Okay, so maybe my title is unfair. Maybe calling Classical homeschooling hard isn’t going to ring true for everyone. But if you got a mediocre (at best) public school education, this method will teach you a ton! Oh, and the kids. The kids will learn a lot too.

Classical education’s modern mother is Susan Wise Bauer. Bauer wrote the Well Trained Mind in 1999, and laid out a pathway for an excellent education that focused on taking learning further and deeper than public schools would ever hope to go. She divides the 12 typical years of a child’s education into 3 phases each made up of 4 year cycles. Each of those 4 year cycles has a focus relevant to the child’s age and phase of learning.

This method is very popular among religious homeschoolers, and there are a lot of programs that emphasize parts of religion and theology to teach with this method. That isn’t what I’m going to talk about today. I’m going to focus on elements that secular homeschoolers may want to consider using from this method. I will also share that Susan Wise Bauer is a very interesting figure in the homeschool world. She is a Christian, and some of her materials skew towards that world view, however, her materials are not covered in Bible verses. This means that she has been labeled as too Christian for secular homeschoolers and too secular for Christian homeschoolers. I have heard her speak at multiple homeschool conferences and throughly enjoyed her homeschool advice. I have also used various products from her company: Peace Hill Press and felt they were quality programs that did not push religious content on my children.

History

One of the things that drew me to Classical education early in my homeschool journey, was the depth and breadth of the history education this method encourages. The suggestion is that your child learn the entire history of the entire world in 4 year cycles, so you go over the entire history of the entire world three times before they graduate high school. Year one you learn Ancient history: Egyptian pyramids, Greek Mythology and the rise of the Roman Empire. In year two you study the Middle Ages, which includes kings and serfs as well as Vikings. The third and fourth years worked up to the modern era.

As a student, I hated how history felt cobbled together in school. We learned some of this and some of that until high school. Then we had a year of World History and a year of American History, where I knew we were missing out on huge amounts of actual history, due to time constrains and the biases of our textbooks. I really felt short changed on learning about the history of the world.

Viewing my child’s education as a long, continuous experience where we could take our time and go into depth was inspiring to me. For my kids, we did not go through the entire cycle three times. We instead went through it once, then went down paths of learning various parts of history more in depth. One year we went deeply into pre-history, including the evolution of life on earth and dinosaurs. A couple of years we spent going more deeply into American History, which resulted in my Yellow Level programs. For my younger children, I realized I felt it was more relevant to learn the history of our own country before we got deeply into world history. While Ancient history is actually a ton of fun with younger kids, the Middle Ages is kind of hard to grasp before age 9.

My children actually loved learning history with this more in-depth approach. We did hands on activities and dug into history as the story of humanity. We learned about the history of the entire world, not just Europe and America but Asia, Africa, and Australia, too. I did not buy into the idea we needed to memorize parts of the story, as much as we needed to understand it.

Latin

Latin is ironically the language of both religion and science for the Western world. This makes it uniquely useful to your student’s education. One or the other is why teaching it to younger students is part of most Classical programs.  There are programs out there that will start your 6 year old off learning songs in Latin and memorizing root words. The idea that children in elementary school are great at memorizing is a core belief of Classical Education. The idea that your child will memorize now, and learn to use the information later, when they are older, is part of many Classical programs.

In the irony of my life, after saying I wasn’t the type of homeschooler that taught Latin, each of my kids separately wanted to learn Latin in middle school. Only one went on to make it their chosen language for high school. However, diving into Latin, even for just a short period of time, gave all of them a deeper understanding of how language works. For my dyslexic kid, it actually helped them examine English from a new perspective and that was helpful to their education in different ways.

I had no intention of teaching Latin until my kid asked to learn it. There are actually many ways to integrate some Latin word study into your student’s education, and I am a fan of those. There are various workbooks that teach Latin and Greek root words that are actually very helpful to know for understanding English. For example, knowing “bio” means life and “ology” means study of, makes it obvious that biology is the study of life. In the past, I have seen these workbooks put out by both science programs and English programs, so I chose different ones for different kids, depending on their interests and needs. There are also Latin programs that teach the language like any foreign language. Some of these programs emphasize translating the Bible from Latin while others focus on learning about ancient Rome. My favorite, Getting Started with Latin, is secular and really didn’t teach history or religion, just the language.

Language Arts

Classical education requires an education that includes classic literature. Many of these programs start introducing child appropriate “classics” to kids while they are still in elementary school. My own commentary is that picture books can also be classics. No one can tell me The Very Hungry Caterpillar is not classic literature that every child should know. Some children thrive with the introduction of high level literature early in their education. The important thing here, is to know your child and what they will get the most from. Reading them great books is always a good idea, but only if they are going to follow the story and understand it.

Language arts in many Classical programs also emphasize learning to write by doing copy work. I’m a fan of copy work for handwriting practice. It gives children a chance to write better sentences than they can create for themselves. There are even some children who learn to read and write at once from working on this skill. However, if your child has dyslexia this method won’t work. The child needs to be able to read the sentence, or at least most of the words in it, before they try to write it, even just copy work.

I have used various language arts programs from Peace Hill Press. I have found a lot of value in them. However, most of the programs were too much for us to complete in a single school year. Maybe that is because my kids are neurodivergent, or maybe they just want to sell you a book that is thick. I have found that skipping some of the lessons, so we cover the topic but don’t do every single version of it, works well enough for my kids. I love the depth of showing them how to diagram a sentence, but we don’t need to do that 100 times. Learning to summarize is important, but again, once we have the skill, we can move on to other things.

Cons

The Classical education model gives a super in-depth educational program that can prepare your child for college. The drawback is that it emphasizes stages of development that may not align with your child’s brain, especially if they are neurodivergent. The child that has some asynchronis development may be ready to discuss and problem solve at a deeper level than these elementary programs suggest. The ADHD child may not be able to memorize all the facts, ever. The ASD child may do many of the skill out of order.

The other drawback to this method, is that it can overwhelm parents. It is easy to start a school year thinking you can accomplish SO much, only to find you really can’t do that many things each week. Keeping up with stacks of books, different assignments and complex schedules is harder for some of us, and not a reasonable goal. This is when it makes sense to read all the ideas and just use what works for your family.