Intellectual...ness....

At the beginning of March, I joined my family in attending the Mid-South Home School Conference in Memphis, TN.  I mostly ended up in sessions dealing with Christian Classical Education (CCE), and I must admit I was...enthralled.  This is the education I wish I'd had growing up!  This is the education I want my kids to have!  The Great Books!  Latin and logic!  Greek and grammar!  Rhetoric!  Virtue!  The Christian Intellectual!

"But I didn't have that education, so is it too late?"  That was the question I posed to several speakers, and they all agreed that no, it's not too late.  (Yey!)

The first speaker suggested that I look up the Encyclopedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World and start reading through them.  Great idea, until I realized how expansive and expensive (almost $1000!) that set actually is!  And while I can't say any of the works are necessarily obscure, many of them--especially the earlier ones--are dense and overwhelming.  I could totally see myself getting discouraged early on and quitting the project without looking back.

A second presenter told me to brush up on my Latin skills, more or less.  I took Latin for a year(ish) in high school, but laid it aside in favor of French in college.  I don't regret taking French, but I do regret ceasing my Latin studies.  So I'm picking it up again!  I bought Wheelock's Latin:  The Classic Introductory Latin Course yesterday at Books-A-Million and spent a while this afternoon downloading other resources from the website.  I'm starting from the ground up--it's been nine years since I've touched it!

Another speaker gave me a more reasonable--though still large--goal than Great Books.  This speaker was Susan Wise Bauer, and after the first lecture I texted this to Trevvor:  "I think I've found a new academic hero."  (She actually reminded me in a softened, Christian way of one of the professors I admired from my liberal arts program in college.)  She has written two books about educating classically in a Christian home.  The first is directed at parents teaching their children (The Well-Trained Mind) and the second is directed at adults who, like me, wish they'd had a classical education but haven't.  It's called The Well-Educated Mind, and I'm kind of in love with it.

The first part deals with how to read--whether you need to work on mechanics and/or vocabulary (I'm ordering Vocabulary from Classical Roots just for fun), how to keep a reading journal, and what questions you need to ask yourself as you go along.  It suggests approaching a book in three stages that mirror the stages of the trivium (grammar, logic, & rhetoric):  first you try to understand a book's basic structure and argument, then you evaluate the book's assertions, and last you form an opinion about the book's ideas (p. 41).

The second part is five lists of selected books that have a lot of overlap with Great Books of the Western World.  The five categories are the novel, autobiography/memoir, history, drama, and poetry.  Each list is meant to be read in chronologically so that you can build upon ideas in the same order as the people who wrote them.  (In case you're wondering, the first book on the novel list is Don Quixote.)


So that's my plan!  I don't intend on becoming the next Augustine or anything, but I do feel I could improve and develop my God-given ability to think--to taste, swallow, and either digest or reject ideas as I cross paths with them according to whether or not they are in accordance with God's Truth.