Overwhelmed with what is available out there, I'm going to attempt to create my own Eclectic Homeschool curriculum, taking the best of each method and trying to create my own system. It is important for me that the final "method" that I use is cohesive and aimed at the goal of encouraging my kids to develop as complete human beings. It should be tailor made for their individual personalities, while taking into account what skills they will need to live in this world. So I introduce the Analysis Paralysis series- a closer look at what has already been done, and what I'm going to pull from it for our program.
This wikipedia article does a great job of summarizing Classical Education. Basically, a classical education is an education in the Classics (go figure), but is also a system of learning which consists of three parts for pre-highschool aged children:
Grammar (includes all language study, reading, writing, vocabulary, and structure)
Logic/Dialectic (the art of reasoning, something rather lacking from modern education. Usually taught using Socrate's original texts)
Rhetoric (debate and composition)
The classical education historically contains Latin and Greek (which I am all for! I love my word roots!), astronomy, architecture, and some other random and possibly less applicable subjects. History is often taught through biography, which is similar to Charlotte Mason's living books philosophy.
The whole system is designed to teach a student how to think and reason, and what we usually consider the "substance" of education (the collected facts and data) are sort of a by-product of the process of the aquisition of Reason.
In short, I love it.
This will probably be the last in my Analysis Paralysis series, as I feel very confident about which roads we will be taking. That is not to say I will carve out our program in stone tomorrow, but I do see the faint path through the woods that we will be following. So stay tuned.
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