Educational Philosophy

     We run a fairly structured, teacher-directed homeschool, and we are advocates for classical education.  Classical learning follows a pattern referred to as the Trivium, consisting of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, in that order.  It is a language-intensive philosophy, in which learning is accomplished through words, rather than through images.  Knowledge is interrelated, science and history must be studied together with philosophy and politics to gain real understanding.

     The grammar phase, which is basically extends through the equivalent of fifth grade or elementary school, stresses content.  I like to think of it as a kind of introduction to the world of human knowledge and history.  Because children are their most absorbent selves in these early years, this is the ideal time to flood them with stories of kings and empires, countries, mountains, rivers, oceans, politicians, military leaders, elements, planets, galaxies.  It is a time for classification, for learning basic skills in math and grammar.  Further, it is a wonderful time to absorb music through learning to play instruments, as well as listening to the vast collection of human achievement in the musical world.  It is a time when children are particularly able to absorb spoken languages as well.

     As children grow older (though of course the age probably varies significantly with each child), children begin to connect the data they have absorbed, and "why" becomes a much more important question than "what."  This is not to say that children are not curious about the whys and the wherefores at earlier ages, but there comes a point at which a child becomes argumentative, and analysis, logic, and other critical thinking skills become the primary focus of his attention and thinking.  In the grammar phase, we might teach our kids about the individuals, discoveries, paintings and inventions that took place during the Enlightenment.  In the dialectical phase we would explore the connections between politics, military, and religious advances during the Enlightenment.  The questions would be less about who and what and more about why.  We expect at this point to give our chidlren more freedom over the specifics of what they study.  But without a grounding in the basics of history, science, math, reading, etc., it is difficult to get to the dialectical stage, because there is no deep context of facts to play with, interrelate, and turn upside down.

     The rhetoric stage is in content equivalent to high school, though in my opinion the typical contemporary American high school doesn't really reach this stage.  It is a time to learn the formal rules of expression in writing and speaking.  The student having a solid grounding in the vast world of human knowledge now must produce.  The rhetoric phase in our home school will be a time to learn to articulate, to speak clearly and convincingly about what is on their minds.  We expect our children to leave this phase of their education with the ability to formulate arguments and gather supporting evidence for them, and to put the information they gather into a logical and persuasive order.  They should be able to communicate this order to others in a convincing way, and they should be able to defend their points in conversation, discussion, and debate.

The Books and Programs We Use

    We have yet to discover a canned curriculum that we like, so Cyndi has put together a number of different resources to make a curriculum for our kids.  For language arts, we us the Scott Foresman spelling books as well as the National Spelling Bee website.  We use the Stanford EPGY math program for gifted children as well as the Scott Foresman math books, which have lots of word problems and do a good job of linking math to science and other disciplines.  The Core Knowledge series is an excellent list of reading subjects, and for science we have quite a collection of books filled with wonderful experiments on every subject.  Junior Great Books and Great Books also make wonderful lists of stories, books, and novels, to use in a reading program.  For history, we have found that The Well Trained Mind, by Bauer, provides a good introductory text.