The following is based on one year of Greek in college (we used Athenaze as our text!). My understanding is that there are four kinds of Greek that people study to any degree: Homeric - the language of Homer - most universities introduce ancient Greek with Attic rather than Homeric Greek. Classical/Attic - the Athenian dialect, the language of the golden age of Greece. Studied by students of classics. The reason this is preferred in universities is that it is the language of the great Greek philosophers, as well as Herodotus, Thucydides, and the great dramatists. Biblical/New Testament/Koine Greek - the language of the New Testament, of the Hellenistic period, from when Greece was ruled by Rome. Studied by Biblical scholars. I believe that if you learn this, it isn't so hard to learn Attic, and vice-versa. Modern Athenaze (which teaches Attic Greek) does not strike me as being an easy text to use for anybody who isn't studying with a teacher. But that aside, I think it's a great text. I learned a lot of Greek from it very quickly.

There is no Rosetta Stone ancient Greek, only modern Greek. If there is one for Attic Greek, I want to know about it!

I don't expect experts to accept early reading as a practice without evidence. I do expect them to withhold judgment of what they are so plainly ignorant of. The phenomenon of children being taught to read at a very early age is so remarkable, and so much in tension with the dogmas of developmental psychology and early education, that I am surprised that virtually no case studies, much less careful surveys or longitudinal studies, have been of it. A researcher could make his or her reputation as a maverick--or as a great debunker--simply by taking on this very rich topic.

@Rivka--a fellow Reedie! Well, that explains a lot. :tongue_smilie: Doman certainly has a lot of weird ideas, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a lot of good ones, too. And being a quack is very different from his entire organization's being a pack of liars--because that's what they'd have to be, when they say over and over again that kids with Down syndrome, for example, are learning to decode by age 3. Admittedly, they could be lying, or they could be greatly exaggerating what success they've had, but I don't think so. The studies under way are not longitudinal, as far as I know--much to my disappointment. If I sometimes defend the proposition that very small children can read, it's because it seemed to that you sometimes implied or made arguments that imply that they can't. Well done on teaching your daughter early--I'm sure she greatly benefited from many early education experiences that you gave her, whether calling them "teaching" or "education" makes you uncomfortable or not. Also, I'm sure you have considered the proposition that, if your child had started to read a few years earlier than she did, she might be even farther along. Do you actually have a reason to think this is not the case? I doubt it. Similarly, the fact that our children were reading at about the same level at about the same age, yet mine started earlier, does not mean that mine did not experience advantages from reading earlier. It's possible that he would be much less advanced than he is now. In fact, considering his development, that seems to be just plain obvious. Of course, I don't have any way to test my claim, but it seems to me that if I did not use any early reading program with my son, he would not now be reading at the level that he is now. For what it's worth, I, personally, was definitely not reading chapter books when I was five, and neither was my wife. But because we undertook to teach him--and of course to read a lot to him and otherwise foster his thirst for knowledge--he is years ahead where both my wife and I were at his age.

