The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home

by Susan Wise Bauer

You don’t have to reform your entire school system. All you have to do is teach your own child.

What is classical education? It is language-intensive—not image-focused. It demands that students use and understand words, spoken and written, rather than communicating primarily through images. It is history-intensive, providing students with a comprehensive view of human endeavor from the beginning until now. It trains the mind to analyze and draw conclusions. It both requires and develops self-discipline—the ability to tackle a difficult task that doesn’t promise an immediate reward, for the sake of future gain. It produces literate, curious, intelligent students who have a wide range of interests and the ability to follow up on them.

The freedom to tailor an academic program to your child’s particular interests and needs, strengths and struggles, is one of home education’s greatest advantages.

No student will do all the work we suggest—especially in the early grades, when learning to read, write, and understand arithmetic may take most of the child’s study time. In the classical tradition, reading, writing, grammar, and mathematics are the center of the curriculum. History and science become more and more important as the child matures. Foreign languages, music, art, and electives have to follow these foundational curricula areas.

Remember that a child must have a thorough grounding in the basic skills of grammar, spelling, writing, and arithmetic before he can proceed to more complex analytical work

Every involved parent is a home educator. If you’re checking your child’s compositions, talking him through his history homework, or drilling him in math, you’re already teaching him. In this case, you’re acting as a teacher’s aide—helping to teach and reinforce material that has already been presented in the classroom.

Encourage your child toward absorption in grades 1 through 4, critical thought in grades 5 through 8, and expression in grades 9 through 12.

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 storybook, 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 them memorize. They could recite multiplication tables, lists of linking verbs, dates, presidents, and Latin declensions.

We no longer teach our children the process of memorization, organization, and expression—the tools by which the mind learns.

I happened to have a teacher’s certificate. But during my years of home schooling, 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.

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?

Classical education continually asks a student to focus not on what is immediately pleasurable (another half hour of TV or computer game, for example) but on the steps needed to reach a future goal—mastery of vital academic skills.

Ruth Beechick writes, “Our society is so obsessed with creativity that people want children to be creative before they have any knowledge or skill to be creative with.”* Your job, during the elementary years, is to supply the knowledge and skills that will allow your child to overflow with creativity as his mind matures.

In the elementary grades, we suggest that you prioritize reading, writing, grammar, and math.

SUBJECT: Spelling, grammar, reading, and writing TIME REQUIRED: 60–110 minutes per day (by fourth grade)

Adjust the time you spend on each subject so that you can concentrate on weaker areas. Your goal will be to bring the child up to fourth-grade level in each area—spelling, grammar, reading, and writing—by the end of fourth grade (ages 10 to 11).

During the first four years of education, you have two purposes: not only to get the child to read quickly, well, and habitually, but to fill his mind with stories of every kind—myths, legends, classic tales, biographies, great stories from history. Instead of a “literature curriculum,” you’ll use your library and the notebook labeled “Literature.” Divide the notebook into two subsections: “My Books” and “Memory Work.”

The principle is simple: try to give the child simplified versions of the original literature that he’ll be reading in the higher grades or introduce him (through stories or biographies) to a writer he’ll encounter later. Begin with twenty to thirty minutes of reading, three times per week, in first grade; you’ll want to work up to forty-five minutes by fourth grade.

(You should find history and reading assignments overlapping quite a bit—this helps the student’s comprehension, since history will be giving him the context that he needs to appreciate his literature studies. Generally, put imaginative literature—stories, myths, fairy tales, poems, novels—in the “My Books” section of the Literature notebook. Put factual books and biographies in the history notebook.

Also, don’t neglect poetry; Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Walter de la Mare, and other great poets of the modern period wrote much that can be enjoyed by young children.

Spelling, grammar, reading, and writing are related skills, but they ask for different kinds of mastery. It’s important to allow students to progress at a natural pace in each of the language arts areas without frustrating them by limiting their progress to the speed of their worst subject. For this reason, you won’t find integrated language arts curricula that try to tackle all four subjects at once in our recommendations.

“Doing grammar early” doesn’t mean hours of workbook time. In first and second grade, students simply cannot do very much handwriting work; hand muscles take time and slow, steady exercise to develop. Actual writing assignments will use up most of the student’s writing energy. So grammar exercises should be done orally—either using an oral language text or adapting a traditional workbook-centered grammar program to oral use. (Read through the lesson with the student, have him repeat definitions after you until he has them memorized, and then do exercises by asking him to tell you the answers or point them out on the page.)

