The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home
Description
Is your child getting lost in the system, becoming bored, losing his or her natural eagerness to learn? If so, it may be time to take charge of your child’s education—by doing it yourself.
The Well-Trained Mind will instruct you, step by step, on how to give your child an academically rigorous, comprehensive education from preschool through high school—one that will train him or her to read, to think, to understand, to be well-rounded and curious about learning. Veteran home educators Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise outline 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 elementary school “grammar stage,” when the building blocks of information are absorbed through memorization and rules; the middle school “logic stage,” in which the student begins to think more analytically; and the high-school “rhetoric stage,” where the student learns to write and speak with force and originality. Using this theory as your model, you’ll be able to instruct your child—whether full-time or as a supplement to classroom education—in all levels of reading, writing, history, geography, mathematics, science, foreign languages, rhetoric, logic, art, and music, regardless of your own aptitude in those subjects.
Thousands of parents and teachers have already used the detailed book lists and methods described in The Well-Trained Mind to create a truly superior education for the children in their care. This extensively revised fourth edition contains completely updated curricula and book lists, links to an entirely new set of online resources, new material on teaching children with learning challenges, cutting-edge math and sciences recommendations, answers to common questions about home education, and advice on practical matters such as standardized testing, working with your local school board, designing a high-school program, preparing transcripts, and applying to colleges.
You do have control over what and how your child learns. The Well-Trained Mind will give you the tools you’ll need to teach your child with confidence and success.
Praise for The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home
If you’re a parent who has decided to educate your children yourself, this book is the first you should buy.
— Washington Times
An excellent resource for any family with a desire to incorporate a classical education in their home, whether as a curriculum or as a reference.
— Educational Freedom Press
[Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer] are thorough and pragmatic, offering a detailed curriculum for kindergarten through grade 12, as well as opinions on everything from Latin (an indispensable language) to the Internet (‘a mixed blessing’).
— The New Yorker
An A for Home Schooling…a remarkable compendium of information designed to help home-schooling parents give their children a traditional liberal education.
— City Journal
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 home-schooling 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 - Richmond Times Dispatch
This book has caused a revolution within the homeschool community.
— The Old Schoolhouse
Homeschooling parents on a mission to find the ultimate resource—or parents of traditionally-schooled children interested in an excellent supplement—are all well advised to peruse the pages of Wise and Wise Bauer’s classy guide to classical education at home.
— Boox Review
An invaluable road map.
— Daily Democrat