#189： The Classical Education You Never Had
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, we discuss the benefits of a classical education, how to get started, and what parents of young children can do to lay a foundation of lifelong learning using a Classical Education pattern.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so do you know
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what it means when someone is said to be facing a choice between charybdis and scylla or do you
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feel like your ability to think deeply about issues is hamstring because you lack an intellectual
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foundation or maybe do you want your intellectual life to be imbued with more texture and nuance
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well if you answered yes to any of those questions then it's time you start obtaining the classical
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education you never had and thanks to my guest today on the podcast we'll show you how to get
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started her name is susan wise bauer and she's the author of the book the well-educated mind a guide
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to the classical education you never had as well as the well-trained mind a classical education at
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home she's also the founder of the well-trained mind academy where middle school and high school
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students can receive a classical education online and on today's podcast susan and i discuss what
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exactly a classical education is the benefits of it and how you can create your own classical
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education curriculum that can fit the busiest of schedules we also discuss what parents of young
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children can do to lay a foundation of lifelong learning using a classical education pattern
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really informative podcast and when you're done listening be sure to check out the show notes for
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links to resources mentioned in the show you can find those at aom.is slash bauer and that's spelled
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b-a-u-e-r and if you haven't already we'd really appreciate it if you give us a review of our podcast
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thank you glad to be here uh so you've uh written two books on classical education you're a big
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advocate for classical education i think most people who are listening have heard of the phrase
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heard of the term the idea might have a vague idea of what it entails but can you explain to us what
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exactly a classical education is and how it differs from the education that most people have gotten if
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they went through public schools sure sure so this has several steps to it so bear with me for just a
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minute um i think uh you know particularly if you tend to be you know a watcher of pbs or or you read
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you know british mystery novels or something um you sort of identify the phrase classical education with an
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education that you know maybe you got at oxford and that had lots of latin and greek um particularly
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latin attached to it that uh traditionally has been part of what a classical education is but there's
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much more to classical education classical education was actually a pattern it was sort of a sequence of
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training the mind of learning how to think and and there were traditionally three phases to this
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education um and we call these three phases the trivium this is based by the way in in the development of
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the medieval university this particular style of learning so the first part of the trivium the
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grammar uh stage has to do with learning the basics of a subject so grammar means the basics the
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foundational information in any one subject it doesn't just mean english that's sort of gotten
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associated with with english in our minds but grammar is just you know the the basic terms and
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principles of any subject then the second phase in a classical education is called the logic phase
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and that's when you take all that information and you start to think critically about it you start to
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think analytically about it you decide whether or not it's valid and why and whether or not you agree
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with it and then the third stage or phase of classical education is called the rhetoric stage
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and that's when you begin to speak back to what you're learning you begin to put it into your own
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frame of reference you you decide how to incorporate it into your own way of thinking you talk about it
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you develop this fluency in speech and in writing that allows you to take the information you accumulated
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and your analysis of it and express it in your own way so that pattern of classical education
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to me is much more definitive of what a classical education is than the inclusion of latin or greek
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sometimes i like to call this actually neoclassical education because i think in our modern application
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of a classical education we tend to put more emphasis on that sort of three-stage process of training the
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mind rather than on specifically latin which was one of the fields in which students learned how to
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practice this process you know first they absorbed all this latin grammar and then they learned all of
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the principles and rules that govern how to put sentences together and they learned how to decode latin
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how to read it and then finally they learned how to write and you know in the 19th century in
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particular maybe 19th too they've learned actually how to speak latin so um today it's often more
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useful for us to um think about how this is practiced in science or in history than in latin but the
