The Well-Educated Mind

As you know, I read and loved The Well-Trained Mind. As I mentioned in my post discussing it, I'd recommend it as reading to anyone interested in educational techniques and philosophies, or anyone who has kids and is interested in learning how children learn. It was compelling, to me anyway, and seemed to make a lot of sense.

One of The Well-Trained Mind's co-authors, Susan Wise Bauer, who teaches American literature at the College of William and Mary, also wrote another book, geared for adults, called The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had. I don't know if this is a good book or not because I haven't read it (it mostly pertains to how to read a book and how to critically analyze the book), but I did want to see which books she highlighted as "must reads" and thought I'd offer them up for discussion. Keep in mind that the whole premise of a classical education is the integration of all subjects so the books you'd be reading for grammar, spelling and reading would mesh nicely with the period of history you were studying. That said, Bauer tries to recommend books from many different time periods so that the classical model is able to be followed.

She divides her recommendations into five categories: novels, autobiographies and memoirs, tales of historians and politicians, drama and poetry and, as I mentioned, not only makes recommendations on what to read, but how to best to critically analyze it.

Here's the list of novels she recommends. I've read some, but not most. I'll confess that a few I have little interest in, but many I do. Never mind that I forgot my pen and paper the other night at Barnes and Noble, right?

1) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (she recommends the translation by John Rutherford)

2) The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

3) Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

4) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (I knew there was a reason I liked Bauer!)

5) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

6) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

7) The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

8) Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

9) Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

10) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

11) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (she recommends the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

12) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (she recommends the translation by Constance Garnett, revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova)

13) The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

14) The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

15) Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

16) The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

17) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

18) The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

19) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

20) Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

21) The Trial by Franz Kafka (she recommends the translation by Breon Mitchell)

22) Native Son by Richard Wright

23) The Stranger by Albert Camus (she recommends the translation by Matthew Ward)

24) 1984 by George Orwell

25) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

26) Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

27) One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (she recommends the translation by Gregory Rabassa)

28) If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino (she recommends the translation by William Weaver)

29) Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

30) White Noise by Don Delillo

31) Possession by A.S. Byatt

What do you think of her recommendations? I feel there are some surprising omissions but, for the most part agreed with her list though I also realize another scholar might put together a very different list. And since I haven't read most of them, nor am I a great academic, who am I to judge the quality of the list?

I'm looking at the list from a less scholarly angle: I just want to find books to read that I'll enjoy and although Oprah Book Club-ish fiction is, well, fun, I prefer to mix books that are a little weightier into what I read more often than not. Bauer said something in The Well-Trained Mind that really stuck with me, and what she said, basically, was that if you only feed your child Twinkies and McDonalds don't be surprised if they grow accustomed to that food and become overweight and develop health troubles. It's the same with with books. If your child consistently reads books with unchallenging vocabulary and simple sentence structure, don't be surprised if it's more difficult for them to tackle good books when they're adults.

What books on this list did you, my readers, enjoy? Or which ones are you interested in? Why?

The Lost Tools of Learning

I forget, at times, that life happens outside the blog and what's been decided there doesn't always get conveyed here. To give the following essay context, and also to keep you abreast of our lives, I suppose it's time to share that we're giving home schooling a go next year, for sure.

Last night I ran across a (very old!) essay that sums up how I feel about education. I know very little about the essay's author, Dorothy Sayers, but she articulates so perfectly what I think is missing in education today and she also outlines, for anyone who's interested, the format Superdad and I are interested in pursuing with Madeleine next year.

Following is an excerpt, but if you have kids in school or are interested in education and educational philosophy, I recommend reading the essay in its entirety.

That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, should presume to discuss education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology. It is a kind of behavior to which the present climate of opinion is wholly favorable. Bishops air their opinions about economics; biologists, about metaphysics; inorganic chemists, about theology; the most irrelevant people are appointed to highly technical ministries; and plain, blunt men write to the papers to say that Epstein and Picasso do not know how to draw. Up to a certain point, and provided the the criticisms are made with a reasonable modesty, these activities are commendable. Too much specialization is not a good thing. There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or another, been taught. Even if we learnt nothing--perhaps in particular if we learnt nothing--our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value.

However, it is in the highest degree improbable that the reforms I propose will ever be carried into effect. Neither the parents, nor the training colleges, nor the examination boards, nor the boards of governors, nor the ministries of education, would countenance them for a moment. For they amount to this: that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.

Before you dismiss me with the appropriate phrase--reactionary, romantic, mediaevalist, laudator temporis acti (praiser of times past), or whatever tag comes first to hand--I will ask you to consider one or two miscellaneous questions that hang about at the back, perhaps, of all our minds, and occasionally pop out to worry us.