Thanks for acknowledging that much. But it's not just bright kids. Glenn Doman and his organization have many examples of children with brain defects who were taught to read very early, too. See my earlier answer, to Amie. Let me add a little more here. On BrillKids.com, there are a number of parents who discovered techniques of early education only after having a few children. They've observed to us that teaching their babies to read was a lot easier than teaching their older children. In our case, it took some commitment and planning on my part, but it was fun, and it was not hard. Well, if he has no interest in learning to read, that could mean any number of things. Most of all, it probably means that nobody has ever shown him how in a way that is appropriate and appealing to a child of his age. Of course if you try to use "100 Lessons" on a 3-year-old, it might be hard. But if you use something simpler, more visual, with big letters, and you use short sessions and make sure the child is interested whenever you do teach him--that's a lot of "ifs," you'll observe--then it "magically" becomes both appealing and much easier to teach the child. I suspect you have a picture in your mind of what it is like to teach a 3-year-old (or younger--my 16-month-old can read most of the words that he can say) to read. It probably involves the parent sitting down with the child and saying, "Now Jack, look here at this page. Let's begin with #1. You recognize that first letter, right? What sound does that make? [etc.] Now, can you sound that out?" Well, if that's the picture you have in mind, I think you need to understand that there are other ways to do it, which are much more effective (and, of course, fun!). I agree with that much, as far as it goes. I also think it's a bad idea to push acceleration on a child that has no interest or aptitude. If you have to push learning on a child, you're doing something wrong. But you'll find, if you learn more about Doman's method and various others, that it's possible to make learning a joyful, engaging, interesting activity for a child. It's more like a game than like school. As soon as the child loses interest, you stop, period. In fact, as Doman says, it's better to stop before they lose interest, to give them a thirst for what you're teaching. Oh? Whoever told you that was incorrect. I have actually looked into the modest amount of research on the question of whether precocious readers (that's the term used in the literature) retain their early advantage. I've actually spent time at the library and read the papers (and a few books) on the subject. For your convenience I summarized it, here. Suffice it to say that the literature that exists supports the proposition that precocious readers retain their advantage through the third grade, and at least one study says through the sixth grade. There aren't any longitudinal studies that go past that age, that I know of, and there aren't any studies--I didn't find a single one, anyway--that indicates that ordinary-age readers catch up with precocious readers. I agree! And one of them is that they're capable of learning a whole lot more than we have been giving them credit for! Ouch..."developmentally appropriate." I've written quite a bit about that, too. I don't propose to make them into tiny kindergartners. Depending on the child, there are a good number of things that younger children really can't do, which kindergartners can do. It's just that, for probably most children, learning to decode written language is not one of them. That's really not more difficult for them than learning to speak. I mean no disrespect, but...nonsense! How did he learn? You put the materials there, someone had to tell him what the capitals are, etc. If you (or his teacher) weren't working with him in a way appropriate to his age, he wouldn't have learned that stuff, and you wouldn't know that he knew it if he did. It sounds to me like we might actually have a subtle sort of semantic dispute on our hands. I have no compunctions about saying that I tried to teach my son to read, and that I tried to teach him many other things. I simply say that "teaching" a child who is that young looks very different from teaching a first grader in a classroom.

We used a flashcard approach (my flashcards are available, free, here). It occupied, on average, 5-10 minutes of mealtime per day. We also watched "Your Baby Can Read" for (average) 15 minutes a day. We also read a whole bunch of books--but this is something I'd recommend to everyone regardless of whether they're trying to teach their children to read early. The point is that the specific things one has to do to teach a very young child to read does not involve a lot of time spent teaching the child. Other programs, like BrillKids.com and the Doman approach, do not require a big time commitment either. So the advantage from my point of view is that we had the task of teaching him to read out of the way several years in advance, and he could (and did) greatly benefit in those intervening years by being able to read to himself, or understand better what I read to him. Yes, we could have spent the time doing other things, but I regard this as time extremely well spent. It's hardly as if the time we spent learning to read diminished his time to play or our time to go out and do things as a family.

That age, 3.5, is not too young to learn how to blend. Some people here actually do have experience teaching kids this young to read. I doubt that the people who say (or imply) that it's not possible have such experience. Over on BrillKids.com you'll find a lot of parents who have demonstrated that a child can blend at 3.5 years old. Mine blended his first words at age 22 months. I don't mean to say it's easy to learn--it definitely isn't. Blending is definitely one of the most difficult parts of learning to read. But if you use certain techniques, you'll probably get the result you want. Tanikit has a good idea: an effective way to teach a little kid to blend is to do it for him. You sound out the word slowly, then a little faster. Then you ask the child to say the word (i.e., blend it). If the child still can't or doesn't want to say the word, then blend it yourself, but very slowly. Then say, "Now you say it!" (Be sure to distinguish sounding out and blending. The point is that you sound it out, and the child then blends it.) If you do that often enough, they'll be able to from you sounding out the world to them blending it. The next step is for them to blend it (preferably, in their head--if they just come out with the whole blended word, don't insist that they sound it out). As ekfk says, ReadingBear.org can help a lot for drilling just this way. I'm sure I'm not biased when I say that! It's also very important to do this (1) systematically, starting with the very simplest CVC words and always working on the same phonics rules until mastered, before going onto a new one, and (2) when your child is fully alert and interested in tackling the task, and also (3) to keep a positive attitude yourself. If you make it fun for your child, they'll be much more likely to get over the hump.