By the end of fourth grade, the child should know the proper names and usages of all the parts of speech, the rules of punctuation and capitalization, dictionary use, and proper sentence structure. Until these basic skills are mastered, he won’t be able to exercise language with the mastery that the logic stage demands.

Continue penmanship through at least the end of fourth grade.

In grades 1–4, students should progress from copywork to dictation, and from oral narration (retelling passages from history, science, or literature) to written narrations.

From second grade on, rather than putting the written model in front of the student, you will dictate sentences to her. This will force her to bring her memory into play, to picture the sentence in her mind before writing it down. Eventually you’ll be dictating two and three sentences at a time to a student, encouraging her to hold longer and longer chunks of text in her mind as she writes.

This begins on a very simple level: You read to the student and ask her specific questions about what she’s heard, such as “What was the most interesting thing in that story?” or “Who was that history lesson about?” You then require her to answer you in complete sentences. As the student grows more familiar with the process of narration, you can move on to more general questions such as “Summarize what we just read in your own words.”

Useful for All Four Years Russell, William F. Classics to Read Aloud to Your Children: Selections from Shakespeare, Twain, Dickens, O. Henry, London, Longfellow, Irving, Aesop, Homer, Cervantes, Hawthorne, and More. New York: Crown Publishers, 1992.

Beowulf Green, John. Beowulf (Dover Coloring Book). New York: Dover, 2007. Brief clear text and thirty scenes to color; a fun way for elementary students to encounter the tale for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

Writing with Ease, Strong Fundamentals: A Guide to Designing Your Own Elementary Writing Curriculum, rev. ed. 2015. $29.95.

Killgallon, Don and Jenny. Sentence Composing for Elementary School: A Worktext to Build Better Sentences. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000. $27.50. Developed by college writing teacher Don Killgallon and secondary writing teacher Jenny Killgallon, this one-year, one-volume course focuses on analyzing and imitating good sentences from accomplished writers. Excellent preparation for the middle-grade years and in line with classical principles of modeling work before asking students to complete it. The course does assume that students have had a basic grammar course. Suitable for fourth-grade writers. Answer key is in the back of the worktext. Samples can be viewed at the publisher’s website.

SUBJECT: Elementary mathematics TIME REQUIRED: 30–60 minutes per day

YOU: Let’s add thirty-six and twenty-seven. For thirty-six, we have three bundles of ten toothpicks—that’s thirty—plus six extra toothpicks: the ones. For twenty-seven we have two bundles of ten, plus seven extra ones. How many bundles of toothpicks do we have? CHILD: (Counts the bundles.) Five. YOU: How many toothpicks are in those five bundles all together? CHILD: Fifty. YOU: How many ones—single toothpicks—do we have? CHILD: (Groups the six toothpicks with the seven.) Thirteen. YOU: Can we write thirteen in the ones column? No, because it won’t fit. Where can we put the extra toothpicks? (The child sees that she can bundle together ten of the thirteen and put them with the five bundles she already has. Now she has six groups of ten and three left over—sixty-three in all. She’s just learned how to carry.)

But don’t push the child to dispense with her manipulatives until she’s ready. Children’s minds mature at different rates; if you require a child to do addition with numerals alone (no objects) before she’s ready, the result will be math frustration. Children aged 5 through 7 usually need concrete objects; children aged 8 through 10 begin to shift into “mental image” mode (but will still need manipulatives when new concepts are introduced).

Second, Third, and Fourth Grade 40–60 minutes per day Mon. Math lesson Tues. Math lesson, read math storybook Wed. Math lesson Thurs. Math lesson, do real-life math project Fri. Project/library day

Second, Third, and Fourth Grade 40–60 minutes per day Mon./Wed./Fri. Math lesson Tues. Math lesson, read math storybook Thurs. Math lesson, do real-life math project

The history of the world is but the biography of great men. —Thomas Carlyle

SUBJECT: History and geography TIME REQUIRED: An average of 3 hours per week, about 60 minutes per day, three days per week or 1½ hours per day, two days per week

So the first-grade history class is renamed Social Studies and begins with what the child knows: first, himself and his family, followed by his community, his state, his country, and only then the rest of the world. This intensely self-focused pattern of study encourages the student of history to relate everything he studies to himself, to measure the cultures and customs of other peoples against his own experience. And that’s exactly what the classical education fights against—a self-absorbed, self-referential approach to knowledge. History learned this way makes our needs and wants the center of the human endeavor. This attitude is destructive at any time, but it is especially destructive in the current global civilization. The goal of the classical curriculum is multicultural in the true sense of the word: the student learns the proper place of his community, his state, and his country by seeing the broad sweep of history from its beginning and then fitting his own time and place into that great landscape.