When we think about the remarkably early age at which the young men went up to university in, let us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were held fit to assume responsibility for the conduct of their own affairs, are we altogether comfortable about that artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day? To postpone the acceptance of responsibility to a late date brings with it a number of psychological complications which, while they may interest the psychiatrist, are scarcely beneficial either to the individual or to society. The stock argument in favor of postponing the school-leaving age and prolonging the period of education generally is there there is now so much more to learn than there was in the Middle Ages. This is partly true, but not wholly. The modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjects--but does that always mean that they actually know more?

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?

Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side? Or have you ever pondered upon the extremely high incidence of irrelevant matter which crops up at committee meetings, and upon the very great rarity of persons capable of acting as chairmen of committees? And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?

Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or elsewhere and noticed how frequently writers fail to define the terms they use? Or how often, if one man does define his terms, another will assume in his reply that he was using the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in which he has already defined them? Have you ever been faintly troubled by the amount of slipshod syntax going about? And, if so, are you troubled because it is inelegant or because it may lead to dangerous misunderstanding?

Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected), but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves? Are you often bothered by coming across grown-up men and women who seem unable to distinguish between a book that is sound, scholarly, and properly documented, and one that is, to any trained eye, very conspicuously none of these things? Or who cannot handle a library catalogue? Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a curious inability to extract from it the passages relevant to the particular question which interests them?

Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a "subject" remains a "subject," divided by watertight bulkheads from all other "subjects," so that they experience very great difficulty in making an immediate mental connection between let us say, algebra and detective fiction, sewage disposal and the price of salmon--or, more generally, between such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art?

Are you occasionally perturbed by the things written by adult men and women for adult men and women to read? We find a well-known biologist writing in a weekly paper to the effect that: "It is an argument against the existence of a Creator" (I think he put it more strongly; but since I have, most unfortunately, mislaid the reference, I will put his claim at its lowest)--"an argument against the existence of a Creator that the same kind of variations which are produced by natural selection can be produced at will by stock breeders." One might feel tempted to say that it is rather an argument for the existence of a Creator. Actually, of course, it is neither; all it proves is that the same material causes (recombination of the chromosomes, by crossbreeding, and so forth) are sufficient to account for all observed variations--just as the various combinations of the same dozen tones are materially sufficient to account for Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and the noise the cat makes by walking on the keys. But the cat's performance neither proves nor disproves the existence of Beethoven; and all that is proved by the biologist's argument is that he was unable to distinguish between a material and a final cause.

Here is a sentence from no less academic a source than a front- page article in the Times Literary Supplement: "The Frenchman, Alfred Epinas, pointed out that certain species (e.g., ants and wasps) can only face the horrors of life and death in association." I do not know what the Frenchman actually did say; what the Englishman says he said is patently meaningless. We cannot know whether life holds any horror for the ant, nor in what sense the isolated wasp which you kill upon the window-pane can be said to "face" or not to "face" the horrors of death. The subject of the article is mass behavior in man; and the human motives have been unobtrusively transferred from the main proposition to the supporting instance. Thus the argument, in effect, assumes what it set out to prove--a fact which would become immediately apparent if it were presented in a formal syllogism. This is only a small and haphazard example of a vice which pervades whole books--particularly books written by men of science on metaphysical subjects.

Another quotation from the same issue of the TLS comes in fittingly here to wind up this random collection of disquieting thoughts--this time from a review of Sir Richard Livingstone's "Some Tasks for Education": "More than once the reader is reminded of the value of an intensive study of at least one subject, so as to learn Tthe meaning of knowledge' and what precision and persistence is needed to attain it. Yet there is elsewhere full recognition of the distressing fact that a man may be master in one field and show no better judgement than his neighbor anywhere else; he remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he learned it."

I would draw your attention particularly to that last sentence, which offers an explanation of what the writer rightly calls the "distressing fact" that the intellectual skills bestowed upon us by our education are not readily transferable to subjects other than those in which we acquired them: "he remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he learned it."

Is not the great defect of our education today--a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned--that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught a child, mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play "The Harmonious Blacksmith" upon the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorized "The Harmonious Blacksmith," he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle "The Last Rose of Summer." Why do I say, "as though"? In certain of the arts and crafts, we sometimes do precisely this--requiring a child to "express himself" in paint before we teach him how to handle the colors and the brush. There is a school of thought which believes this to be the right way to set about the job. But observe: it is not the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a new medium. He, having learned by experience the best way to economize labor and take the thing by the right end, will start off by doodling about on an odd piece of material, in order to "give himself the feel of the tool."