Someone mentioned on an earlier thread that the most efficient way to learn a foreign language is in a focused immersion school. That sounded plausible to me. A friend told me how he learned Latin at a six-week immersion program one summer, and after that he could read Aquinas. It got me thinking. :D Instead of doing math for a half hour a day, or whatever, for the whole schooler year, you'd do math for a week and a half, two times a year (or more often, if you want to speed it up). You'd be doing three one-hour sessions every day for a week and a half, and that would get you through half a year of a math book. This would probably be more efficient, which is to say that the student would learn more per hour of studying. I say this because of lack of distractions, less need of review (at least during the actual study period--if you didn't do periodic refreshers between intensive sessions, you'd need review), and stronger neural signals due to recency. Imagine doing all of homeschooling this way, a little like the way St. John's College does focused study of one text for one period of time, to the exclusion of anything else. You do math a few weeks, then writing, then science, then history, and so forth. Or maybe, just to keep things a little more interesting, you do two (but only two) subjects at a time. Of course, I'm not the first one to think of this. I'm curious--has anyone tried it much? Is there any reason why you wouldn't want to do it more, if you don't? I imagine most kids couldn't put up with it. But suppose that they could...

I haven't tried that but I do have one thought. One problem with it might be that some places have a lot more history than others. For example, South American history is not nearly as deep as Middle Eastern history. Would you want to spend 10 times more on Middle Eastern geography than on South American geography? Or would you want to study South American history for much longer than it "deserves"? Or maybe you're saying that the geography wouldn't always match up with the history that precedes it?

As co-founder of Wikipedia, I'll just say: make sure your child avoids all the porn. To give you an idea of the sort of people you're dealing with, a huge contingent of Wikipedians strongly opposes any movement toward even allowing people to hide pornographic images from view. I.e., they oppose a personal, opt-in filter, that you have to go into settings to turn on and which applies to your account only. The information is often correct, although often presented in an amateurish fashion. Whether it is reliable is a different and more difficult question. I wish I could recommend Citizendium.org for school purposes but frankly it doesn't have enough content yet. Check back in a few more years--things might change! For immediate practical purposes, we have a subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica on my iPad. Works beautifully for most of our purposes. Occasionally we do a web search, and occasionally that does bring us to Wikipedia, when nothing else seems convenient. I would not let my young child spend time alone on Wikipedia for any purpose.

The first one is much, much too difficult for a 10-year-old. Probably too difficult for most high school students. The second isn't about political philosophy...? Laura is probably right in her recommendation, but that looks hard for 10-year-olds to me. Depends on the child, I'm sure. I'd look in the Amazon philosophy category and also books like this which concern civics. A good civics text should cover some political philosophy, introducing the concepts you mention.

Speaking as a former college logic instructor who is starting to teach his son logic, there are four relevant types of logic book. In order from most basic to most difficult: 1. The most basic sort is the Prufrock Press "different kinds of logic-related puzzles" books, like Lollipop Logic. These aren't really logic, but they are preparatory and probably helpful. They aren't necessary to have done, when a child is old enough, but they will probably make things easier. 2. Critical Thinking texts. These tend to put heavy emphasis on fallacies and discussion of examples of arguments. Sometimes they introduce traditional logic, and there is some overlap. 3. Whole-hog traditional logic courses. In this sort of text the student is exposed to Aristotelian logic. In this kind of logic, the variables are terms (concepts, classes) instead of propositions (sentences). You learn about traditional syllogisms and their forms. Usually contains some fallacy work and also, occasionally, basic propositional logic. 4. Propositional logic. This is what mathematicians call logic. It involves learning various formal rules governing whole propositions (and alternate ways of representing terms) and using them to construct proofs, similar to geometry proofs. If you aren't mathematically inclined and never had a course in this, you would definitely have to take a course or carefully study it yourself before trying to teach it to your kid. Most people would find type 1 accessible in elementary grades, type 2 in grades 5 and up, type 3 in grade 7 and up, and type 4 in grade 10 and up. Of course, your mileage may vary.

