I don't think we ever really addressed these questions. Sad to say, we've lost at least one long-time poster in these threads due to the recent privacy issues. 😢 I hope there are still some of Father Donnelly's readers on the boards who'd like to discuss how this could actually work. My thoughts for now are limited to history, as it's the subject I've been trying to figure out for my own family. There's an excerpt from a speech by Father Donnelly about teaching history here, in the Catholic Historical Review (circa 1924). He says that the goals for history at the high school level are: 1) the mastery of essential facts, in an interesting and truthful way (without filling the students' heads with scandalous or unsavory information, which is best left for the college or university) 2) the development of skill in narrative composition, through the close study and imitation of models. The traditional classical course included many Greek and Roman historical narratives, which served the latter purpose. For the modern high school student, we can use equivalent English models. This is going to be more challenging than simply finding a reasonably well-written "living book." On the other hand, he doesn't expect the teacher to use these classic books to teach all of the facts. A good textbook, or some other general overview, is necessary as well. For the early high school years (if I'm understanding correctly), he also recommends using historical fiction, "stirring biographies," films, and other activities to make history more enjoyable. With this in mind, I had a look at some Catholic homeschool providers to see if they assigned any suitable narrative history books. Several programs do use works by Herodotus et al., but these are translations, so I'm not sure they're ideal from a literary standpoint. For non-fiction written in English (other than primary documents), the pickings are slim. MODG is probably the closest. They use narrative history books by Warren Carroll, Winston Churchill, and others. Kolbe uses Paul Johnson's Modern Times. Angelicum's "Great Books" curriculum looks to me to have no history books in the early modern and modern years, other than Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley, which is listed as an optional extra. They do include a lot of history in middle school, with Catholic Textbook Project's Light to the Nations in 6th and 7th grade, and Lands of Hope and Promise in 8th. This seems very inappropriate to me. RC History seems inappropriate in the opposite direction. They assign historical fiction all through high school, and put The Boys' and Girls' Herodotus in the 10th-12th grade level. And Seton's entire history curriculum is textbooks, mostly Anne Carroll. But then, they don't claim to be "classical." My impression, after looking at all these lists, is that there isn't a standard "modern" and "rigorous" way of teaching high school history. People from all of these programs have gone on to be successful in various college majors, likely including history. And this is just the book selection. It's not even getting into what they actually do with the books. I think the mysterious formula for a high school history credit probably comes down to "reading some sort of books to do with history" and "writing some sort of essay." I'm sure we can pull this off while sticking mostly to Father Donnelly methods. I'm going to submit this post now, lest it get eaten (as happened to my previous attempts). Will post more later, if there's anyone out there. 🙂

Thank you both for the posts. Apps are looking too complicated for me at the moment, so it seems that sheets of paper are the way to go. I’ll just have to choose a format. Will be including the menu, shopping and to-do lists as well. mms, I can relate to your last sentence! It only occurred to me now, after reading your post, that I’ve been attempting to use Great Big Planners for three years in a row. 🙄 The first one, a disc-bound teacher’s planner that I found at Target, was enormous but still lacked enough space. Then last year, in a moment of stress-induced folly, I bought a smaller (but still bulky) disc-bound one at a craft store. It had a nice cover and lots of cutesy stickers, which I guess I thought would make all the difference. 😄 This year’s model, a standard spiral-bound one, was relatively streamlined by comparison. My older children each have their own half-size planner that gets pretty full with assignments, and that’s not even counting the younger ones. Not sure how I thought I could fit notes and reminders for all of that, along with enrichment activities and my personal stuff, in any sort of weekly spread!

