Suggested reading for Mom?
I'm just starting to delve into classical education. We've been using mostly Catholic Heritage Curricula for primary school, but I had been planning to switch to the Mother of Divine Grace curriculum for 3rd grade and up. I've been attracted to classical education since I first started researching my homeschooling options, because one of the most important goals for my children is that they learn to think and reason well. You only have to read the editorial page in the newspaper to see how many people in our society don't reason well.
I am only schooling one child right now, with 3 more in the wings. I'm feeling overwhelmed with all the subjects and hands-on projects I'm juggling, and we're only in 2nd grade! Part of the reason LCC appeals to me is that it seems that there will be less to juggle, especially once I have more children in formal school, leaving more time for "real life," which is what I'm longing for with my children. I found Climbing Parnassus at the library and started reading it this week...and I'm having trouble getting through it. I can pronounce Latin, but only because I'm a singer and I've sung so many Latin mass parts and songs! Any knowledge of Latin I have is pretty much limited to what I've been exposed to through music. I know next to zero about Greek and Roman civilization. So Tracy Lee Simmons loses me when he throws out Latin phrases and mentions elements of Greek or Roman culture like the reader should know what he's talking about. I'm wondering, do I really need to read this to go ahead with classical education? Will LCC make sense to me w/o my reading Climbing Parnassus? Can you suggest any more "mom-friendly" books on classical education? Or do I just need to suck it up and read Climbing Parnassus? I don't have LCC yet...I'm planning to buy it soon, though.
Thanks for any input!
Dawn
Mom to Mary Beth (5/99), Anna (5/02), Lucia (5/04), and Baby due 11/06
Thanks
for the suggestions! I am very interested in how our faith fits into LCE, so I will check into N&N, too. We are a Catholic family and our faith is very important to us.
Dawn
Mom to Mary Beth (5/99), Anna (5/02), Lucia (5/04), and Baby due 11/06
A few thoughts...
I don't really want to be discouraging, but I would suggest that you cannot give your children a classical education if you are not willing to give yourself one first. You can teach them a little Latin, but classical education is much, much more than Latin. I would suggest that you give yourself time and make it a goal to read a book like Climbing Parnassus, which is a challenge for you (Norms & Nobility is an awesome book and I recommend it it highly, but it is much more difficult than Climbing Parnassus). Even if it takes you a year to comprehend the scope of it, you will begin to get a vision for what classical education does for the mind. Without that...
Well, there just isn't a "classical education in a box" that will do this for you.
On a more encouraging note, your children are very young. Classical education OFTEN was not begun until age 12. You have plenty of time to do some learning and growing yourself if you want to classically educate your children. In the meantime, you can work on content such as Latin with them, but without the classical vision, there is no classical education. No practical or "how to" book will give you that, and without it, "classical" education is husks and ashes.
I think another excellent book, especially as you are still working with very young children, is Poetic Knowledge by James Taylor. But these are all meaty books, and there is no hurry to race through them. Take it slowly and absorb what you read. Think and meditate on what you read. Classical education doesn't happen rapidly. It's a slow, natural growth that yields wonderful fruit.
Another possible book that might help you is "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler, or the worldview books by James Sire. None of these will give you practical advice for your 7yo, but you have to educate yourself about classical education if you want to pass it on to your children.
Simmons can be rough going...
but I do think it's worth reading at least some of CP. If you want an "abridged" version you could just read pages 1-70 and pages 215-247. The first section defines some key terms (culture, liberal arts, humanism) and the last suggests ways in which classical education presents an alternative to current educational philosophies. In between, Simmons gives a history of classical education from the Greeks on down. I summarized his account in LCC (with material from other sources as well, of course), so if you do get the book, you'll be getting the gist of his argument in far fewer pages, and, I hope, a more accessible presentation. :)
Part of the reason I wrote LCC was that all the books for homeschoolers focused on neoclassical education - the Sayers Trivium - but there was nothing that dealt with traditional classical education, with its focus on classical languages. There just isn't much else out there except for academic studies of, say, Roman education.
The only other resources I can think of are the articles at the Memoria Press site and the book Norms and Nobility. N&N is geared more to private schools - the author is headmaster of a prep school - but it is helpful for Christians who want to know how their faith fits into the kind of education Simmons describes. I don't know if that's something that you're looking for, but while CP emphasizes the intellectual benefits of classical education, N&N focuses on the character-formation side of things. The two books balance each other out nicely.
HTH!
-Drew
***
"I wonder how far I shall carry any opinion with me when I plead for active effort to revive the general use of Latin?" - Hilaire Belloc
***