Well, this is quite a surprise! I wouldn't have guessed so many people are doing what we're doing--combining MEP with two other programs!

All, I'm writing just to get input/feedback/reaction about our current math practice. Ever since someone pointed my attention, about a month ago, to MEP, saying it's "better than Singapore, and free too," I had to check it out. I printed out 30 pages and I thought my son would try it out, just to see if it would be any good. I thought he'd rip through the 30 pages in an hour, maybe, because after all, it was Kindergarten math, right? Noooo...if anything, it takes him longer to go through this than it does the same amount of Singapore first grade math. (Well, that might be because he really likes to draw the figures and color things in, the way it instructs the student to do.) He really likes MEP. He likes it even more than Singapore Math or Two Plus Two Is not Five, which is what we've been doing. We're on SM 1B, and 3/4 of the way through 2+2≠5. We were switching back and forth between these two, spending 15-30 minutes a day. Then in MEP we started working on Practice Book 1a, which is supposed to be Kindergarten math (a year behind SM 1B). Since we started MEP, we haven't stopped. My son likes it and I find the value we get out of it compelling. He also likes math and doesn't mind the extra workbook. In fact, we discuss the addition of books and stuff and he is all for continuing with all three books (and Life of Fred once a month or so). We've done 15 minutes of MEP and then 15 minutes of one of the others. This means we progress more slowly through the others. You might think that this is just slowing us down generally. Well, I'll tell you--I was surprised that in this supposedly Kindergarten level math program, he has been learning quite a bit of new stuff, like >, <, >=, <=, and ≠. We are also doing quite a bit of review, of course, but because the program is so different from SM and 2+2≠5, it feels less like repetition and more like highly valuable consolidation. The stuff he's gone through in MEP he really has down. The stuff he has gone through in the other sources, well, he understands all right, but in a few weeks or months it might be a little iffy. This gets me thinking about the merits of this sort of procedure. We're using SM to break new ground. My son finds SM welcoming, enjoys the concrete-to-abstract method and the multiple approaches, and he does seem to understand what he's gone over in it. 2+2≠5 is not so popular with him but he is OK with it. He does enjoy making progress memorizing his math facts, and this seems like a great way to do it. MEP is something different. It gets him thinking more deeply about what he's already gone over (even more so than with SM), which is something I really want to get him to do. It also constitutes excellent logic training, which I also think is important. (I was able to introduce him to variables and got him all excited about taking 3 + x = 7 and solving for x.) I don't know if we'll keep it up, but I kind of hope we do. This seems like a great way to make sure he has the deepest understanding he can get of the material. I do worry, though, that three different math books is a little overkill. But we're working enough in them to be able to get through a year's worth of topics in a year, so... Comments?

All, I just wanted to say thanks--I'd continue but I'm thinking about other stuff now. I did read all the replies, though, and learned a lot from this conversation. You haven't heard the last of me on these philosophical issues, trust me!

I think geography is extremely underrated in its importance and the amount of time spent on it. Sadly, there aren't very many good series of geography books, and if there is any geography program for early to middle elementary that is both detailed and really stand-out, I don't know about it, and I've looked. Still, there are lots of good ways to approach the subject. The way we've chosen is by reading a series of books, one or two per country and several general introductions to the continents. We skip over the smaller countries. In a way, we're approaching it long-term and systematically, a little like the SOTW four-year plan, just applied to continents. We've been doing South America for the last five months, 15-30 minutes per day. If you're looking at first grade material, and you wanted to do something similar, the best series IMO would be True Books and, for more introductory stuff, Rookie Read-About books. There are also many text-heavy but still usable single-volume atlases or encyclopedias of geography. We've got several and use them, although the books easily outstrip them in detail. I also like Children Just Like Me which someone mentioned, and it is probably accessible to most first-graders. In addition to books, we spend quite a bit of our time (lately, maybe half) looking at pictures, videos, globes, maps, etc., to help bring the text alive. This really makes geography fun for both of us. We also occasionally trace or draw maps. More discussion related to my approach: http://larrysanger.org/2011/09/what-is-the-best-way-to-teach-geography/ http://larrysanger.org/2011/11/what-are-the-best-books-about-countries-for-children/ http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=326959

We rarely have problems. When we have had, we fixed it by lowering the mic input level, getting rid of background noise like babbling babies, or switching mics. It helps to diagnose if you try the feature where you can record your voice and play it back, seeing the waveform. We've found a few times that the mic level was too high that way, or the kid was just talking too loud. One other thing, which I am constantly having to tell my son: wait for the ding! If you start talking before the ding, it won't get your full answer.