Back to the planner question for EFL style lessons! I started out this year using a full-sized teacher planner, with a row for each day of the week and a column for each child, but it’s inconvenient to carry around and still doesn’t have enough space. I’m wondering if it would work to have a weekly planning sheet and record sheet (separate or combined) for each child, which I could keep on a clipboard, and store in a binder when done. The other possibility I’ve been thinking about is some sort of app (iOS or Android) that I could use to make notes for each of our meetings. This would have the advantage of letting me add links to web pages and stored documents, either for my own reference or to share with the children. I already have the meetings in my iPhone calendar, but there doesn’t seem to be a simple way to add notes for each event, or to export or print them all if needed. It seems like I’d need something different, but I don’t know what. LostCove, I remember you were experimenting with your own planning sheets years ago. Have you found something that works for you?

It turns out that my largest planning problem has kind of solved itself. I decided to start with the easier part: choosing the “extensive reading” for my less enthusiastic high schooler. This resulted in some good possibilities from the Prose & Poetry series, from suggestions online, and (after some prodding) from my own memory. After that, I decided to just take the models from what was being read, but otherwise stay more or less with the Model English plan. I realize that this is embarrassingly obvious, and very likely what Father Donnelly would recommend in our situation, but apparently I had to take the long way around. So, on the up side, no need to keep looking for a hand-holding textbook. But on the down side, no hand-holding textbook. 😬 Ora pro nobis!

Yes, there are formal outlining exercises in the second half of Book I, and in chapter X of Book II. He refers to this as “analysis,” or, more specifically, “tabular analysis.” By the time these exercises are begun, though, the students have already written many imitation exercises. I suppose this is why the original title of Book I is Imitation and Analysis, rather than vice versa. From the beginning of the course, the teacher is supposed to help the students understand the structure of each of the models studied, both as an aid to comprehension and as a guide to composition. This can be done through oral discussion (my 1941 edition of Book I has an example lesson in the appendix), and also, where the divisions are regular and orderly, by the teacher doing a tabular analysis on the board (suggested in chapter VI of the Teacher’s Manual for Book II). Throughout each lesson, the workings of style and structure are taught together, with “excellences” pointed out by the teacher and students. As the TM says, “These benefits may partly atone for the violence done to literature by shredding it in this fashion.” 😄 So there is certainly plenty of outlining, as we would call it. It just has quite a different feel from the many textbooks that have the students do their own outlining almost from the beginning, and then use those outlines to write their compositions. They tend to give the impression that the study and imitation of models is an aid to the teaching of outlining, rather than vice versa. I can’t post much more for the next few days, as I still need to firm up my own high school English plans for the year. But thank you for the interesting and relevant Edwin Miller link, and I think you’re on the right track with the big-picture ideas. mms, sorry to hear that your little ones aren’t well. I hope your family is feeling better soon!

I think Edwin Miller would be as surprised as anyone to hear that he advised spending a whole year just on writing letters. In the first book, letters are taught in 8 of 21 chapters. Even in those weeks, there are a number of unrelated or loosely related activities, including oral composition on various subjects. Connecting this back to Father Donnelly, while I don’t recall him saying much about letters, they were certainly a part of the traditional Jesuit curriculum. The letters of Cicero were studied, translated, and imitated, in a variety of ways, in the upper Grammar classes.

On looking through both books of Model English, I realized that the problem of outdated topics isn’t nearly as bad as I was remembering. I must have been mixing them up with some other series. The topics are mostly taken from everyday experiences that would still take place today, and from sports, literature, history, and nature. We have difficulty with the “everyday” topics too, so I guess we’re just not great at coming up with ideas quickly, especially when we’re supposed to be fitting them into a specific form. Not sure how normal this is! Maybe the point is just to work through it. I need to take another look at the suggestions for scheduling and lesson structure. Also, it’s occurred to me that maybe my assumptions are wrong, and students sometimes did do research for these compositions. 🤔 Or maybe the teacher sometimes chose a single topic for everyone to use, and they discussed it in class before writing. What do you all think?

