Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

A classical method of education can help your child see the connections between his various school subjects. Mike Farris discusses this topic with Lene Jaqua, today on Home School Heartbeat.

Michael Farris:
Modern education tends to treat each subject individually—a little spelling, a little math, then a little PE break followed by a writing assignment. Lene, how does a classical approach differ from this scattershot method?

Lene Jaqua:
Mike, an authentic classical education is rooted in the premise that language is the foundation of all learning. And a successfully educated person is able to observe, think, make connections, and draw conclusions, and that requires a solid foundation of language skills. Those skills can be applied to theology, philosophy, literature, any discipline. So in classical education, we tie those subjects directly to our writing. That way, we're not overloaded with too many subjects, and we're seeing education as a connected whole. For example, if we study Ancient Greece and Rome, we're tying together history, philosophy, literature, art, math, science, and even the rise of Christianity. All of that is done in the context of reading and writing. Now that takes a lot of effort, and it's not easy to put a program like that together, but the payoff is that when we make the whole educational process connected, the student will learn how to learn, and so when they need to add another discipline to their knowledge—something they haven't learned before—they'll have the tools to learn on their own.

Mike:
Lene, thank you so much for being with us. Listeners, please join us next time. We're going to be talking with a homeschooling mother about a great tool that she's found for evaluating her children's writing. I'm Mike Farris.