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principles are the same gotcha and that was a long speech no i loved it it's perfect perfect description
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of uh encapsulating what you've written about um so how does that differ from the education that most
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people have gotten through public schools you just mentioned there was a time uh even in american
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history where a classical education was the pattern that schools used but then there was a shift uh why
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did that shift occur and what does it look like now right well there's there's actually not one simple
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answer to this because you have to understand that when we talk about american education we're talking
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about a vast vast subject here because of the way that the u.s is structured um states have much more
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say over how subjects are taught than than the federal government and even within states local areas do school
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very differently and then private schools have a whole different set of of you know things that they're
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trying to do so i try not to use that phrase american education um but i will say that that many public
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education systems were highly influenced by progressive learning early in the 20th century and progressive
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learning tended to be very process centered rather than um knowledge centered so the entire focus was on
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understanding how a child's mind works and then giving information to the child in a way that's sort of you
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know dovetailed into those particular mental processes and the emphasis on actually learning information on
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facts on knowledge on this being the foundation and the basis of all learning really began to fall out of
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uh many public education curricula and you know i think the flaws to this kind of of learning began to be apparent
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in the 60s and in the 70s and when it became clear that kids just weren't getting the basics they weren't
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learning how to read they didn't know how to do math they didn't know anything about history
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and so a sort of a reform movement began and really kind of hit its hit its stride actually maybe i don't
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know 25 years ago so where the emphasis shifted on teaching children how to think critically how to
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think analytically as a way to try to um fix this problem that we had you know all these kids who'd
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gone through public school and didn't seem to know anything that they were supposed to there were two
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problems with that shift in emphasis the first was that it didn't actually make up for the fact that
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there still wasn't a focus on what needs to be learned on actual knowledge and the second was
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that this critical and analytical thinking was often pushed all the way back in the curricula into
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the elementary grades which is a time when most students are not ready to think critically and
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analytically they really need to focus on learning the basics so the critical thinking movement
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in my opinion didn't really go towards um solving this this problem of i don't know sort of basic
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illiteracy in the basics of of the english language in the basics of history in the basics of science
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you know in the in the core skills of of mathematical thinking so i think a lot of people who've been
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through the public school system realize that there's sort of this um they have this gap in their
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basic knowledge that there's some foundational um well just foundation that foundation of basic
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training in the essential principles and facts of a field that they're still kind of missing that
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right and i think you referenced in the book that one of the the consequences of this in the broader
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culture is that uh we have a tendency in our population for people to make opinions about things even when
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they might not know all the facts because they were taught as a child or asked as a child in school
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like what do you think about this even though they didn't really know much about the thing they were
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supposed to have an opinion about yes that's very true we tend to leap directly to what is my opinion
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without taking the time to gather the facts and then to think critically about them and you know this is
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this is always so painfully apparent in an election year um when you read uh you know you don't even
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have to go to to online forums which you know showed the worst argumentation of anything anywhere you
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look at newspaper opinion columns look at you know speeches made by political leaders and you can see this
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this leaping to form an opinion and to hold it very strongly without actually going back to find the facts
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and critically analyze them can be very depressing to watch right and so this this foundational knowledge
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uh i guess you could call it the great conversation right uh this sort of cultural literacy that we need
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to have in order to engage in a conversation about big ideas whether it's uh in politics or philosophy or
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science uh public policy that's actually that's a really interesting point too the use of that phrase
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the great conversation this is a phrase that was originated in i think the 1940s by mortimer adler
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who was an advocate of returning to what he called the great books returning to the classics
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and reading the classic works of history and literature and philosophy and the reason why he called this the