Maxwell’s books include literary models, but they also use late 19th century schoolhouse methods, with their heavy emphasis on structure and outlining. Many popular homeschool writing curricula, such as WWS and IEW, follow some variation on this approach. Model English is based on the classical pedagogy described in Father Donnelly’s Principles of Jesuit Education in Practice. If you’re familiar with at least one of those books, the differences with the above will be apparent. For those who are new to the subject, while I don’t have the time (or probably even the ability) to post a concise yet thorough explanation, the books, especially PJEP, are a great place to start. Of course, if someone has already read them and disagrees with some aspect of this way of teaching, we can discuss that. In the U.K. and Commonwealth countries, the teaching of English composition was influenced by French methods that date back to the Renaissance, and derive pretty directly from the classical model. There are some differences from one country to another, which might be interesting to discuss; e.g., the Canadian texts tend to make fewer explicit connections between the analysis of models and the composition exercises. But the greater value placed e.g. on style and learning by example, and the lesser emphasis on structure and rule-based teaching, are still quite apparent. Miller’s series is different from any of the above, but from what I’ve seen so far, I think it’s closer to the classical approach. Beyond that, though, I think he’s brilliantly creative (though, again, his ideas might not all translate well to homeschooling). The emphasis on letter-writing at the beginning of Book I is one example. He suggests asking the administration to require students to provide a correctly written letter of explanation for each absence or tardiness. This increases the students’ motivation both to write well, and to show up on time. Then he uses these first two very simple letters as an opportunity to work on skills that many 9th graders might need help with, such as mechanics. The next few letters are much longer, and more literary in both style and content. After working with all of the letter types, the students will have experience with descriptive, narrative, expository, and argumentative writing, although the author doesn’t point this out until those terms are introduced and defined in chapter 13. It seems like a great way to handle all the usual topics covered in the beginning of a composition course, with a new class of probably somewhat reluctant or uncertain students. To me, it’s a very neat book.

The author of that paper, Edwin Miller, went on to write a high school textbook series titled Practical English Composition. Archive.org has Book I, Book II, and Book IV, and HathiTrust has all four books. (ETA: Google has Book III in downloadable form.) Father Donnelly mentioned that there was a spate of imitation-based writing texts in the US, following the publication of Model English. This must have been one of the series he was thinking of. It seems rather good to me at first glance, with an interesting blend of classic literature and practical speaking and writing exercises, and I might add it to the list of possible alternative or transitional resources. The lessons assume that the class sets itself up as a “literary society,” though, which might make it difficult to adapt to homeschooling. Early in the first book, he says that “most boys and girls of fourteen” are familiar with Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome.” I sense a pattern in these expectations. 😄 (And those are indeed beloved by my most eager reader of classics.)

Here’s one from archive.org. This was written for use in middle school or early high school. Composition From English Models, Book II by Ernest J. Kenny (Longmans, circa 1920) A few more random thoughts. We have some children’s books that were written around 1930 by Aline Kilmer, Joyce Kilmer’s wife and a poet herself. They’re humorous stories about a family, and the children seem to be based on her own. In one story, a boy of about ten years old is depicted as being in stitches while reading The Pickwick Papers. Similarly, in the big Great Books thread, I mentioned a British composition textbook for 5th-6th graders (circa 1940), which assumes that they‘ve all read Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield. So far, only one of my children has been strongly drawn to this sort of leisure reading in the elementary years. Another child read many challenging books at that age, but tended more toward non-fiction and fantasy. This has me wondering if perhaps one difference is that there weren’t so many choices for mentally stimulating occupations in the days when these textbooks were written. And here‘s a rather amusing paper, given at an English teachers’ conference in 1914. It’s by the principal of a Detroit high school. He starts out sounding like an opponent of the Model English approach, but by the end, it’s clear that he sees it (or something like it) as an important part of the solution to “the English question.” Separating Composition From Literature in the High School (Note that the current norm for high school English courses is to do the complete reverse of what this teacher recommends.)

