The Education We Never Had

Both of us never grew up with a classical education, but Brock discovered the Great Books in high school, and Fernette after her medical training. Now we are discovering the joys of classical education at an even deeper level as our daughter joined a Latin-based Christian school, and we've embraced a classical education for our homeschooled son.

Our other blog is the Eide Neurolearning Blog, a very different blog, so it seemed like a good idea to collect our classical education links in one place.

I am learning Latin with our kids, our daughter is studying the Middle Ages and Renaissance at school, and our son is studying 1815 to Modern Times using materials from Veritas Press. I'll review them for you in more detail in a subsequent post. We are eclectic, using established secular and Christian curricula as well as child-led interest topics. I haven't seen another blog that does quite what we do, so I thought I might as well make one!

I was a little worried about our daughter's joining a Latin-based school because of the intense memorization, but the chants make it easy, there's plenty of repetition and if all are saying it together, there's not the stress of not knowing when you're called on. Our daughter is also motivated a great deal by her peers, and because her classmates are a generally studious lot, she hasn't complained much about the extra work. She also loves the kids at school.

We are still homeschooling our son because of his dysgraphia and sensory / endurance issues. He has been taking an online secular logic course through Northwestern, but easily transitioned over to classical curricula because of his interest in history and word origins (Latin). We would like to run his homeschooling curriculum roughly in parallel with our daughter's school so he has the option of entering it some time in the future. Our son is solidly in the dialectical stage (loves controversy, reasoning, and fallacies), and his writers block is melting away with Progymnasmata or the ancient exercises devised for budding orators. We'll blog more on those as well.