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great conversation was because he believed first of all that when you read those books you were
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having a conversation with these great minds of the past but also it had to do with establishing this
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sort of um this shared body of knowledge this shared set of terms this uh these shared ideas and once two
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people have common knowledge of an important concept or idea and once two people are using the same terms
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to mean the same things then they can have a conversation with each other until they otherwise
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they you know they're just talking past each other which we see a lot of so i wouldn't say that the
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great conversation is um equivalent to i mean they're not they're not exactly the same thing they're
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not exactly parallel terms but they're definitely related to each other right i mean i that's one thing
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i've noticed with my own writing uh with the the website that i have is that sometimes i'll throw in just
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these like references sort of cultural touchstones that you know that mean something beyond like you
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know crossing the rubicon for example and i've had people like what does that mean and i have to go
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and i have to sort of i have to explain you know you know the history behind it then explain the the you
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know the illusion that i'm trying to make by using that term uh but when people understand those type
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of phrases or those references like you said it makes the conversation a lot easier and more fluent
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yes and and you know this is not a this is not a simple thing to sort of make up for um if you
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haven't gotten it so with your example crossing the rubicon okay it means making a decision that you
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can't turn back on but if you know the original story there's all of these implications that not only
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have you made a decision that you can't unmake but that you're doing it with reluctance and you're
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doing it in a way that you're aware you're actually violating some of your own principles but you feel
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not to do it would be more of a violation there's sort of all these shades of meaning that enter into
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the use of these terms and if you had gotten a classical education where you spent the early
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part of your life just learning these stories learning the history learning the facts you would
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have been able to suss that out later on in life yes yes i think so i mean it's like learning it's like
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learning a language learning a language takes a long time you know to do it well and to use it well
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and that's really what classical education is about it's about um learning learning learning the
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language of i was gonna say discourse that sounds so college professor doesn't it um learning a language
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that that makes meaningful conversation possible right but it just sounds so impossibly
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idealistic in in in the present political climate too but i i know there's a lot of people out there
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who they feel like they've missed out on that yeah and now they're in their 30s their 40s and they're
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thinking i want to catch up so how do you do that um i mean what's the best approach of uh playing
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catch up to this great conversation uh while using the the pattern of a classical education to do that
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right and that's such a great question because i think there's so many people in this in this boat
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as it were um so the first book i did on classical education was called the well-trained mind and it
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was for parents to help train their kids and i had so many parents out that book came out 16 years ago
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now it's not going into its fourth edition now i've had so many parents come up to me and say i am
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enjoying training my kids so much if only i'd had this education what can i do so i did a second book
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called the well-educated mind which was basically sort of a guide for grown-ups to retrain themselves
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in these foundational skills and the the central way that you do it is to read but to read in a very
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particular way where whereas you read you are practicing first of all gathering information
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and then secondly thinking critically about it and then third expressing your opinion so you're
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you're practicing these steps of grammar and logic and rhetoric and one of the things i point out
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in the well-educated mind is that you don't have to think about giving yourself a classical education
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in terms of now i have to go read the iliad and the odyssey because although these are great texts
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um you know epic poetry is not everyone's jam that's not necessarily the way you're going to think
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a lot of people do better with non-fiction with reading great works of history or great works of
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science what's important is that you be very conscious of the mental steps you're going through
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as you approach and absorb this information and it begins to change the way you uh you receive not
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just information but other people's opinions it begins to change the way you read news stories it
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begins to change the way that you understand uh broadcasts it really does begin to retrain your
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mind in the classical tradition and i think that's interesting uh about reading because