I had to reply to this one briefly, too: Of course not. But you seem to be under the impression that people who spend many, many hours teaching their children to read don't understand this distinction. Why think that? Believe me, they know when their children have merely memorized individual words, or individual phonemes, but cannot decode. (I know, because many of them have asked me for advice, and I tell them to use ReadingBear.org ;-) . Not that I'm biased or anything.) My point is that many children can indeed decode at a surprisingly early age--as early as 18 months. You might find this hard to believe, but it is a fact. And you know what they say--you can have your own opinions, but you can't have your own facts. There is nothing really to interpret here. If you tried real hard to be unbiased, you too would probably be forced to admit that some of those sub-three-year-olds were decoding very nicely at an early age. Sometimes, probably, kids who start reading in kindergarten or first grade can learn to read faster than a kid who starts at age 12 months. But typically, children are reading at the second grade level when they are seven. We (on brillkids.com--don't worry, I'm independent of them--and elsewhere) have lots and lots of examples of kids reading at the second grade level when they are three. I don't say that early reading is necessary. I say it is possible for many children and probably very beneficial when achieved, and too easily cast aside by parents who mistakenly think that the research or experts are against it, without actually being acquainted with the actual state of knowledge on this narrow topic.

Gosh, where to begin. Thanks to everyone for the lively debate and thoughtful responses! Ester Maria, you've made some perfectly sound arguments. With maybe one exception, I agree with everything you've said. I too would disagree with someone who had said that a simple-minded commitment to efficiency of all sorts in education, without adequate attention to the end sought. I'm glad that's not what I said, though! ;) Let me repeat my principle just to contextualize the following: "Seize every opportunity to help the individual student to learn efficiently–which occurs when the student is interested in something not yet learned but is capable of learning it, and especially when learning it makes it easier to learn more later." By the way, @OrdinaryTime--that doesn't say that efficiency is a measuring stick for a solid education. I didn't discuss the goal of education, but the means of education. If you're disagreeing with with me that knowledge is the primary goal of education, saying that ultimately it's character-building, then your complaint is not about my principle but the assumptions about educational goals I make in applying the principle. And @GGardner, efficiency in this sense is not efficiency in the physics sense, which is indeed a ratio. In the sense I'm employing, efficiency is simply a measure of how well suited the use of time is to the end of getting knowledge. Someone who does nothing toward getting knowledge has zero efficiency, in this sense. Why do I focus on efficiency, of all things? Why that word, or concept? Because I find myself actually agreeing that lots of educational activities aren't entirely wastes of time. Doing projects of various sorts, doing six years of gradually more difficult grammar work in workbooks, reading textbooks, letting kids spend hours upon hours developing their own non-academic hobbies during prime working time, spending 90% of school time in on-the-job training at age 14, etc., etc.--these and many more things strike me as plausible in some sense. But at the end of the day, I've acquainted myself adequately with such things and decided not to use them with my child. I find the endless drumbeat of progressive educators on some of these scores (the project method, "experiential learning," etc.) obnoxious. I ask myself why. Ultimately, it is because the methods in question do not serve the cause of knowledge efficiently. Again, they are not exactly a waste of time, it's just that doing other sorts of things during the limited time we have to study will result in a better education overall. Notice that, in making this argument, I am not saying that efficiency in this (or any other) sense is the only consideration in making decisions about education. The principle is, again, neutral as to the precise goal of education (it only speaks of "learning"). There might be other principles that refine or qualify this one. So back to Ester's post, which I found to be very interesting. "Efficiency doesn't guarantee effectiveness" is just a way to say that getting one job done efficiently (like getting knowledge into the student's brain) doesn't guarantee that the correct job has been done (ensuring the information is deeply understood). Agreed. But then you're not disagreeing with me on efficiency, you might be disagreeing with me about the goal at which I am aiming. Or you might not--after all, I mention understanding several times in my blog post, and in fact I agree that deep understanding is paramount. I would in fact say that the question is how most efficiently to give the student deep understanding of the world. On this, you (Ester) say that children should be allowed to discover things for themselves and while this might not be the most efficient (fastest) way of learning something, it is the most effective (presumably, because of superior understanding). Well, I think that depends on the field and on the age. Lots of progressives want students to follow "discovery learning" or "inquiry learning" but they end up having students attempting to prove some abstract laws of physics, for example, that none but the most brilliant of students have any chance of discovering except with quite a bit of hand-holding. Enough hand-holding and it's not "discovery learning" anymore. There are lots of things that a child simply cannot discover on his own--facts about history and geography, for example. They have to be told, and the more clearly and directly, the better. When students get older, like college philosophy students, then yeah--you can expect them to think things through for themselves. But they can't do that effectively until they've seen many, many instances of teachers (or authors of books, or whatever) thinking things through. It makes sense in philosophy, so I know just what you mean. It also makes sense to have math students choose their own methods for working out a problem. It does not make so much sense to have elementary students try to discover the methods themselves, however. In fact, I'd say that what can be taught directly, and what can be taught indirectly by asking students questions (or inducing them to ask questions of themselves), is so complex and variable that the whole direct instruction vs. constructivism debate is pointless. Pick a particular topic, and we can debate about the effectiveness of different methods of teaching it. Sometimes, asking questions is the best way to conduce to understanding. Other times, that's silly and the only way is to have the students, say, read a book very carefully. If we can make a generalization, it's that direction instruction works best for younger children and when the subject matter is purely factual, while the inquiry method works best for older students and when the subject matter is highly complex and open to interpretation. There's much more to say, but I have run out of time and need to head to bed! Wait, let me add one concession--if I were to rewrite that blog post, I would be sure to say more about understanding as the goal I have in mind.

