Once Ann, a young homeschooling mother, called me for advice. She was dismayed by the difficulty of the task in front of her. The responsibility of raising five children, tending to their physical, spiritual and intellectual needs seemed overwhelming. Ann asked how those of us who have home schooled large families for many years have managed.

I don’t know if any of you have ever felt this way, but I have, and I think it’s an understandable response to the enormous, and enormously important, task to which we have been called. Raising children, like all good things, is difficult.

In the book Holiness for Housewives (a book which I most heartily recommend), Dom Hubert Von Zeller quotes G.K. Chesterton. “...I cannot, with the utmost energy of imagination, conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery...the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home--as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is heavier because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then, as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, books, cakes, and boots; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene, I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman’s function is laborious; but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.”

This is as it should be, for God has ordered our universe in such a way that most worthwhile ends are attained only with real effort. We see this in every area. Physical prowess requires years of dedicated labor (ask any of the Olympic athletes). Intellectual achievement also entails significant time, attention and plain hard work. Think about how long it takes to acquire mastery of a language, or medicine, law, or theology. In the spiritual realm as well, achievement is granted to those who persist and are willing to give themselves to the task. We have been told to follow Christ, to conform our lives to His, but we have also been told that this will require the daily taking up of the Cross.

It is helpful to remember that no matter what we do about school at this time of life, it is going to be demanding. However, I assured Ann. There are ways in which home schooling makes this time of life easier, especially with regard to education.

I told Ann all of this, and she was heartened to hear that no one thought raising children was supposed to be easy. However, she still had reservations. “What about the education?” she asked. “Maybe my children will be pleasant, maybe they’ll even be good, if I give myself to this task, but I’m afraid they’ll be ignorant. My own education was inferior, and I worry about how to teach what I don’t know.”

This is where the advantage of the classical curriculum can be seen most clearly.

Initially, work on reading, writing, and simple arithmetic, the first tools of any further learning. First grade through third grade is spent acquiring these basic skills. This doesn’t mean that this is all the child should do at this stage. But the rest of what he does shouldn’t require what is usually regarded as ‘school’. He should have great stories read to him, his imagination should be filled with the heroic, the noble, and the beautiful. He should listen to stories from the Bible and stories of the saints. He should go to the zoo and the natural history museum, as well as take walks around the neighborhood, becoming acquainted with God’s creation by direct experience. His imagination is being furnished, and the information and observational skill acquired now will help all through the school years.

From the third grade through sixth grade, the child continues to observe the world around him. Reading for pleasure should be encouraged, and basic writing skills developed. But the heart of the curriculum is found in the child’s natural inclination and ability to memorize. Left to his own devices he will memorize commercials (if he sees TV), jumping rope rhymes, and doggerel verses. If this natural proclivity is directed he can memorize the questions and answers in the Baltimore Catechism, Latin paradigms (‘-a,-ae,-ae,-am,-a,-ae,-arum,-is,-as,-is’ is no harder than ‘eeny, meeny, miney, mo’, but it is significantly more useful), all of the states and capitals, lists of history dates, the multiplication tables, the characters of salvation history, many great poems and the books of the Bible. In every subject area, some of the material studied can be memorized. This strengthens and makes docile the imagination and memory, which allows the student to move on to the next stage of learning, properly prepared to start analyzing, sorting, and categorizing.

When a child reaches the sixth or seventh grade, he often manifests a desire for argument. Use this inclination by directing his attention to the arguments present in the materials he is using for his subjects. Have him find the topic sentences in the paragraphs of his various textbooks, and write summaries of the material he is reading. Read materials, like C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity or Fr. Howell’s Of Sacraments and Sacrifice, where there are clear and fairly simple arguments being made. Have him outline the arguments. Study Latin and English grammar. To do grammar well, or any kind of translation, analysis is required. The student must see the relationship of the parts of the sentence to the whole, and to each other. Encourage him to investigate the various sides of a controversial position and write a paper presenting the question clearly and drawing a conclusion.

The emphasis here is not on elegance of expression, but on clarity of thought. Once that is in some measure achieved, the curriculum can turn to elegance in oral and written presentations. In ninth through twelfth grade the classical curriculum will emphasize the power and beauty of language, and introduce the student to great writers, of both prose and poetry. Though at least some of these authors will already be familiar, this is the appropriate time to think about what specifically gives their writings such impact. This is also the time for practice in writing and re-writing.

I’d like to go through one subject area, English, and make concrete suggestions for how to adapt it to the plan for formation that I have just outlined.

English (or Language Arts) - In the earliest years one needs to become acquainted with great literature of an appropriate level. Read Beatrix Potter stories to your children (C.S. Lewis once said that any definition of literature that excludes Peter Rabbit is simply not accurate), the Red and Blue Fairy Tale books of Andrew Lang, and The Children’s Bible. Have the children, on occasion, retell the stories, because this exercises their imagination and memory and helps them learn to focus their attention on what they hear. Work on learning to read and write. Use How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and then Sound Beginnings or any one of the other phonics based reading programs to accomplish this. (I like 100 Easy Lessons because it is so easy to use, and relatively painless, and the child learns how to blend sounds right away. I like Sound Beginnings because it is much like The Writing Road to Reading, but it is scripted; it tells the teacher what to say lesson by lesson.) Have the student practice the physical act of writing by learning letter formation. As his fine motor skills improve, pick out one or two sentences from his retelling and write them for him to copy. This supplies practice in hand/eye coordination, and introduces capitalization and punctuation. In all of these suggestions the formation of the student is directed toward acquiring the tools of further learning.

