Why We Educate At Home, a discussion of the Classical Education Method

By: Teresa Dear




The Smithsonian Institution’s recipe for genius and leadership:


(1) children should spend a great deal of time with loving, educationally minded parents;

(2) children should be allowed a lot of free exploration; and

(3) children should have little to no association with peers outside of family and relatives. --H. McCurdy

My husband and I have no qualms about our style of parenting, which is so tied up in home education. He grew up beside his father in a greenhouse. Our first apartment at 500 sq ft, had 31 houseplants in it. He now works as a landscape designer. So we understand this analogy: Children are like little plants. You take the seed and put it in a little cup of the best topsoil. You give it lots of light. You gently sprinkle it with drops of water so the delicate leaves aren't broken. When it gets a decent root system, you transplant it to a bigger pot. You protect it from the wind and the hottest sun. You bring it in when there's a freeze. You don't put it out where the dog will trample it or a deer will eat the buds. When its well-established, and the season is right, you can transplant it finally to its place outside your home. Then it will do well on its own in the downpours and coldest winters.

So we plan to raise our children, protecting them and ensuring they are firmly established before they go out into the world. It is our hope that they do much better at surviving their relationships and careers with such a secure beginning. Our family follows the Classical Education model. I use the book, "The Well-Trained Mind" as the base for our curriculum. The basic premise of the classical method is the breakdown of education into three sections which each build on each other. First is the Grammar stage, generally 1st-4th grades, in which a child's curiosity is encouraged by just stuffing them full of images and facts. The next stage is the Logic stage, generally 5th- 8th grades, where an adolescent begins to find the answers to the how and why of what they learned in the Grammar stage. Last is the Rhetoric stage, in which 9th -12th graders learn how to coherently express what they have learned. In Classical Education, all learning follows history as its base and the other subjects work around it. In addition, a student goes over the same material three times in his education (cycling through the material once in each stage). An example of this is our reading material. Ideally, it should be exciting to entrance and interest the first grader, in-depth for the questioning fifth grader, and even more interesting and in depth for the ninth grader. In our home, I buy books on a fifth grade level to read to our first grader, and when we cycle back to the same material in the fifth grade, they read it for themselves, and in ninth grade they read source material. For example, I read The Trojan War and the 12 Labors of Hercules to my first grader. All of my children were enthralled. There were no pictures except those that streamed through their imaginations. Then, when we return to ancient history in the fifth grade, she will curl up on the couch and read about Hercules on her own. This time she'll learn that mom edited out the reason why he was assigned the 12 tasks: he killed his wife and children in a drunken rage. Then, when she returns again to the ancients in the ninth grade, she won't be intimidated by reading Homer's Illiad itself in the poetic original version. What's to be afraid of, when you're already familiar with the times and places? Also, when she was taught astronomy in the second grade, she already knew the story behind the crab-shaped constellation, from last year when she saw Hercules toss him into the sky in her mind's eye.

I was looking at a book from a series aimed at second-graders, called Junie B. Jones. It is listed on reading lists for this age group- yet it has sentences starting with conjunctions and fragments on every page. It has adjectives like bestest. It frequently says me and her. On a whim I looked up classical literature for this age group. I found rough breakdowns of classical literature by grade level. One example was The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. The first five sentences in The Velveteen Rabbit had an average of 29.2 words in each sentence. The first five sentences of Junie B. Jones and her Big Fat Mouth had an average of 5.4 words per sentence.

An example of one of the more complex sentences which I found in JBJ & her Big Fat Mouth was "Eating things that you find on the ground is very, very dangerous." I gave it another try and found "That's because I had tingling excitement in me about Job Day." In addition to using more complex sentence structure, Williams does not pare down her vocabulary to meet the child reader. Look how this sentence from The Velveteen Rabbit teaches the meaning of the word superior: "The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon every one else; they were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real." JBJ is so full of incorrect grammar and simple sentences because it is written from the point of view of a modern first-grader, who would actually speak like that (unfortunately) and have simple interactions. However, there are quite a few older books, written in a different time, from the point of view of a five-year-old (Heidi, Little House series). They are also more complex and descriptive and are much preferred to modern books written for our young people.