Finally, prairiegirl: Sometimes philosophers sound arrogant to non-philosophers when they are simply stating their views. Or maybe I just am arrogant. :D I don't think I am, I hope I'm not, and I'd feel bad if I decided I had been. Anyway, this is just how I write. "Reject" is not a strong word in my mouth. When a philosopher tells you he rejects a view, he means simply that he disagrees with it. 8FillTheHeart rejects very early learning--I respect that and don't fault her for it. Radical unschoolers reject many of my views, or would if they knew about them. I don't fault them for that, either. If there is some particular point that you think I'm wrong about, please say what it is and why I'm wrong. But please don't try to make me feel bad for forthrightly stating my opinion, just because it might seem to entail a criticism of how other people teach their children. If they get upset about my doing merely that, then boo hoo for them. As someone actually trained in philosophy for many years, let me say that I don't know what you mean when you imply that I think that philosophy "trumps" real life. Philosophies can fail to cohere with common experience, and unlike some philosophers, I frequently criticize philosophical views that do so. But then, I'm unusual as a philosopher, because I actually endorse the method of common sense (you can look it up--Thomas Reid and G. E. Moore are my heroes). But simply claiming that the things I said in my previous posts are somehow refuted by "experience," if that's what you want to do, is unimpressive. If you have an experienced-based argument to make against a general claim that I made--for example, if you want to offer a counterexample--then please do so. Just bear in mind that I know some of the things I've said were painted with a broad brush, and that more careful, long-winded writing is needed to get the nuance right. Finally, let me clarify that when I say that early learning is efficient, I do not mean teaching children things they cannot understand and have no interest in. Probably, the methods I'm describe are unfamiliar to you. I never felt like I was pulling my hair out. The methods I have in mind routinely work, and are enjoyed by the child, when they are properly used by parents or teachers. They just happen to result in knowledge of certain concepts several years before children normally grasp them in our society at present. Descending my podium! :D