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when we talk about our culture that we are we say that we're a literate society people can read
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right um but literacy the way you're sounds like you're defining it is more than just being able to
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read uh words it's actually understanding and doing something with or being more active with your
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reading i guess yeah i like that phrase active reading that's really good um our schools not
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everyone knows this but our schools are designed to turn out students who read on what's called the
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10th grade literacy level which essentially means you can read and you don't have a problem with reading
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um what the 10th grade literacy level doesn't really teach us is how to read actively how to engage with
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and think critically about text so yeah i mean as a as a as a nation we have a very high 10th grade
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literacy level i think we have a relatively low um we'll call it the classical literacy level um you know
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we we have we have a much lower number of people who are able to really grab onto information through
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reading and and have that make a difference in the way they think right and i mean i imagine it's gotten
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harder uh with the internet you know i feel like the internet has fostered this too long didn't read
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mentality right um where people just want the summary and then make their opinion based off of that
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uh so you have to be uh very proactive about this and like i mean like i like how you you call your
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first book a well-trained mind because you are training your mind and it is a it is a mental workout
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when you read like this yeah yes and and i do think you have to be very deliberate about it you have to be
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very intentional but you know what the internet hasn't changed that that's always been true if you go back
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and you look at um the journals of people who were self-educating themselves in the 18th and the 19th
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century you see them consciously deciding to learn how to think and to read in a certain way and sort of
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going out and getting that for themselves because it hasn't just been given to them so i think there's
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always been this intentionality in learning how to read and to think properly and although the internet
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you know is a wonderful distraction the world has always been full of things that could pull you
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away from that process of reading and thinking now it's the internet you know 100 years ago it was the
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pub there's always something else to do that seems more fun but you have to have that determination that
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there's something here that i want to get for myself and i'm going to do it so what should we be
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reading for you know to to if we're taking this classical if we want to catch ourselves up on
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this classical education uh suggested books just a few i know you you get in very detailed about in
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your book uh well-educated mind but some suggestions or genres that people should look to to uh peruse and
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start reading deliberately with you know well i always suggest that if people are super super um uncertain
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about their reading abilities that they start with novels because stories have this sort of um
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intrinsic forward motion that pulls you along and so it's it's just a good starting place so if you
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were to read great novels um sort of chronologically which is what i always suggest because then you
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start to see the development of the genre over time you might want to start with don quixote which is
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generally thought to be it's considered to be the first novel in the modern sense um and i always tell
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people you really don't have to read the 800 page unabridged version there's some really great
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abridged versions out there that's one of those books that you can read it in an abridged form and
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you'll still get what you need out of it um but then you can then move forward through uh the 18th and
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19th century novelists through dickens and jane austen for example um nathaniel hawthorne on into the
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20th century masters so we think about sort of bridging the 19th and 20th centuries maybe
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stephen crane and then on into the 20th century you know we're talking about henningway and dostoevsky
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and then all the way up to the present when i did this chronological list of great novels in the well
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educated mind they started with don quixote and i ended with cormac mccarthy's the road and what you
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see there is this whole like three century four centuries really of writers using the image of a
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journey along a road to an unknown destination in order to say something very profound about how
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human beings function so that's the sort of thing you want to do the truth is it it doesn't matter so
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much which novels you choose to read and let me quickly qualify that i'm not saying that reading
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stephen king um is going to do the trick for you but there are so many great lists online of great
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books of both um both ancient medieval renaissance 19th century 20th century 21st century classics
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if you take those lists and select titles off them and read chronologically through them you will begin
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to retrain your mind right and again you're you're applying that uh three that three part pattern
