If You Thought Schools Were Intimidating…

Author's Rating:

Pros: thorough, thought provoking, well researched

Cons: patronizing and inflexible

The Bottom Line: 
I recommend that you read the book, but only for ideas as I find the methods in this book to be terribly inflexible.

Author's Review
The well trained mind, by Jesse Wise and Susan Wise Bauer, is a step by step instructional book written by a mother and daughter team who have actually homeschooled successfully, and thus know what they are talking about. The elder in this group was also a teacher before homeschooling her children. As this method of homeschooling worked well for this family, they are convinced that it will work well for all others, so some bias does exist here. The authors point of view is that a classical education, one that a child would have received in a perfect classroom, once upon a time, is the best way to train up a child to have a “well trained mind”, and anything short of that is just insufficient.

“The well trained mind is a handbook on how to prepare your child to read write calculate, think, and understand.” And a comprehensive guide, at that. Written for homeschoolers, by homeschoolers, this book based on the classical pattern of education called the trivium, which organizes learning around the maturing capacity of the child’s mind and comprises three stages, the: grammar stage”, the logic stage”, and the “rhetoric stage”. For your information and my sanity, I will stop here and define these new and interesting vocabulary words that you must know in order to read this book.

Trivium: a group of studies consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and logic and forming the lower division of the seven liberal arts in medieval universities

Grammar stage: the study of the classes of words, their inflections, and their functions and relations in the sentence

Logic stage: a science that deals with the principles and criteria of validity of inference and demonstration: the science of the formal principles of reasoning

Rhetoric stage: the study of principles and rules of composition formulated by critics of ancient times

(Merriam-Webster online)

Thus the Classical education route of homeschooling is based on the same forms of education that was studied by our ancient ancestors.

There is a great deal of validity in a classical education. If you were to study history and philosophy you will find that the worlds best thinkers came from the ancient times. Why did our best thinkers come from the ancient times? Because they were trained to think. This premise truly excites me. The possibilities that one of my very own children would have a mind like that of Plato or Socrates was enough to make me read this book from cover to cover. The book discussed laying a basic foundation by teaching a child proper phonics mathematic facts, and historical information, then building upon this same information while reinforcing it in four year cycles. The first cycle is simply to teach the information, the second cycle is to understand and theorize why the information is makes sense and the third cycle is to cause the child to think critically about the information; to question and to test, rather than to just accept the information. In my estimation this equates to finishing a public school education as well as college. In today’s elementary schools, children are expected to memorize, memorize, memorize tons of information, just as in the grammar stage. In High school the child is taught the same subjects on a deeper level and at times encouraged to question these “facts”. This is a watered down version of the logic stage. Then in college, the student is taught and encouraged to argue and think for himself, which closely parallels the rhetoric stage. So teaching a child the trvium, or a classic education would basically prepare them for grad school by the time they are 18. They would probably sail through four-year college in 18 months challenging all of the required classes upon the way, and then jump right into their masters and doctorate degrees.

So why do I find this book and it’s methods disturbing? Upon reading this book, I found the methods of teaching this classical education to be inflexible. It does not allow for differences in learning styles of a child, or any creativeness whatsoever. It makes me wonder if this book is not setting up children who learn differently for the same frustrations and roadblocks that they would encounter in public schools. A child who resists this rigorous style of learning would be labeled “dumb” or the parents incapable of teaching. Thankfully, other styles of homeschooling exist.

Don’t get me wrong. I still love this book. It has given me many great ideas and complete resources for teaching my children. It has also taught me how to create a great foundation for learning. I can also see my older child thriving in this kind of academic environment, though I would have to find more time in this jam-packed learning schedule for music and arts, which seem to take a passive back seat in a classical education. My younger child however, seems to have skipped the grammar stage altogether developmentally, she has been exhibiting signs of readiness for the logic stage since she could talk (at 8 months). This readiness is exhibited by constant questioning of “why, Why, why” about anything and everything. So while this book has great ideas (like teaching Latin to lay a foundation for vocabulary) and resources (like kingfisher illustrated history of the world) I feel it does not allow for any kind of giftedness other than academic to surface in a child.

For the most part, the evidence that this route of home learning works is the standard “It worked for us" scenario. There is also, however a chapter called “Going to College” that shows that Classically trained Students are easily accepted in college. The book does not mention however what many unschooling and eclectic homeschooling books to mention. It is simply that most homeschoolers start out with a classical approach, and after one to two years move on to unschooling or eclectic (a combination of the two). For myself, eclectic homeschooling seems like a good place to start, so when reading my review, read it from the standpoint that I have already decided upon an eclectic approach before reading this book, and so therefore, my opinion may be biased.

All the same, this is the most comprehensive and detailed instruction book on classical homeschooling written to date. It is so detailed in fact that is tells you not only what books to read, but gives step by step instructions on how and when to do a learning activity down to the size notebook and type of paper to use. (Just a bit patronizing, huh?). This is a complete opposite realm of unschooling which also has many good points and ideas, but I would hate to get the Wise women, and Mary Hood (of the relaxed homeschooler) or any major unschooling advocate in the same room. I fear it would get “ugly” pretty quickly. For me, I would like to “just get along” and use bits and pieces from each camp as they are all brilliant though opposite, just like my children.

I recommend that everyone, I mean everyone who has children read this book. For the person considering homeschooling, please do not read it first. Read a book on unschooling first as it won’t send you running and screaming for the hills in an anxiety attack of inferiority. Since I borrowed this book from the library, I will be purchasing a copy to refer to from time to time, as I found the book to be both stimulating and thought provoking.