Here's the rest.

The Kids' Education

It's time for me to admit something that Superdad and I have been considering for months now. The revelation is something that will come as no surprise to some of you but to most others I have little doubt that you'd no inkling of our thoughts. I'm sharing it now because even though we've made no final decisions yet, it's something that's been weighing heavily on our minds. And what, pray tell, am I talking about?

Homeschooling.

There. I said it.

"Why!?"

There are numerous reasons that we're so seriously considering this move, but first let me start in a logical spot: the beginning.

I never, ever thought homeschooling would be anything I'd remotely consider. Ever. Homeschooling was for weirdos and loners and losers and certainly nothing I'd ever think of doing. We chose our community primarily because of its reputation for excellent, first-rate schools. We've been pleased with Madeleine's school and, to a greater extent, her teachers these past three years.

Until this past year homeschooling never made a blip on my radar.

And then Madeleine went to first grade; the first serious year of academics. We were prepared to be dazzled. We'd heard glowing reports of the rigorous mental stunts our children would be put through and assured they'd be well trained for any career they might so choose.

Then came home the homework. "Homelinks" is the cutesy term used for their math curriculum's homework. After measuring umpteenth objects in our home, watching Madeleine count tally marks and watching her struggle to subtract six from ten (not on her math homework, I might add, just a mini-mental test from me) we started to get a little concerned.

Superdad and I realized we should probably research and get familiar with her school's math curriculum, both the positives and the negatives. I won't bore you with the details of what we found or get into it too deeply because I know there are people out there who love the Everyday Math program but, I'll be honest, what we found scared us.

We then made the decision to supplement math. That involves bringing a tired six-year-old girl home from a seven-hour school day and having her do, in addition to her regular homework, another twenty to thirty minutes of supplemental homework. There are days I see the other kids on the block whizzing up and down the sidewalk on their scooters and even though I know what we're doing will serve Madeleine well down the road, there are days I want to cry when I see her look up, despondently, at the kids outside before going back to solving a tricky math problem.

And there are all the other things that they don't learn in school that I want the kids to learn: Latin, geography, history (it's touched on so, so minimally), music (I want them to learn who Beethoven was, how to play the piano, identify important periods in music history), art (how to mix colors, who Picasso was, having the freedom to create) and, most importantly, I don't want the kids to feel like they have to walk on eggshells when talking about their Christian faith.

Our day is already filled with seven hours of school, homework, the supplementing we're already doing and then, most importantly, the freedom of being a kid. Something has got to give.

We've checked out every private school within a drivable radius, those with religious affiliations and those without, and none fits our idea of what school should be.

I accept the idea that Superdad and I may have standards that are more stringent than necessary, but I've always regretted not having the same exposure to a great, well-diversified liberal arts education and I want my kids to have better. Isn't that what all parents want? To give their kids better than what they had? I'm now well aware of what's out there that young kids should, in my opinion, be exposed to and taught that I never was. I had to cram it all in, in my adult years, but I feel like my kids should have the opportunity to learn these things now.

To my shock and surprise this past year I've had numerous opportunities to meet lots of homeschooled children, on all ends to the spectrum (classically taught to unschooled) and to my shock and dismay they were... normal. In fact, they were just like I would like my kids to be: happy, polite and smart.

We don't know what we're going to do. Hank will for sure go to the public school next year for Junior Kindergarten. He wants to go and we want him to go. Beyond that we have no idea what our children's educational future holds. Madeleine, however, seems committed to homeschooling her second grade year. I think I'm on board with the idea, but I'm not sure, completely and totally, yet. Selfishly I like having the time away from them, yet, I hear myself say it or see myself write it and I feel like it seems like a thin excuse.

Right now I'm exploring more in-depth the possible curriculum we could use and getting acquainted with the massive amounts of resources out there for homeschooling (overwhelming tasks, both!). Already I've been hooked up with an impressive Latin teacher and a homeschooling mom with a girl Madeleine's age that wants to join with me to encourage the Audubon to offer classes for homeschooled kids. We're also exploring the possibility of a part time college girl coming in a few mornings a week to help with Elisabeth so that I can devote time to Madeleine and later Hank, if necessary.

We might not make the jump. I know it sounds like we don't like our public school but that's really not true. I've just vetted a lot of what we don't like; there's also a lot that we do. We just need to decide which column outweighs the other.

Now you know. If Madeleine is suddenly home with me next year and discussing etymological theory and the wonders of analyzing Latin, you won't be totally shocked. Oh, you might be appalled, and that's fine since if I were you a year ago I would be too, but don't say I didn't warn you.