What is Classical Education? A Guest Post

Today's guest post is from Laura Lund, homeschooling mom and author of Classical House of Learning Literature. Today she explains what Classical Education is, and on Monday she'll be sharing her daily homeschool schedule.

If I could only read one book on homeschooling, it would be The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise, which outlines a systematic approach to home education based on history, literature, and science. As it happens, I’ve read many books on homeschooling, including titles by John Holt, Rebecca Rupp, Cathy Duffy, Mary Pride, Mary Griffith, and Oliver DeMille. The two reasons why I favor The Well-Trained Mind above all others are that it gives a detailed outline of a classical model of education and it gives explicit instructions on how to implement a classical education at home. Although I gained some helpful ideas while reading other homeschooling books, I found that many of them fell short when it came to practicalities.

Because classical education divides a child’s education into three major periods of development, it works with the child’s current abilities.

Grammar Stage (grades 1 – 4) is a time for the student to learn the basic skills of reading, writing, grammar, and arithmetic (among others). Young children have an amazing capacity for memorization, so this is also an excellent time to incorporate the memorization of poems, quotes, and facts. Rather than getting into deep analysis of historical events or stories, a Grammar Stage student focuses on being able to determine what happened. Grammar Stage builds the skills needed for the upper years of learning, so it serves as a foundation period.

Logic Stage (grades 5 – 8) is a time for the student to hone his critical thinking skills as he asks deeper questions about why historical events occurred or why a character in a work of literature acted a certain way. The student applies logic to all of the subjects he studies, including analyzing literature and learning the scientific method.

Rhetoric Stage (grades 9 – 12) is a time for the student to deepen her reasoning skills and articulate her unique views about historical events, literary works, and scientific ideas. The skills learned in Grammar Stage and the ordered thought learned in Logic Stage equip the more mature Rhetoric Stage student to engage in “the great conversation” of great thinkers.

At each stage of study, the student works through a four-year pattern of history, starting with ancient times and ending with the modern age. Because the student is concurrently exposed to history and literature in the same chronological order for three different cycles, he is better able to make connections between various civilizations, literary works, and historical events and people. Time becomes more ordered in the student’s mind as she is able to place key ideas in their proper place in our world’s past.

One focus of our homeschool is to gain a familiarity with our world’s rich history so that we can better understand where humanity is and where it’s headed. In order to achieve such intimacy, we take a chronological survey of world history and read classic works of literature from each major time period and civilization. We accept that it is impossible to cover absolutely everything so we tend to cover the civilizations, events, and stories that have had the greatest impact on our current world. We reserve the right to go off on tangents and enjoy ourselves. And we do. :-)

I’d be happy to answer further questions about our homeschool or my literature program at classicalhouseoflearning@gmail.com.