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the first time so the first time you might just read through the entire novel without stopping getting
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a gist of the story uh and then you might that's like the grammar level and then the next level would
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be starting to analyze it a bit more yes exactly and you know actually that first step just reading
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through without stopping can be really hard for people because i think many people learned in school
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to sort of read a bit and then stop and decide what you think and then read a bit and stop decide
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what you think and that makes it very very difficult first of all to get all the way through a book
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because it's it's really you know halts your momentum um and it's also a bad mental habit to start
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making conclusions about something before you finish it um but but also uh that habit sort of um
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it keeps you from getting absorbed in the book from really experiencing it from really entering
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into the author's vision so on your first read through you almost suspend that critical faculty
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you just try to immerse yourself in the book and then once you have the whole picture you know the
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book from beginning to end then you go back and you start to ask some critical questions about it
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um you know if you're working with a novel you might just begin with the very basic all right who's
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who's the main character who's the protagonist what does the protagonist want and how does he set out
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to get it and this seems like a really simple question um but it it's it's not that simple
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a question if you're thinking about something like cormac mccarthy's the road and you know the
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protagonist is this unnamed character and i'm going to do this without trying to give away too much about
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the book because it's a really great read um what does the protagonist want well the protagonist wants
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to stay alive you know that's really basic but then you always ask yourself what does the protagonist
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really want what are the motivations behind staying alive what is what is the protagonist trying to
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accomplish by staying alive and there are a set of much more interesting and deeper answers to that
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you know this is a world where a lot of people have actually just given up and died so you need to say
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why is it so important for this character to stay alive then you start to really understand
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what cormac mccarthy is saying about the human and then i always tell people that the third step
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after you've gone back and asked a bunch of critical questions and i've suggested a number
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actually in the book um and you can also parentheses go to something like um uh cliff's notes online
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and use some of the critical questions that they offer for various classics if you need
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help thinking about what questions to ask then it's really good if you can talk to someone else
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about the book that's sort of the rhetoric stage you find a reading buddy or a friend or you know
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or even an online discussion group as long as people are expressing themselves um well and coherently
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and not in fragments and you explain what you learn from the book in your own words uh one of the
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things you learn in a graduate education is that um you don't really know what you think about a book
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until you have told someone else in actual words either in writing or or in a discussion until you
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actually put your ideas into words they still remain um unformed or partially formed you may think you know
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what you think about a book but until you have said it you haven't finished formulating those thoughts
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so that sort of leads you through those grammar logic and uh and rhetoric stages of thinking
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i love it and i love that suggestion of finding a reading buddy even online because you talk about
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in your book as well is that this is very common for people back in the 18th 19th centuries they would
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you know the founding fathers would have letters amongst each other where they just discussed uh you
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know a piece of like a cicero or some other roman you know livy or something like that
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exactly this was a huge part of their own intellectual development was to talk to other
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people who were developing the same um the same background you know the same basic information
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and to express ideas to each other yeah and i love the suggestion too of starting with something you
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enjoy um and because i one like a few years ago i decided you know i'm going to get through the
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the entire great book series i started plowing through it from starting at the iliad and i was doing
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great and then i got to uh i think it was aristotle's like you know his discourse on syllogisms and i was
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just like yeah i lost steam i just abandoned ship on the project well you know not everyone not everyone
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thinks philosophically in a way that's going to make that a useful book i think a lot of us came out
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of school with the sense that if you're really doing something intellectually worthwhile it's going to be
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really unpleasant you know it's going to be so hard you're going to have to make yourself do it
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you got to put a hair shirt on right yes exactly well i think it is sort of you know it is sort of a
