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

by Robert Holland                                                                                           Vol. XIII, No. 5, May 2000

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

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 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 homeschooling 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.

Robert Holland is a senior fellow specializing in issues of education reform for The Lexington Institute in Arlington, VA.  He can be reached at: RHo111176@yahoo.com or mail@lexingtoninstitute.org.