‘The Well-Trained Mind’ by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise

The home educating life is the bookworm’s paradise and if you are interested in classical education, then ‘The Well-Trained Mind’ is a priority read. I have returned to my volume again and again over the years for inspiration and direction. Although this is the book that originally set our faces towards classical education, my recommendation does come with a health warning: it is impossible to actually DO everything this book suggests! Read the book with the intent to follow it precisely and you will probably want to give up home educating. Read the book with wisdom and you will be inspired that home education can give rise to an excellent education for our children. We also need wisdom on a second count: it is possible to follow the book to the letter, provide our children with an superior education and to forget Christ.

 

Jesse Wise Bauer, (a former public-school teacher) opens with her account of removing her child from school in order to teach him at home. Having learned to read at home at the age of four, her child was bored at school and unpopular because of his advanced abilities! The second chapter is Susan’s description of classical education and an overview of what it looks like. The first years of a child’s education are named the ‘Grammar Stage’ which is when the child’s mind absorbs facts and enjoys memorization. The ‘Logic Stage’ follows around about the ages of 9 or 10 whereby the child starts to ask ‘why’ and looks to understand the facts she memorised during the logic stage. Finally, around the ages of 13 or 14, the child enters the ‘Rhetoric Stage’, and learns to ‘write and speak with force and originality’ . If you are interested in classical education, you only really need to read the first twenty pages in order to obtain a grasp of what it looks like. Do not be put off by the size of the tome!

 

The rest of the book is a blow-by-blow account of what classical education actually looks like for a child beginning around the age of 4 and completed around age 18, including recommended curricula for each subject. Since we live in the UK, I found it helpful to pencil just inside the front cover which UK school years matched up with which of the US school years, since they are different and it helps me to better place the book in our context. I also had to bear in mind that not all their recommended curricula are easily available in the UK.

 

My understanding is that Jessie and Susan are Christians, although this is not evident from the book. Believers need to bear this in mind on two counts. Firstly, Jessie gives the impression that the main reason for teaching her children at home was in order to give them a superior education. The classical method resonates with me and I work hard to give my children a (hopefully!) excellent education. However, my primary purpose in teaching our little ones at home is to give them a Christian education. There is a distinction within the two. A Christian education recognises that true knowledge is rooted in the fear of the Lord. An excellent education is a by-product of teaching our children about Christ. It is not the end-product.

 

Secondly, Jessie and Susan do not hold to a biblical view on creation and their book does not recommend creationist curricula such as that produced by Answers in Genesis or Apologia, who are intentional about teaching a biblical view of origins and our Creator.

 

Furthermore, they do not suggest ‘Mystery of History’ as a Christ-centred history text beginning with the biblical account of creation, which is a glaring omission in my view.

 

I am very thankful to Jessie and Susan for the work and experience they have put into writing the ‘Well-Trained Mind’. Their methodology makes sense to me and I have grown alongside my children as we have sought to follow the classical model. Nevertheless, I always read the book with the caveat that I could follow the book to the letter and relegate Christ to the side-lines. To do so would be to completely miss the point of what we are doing since our focus is to give our children a Christian education and not simply a ‘Well-Trained Mind’.