Educational Philosophy

The first book to open up my mind to the possibilities in homeschooling was Mary Pride's Complete Guide to Homeschooling. I think I picked it up at a random Christian bookstore on the highway on the way to Gatlinburg way back when Sharkbait was 3 or 4 years old! I learned that there is a range of educational philosophies, from unschooling to textbooks, from classical to eclectic! I discovered that my desire was to follow the classical model of education.

In short, the classical model uses the Trivium as its foundation. The Trivium includes the grammar stage, the logic stage, and the rhetoric stage. The grammar stage aligns with early elementary ages and is the prime time to stuff the kids' heads full of facts! Timelines, lists, math facts, poems, stories, etc. The next stage correlates with the late elementary ages/middle school ages and is when the students begin to make connections among all the facts learned in the grammar years. For example, they might have learned the books of the Bible in order as grammar students. In the logic stage, they learn why the Bible books are ordered that way. They learn critical thinking. In the rhetoric stage, the student learns to defend and debate their hypotheses and conclusions, developing and using their writing and even speech skills. To complete our example, the rhetoric student would learn to research the differing theories of how the canon came to be, choose a theory and support it with logic and facts.

The second resource that has shaped my educational philosophy and curriculum choices is the Well-Trained Mind book by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise and its discussion board. It's a treasure trove of information for every year of a child's classical education. Finally, I use the Latin-Centered Curriculum by Andrew Campbell as a guide for curriculum choices (esp. Literature, at this point). His philosophy is "less is more." Focus on quality, not quantity.

And that's why I'm doing what I'm doing :)