Tibbie, thanks for the responses. Basically, I've discovered that we can really improve our grasp of and excitement about a text by looking at pictures of unfamiliar objects and places, watching videos of "action" stuff like waterfalls or battle re-enactments, and listening to examples of ethnic music (and other things, like peacock yelps). Since we can't usually go to the distant places and times of the things we're studying, or see objects we don't have in the house, this sort of multimedia is crucial to explaining meaning. I used to love the few pictures in our family's big fat Webster's dictionary when I was growing up. This is the same thing, only better--it helps teach concepts. I think it's of paramount importance that children routinely come to understand all the words (and place names, etc.) in a text. Another thing we do is look up place names, even casual asides, on a globe, atlas, or iPad app. You'd think it often doesn't matter, but time and again I discover that things that I might have thought were unimportant turn out to be pretty big deals. I'll give you an example. We were reading a mediocre geography book (I bought this one before I became a connoisseur of these things) about Argentina, which mentioned that a certain town was in the Lake District of Argentina--as if the reader would know what that was, or would care. A better book would have spent at least a couple sentences explaining what the Lake District was and why it might matter. So we put down the book, looked at the atlas, and observed that indeed there were a lot of long lakes (like Scottish lochs) in the far south Andes, near the border of Argentina and Chile. We then used Google Maps or Earth (I forget which) to view a satellite image. I noticed glaciers there. Then we went back to the text and we were then much better able to understand what it was talking about when it referred to a certain national park. We looked up pictures of the national park on the iPad, and it showed some very common pix of South American glaciers, pix that my son and I had actually seen before, in other sources. So that's where that glacier is, I said. I don't know if my son was as impressed by the connection as I was, but he often is. Another example is, as you observe, using other printed sources to supplement a main source. We started doing this with SOTW--we would read a chapter, then go to a historical atlas, then maybe a historical encyclopedia. Now we're doing this more systematically--we read several chapters of SOTW Vol. 2, then we read the (roughly) corresponding sections of three other sources. The repetition is not at all boring, in fact it makes the stuff more interesting--it is exactly what is needed to make better sense of SOTW. We also do this with fiction books from time to time. While reading Little House on the Prairie recently, we looked up the location of Independence, pictures of Osage Indians, and routinely we look up definitions, pronunciations, and pictures of unusual things mentioned. Somebody might say that pictures ruin imagination; but how can you imagine something if you've never seen a single example of it? On another thing you mentioned, I've read and skimmed a fair bit of Charlotte Mason, and read quite a bit of CM websites, but never actually dived head-first in to her books themselves--I must do that soon. Thanks also to you and others for all the background info and pointers about classical education. Just a couple of responses to 8FillTheHeart: I'm sure you're right, but you're talking about the efficiency of the teacher/parent's time use. I was talking about the efficiency of an educational approach for purposes of educating the child--different thing. I'll try not to embarrass you too badly here, but I've written a book-length essay on this subject, so I disagree and know whereof I speak. :-) In fact, my essay is probably the single most complete, best researched, and most balanced source of information on the topic available, so if you want to learn more, or gain a new perspective, please read it. (How that for arrogance, huh?!) Here's a direct link to the PDF--it's 100% free. Your views are very understandable and though I disagree, I don't blame you for thinking as you do. You've stated the mainstream attitude on the subject pretty well. But, without repeating my essay here, suffice it to say that there are quite a few people with brain defects who taught their children to decode at the first or second grade level when their children were still preschoolers. Given all those examples--and the many other regular folks who have used programs like "Your Baby Can Read" successfully--genius-level intelligence is clearly not required for a child to learn to read early. In some ways, learning to read as a baby or toddler is easier than as a five-year-old. This sounds like crazy talk, I'm sure, but it's not speculation, it's observation. The fact is that very, very few experts on reading, early education, or child development have had any significant experience with the methods that people have successfully used to teach their children to read, since the 1960s. The phenomenon simply hasn't been studied. Though thousands upon thousands of children have started reading before the age of two, and were well able to read brand new picture books with good understanding at age two or three, there is not so much as a case study of this phenomenon (i.e., parents deliberately teaching babies to read) in the literature. And, typical experts that they are, these experts pretend that since they don't know about it and haven't observed it, the phenomenon doesn't really exist. Well, speaking as a parent who taught his child deliberately and observed precisely how his child learned how to read beginning at age 22 months, speaking as a parent who talks nearly daily with other parents who have done similar things with their children, for me and us, it's a daily living reality. Not theory! :-) By the way, one thing I did not do is force material created for kindergartners or first graders on my child when he was 2 or 3. I agree, that's a bad idea. The methods used for teaching very little kids are significantly different from the ones used for teaching first graders. Glad to hear it! Chopping my post into two as the system is complaining...