I think these are very good points. In my previous attempt at using Model English, my less enthusiastic reader (who was also on the younger side) did struggle a bit with Irving. And everyone, myself included, often had difficulty finding one of the “suggested topics” that we could actually write about. The topics tend to be either about some typical high school activity from 100 years ago, or about some classic author(s) that, as you say, we’re just supposed to know all about. I guess I could simply add more topics based around, say, Tolkien and certain Internet sites... yikes... but I can’t think of anything else my high schoolers and I are all very familiar with. Even within our household, my older children don’t seem to have that much of a shared cultural base. Not to the depth that would be needed to write about it. Or maybe the problem is more that we’re not used to writing about things based on our limited knowledge, without doing a lot of research first? Children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries used to do many on-the-spot descriptive writing exercises, just not necessarily using imitation. My mother and I were just talking about this. They started with ones that were very simple and creative, and worked their way up to more challenging ones in high school. So maybe that also provided some of the necessary background. I do think that the majority of us will need either an adaptation, or some kind of a “bridge.” My current plan is to get my more reluctant reader doing some vintage middle or high school composition exercises from Commonwealth countries, which also used imitation. They tend to have more varied models, with less of a Ciceronian emphasis. The topics still tend to be obscure to present-day readers, though. Maybe I can post some links to some of these books that are available online. Then we can all “write two paragraphs comparing Donnelly and [unnamed textbook author],” in the style of a passage from Irving. 😁

Okay, here’s a Fordham catalog from 1932, when Father Donnelly was teaching there. By that time, the prep school was separate from the college, which offered three different bachelor’s degrees. The catalog doesn’t give the curriculum for the prep school, just the college. In freshman year, everyone studied book II of Model English, as well as poetry, Newman’s essays, oral expression, and an overview of the history of English Literature. In sophomore year, they all studied rhetoric using Persuasive Speech, along with Coppens and Kleutgen. “Second Spring,” Shakespeare, and various classical speeches were used as exemplars. That was the end of the required English studies. Students on the classical track also took Latin and Greek during both years (for details, see the link). In junior and senior year, everyone was required to take philosophy. This is obviously similar to the traditional plan of the Ratio, but with the whole sequence pushed forward a few years. On the one hand, it’s kind of a relief to know that even Fordham wasn’t up to teaching all of this material at the same time as the standard 1930s high school course. It’s also good to know that all of the rhetorical texts were meant to be studied in the same year. On the other hand, this doesn’t help us much in planning, unless our children are working three years ahead of the norm. Which mine are not. And if they don’t get this sort of education during high school, there’s no liberal arts college at present that’s going to provide it. I’m pretty sure I read this listing (or similar ones) a few years ago, but I guess my hope was that we could overcome any issues with a combination of advanced work and, IDK, maybe warping of the space-time continuum. 😄

Complicating things further, I’m not even sure that some of his higher level texts were chiefly intended to be used in high school. Persuasive Speech (1931) is subtitled “An Art of Rhetoric for College,” which I think must refer to college in the modern sense, but maybe he also envisioned it being used in secondary classical colleges. And I can’t tell if it‘s meant to be studied before, after, or instead of his rhetorical edition of Newman’s “Second Spring” (1911). Or if “Second Spring” is supposed to be studied after, or instead of, Model English. The preface to the former book says that Model English is suited for the earlier grades of high schools, while “Second Spring” is more suitable for “academies and colleges.” Does he mean that Model English is a better fit for a more academically mixed environment, and “Second Spring” for the heavily literary schools? Or that the high schools spend more time on English and can do more exercises, vs. the classical schools which might only have time for the shorter book? Or perhaps this is just a way of saying that the excerpts from Irving are secular, while Newman’s sermon has Catholic content. It would be very helpful to see some examples of sequences in which these books were used.

Just to clarify, while I’d prefer to have the same tutor for both languages if possible (as I think it would make things easier for everyone), Father Donnelly’s Latin and Greek texts don’t require this. Nor do they require the teacher to have personal experience with the older methods. They were written with the modern high school in mind, and were meant to be used as a supplement to whatever language learning approach was being used in each school. What they do require is the ability to teach literature with a rhetorical emphasis. This seems to be the limiting factor, as LostCove suggests. It’s way off the radar screen of all the teachers and tutors I’ve spoken to. Looking around, I can see a bit of a revival of classical languages, and a bit of a revival of classical rhetoric, but the two streams aren’t joining up as they used to.

I think this might have been either in Literary Art and Modern Education, or the little biographical pamphlet from his publisher that I mentioned early in the thread. I know I’ve seen the former book around here recently, but not as sure about the pamphlet. Will try to hunt them down. Thanks for reviving the thread, although it‘s been difficult to read my optimistic posts from a few years ago. Unfortunately, circumstances required us to start outsourcing high school almost as soon as we got started. I’d like to switch back partially to more traditional methods, at least for English. But it’s seeming unlikely that we’ll be using Fr. Donnelly’s Latin, Greek, and rhetoric books with my current high schoolers. And unless I come up with a lot more mental energy, it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to learn enough to teach those materials myself, even to the younger ones. If anyone here has some understanding of Fr. Donnelly‘s approach, and knows of an all-in-one Latin *and* Greek *and* classical rhetoric tutor who might be open to teaching in this way, either one-on-one or to a small group, please send me a PM. (With current circumstances being what they are, at least I’ve got over my qualms about video lessons!)

We used to have quiet time in our house, but it disappeared at some point when things were topsy-turvy, and never got put back. Will have to think about that. Thanks for the reminder. My sense is that most of the in-depth discussion of high school curriculum, especially about the choice of subjects, would be better moved to another thread. The ideas we’ve been referring to above aren’t specific to EFL, and weren’t her area of expertise, as they were with so many who worked in classical colleges and girls’ schools. (I actually came across EFL’s books while praying for “an elementary school version of Father Donnelly.”) Nor did she endorse classical education for all children. It’s unclear to me what she would suggest for the large proportion of students in our time who might not be a good fit for something like the Vittorino model, but would still be going on to higher education. Still, this thread seems like a good place to discuss how we might implement a particular high school plan in ways that are compatible with EFL’s ideas about, say, personal growth and family life. Also, of course, how we can continue to help our older children to develop the fundamental skills and character traits that she considered essential for everyone.

BTW, apropos of the chapter on “Work” in Bookless Lessons: I recently shared with my very hard-working mother that, even though she taught me how to do various types of chores (which I greatly appreciate), I never learned to do them day in and day out, and find it very difficult and unpleasant, like it’s a real ordeal each time. Her response? “I think everyone feels that way. I mean, it’s awful, isn’t it. It’s why I’ve always listened to the radio, or books on tape. And now there’s YouTube.” This has me 😂. All this fretting about my moral weakness and failure to live up to her example, and it turns out that the key component is audiobooks and podcasts!

mms, ITA about everyone having different resources. In addition to generally low energy, one challenge I have is that I can’t keep track of many things at once. Driving a car has always been difficult and stressful. Mystery stories or dramas with lots of characters are baffling. And while writing this, I suddenly remembered that in upper high school and college, I found a normal course load overwhelming; it seemed as if I just didn’t have room in my mind for all the subjects. One summer, I stayed on campus and took a couple of courses. Despite the accelerated schedule, I found that I could keep up with all of the work for a change, could learn much more easily, and enjoyed the subjects much more. I wished then that I’d been able to go to one of those schools where you only take one course at a time. To make this trickier, though, I also seek out variety. In college, I wished they had a predetermined “super rigorous” liberal studies program that we could choose to follow, because I had a very difficult time settling on a major. Nearly all of them looked interesting! (My mom, who had been reading Allan Bloom’s bestseller, suggested doing a Great Books program, but I was skeptical of the idea even then. 😄 It was only a year long anyway.) I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that this is happening with homeschooling as well. Curricula with many different subjects, and integrated thematic curricula with multiple books and other materials, are very stressful and off-putting for me, even though I often find the latter type very appealing in the beginning. What has really worked for us is to have just a few core subjects (done either via standard materials, or ad-hoc lessons based on a text I’ve chosen), and lots of resources put out for free choice. Last year, my middle graders seemed to need more, so I started giving them materials for additional subjects, which went okay. But in hindsight, I think they just needed more to do in general. Right now, we’re supposed to be ramping up to our full number of subjects for this year, and I’ve been dreading it, because X children * Y subjects just seemed like way too much. Thanks to your post and my subsequent reflection, I’m now thinking it would be fine to go back to the basics, and solve the “keeping children busy” problem separately. The desire for simplicity is one of the things that drew me to EFL, of course, but the desire for variety runs counter to her philosophy and also tends to get me in a lot of general trouble, especially in the clutter and time-wasting departments. If I can resolve this, the only hurdles will be my frequent desire to be left alone — which I’m starting to think is more a matter of habit than temperament —and the practical demands of scheduling. (I hope you will post on that!)

