The Well-Trained Mind

Home-schooling ought to be the absolute best guerrilla schooling strategy. Too often it isn’t, though, because giving your children a rigorous academic education at home is such hard work. I confess to being less than whole of heart in my support for home-schooling, not because many people don’t do it well, but because many others seem to me to do it badly. Between the relaxed discipline of the unschoolers and the relaxed rigor of the religious home-schoolers, I fear that many home-schooled children are having the gift of youth wasted just as completely as their public-schooled contemporaries.

That fear could not possibly be directed at parents who school their own according to the guidelines supplied by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer in their new book “The Well-Trained Mind”. A mother and daughter team, the one-time teacher and pupil of their own home-school, the authors are very serious about rigor. The curriculum they present replicates the Roman trivium, beginning with the skills of literacy—including literacy in Latin—and ending with the art of rhetoric.

The review below, graciously lent us by Robert Holland, explains the curriculum in greater detail. The authors maintain a web-site rich in resources for homeschoolers, including a Latin curriculum targeted at children (although the works of Peter Jones exclude no one). Wise and Bauer are devout Christians, as are many of the sites they link to; caveat lector, to whatever extent you think necessary. They provide sample chapters for you to inspect. The book can be purchased from their publisher or at a discount from Amazon.com.

This is an education you can’t find anywhere but at home, and the teacher will surely profit as much as the student. Even if your children are schooled outside the home, it would make a great sense for guerrillas to use this book as a supplement.

—GSS

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Guide Offers Aid to Parents Who Opt for Home Schooling

The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home,
by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer, W.W. Norton & Company, $35.

Reviewed by Robert Holland (reprinted with permission; ©1999 by Robert Holland; do not republish without permission)

The growth of home schooling has been so phenomenal that Newsweek recognized the trend with an on-the-whole favorable cover story last October 5: “Home Schooling — More Than a Million Kids and Growing: Can It Work for Your Family?” As the boom proceeds, someone is going to have to make a command judgment: Is it home schooling or homeschooling or do we just fudge and call it home education?

But for those brave souls who do school their own children at home, there are more pressing questions, such as: How do we get help in fashioning a coherent educational program for our child? Or the one I would ask: How do I, a math illiterate who struggles to calculate a percentage of increase, teach my child to do algebraic equations?

With home-schooling’s expansion (there are now an estimated 1.5 million children being taught at home) has come a market for books, tapes, CDs, and Internet fare to help parents set up school and teach specific subjects. Some of the books are about as thick as a government directory, but more riveting — chock-full as they are of resources for further learning about learning. But The Well-Trained Mind, by the Charles City mother/daughter writing team of Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer, is much more than a guidebook, though it offers many useful lists of sources in its 764 pages.

What makes the book stand out is that the authors advocate a philosophy of systematic learning based on the trivium — a division of education among the grammar (grades 1-4), logic (grades 5-8), and rhetoric (grades 9-12) stages. It’s pegged to the maturing process of a child’s mind, and it’s rare, if not extinct, in modern public education.

Their approach is not necessarily uncontroversial even within the home-schooling family. There is a strong contingent of “unschoolers” — those who teach at home because they resent authoritarian schools and believe the child will learn what he or she needs to know by following natural impulses without imposition by authority figures. The classical regimen the authors lay out is, by contrast, focused on teaching knowledge — albeit in a way that will elicit the interest of children. How do children know what they’re interested in if they don’t know anything? the authors ask. Good question.

And so their version of classical education has third-graders beginning the study of Latin, sixth-graders plumbing logical fallacies well-known to editorial writers, such as the argumentum ad hominem, and high-schoolers writing well-organized papers on the ideas in great books that inform our civilization. The classical approach trains the mind to deal with words, not video-game images. Why Latin? Why not? About half the English vocabulary is based on Latin.

This book would be entertaining simply as the story of how Jessie, then a schoolteacher, decided to teach Susan, who now teaches literature at the College of William and Mary, at home — pulling her and brother Bob out of school in 1973 when home-schooling did not have social acceptance and explicit legal sanction. But it’s so much more than a good yarn. It’s a mind-stretching tome.

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Robert Holland, a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia, was formerly the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Op/Ed Page Editor.

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