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calvinistic leftover uh in a lot a lot of americans particularly protestants um although you know
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catholics have their own their own tradition of doing things you don't want to do so but we really do
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a lot of us have this sense of if it's good for me i can't possibly like it you know sort of the
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broccoli mentality and that's not true one especially once you get to be an adult things
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that fascinate you are things that you should cultivate and you can use those topics those
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subjects those genres in order to develop your thought if poetry isn't your thing read science
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you know read the great books of science um and think critically about those don't feel like you've
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got to plow through um you know homer or or aristotle for that matter right yeah i enjoyed homer and i
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enjoyed the the greek tragedies it's just yeah i remember just getting to the syllogism as far as like
00:28:16.580
okay no i can't do this um so what do you tell the person who's like yeah i want to do this
00:28:23.380
but then they look at everything they've missed and like what they have to do to get caught up even if
00:28:28.660
they just you know pick a genre they enjoy say science and they're like i want to start way you
00:28:33.580
know go back to um the greeks and see what they thought it can be kind of overwhelming and they're
00:28:39.580
thinking man i don't have very much life to live how am i going to get this all done before i die
00:28:44.020
um so any suggestions or advice on not feeling overwhelmed about the prospect of acquiring a
00:28:51.620
classical education yeah well that is that is a really great point and and it sort of leads us
00:28:57.200
to understand something about our culture um you know every every society has its own sort of
00:29:04.940
internal ethic those things which it finds to be good and worthwhile and those things which it finds
00:29:11.600
to be you know not so good and worthwhile and a lot of times you can you can get a clue as to what
00:29:17.580
this ethic is through the language that we use and one of the things that has always struck me
00:29:22.040
particularly in talking to people about educating themselves is the extent to which we use um fast
00:29:29.860
to mean good and slow to mean bad so you know if we if we talk about computers or fast food places
00:29:38.220
the one that is really really fast is is the good computer or the good fast food place and the one that
00:29:44.320
takes longer to process or to get you your burger is the bad one and you know we should think seriously
00:29:51.540
about that it's not really normative to use these value words good and bad about fast and slow but
00:29:59.380
because we live in a capitalistic economy in which doing more and faster um is more profitable we have come
00:30:08.240
to identify quantity and speed with virtue and that would have been totally foreign to the ancients
00:30:17.420
actually it would have been totally foreign to most thinkers prior to the industrial revolution so when
00:30:23.620
we're thinking about educating ourselves i think we have to start to let go of this i'm you know this
00:30:30.160
this i'm not going to be able to do this well you see i'm going to do it badly because i'm not going to
00:30:35.580
be able to read that many books and i'm not going to be able to do them quickly um quantity and speed
00:30:41.760
should not be our measure of how well we are doing something like reading the great books the truth is
00:30:49.700
that what whichever of the great books you read and however many of them you get through you're
00:30:54.260
studying the human condition um many times you're studying the same conclusions about the human condition
00:31:01.560
expressed in a different way or from a different angle but what you have to realize is that
00:31:07.700
understanding the human condition is not something that um you know it's not like making a widget it's
00:31:14.460
not like something that you finish and oh look i achieved it i'm done um it's it's a lifelong process
00:31:22.040
and everyone goes through that process in a different way and hits different milestones of understanding
00:31:30.780
at a different time how many of the great books you read should not even be a question the question is
00:31:39.200
are you spending time thinking deeply about these great ideas and what they say about humanity you've
00:31:49.000
got to let go of speed and quantity and that actually it's me is a big part of the self-education
00:31:55.260
process it's letting go of the need to reach milestones at any particular time and listen if
00:32:03.300
you've been through k-12 and particularly then if you've been through college and certainly if you've
00:32:07.180
been through graduate school that's so hard to let go of because learning has always been associated
00:32:13.100
in your mind with deadlines and with um earning quote-unquote degrees you have to get a certain amount of
00:32:21.400
stuff done by a certain time and then you are more educated that you gotta let go of yeah and as you were
00:32:28.640
saying that it made me think about the the analogy to the great conversation uh you know in my own life
00:32:34.360
like actual conversations i've had with people really good ones you never finish it yeah exactly like
00:32:39.760
you might you might you might have this great talk and then they have to leave and you're not done
00:32:44.540
and i don't feel bad like that was really good i enjoyed that and we pick it up you know maybe a
00:32:49.840
month later exactly and i think instead many of us have learned to think of conversation um as if you
00:32:56.100
know you're you're you're going to the doctor and you have 15 minutes to tell them everything you need
00:33:01.300
to and then your time's up um but but that's not how learning is um so we we've talked about uh you
00:33:09.900
educating ourselves if we're an adult um and i highly recommend people to go check out her book
00:33:15.240
well-educated mind uh she gives some really great suggestions on books that you should check out and
00:33:21.020
suggestions on how to approach them but let's talk about uh your first book a well-trained mind
00:33:25.620
um where it's geared towards parents who want to provide their children with a classical
00:33:31.040
education at home uh you know it's kind of geared towards homeschoolers i'm curious um is it possible
00:33:38.580
for parents who can't homeschool maybe both parents work there's a single family home uh and so they
00:33:45.480
had to send their kids to either a private school or a public school uh to apply these principles and
00:33:50.980
maybe supplement their public education with the principles in a well-trained mind to give their
00:33:55.200
child a classical education yeah absolutely it is um you know when we when we did the first edition of
00:34:01.380
that book in in 1999 we were thinking primarily of educators but what we found in the last you
00:34:08.480
know 15 16 years is that there are so many parents out there who are doing what they call after
00:34:13.180
schooling which is they're you know picking one or more subject in which they feel that that you know
00:34:19.000