In about third grade the student can write original sentences about a story he has heard or read. He may say, “The sun shone,” and you might not consider that the most important circumstance in the story, but never mind. Just make sure the sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a period. As his skills increase the length and accuracy of his retelling will improve as well. Once original sentences become easy, move on to dictation. This gives children opportunities to study examples of good writing and to move from the spoken word to the written, an exercise requiring observation, concentration of mind and application of mechanical skills. There are many
sources for dictation exercises: the book he is currently reading, the poem he is presently memorizing, the suggested dictation exercises in the Harp and Laurel Wreath, or Scripture. Study the passage that will be dictated with your child. Go through the paragraph, explaining the reason for capitals, commas, semi-colons, and quotation marks. Then dictate the passage. Also have the child of this age memorize poems. This is a golden opportunity, don’t let it pass. He will find it easy and generally pleasant to memorize, and you will be instilling a habit of memory and delight in rhythmical spoken word. Intermediate Language Lessons by Emma Serl has many exercises that are
well suited to the formation of this stage of development. It has copying, dictation, observation and memorization all worked into the text. What it doesn’t have is also worth noting. Until sixth grade, there is virtually no analytic grammar.

The sixth or seventh grade student is ready to analyze, sort and categorize; this is the time to do English grammar. The student sees the whole and the parts, the relationship between them and the relationship between the parts themselves. He has to pay attention to detail in order to put the parts of the sentence in the right category. There are a number of texts that will teach this subject well. I like both Easy Grammar and Voyages in English. Easy Grammar seems to be somewhat easier for children to do on their own, but Voyages is perhaps more thorough. Either is fine. I use one or the other of these texts in 6th grade, then move on to Basic Language Principle Through Latin Background in 7th.

In 8th and 9th grade we continue with grammar, but other English exercises take a prominence they do not have in 6th and 7th. After two years of grammar most children have a handle on the subject, and have acquired a certain formation in their habit of thought. During these two years students should continue to write, but the writing is secondary to grammar. The writing exercises that are done should be directed to analysis. Have the student write summaries of one of the Gospels (I like to use St. Luke’s Gospel because it is so familiar to the children), turn poetry into prose (Shakespeare’s sonnets work quite well), and collate information from numerous sources for a history paper on Egypt, Greece or Rome.

By eighth grade the children are ready to turn their attention to intellectual argument in a more formal way. During this period of formation use real speeches by people being studied in history. Have your child pick a speech that is of interest to him from Dover’s Great Speeches. Have him outline the speech, lay the outline aside for a few days, and then try to use that outline to reproduce the speech. This allows him to exercise his analytic skills and gives him practice in writing, as well as the opportunity to become acquainted with others’ great writing. After he has done this a number of times, have him outline an argument of his own and then write it out. The emphasis at this point is on the clarity of thought rather than elegance of execution.

That comes later, in the high school years. The study of literature assumes a much greater importance in these years. In these years we weave the study of literature in with the study of history and the children write a number of papers presenting the arguments in their other studies. In twelfth grade we turn to a study of British Literature. In all of these years the student becomes familiar with great works of literature, examines them thoroughly both with respect to what they say and how they say it, and then tries to imitate them
in his own writing. Also, he studies poetry formally, carefully examining various poems in the light of specifically poetical considerations (alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, etc.). The Harp and Laurel Wreath published by Ignatius Press contains all the poems I mention in Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum as well as ‘terms to know for the study of poetry’, and study questions and answers for a large number of poems.

You can see that this education is not hard to implement in the home, because it works with the child’s natural inclinations. Further, it prepares him to do classical education in its fullness. The student whose education has enhanced the natural intellectual inclinations is ready for the formal study of the Trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric, and the Quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. These disciplines are all ordered to philosophy and theology. In acquiring the arts of the Trivium and the Quadrivium the student cultivates the areas of understanding that will make him able to do philosophy and theology well.

This is the education that was once the patrimony of all educated men. It is the education that formed western civilization. It is the education that recognizes that man is made in the image and likeness of God, and that that likeness lies in man’s intellect and will. Knowledge is a good in itself, because it makes one more perfectly what he is: a creature with the power to know, and more like God, who is the First Truth.

However, I know that not everyone is going to go on to a formal study of philosophy and theology. I wish they would, and in past times in Catholic colleges and universities they did. It was once the case that liberal education was seen as a prerequisite for any kind of specialization. (One of the most prominent architects in the country was quoted as saying that the best preparation for architecture was a liberal education.) Nonetheless, an education which prepares one to do these disciplines well, forms and strengthens the intelligence in such a way that any field of study can be undertaken successfully.

Additionally, the education offered to the homeschooled high school student, though it might lack some of the specialized information available in a traditional high school setting, is superior, in my experience, in its attention to the student’s understanding of the foundations of each subject. Home schooled students have actually learned what they have been taught, and oftentimes their mothers have learned along with them. In my opinion, that’s one of the chief benefits of home schooling.