As you do this, it’s important to remember that history isn’t a skill or a “mastery” subject. You will never cover all of history (or even most of its more famous events), and your elementary student is not going to retain everything (or even most) that she learns.

Elementary history study has three major goals: to give students an overall sense of the progression of historical events from ancient times to the present; to develop skills in reading and writing; and to teach geographic awareness. And in the elementary grades, history should be enjoyable.

The Study of History Period Years Studied during grades . . . Ancients 5000 B.C.–A.D. 400 (5,400 years) 1, 5, 9 Medieval–early Renaissance 400–1600 (1,200 years) 2, 6, 10 Late Renaissance–early modern 1600–1850 (250 years) 3, 7, 11 Modern 1850–present (150 years) 4, 8, 12 This progression is not, of course, set in stone. You might choose to condense the four-year sequence into three years, and then spend a year doing national and state history.

To study history and geography, you’ll need a 3-inch three-ring notebook with lots of paper, a three-hole punch, art supplies, your chosen history “spine,” geography resources (a globe, a wall map of the world, and maps to color—see Resources for ordering information), and a library card. The history notebook will contain your child’s pictures, compositions, and narrations about history, and will organize the child’s history study for grades 1 through 4. Make four dividers: Ancients, 5000 B.C.–A.D. 400 Medieval/Early Renaissance, 400–1600 Late Renaissance/Early Modern, 1600–1850 Modern, 1850–Present Day

1. Read the material to your child as she follows along. Once she’s beginning to read independently, alternate reading paragraphs or sections out loud to each other. By third or fourth grade, some students are ready to read alone (although most will still get more out of the material if they read out loud to you; it’s easy for young minds to wander when reading nonfiction). 2. Make a narration page. After your first or second grader tells you about what you’ve just read, write her version down on notebook or drawing paper for her. (By third grade, children should be starting to write down their own narrations; see page 78). 3. Ask the child to illustrate what she’s just read (and help her make a caption), or let her color a picture related to the story. 4. Find the geographical area under discussion on a globe and on a wall map, and color the appropriate black-line map. 5. Go to the library to find out more about the subject.

Pay special attention to biographies. Try to make a page for all the great men and women you encounter (Sargon, Moses, Hammurabi, Hatshepsut, Tutankhamen, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar . . . the list goes on). These biographies can be wonderful “pegs” on which to hang the progression of history. You may not remember much about ancient history, but you probably remember that Alexander cried when he found no more worlds to conquer. We’ve supplied a list of great men and women at the end of this chapter, for your reference.

The elementary years are not the time to develop comprehensive knowledge, but to see how history progresses.

You can study history either Monday/Wednesday/Friday, or Tuesday/Thursday for a longer time. A good Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule might look like this: Monday Read selected pages from your selected history spine. Look up locations on a globe and map. Ask the student questions about the reading; help him to answer in complete sentences. Wednesday Help the student to make a narration page about the material covered in the spine (first and second graders narrate to you, third and fourth graders can begin to write their own narrations). Younger students may also choose to draw a picture and then narrate a sentence to you about the picture. Friday Read additional chapters or library books about the subject, or do a history project/activity. Go over memory work. A Tuesday/Thursday schedule might look like this: Tuesday Read selected pages from your selected history spine. Look up locations on a globe and map. Ask the student questions about the reading; help her to answer in complete sentences. Read one additional chapter or library book. Thursday Read at least one more chapter or library book. Ask the student to make another narration page covering one of the additional resources. Or do a history activity or project. Go over memory work. You could also choose to alternate weeks: Week One Read from your history spine MWF or T/Th; make at least one narration page about a topic covered. Week Two Read additional library books, or do history projects/activities based on at least ...

Bingham, Jane, Fiona Chandler, and Sam Taplin. The Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History. Tulsa, OK: E.D.C. Publishing, 2003. This is the hardback; the paperback is currently dated 2010. Definitely the most age-appropriate encyclopedia for the grammar stage, but (annoyingly) out of print. Check online for used versions.

Arnold, Caroline. The Geography Book: Activities for Exploring, Mapping, and Enjoying Your World. New York: Jossey-Bass, 2001/Wiley, 2002. $15.95. For third grade and older. An excellent introduction to physical geography: the points of the compass, time zones, different types of maps, physical formations (continents, mountains, valleys, oceans, seas, etc.), and weather. Activities and projects throughout. Good for focused geography study.