the school's just not quite doing it for them or the child has a real gift and they want to move on
00:34:23.880
do more and they use the principles um in our book to just do supplemental education you know in one or
00:34:32.480
two subjects and it's really a matter of um feeling like you have the ability and the authority
00:34:40.260
to take control of your child's education to not just say all right whatever the school gives us that's
00:34:47.680
what we're going to take but okay what the school gives us we're going to take but as good as the school
00:34:53.660
may be my child has these very individual gifts and talents and needs and i have these ambitions for
00:35:01.200
my child and so we're going to do a little extra work sometimes people work over the summer a little
00:35:06.200
bit sometimes they do a little bit of after school work a lot of school districts will work with you
00:35:11.320
if you want to sort of take over one subject and teach it yourself as long as you know you're willing
00:35:16.260
to provide them with documentation that you're doing it well there are any number of sort of innovative
00:35:22.520
um innovative approaches that you can take to really putting your hands on your child's education
00:35:28.520
and saying i'm going to give it a little twist a little push in this direction because i think
00:35:33.440
that's what will really benefit my child so uh you get really specific um in the book and you divide a
00:35:40.580
child's learning life right his grade school life into the the three parts the grammar logic and rhetoric
00:35:47.140
part let's just focus on the grammar part because um you know i'm kind of there with my kids they're
00:35:52.220
three and five years old um what could what should parents be doing now uh with their children if
00:35:59.580
they have young kids to lay a foundation for them so they can have a great learning life not only
00:36:06.640
in their school years but in their adult life as well well i think with with um with young children
00:36:14.260
you're thinking to yourself literacy literacy literacy literacy literacy and here are the i i like to think of
00:36:21.240
this as having sort of three separate three separate aspects the first is making sure that they read
00:36:28.820
well they read as early as they're able to they read often that reading becomes a habit for them
00:36:36.760
and often that means um yourself taking on the task of teaching them basic phonics so that they can begin
00:36:43.520
to sound out words and begin to crack that code and you know have the world of books open to them
00:36:49.660
many classrooms do a good job with phonetic instruction um many do not do a good job with phonetic instruction
00:36:57.720
and also what classrooms tend to do is they tend to tie reading and handwriting together for kids so
00:37:05.860
even if they're learning phonics they'll learn how to sound out you know a combination of letters
00:37:10.900
but then they learn how to write it at the same time and the problem with this is that most young children
00:37:16.980
are ready to read long before they're ready to do a lot of handwriting the fine motor muscles just take
00:37:22.740
longer to develop and a lot of kids start to associate reading which they could do easily and
00:37:29.160
enjoyably if they were allowed to with this struggle that they have getting words down on paper and it's
00:37:35.280
one of the reasons why boys tend to struggle with the language arts curriculum in elementary school more
00:37:41.820
than girls because it is just a biological fact that those fine motor muscles develop more slowly in
00:37:47.860
boys um so we can really help particularly our little boys um develop a love for reading by teaching
00:37:55.340
them how to read phonetically outside of the classroom and without demanding that they learn how to write
00:38:00.200
all the sounds at the same time does does that make sense that makes perfect i mean when should you
00:38:05.960
introduce writing because like my son uh you know he started reading really young i don't know why it was
00:38:10.900
bizarre like it freaked my wife and i out um but like his writing's atrocious um so at what point
00:38:18.280
should you start like incorporating writing practice with your kids or boys and by the way what you
00:38:24.300
describe is just the most typical it's that is the most typical developmental um arc ever i see it all
00:38:31.080
the time and you know it's really important with your little boy that you you praise what they do well
00:38:36.380
and don't think oh but look at all this catching up you have to do over here um which is so easy to do
00:38:42.140
but you know that to the side you should start doing doing just phonics with them as soon as they show
00:38:48.040
interest in the printed page with writing really they should be practicing just handwriting not composition
00:38:56.060
just handwriting practicing the letters for five or ten minutes a day starting when they're maybe five
00:39:02.240
years old but in terms of actual um original composition that is actually more of an eight
00:39:09.420
nine and ten year old um enterprise in the in the traditional classical curriculum students pretty
00:39:17.560
much just copied up until they were nine or ten years old and what that did was it filled their minds
00:39:23.900
with great language because they were copying the words of other writers it filled their minds with
00:39:28.640
vocabulary it exposed them to all these different written styles and it gave their little hands a
00:39:34.300
chance to develop and in in many classrooms uh composition exercises even long ones even like
00:39:41.860
five paragraph essays are pushed all the way back into the elementary grades and are introduced to
00:39:48.240
students at a time that is just completely developmentally inappropriate and that can really
00:39:54.100
sour kids on writing um again a lot of little girls can do it because they're just their muscles are a
00:40:00.060
little better developed but it just has the potential to discourage students who just you know physically
00:40:05.980
aren't quite there yet in a way that's so unnecessary so one of the ways in which you can protect
00:40:12.560
your child's literacy is to be kind of hard-nosed with the teacher about it um you know if the teacher
00:40:18.520
is hard-nosed in the nicest possible way if the teacher is sending home and i've seen this often
00:40:24.720
five paragraph essays for third graders and research papers for fourth graders i think it's our role as
00:40:31.680
parents to say uh no wait hold the phone you know this is discouraging my child my child is going to give
00:40:38.300
up on language because they're so overwhelmed so being very sensitive to frustration and when you're
00:40:46.020
dealing with an elementary student if the student cries or gets angry that always means that they're
00:40:53.760
well almost always means that they're struggling with something that's developmentally inappropriate
00:40:59.000
they don't even know how to express to you why they can't do it because they haven't yet developed that
00:41:05.160
kind of vocabulary what you get is non-verbal response so always look out for tears and always look
00:41:12.720
out for anger and be willing as the parent to say to the teacher my child needs a little more time to
00:41:18.640
mature before we do this it's it's a very difficult mindset to develop but i think it's so important
00:41:25.380
if we want our kids to go through their k-12 education and come out the other end still excited
00:41:31.860
