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

by Susan Wise Bauer

“In print culture,” Neil Postman writes in The End of Education, “we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must ‘draw them pictures’ so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.”† Indeed, the higher stages of classical education require the child to think without pictures—to be so comfortable with nonvisual concepts such as responsibility, morality, and liberty that she can ponder their meanings in widely different circumstances. Word-centered education requires the student to interact with the material—to comprehend it, interpret it, and talk about it. A student must be actively involved in the learning process in order to benefit; this is why we lay such stress on reading history and science and then writing about the knowledge gained.