through the early Renaissance (400-1600 AD), the late Renaissance through early modern times (1600-1850), and modern times (1850-present). The child studies these four time periods at varying levels, simple for grades 1-4, more difficult in grades 5-8 when the student begins to read original sources, and taking an even more complex approach in grades 9-12 when the student works through these time periods using original sources (from Homer to Hitler) and also has the opportunity to pursue a particular interest (music, dance, technology, medicine, biology, creative writing) in depth.

The other subject areas of the curriculum are linked to history studies. The student who is working on ancient history will read Greek and Roman mythology, the tales of the Iliad and Odyssey, early medieval writings, Chinese and Japanese fairy tales, and, for the older student, the classical texts of Plato, Herodotus, Virgil, Aristotle.

She'll read Beowulf, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare the following year when she's studying medieval and early Renaissance history. When the 18th and 19th centuries are studied, she starts with Swift (Gulliver's Travels) and ends with Dickens. Finally, she reads modern literature as she is studying modern history. The sciences are studied in a four-year pattern that roughly corresponds to the periods of scientific discovery (biology, classification, and the human body) subjects known to the ancients, earth science and basic astronomy (which flowered during the early Renaissance), chemistry (which came into its own during the early modern period), and basic physics and computer science (very modern subjects).

This pattern lends coherence to the study of history, science, and literature, subjects that are too often fragmented and confusing. The pattern widens and deepens as the student matures and learns. For example, a first grader listens to you read the story of the Iliad from one of the picture book versions available at any public library.

Susan's experience has been that first graders think the Iliad is a blast, especially when Achilles starts hauling Hector's body around the walls of Troy. Four years later, the fifth grader reads one of the popular middle grade adaptations – Olivia Coolidge's The Trojan War or Roger L. Greene's The Tale of Troy.

Four more years go by and the ninth grader, faced with Homer's Iliad itself, plunges right in undaunted. She already knows the story, what's to be scared of? In the chapters that follow, we'll show you how to follow this pattern for each subject, list the resources you'll need, and tell you where to find these resources.

Classical education is, above all, systematic, in direct contrast to the scattered, unorganized nature of so much secondary education. Rigorous, systematic study has two purposes. Rigorous study develops virtue in the student – the ability to act in accordance to what one knows to be right. Virtuous men or women can force themselves to do what they know is right, even when it runs against their inclinations.

Classical education continually asks a student to work against her baser tendencies – laziness, or the desire to watch another half hour of TV – in order to reach a goal – mastery of a subject. Systematic study allows the student to join what Mortimer J. Adler calls "the great conversation" – the ongoing conversation of great minds down through the ages.

Much modern education is so eclectic that the student has little opportunity to make connections between past events and the flood of current information. "The beauty of the classical curriculum," writes classical schoolmaster David Hicks, "is that it dwells on one problem, one author, or one epoch long enough to allow even the youngest student a chance to exercise his mind in a scholarly way, to make connections and to trace developments, lines of reasoning, patterns of action, recurring symbolisms, plots and motifs." My mother struggled hard to give us the benefits of a classical education.

She began to teach us at home in a day when few materials existed for home-educating parents. She had to create her own curriculum. We are going to lay out a whole plan of study for you – not just theory, but resources and textbooks and curricula. It's still hard work, we don't deny it.

We'll give you a clear view of the demands and requirements of this academic project. But a classical education is worth every drop of sweat, I can testify to that. I am constantly grateful to my mother for my education. It gave me an immeasurable head start, the independence to innovate and work on my own, confidence in my ability to compete in the job market and the mental tools to build a satisfying career.

In 15 years, I believe that my own children will say the same to me. And that concludes the prologue, A Person to Look at Classical Education, written by Susan Weis Bauer. This is the prologue from the excellent book, The Well-Trained Mind, a guide to classical education at home, by Susan Weis Bauer and Jesse Weis.