about reading and writing we have to really step up and be their advocates when they're being asked to
00:41:37.640
do something that isn't actually going to move them towards that goal with with the reading do we
00:41:44.280
encourage our kids to read things they want to read or should we maybe subtly introduce some of those
00:41:51.520
great books that are based on like on a child's level like maybe throw in some odyssey or you know
00:41:57.000
a child's version of it or something like that yeah well we do both we don't have to we don't have to
00:42:02.280
do an either or approach to this um i when i when i said there were three ways in which you could
00:42:07.440
develop your child's literacy we just talked about the first the second i was going to say is to help
00:42:13.460
them develop a much more advanced vocabulary and one of the best ways to do this is to make a habit of
00:42:21.000
of for your kid and for both of you together of listening to unabridged audiobooks on tape or on
00:42:27.900
whatever mp3s because what that allows students to do is to immerse themselves in a story which is
00:42:35.680
still above their reading level but which isn't beyond their comprehension level and that pulls
00:42:42.500
them towards a more mature level of reading they're not yet technically able to read this work for
00:42:48.320
themselves but in listening to it they gain greater vocabulary you know building their vocabularies is huge
00:42:56.040
and they start to develop um a knowledge of complex sentence structure so the listening
00:43:03.500
moves them towards greater achievement in reading so we let them read what they want we encourage them
00:43:10.800
to read children's versions of classics that they might not otherwise pick up on themselves and we
00:43:16.780
encourage them to listen to actual unabridged audiobooks that are on a slightly more difficult level
00:43:22.360
than what they feel comfortable with and all of those things move kids towards maturity
00:43:26.960
yeah my son and i have been listening to the trumpet of the swan on his on the way to school
00:43:32.720
and it's great because it's actually narrated by eb white yes and his his charlotte's web which
00:43:37.880
she also narrates is just the most beautiful book yeah yeah he's got such a soothing calm voice
00:43:44.000
yeah it's wonderful yes he does um let's uh let's can you tell us about the well-trained mind academy
00:43:49.620
because that seems to pick up you know after this uh first you know couple of years of of education
00:43:55.880
uh you actually have an online curriculum correct at the well-trained mind yes yes we do we do i'd
00:44:01.420
love to tell you about that it just occurs to me that i didn't tell you about the third thing we
00:44:04.700
can do to develop literacy i tell you that let's go back to it yeah and then we'll go back to it yeah
00:44:08.260
sure we just we just don't want to forget this the third really important thing to do is to develop
00:44:13.140
kids um numeracy which is you know mathematical literacy i think it's easy particularly if you're
00:44:20.060
not a maths oriented person to forget that a big part of what you want to be doing with your
00:44:25.120
elementary student is not just working with them with their arithmetic assignments but doing your best
00:44:32.520
to make mathematical thinking part of everyday life and what that means is with really little kids
00:44:39.200
counting with them doing number pairing you know um i'm gonna get i'm gonna get pieces of chicken for
00:44:45.400
dinner there are five of us how many pieces of chicken should i get i should get five that sort
00:44:49.960
of thing and then also making uh mathematical picture books and and just math books generally
00:44:56.640
part of what we expose the child to and part of what the child does for entertainment don't forget
00:45:03.580
that numbers are another language and students need to be just as literate in numbers as as in
00:45:10.120
you know the alphabet as and and words so i just want to you know put that out there or it's something
00:45:16.100
for parents to think about perfect um so let's go back uh talking about the well-trained mind academy
00:45:22.060
i mean what's their what kind of resources can parents find there to help uh provide their children
00:45:26.420
a classical based education right well this is one of the ways in which again i love the term
00:45:31.120
neoclassical because it means that you take what is best from the past but you you know you can also
00:45:36.160
combine it with the best of the present um online education can be a really wonderful delivery tool
00:45:44.060
meaning that it gives students the chance to um to access expert teaching um without having to be
00:45:52.980
you know geographically near the teacher so what we're attempting to do um with with the well-trained
00:45:59.780
mind academy and you know so far we've just been so pleased with the response and how it's going
00:46:03.920
is to offer live online instruction where in in in all of the core areas of the curriculum
00:46:11.800
where teachers who have a commitment to classical education who have training in it um teach students
00:46:19.760
in a very traditional manner it's just that the computer is the delivery system so there are live
00:46:25.160
lectures there's conversations we actually have a great socratic dialogue class um online which has
00:46:30.980
been super super popular there are written assignments traditional written assignments
00:46:35.660
which are uploaded you know to the blackboard site that the student is using and then that gets
00:46:40.500
feedback from the teacher so it's really the best of traditional classical instruction um what the
00:46:46.700
computer does is it allows us to you know um take the distance out of the process so we have classes
00:46:53.080
for um middle school and high school in the core areas of the curriculum um we don't offer classes for
00:46:59.820
elementary students because i believe very strongly that elementary students who are still
00:47:05.520
at a very basic level of learning what social interaction is about learning how to read people
00:47:10.900
learning how to interpret tone of voice etc should receive the majority of their instruction face to face
00:47:16.940
but for the middle grades on we do offer uh classes that incorporate these principles that i've been
00:47:23.620
talking about fantastic well susan weisbauer thank you so much for your time this has been an absolute
00:47:28.960
pleasure thank you it's been so nice to talk to you my guest today was susan weisbauer you can find
00:47:34.500
her books uh the well-educated mind and the well-trained mind on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere
00:47:39.600
and you can find more information about her work at susanweisbauer.com and if you are a parent and would like
00:47:46.560
more information about online classical education check out the well-trained mind academy at wtmacademy.com
00:47:54.040
and also like i said earlier in the show be sure to check out the show notes for this podcast for
00:47:59.500
links to all the resources we mentioned in the show at aom.is slash bauer again that's spelled b-a-u-e-r
00:48:07.600
so aom.is slash bauer well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more
00:48:16.180
manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com
00:48:20.380
and if you enjoy this podcast i'd really appreciate it if you give us review on itunes
00:48:24.660
or stitcher helps get the word out about the show as always i appreciate your continuing
00:48:29.040
support and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly