The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical
Education at Home
by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise
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As the school year wraps up, now is a good
time to pick up this book; it's an amazing resource for anyone involved in a
young person's education, including parents, grandparents, family friends, and other relatives. Written with homeschoolers in mind, its reach easily encompasses those of us who teach on a more humble scale, reading bed-time stories, tutoring, giving books as gifts, or seeking to supplement a child's formal schooling with added learning at home. The authors draw on a deep well of experience from their own family's homeschooling practice: former elementary school teacher Jessie Wise homeschooled Susan Wise Bauer and her siblings, and Susan carries on the tradition with her own children while also teaching literature at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. They offer a wealth of resources, schedules, and personal stories to aid readers in taking an active part in their children's education. Their approach focuses on "classical education," which puts heavy emphasis on the trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. It's an appealingly systematic approach, leading a learner through the stages of absorbing and organizing knowledge, then formulating it into a spoken or written response. Language, reasoning skills, mathematics, and other subjects weave together, making a whole that's greater than their parts. The Well-Trained Mind can help you meet a number of thorny challenges: how to teach a child to read before he or she starts school, how best to help with math and science homework, or how to incorporate learning a foreign language (Spanish, French, even Latin) into a young person's life. Also, how can television, computer games, and the Internet be tamed and put to use as teaching tools rather than baby-sitters or wasters of time? My favorite parts of the guide are the extensive lists of books, spanning history from ancient times to the present, classic stories and literature, and fantastic picture books. The Well-Trained Mind has frequently been pressed into service to aid me in choosing quality, age-appropriate gifts for my nieces and nephews, and I've found several book recommendations so good that I've read them myself (it's amazing what knowledge holes our schooling can leave us with!). It's a great resource to consult before summertime trips to the bookstore or the library. This book is an especially great gift for parents with young children beginning or about to begin school, and it's a good summer read for anyone who wants to take an active interest in a young person's education. Best of all, it's just been revised and printed in a new edition, so those tempting reading lists are more up-to-date than ever. Review by Mark Bradshaw, May 27, 2004 To do a little DIY learning and start spackling your own educational gaps this summer, start with Susan Wise Bauer's "The Well-Educated Mind," reviewed here: http://www.watermarkbooks.com/review0803-006.html |