Correction: EFL did advocate for Fr. McGucken’s six-year “Vittorino School” when the plan was published in the 1930s. This was meant to be a school for the most capable students. It was relatively light on classics by Jesuit standards, as Latin was required every year, but Greek was optional. That was for the boys’ school; there’s a good chance that the girls’ school, whose plan was never written, would have had less. I don’t remember what it was supposed to offer for science and modern languages. The Vittorino School wasn’t intended as a model for homeschooling, as it relied on integrated instruction from expert teachers, as well as a lot of sports. But as a brick and mortar school, it had apparently been tried out with success.

No, it’s not nearly that nefarious. It’s just that lengthy discussions of the time taken up by intensive classical studies, the balancing of languages and science in high school, etc., are getting off topic (since they weren’t a focus of EFL’s writings), and would probably be better addressed elsewhere. EFL’s advice is mostly for parents of younger children, as LostCove said above. She was looking for suggestions for a compatible approach to science for the middle school years. I posted a couple of articles from people whose views overlap with EFL’s, and who have written at greater length about science education, in case there was anything of interest there. Since we often share links to various books and articles in these threads, I thought it would be understood that these ones weren’t intended to represent an “EFL philosophy” of everything, nor was I exhorting everyone to commit to following them. (Nor was it all on topic. Fr. Jaki’s talk, for example, only had a few things that I thought were directly relevant to the question, such as his advice to teach the history of science as a way to support humility. Thinking about it now, though, maybe the sort of history he was referring to wouldn’t be accessible to a 12 year old. Not sure.) But somehow, it all seems to have become jumbled together: EFL, Robinson, Fr. Jaki, the 19th century classical curriculum, what each of us is trying to do at home, etc. Again, while there is some overlap, these are all different things. As a result, I don’t think the current topic (whatever it is) is benefiting anyone at this point.

This is all getting farther off topic, especially as EFL didn’t advocate for any particular type of secondary curriculum. But human experience, in the late 19th and early 20th century, found that it wasn’t possible for most academically inclined students to combine the traditional level of proficiency in classical subjects with the full slate of modern subjects. The classics had made up the bulk of secondary studies, accounting for the equivalent of multiple credits per year. Modern high school Latin courses, such as Henle, have had their contents drastically reduced from those previous expectations. In addition, many parents who value classics would nonetheless like their children to study one or more modern languages. It was common for 19th century classical schools to teach three or four languages, both ancient and modern, as part of their standard curriculum. I’m guessing this might be what mms has in mind.

