Classical Education & The Homeschool

One more book read..well this one was more of a pamphlet size...but we'll count it anyways.

Some background info - Scott was homeschooled through 12th grade and successfully graduated from college and knows how to make friends. I went to public school and successfully graduated from college and know how to make friends. :)

What is the one difference I would note between my hubby and me? He is a thinker. Now I think some of that has to do with the way God wired him (i.e. he is an engineer). But I also think a bigger part of it is he was trained to think/analyze. Therefore....

Homeschooling intrigues me. Classical education intrigues me. So I picked up Classical Education and The Homeschool by W. Callihan, D. Jones, D. Wilson.

I constantly hear that if my child is homeschooled he won't have social skills..obviously they don't know many. I constantly hear that if I want my children to have a Christian education that I need to send them to a Chistrian school.

Maybe someday down the line my child won't be homeschooled. I don't know what the future holds, but I do know now that I am more solidly grounded in the reasonings my heart wanted to homeschool with a classical education yet I couldn't verbalize it.

What is a Classical Education...what makes it different from today's mainstream education (including most homeschool material)?

"One of the primary purposes of classical education is to equip the students to learn for themselves" (6). There are 3 levels within the education method: grammar (elementary), dialectic (middle school), and rhetoric (high school). The content studied on top of your average studies are Latin, logic, theology, and rhetoric. A CE education teaches everything under the sovereign God's hand. Historically, the early American education system was a CE education.

More about the trivium:

Grammar: this stage is all about facts in every subject

Dialectic: the facts start being connected and you nourish the questioning stage of the early teenage years. At this stage we begin teaching the laws of logic and proper argumentation.

Rhetoric: learning how to manipulate our language in order to effectively communicate what they believe. "All of morality and reasoning involve imagination and metaphor" (28).

More about the extra content:

Latin: it's the key to all the Romance languages and "the precision of mind required in the study of Latin is a great benefit in other fields requiring such precision" (32).

Logic: "is concerned with evaluating arguments, and every academic subject involves arguments" (39).

Rhetoric: a way of gathering, organizing, and using knowledge with eloquence. A thought of Aristotle: communication through language is a characteristic of human beings and therefore we have only two choices - attempt to communicate and persuade by trial and error and accident, or think about what we are doing and try to refine, hone, and improve it (46).

But as people ask, "Why don't you send your kid to the Christian school down the street?" Fair enough. Why don't I? On average (and truth be known I don't know this for a fact), your Christian schools tack on Bible class as a subject, but don't use it as the focul point of all subjects. My God is the creator of all and I want my children to see that in their education. I want them to have a Christian worldview.

What's a Christian worldview? Realizing that there is a relationship between Jesus Christ and the subject under consideration. It's "bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ" (2 Cor 10:4-5).

As I read the book, I thought, "Wow, I must be careful not to make studies the end all for my kids if I use a CE." The authors brought everything into perspective in this quote: "All gifts and abilities, including those of language, when submitted to the God who gave them, become powerful tools for the edification of the saints, the dominion of the earth, and the advancement of the kingdom of God" (49).

I honestly also think that an education outside the home can cause too much individualism within the family instead of creating a tighter family unit. Sigh I do recognize I am only 28 and I've yet to teach something consistenly in my home (outside of Biblical concepts anyways). But I do know that the thoughts within this book really spoke to my heart and made me say "Yes! That's what I've been wanting to communicate to people in defense of homeschooling." We shall see what the future holds.