Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I read this book twice- the first edition was the first homeschooling book I ever read. While it did inform my thinking, more often than not it left me saying, "Geez, these ladies are SCREAMING for an editor". Besides being repetitive and verbose, it is abominably organized. The "How to Do It" sections in particular read in a confused, spiraling, and ultimately pointless manner. (Oh, and a note the authors and their editor: the word "notebook" is not a synonym with the word "binder".) Both the meat of the book- the outlined methods- and the decent part of the book- the resource lists- are so poorly organized that it makes the book extremely cumbersome. The resource lists, in particular, are nearly incoherent, even when the recommended book/curricula are truly good. Since my reading of the first edition, I have read widely about education in general and homeschooling in particular. With this hindsight, I would strongly suggest that any new homeschooling parent (or even anyone who is just interested in educational philosophies) read the Moores, Beechik, Mason, Holt, Gatto, and Montessori, as well as at least one other book outlining the trivium BEFORE committing to any educational approach. I checked the second edition out of the library because I remembered it had a ton of resources listed. To my extreme chagrin, many of the core resources (a.k.a. "spines") mentioned it the first edition have been replaced with books written by the authors themselves. While this is slick marketing, it is, quite simply, anti-education. I have found most of these new spines to be of inferior quality to the original recommendations- they read as though they were hastily churned out. In seeking the resource list from the first edition, I went online, where I found that not only have the book's authors contrived to make it unavailable, a veritable cult of personality has sprung up around this book. It's weird, and a little creepy. For example, the Peace Hill Press website (the company that publishes the Wise/Bauer books) continously exhorts you to buy directly from them, even though their prices are most uncompetitive, ostensibly because they offer such a great service to homeschooling families in publishing. Yeah. Uh huh. Riiiight. And, as much as logic is lauded in the Well-Trained Mind (which is as it should be; logic is vital), the obessive, faddish crowd that has swarmed around this book overlooks much of the contradictory and faulty logic found throughout both the book and the associated websites. (For example, online you can read one of the authors write, that "Careful thinkers do not make blanket statements." Great, considering that is, in itself, a blanket statement, which reveals the stator to be... well, something of dolt.) But, back to the lack of logic and continuity within the book: even though the authors extoll the virtures of flexibility and individually tailored learning, they include pages (and pages!) of rigid, overstuffed schedules- daily, weekly, and yearly. Now, to be perfectly fair, on their websites the authors claim to always have known that the schedules were stupid, but that their publisher insisted that they be included. {ETA: A commenter pointed out that TWTM was published by Norton. This is my mistake. I was under the impression that it was published by Peace Hill Press.} The notion that living foreign languages should take a back seat to Latin might be the most asinine idea in this book. Should a well educated person learn enough Latin to understand English root words and common Latin phrases? Absolutely- BUT much of this knowledge will come out of learning Spanish, which is incredibly useful. Also, learning some Latin after already having grasped (and hopefully, having spoken) some Spanish will make the task that much easier. Finally, the notion that Latin should be started in third grade, yet living foreign languages should be put off until the middle grades or later is in direct contrast to every other language education book I have ever read. The sections about college are a waste of time. It would take pages to explain how and why their take on college is entirely useless, so I will simply suggest that these sections be disregarded in their entirety. There are some good ideas within this book, but I found the best ones (narration, using living books) to be cribbed from Charlotte Mason. My main caution against this book is not to be caught up in the fervor that surrounds it. It's just a trendy tome filled with fifty cent words, not the be-all, end-all of classical education that it claims to be.