Thank you, Tibbie! Well, I'd love to have feedback on today's blog post, "Efficiency as a basic educational principle," which is very much along the lines of what I started in post #1 in this thread. Here is the principle in question: "Seize every opportunity to help the individual student to learn efficiently–which occurs when the student is interested in something not yet learned but is capable of learning it, and especially when learning it makes it easier to learn more later." Using this I explain why I come down where I do on often-controversial educational issues, which I have explained elsewhere, such as on my blog: 1. Very early learning, by certain methods, is efficient learning. 2. Homeschooling’s main advantage is its efficiency. 3. Unschooling, or at least “radical†unschooling, is often inefficient. 4. Memorizing some facts is efficient. 5. Reading many carefully-chosen, well-written books is an efficient way to learn. 6. Incorporating illustrative multimedia to supplement reading is efficient. 7. Learning the texts of Western civilization is efficient. 8. Grounded in enough reading, it is much more efficient to write a lot than to do “language arts†workbooks. 9. Ed tech’s main appeal is its efficiency. When inefficient, it sucks. 10. The project method is inefficient. 11. Many textbooks are inefficient. The details are in the post.

Thanks! Now I know!

I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but this sounds quite condescending and disrespectful. Unfortunately, you didn't understand what I was trying to do. If I had written as though I had the answers on practical questions of how to homeschool, then yeah--I should feel duly chastised. I believe that what you, and others commenting here, are doing is basically projecting your own past experiences with educational theorizing on to me. But what I was doing, instead, was trying to articulate a few tentative thoughts on general issues. I have been theorizing about education since I was a graduate student in philosophy in the early 1990s. When a philosopher writes philosophy, it is often not meant as a definite or especially practical proposal. It is meant as an attempt to understand general or abstract issues. So it is obvious to me, from the get-go, that how general claims might need to be applied is very much up in the air. If you will look at my contributions on this forum so far, you will see that I'm seeking answers and help on plenty of practical issues. I don't think I have all the answers. As a skeptically-inclined philosopher, I know I don't have them. Still, which of the many options I choose is often informed, to some extent, by my general views on education, its aims and methods. And just as much, when I go to formulate my general views on education, as I do in this blog post from today, I am often making very broad generalizations based on how I've observed things go with my son. On unschooling, your point isn't clear. If you're saying that people combine an unschooling approach with a classical approach, well, I already knew that some people do that, and I'm surprised if you think I wouldn't have figured that out. I'm not judging any particular homeschooling family--doing that would require careful examination of circumstances. See the above link for some still-brief but more nuanced thoughts on unschooling. As to examining my child and tailoring his education to his needs--well, you don't know me, so I'll tell you a few things. I have written somewhere north of 150,000 words just for my personal consumption over the last five years or so--since I started systematically teaching and studying how to teach my son before he was one. I am constantly thinking about how he's doing, what works, what isn't working, and so forth. I constantly go back and forth from the ridiculously general to the extremely practical/narrow. Of course, I've read lots of books and talked to a lot of people, especially about early education. I've been very much blessed with the time to think about all this stuff. I appreciate that others often lack the time or inclination for this sort of thing. For me, it's fascinating and my main hobby. If my child had a serious learning disability, I would go to work studying that, and of course tailor our approach to his needs. Whether this would involve giving up classical approach, that depends on how you define "classical," I'm sure. General theories, if well formulated, are not apt to go to the window.

Thanks for the recommendations! Climbing Parnassus has been on my wish list for a while...the others, well, they look awfully Catholic for my tastes. I mean, I'm sure they'd be interesting, if I had time...