As I have been expanding my table of Charlotte Mason and CM-like curricula (click here to suggest new additions), I feel the need to be a little more regimented in how I rate the various resources that are out there. I have created to following to help clarify how I evaluate the curricula. There is ..read more

Probably the most popular thing I have done through this blog is provide a chart and ranking of the many, many Charlotte Mason and CM-inspired curricula out there (see this Google document as well as this post and this one). Up until this point, I have limited myself to comprehensive curricula but I am being ..read more

To start with something positive, I have heard and read a few things lately from Susan Wise Bauer of The Well-Trained Mind (WTM) and I have to say I am more impressed with her than I thought I would be. “Classical education” these days is a pretty big umbrella. My layman’s description would be that ..read more

In my ongoing project to compile a master list of Charlotte Mason and CM-ish curricula, I have a few updates — A number of you have also recommended additional curricula that I should look at so today we will do those quick reviews of: A Year of Learning; The Children’s Tradition; Campfire; and Simplified Feast ..read more

(This list is in the order I read the books. Below I give blurbs on each and group them by broad categories.) The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton Tender is the Night  by F. Scott Fitzgerald  A Temple of Topaz (Life Verses volume 5) by Frank Boreham ..read more

In the every growing world of homeschooling, it seems there are always more curricula one could buy. Charlotte Mason homeschooling seems to be having a bit of a hey day so there are more and more products using the label, some of which are true to her philosophy and some . . . eh ..read more

It’s rare for me to read a book that’s modern and trending but when I heard an interview with Jonathan Rosen, I was intrigued enough to line up in my library’s queue and wait my turn for The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions (New York: Penguin Press, 2023). {Warning: this post contains spoilers.] The Best Minds was worth the wait, but it is not a book that is ultimately satisfying in many ways. It gives us problems but does not give us the solutions. On a societal level, the solutions are not easy and a book like this is just not going to have all t ..read more

I seem to see more and more lately in the reformed world on spiritual beings and their influence. Michael S. Heiser’s The Unseen Realm was recommended by one source and so I picked it up, not fully knowing exactly what it was about or who Heiser was. It turns out we actually share an academic pedigree (up to a point at least). Heiser received a Ph.D. in biblical Hebrew from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is the same small (but quite good) program where I did my undergrad1 and got a Master’s in biblical Hebrew.2 It appears that he was there a few years after I left so we did not over ..read more

I try not to spend my time beating up on other philosophies of education but I was struck by this quote from Susan Wise Bauer, classical education guru and co-author of The Well-Trained Mind: “What we are talking about here is the embrace of classical education by a group of particular socially conservative Christians who otherwise would seem unlikely to latch on to a model of education that was conceived of and taught my ancient polytheists who were sexually permissive, certainly not by and large heterosexual, and often ended up being the enemies of the conservative governments of their time ..read more

Through one of those internet rabbit holes, I ended up listing to an episode of The Well-Trained Mind Podcast entitled “Where is Classical Education Going?” Susan Wise Bauer, co-author of the WTM book and classical education guru, was being interviewed on the state of classical ed today looking specifically at curricula that use the classical label and its perception in the media. It is not new news that “classical” is a label that is so widely and diversely used that it becomes hard to define (see my posts on Sorting Out Classical  and Characteristics of Classical Education) bu ..read more