Name: The well-trained mind
ISBN: 9780393067088

The well-trained mind

This book will instruct you, step by step, on how to give your child an academically rigorous, comprehensive education from preschool through high school. Two veteran home educators outline the classical pattern of education--the trivium--which organizes learning around the maturing capacity of the child's mind: the elementary school "grammar stage," the middle school "logic stage," and the high school "rhetoric stage." Using the trivium as your model, you'll be able to instruct your child 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. Newly revised and updated, The Well-Trained Mindincludes detailed book lists with complete ordering information; up-to-date listings of resources, publications, and Internet links; and useful contacts. 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)

What Hacker News says

jkurniaMar 2023

Thanks! I am familiar with some of these and a big fan of The Well-Trained Mind.

Our curriculum uses "Great Books" in a broader sense of quality fiction and nonfiction literature, which includes classical Western literature but also lots of modern and non-Western books.

thread

simonhMay 2012

A few to start with. To be honest, even one good book is a great start.

Raising Happy Children - Jan Parker, Jan Stimpson, Dorothy Rowe

Playful Parenting - Lawrence J. Cohen

The Well-Trained Mind - Jessie Wise, Susan Wise Wise Bauer

I don't agree with everything they say, but they are pointed in the right direction. I don't home school our kids, but we do homework with them and I go out of my way to talk to them about anything they're interested in and look things up with them.

It does help that my mother was head teacher of a primary school and did an Open University degree in child psychology when I was a teenager.

We're engineers, right? When you've got a new piece of equipment or software or a new language to get to grips with we read the manuals and find out about best practices. It's the same with kids.

thread

thejteamJan 2012

Read "The Well-Trained Mind" by Susan Wise Bauer. It is written with only a hint of religion, so a secular homeschooler will still get a lot out of it. There are vast lists of resources in the book from kindergarten through high school. The book emphasizes a "classically based" curriculum. This means different things to different people.

My oldest is in Kindergarten and we are homeschooling her. You didn't mention your opinions on religion, but you will find that most of the complete curriculum are made by religious organizations. Although we are moderately religious, we use a completely secular curriculum, The Calvert School. See homeschool.calvertschool.org. We used them largely because they are an "umbrella" program approved by the stte of Maryland(where they are located and where I live.) We are happy with them so far. They are one of the more expensive programs out there but there is a lot of value in the materials they send.

If you are located in a state or school district that makes homeschooling difficult also consider joining the Home School Legal Defense Association. We have not had any problems(our county seems to be okay with homeschooling) but others in our state are not so lucky.

thread

jkurniaMar 2023

Thanks for this detailed feedback!

Re introducing reading separately from writing, this is recommended in The Well-Trained Mind and A Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and worked well with my two sons. Both learned to read fluently at age four, but needed a couple years beyond that to develop the fine motor skills and attention span needed to form letters well. That said, many kids are ready to write at an earlier age and we try to make it easy for parents to edit the default curriculum and do things like move the first-grade writing component to kindergarten. The main point is that learning to read doesn't need to be coupled with writing.

The typo and awkward phrasing you mentioned are fixed now. :)

thread

blacktriangleJul 2021

I think your line about rote excersizing allowing education to scale to millions is an often lost point when talking about the problems with modern education systems.

The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home has an interesting comment on this issue. The author, with a Masters in Education and years working in public schools, says that she often runs into parents who are worried they are not qualified to teach because they do not have formal training in big-E Education. Her response is that our Education training system, with all of its study of psychology and law, is not designed around educating a single child to their maximal potential, but about scaling up education so that a single teacher can teach a room of 40 children to a socially acceptable minimum. From this point of view professional educators have no advantage over the individual parent and may even bring along irrelevant habits from their formal training.

thread

jchinMar 2021

I've recently come across Latin as I was reading "The Well-Trained Mind" by Susan Wise Bauer. It's a book describing how to provide a "classical education" to kids at home. (I'm homeschooling my two young kids this year and reading everything I can about how to homeschool.)

The author strongly recommends having the kids learn Latin. In case anyone is interested, some resources/curricula for homeschooling Latin she mentions in the book include Prima Latina, Latina Christiana, Song School Latin, Latin for Children, The Big Book of Lively Latin, The Latin Road to English Grammar, and Latin Alive!.

Anyone have experience/thoughts/opinions on teaching their kids Latin? Or even learning Latin as a kid?

thread