Classical Education & the Homeschool

Homeschooling is an adventure, and it often feels like you're barely keeping ahead of your child. Why do we do it, and how can we do that well?

As we survey the educational ruins around us, classical and Christian education appears to be an idea whose time has come again, both in schools and in homeschools. More and more Christian parents are seeing the failures of modern education, and they are hungering for a substantive alternative, one that has been tested before and found to be good. Classical and Christian education presents them with just such an alternative.

This collection of essays by Douglas Wilson, Douglas Jones, and Wesley Callihan gives both a hearty defense of this kind of education, as well as descriptions of what it should look like on the ground.

72 pages.

View excerpt here.

"Parents are coming to see that it is simply not enough to pull the kids out of the government schools. When a demon is cast out, and nothing put in its place, the final result can be seven times worse (Mt. 12:45). Reactionary Christian education is consequently not really a permanent alternative. Many Christian parents who had initially just reacted to the godlessness of the government schools are now seeing the shallowness of that kind of Christian response. They have become hungry, on behalf of their children, for an education that is unabashedly Christian, rigorous, and thorough. At the same time, parents who think this way also commonly acknowledge they really do not fully understand what it is they desire.
This brief treatment aims to present some of the basic principles and methods of a classical and Christian education, tailored for use in a homeschool setting. One of the primary purposes of classical education is to equip the students to learn for themselves. So, in a similar way, the purpose of this booklet is to set interested parents on this path and to give them some of the basic information they will need to walk on it. Even though it is an unfamiliar path to many of us, it is still well-worn from centuries of use, and it should be possible for us to feel at home there once again." - From Douglas Wilson's Introduction