The thing is, if college admissions still required proficiency in Latin and Greek (as some people believe they should), then children who wanted to attend college would have to “choose” to study those subjects in depth. Since they don’t, this requirement has to be imposed by the parents or school administrator, or it’s not going to exist at all. Either way, it’s a matter of externally imposed requirements. Most bright teenagers, left to their own devices, would choose science courses over classics courses; this has been proven by experience over the last 150+ years. This is also why classical education can never be restored from the bottom up. Without the colleges reinstating these prerequisites (or, more likely, new programs being developed with them in mind), the great majority of students and parents will not pursue this path through high school, when other interests and requirements tend to take over. I had heard this said in the past, but was not sure about it. Now that I have high schoolers myself, it’s very apparent. We’re only on track to do a fraction of what I‘d hoped for with the older ones, and I’m much more highly motivated than most (and my children have been quite interested as well, especially with Greek). It’s harder to keep going without that “push” from the outside society that says “yes, you can and should do this”: college admissions, state requirements, the example of other homeschool families, etc. mms, I don’t mean to dishearten you! Some families have managed to achieve this, and I think yours does stand a good chance. (Otherwise, you could always move to Italy, or some other country where Latin and Greek are still required for university humanities programs at least. 😉)

Educating the Child at Home does have some advice that goes up to age 14, which is one of the reasons I originally preferred it over Bookless Lessons. It gets much more vague as the children get older, though. The advice is more or less to continue as you started, and then transition into preparing for the requirements of college or work. I think the lessons described in the first part of the quotation could involve children of a fairly wide range of ages, depending on the complexity of the chores they’re doing. “All she need know about chemistry” refers to practical knowledge for children who won’t be attending high school, who were the great majority in those days. This is evident from the bit a few sentences later, where EFL says that these lessons are also an ideal background for a future high school course. Of course, this part would apply to nearly every child today, since they all now have the privilege and obligation of secondary education. The second part of the quotation talks more about high school and college students, as she describes the benefits of this sort of preparation for their formal “book lessons.” My comments about AP Biology were in response to the suggestion that the example of curriculum she gave in this section was outdated. Sorry to keep posting on this topic, LostCove. I know you’ve had enough. And I didn’t even remember to mention the good old Fr. Jaki essay about science education (which even mentions Herbert Spencer). Maybe I can sneak it in to the discussion by trying to tie it in to perceptual control theory? 😄

When I mentioned the Robinson children, it was suggested that they were likely exceptionally gifted, and that their experiences might not apply to children in general. But 8’s DS sounds exceptional as well. In any case, I’m thinking that EFL’s concern would probably have been less about “how to help a student, who has a great interest in and aptitude for some area of science, to pursue a career in that direction,” and more about “how to improve the value of science as a part of liberal studies.” Over the past century, we don’t seem to have made much progress with the latter, though there have been plenty of anecdotal reports of problems. Even in the 1910s, there were widespread concerns that the addition of science to the former classics-and-math curriculum hadn’t borne the expected fruits in terms of general culture, and that even advanced students were often unable to explain basic phenomena. The proposed solutions sound familiar: physics before chemistry, “conceptual” rather than math-heavy courses, the use of “discovery” methods, etc. I don’t have time to look into this further right now, but I hope your DS has a good experience with whatever you end up doing this year, LostCove. (Editing to add a link to the very influential Herbert Spencer essay that was mentioned in the above article. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why Victorians put so much stock in Spencer’s ideas. By the end of his life, from what I’ve read, he had even given up on a lot of them himself.)

Two more clarifications: 1) While I don’t want to discuss Robinson any more than necessary, I think it’s important to point out that he didn’t recommend waiting until college either. He found that students following his homeschooling approach were able to complete introductory calculus by age 14, or sometimes a bit later. Again, we haven’t gone that route ourselves (so far, at least); I’m just taking this from his writings. 2) EFL’s hypothetical chapter from a botany textbook would have been just that: one part of a much longer book. The same goes for my observation about the contents of AP Biology. Neither she nor I were saying that “naming of parts” was all that was being taught about plants. But it is foundational, and students who don’t already have a strong familiarity with it are going to be at a disadvantage, especially given the usual time pressures in high school and college courses. As someone who finds it very difficult to memorize terms without either a concrete association, or a thorough understanding of the big picture, I can certainly relate to this point.