Free Love in a Time of Homeschooling by Laura Brodie Page B

she scored off the charts, almost one hundred percent. But I never made her study math, so her math scores were pretty low.”
    I couldn’t imagine Nina teaching algebra. She’s an artsy spirit, the sort who often lets modern dance students choreograph their own recital numbers, sometimes to the parents’ chagrin. Whenever John sees Julia rolling across the floor at an end-of-the-year performance, he turns to me and whispers, “How much did we pay for this?”
    Reassured to find a hidden homeschooler among my acquaintance, I resolved to mention my plans to other homeschooling moms, beginning with Julia’s violin teacher, Esther Vine. Esther is a Mormon homeschooler with seven children—facts that,in my mind, would normally conjure an image of a repressed housewife and religious extremist. In fact, Esther is one very cool Latter Day Saint. In addition to raising her large family, she performs in orchestras and chamber groups and teaches college students and children. She serves as the perfect poster woman for her faith.
    Esther is a very calm home educator. Just that fall, when her seventh child asked to attend fourth grade at the county school, she packed his lunch and sent him off on the bus, no problem. But by January, when he’d had enough, she confessed to being relieved. “He had so much homework every day,” she told me, “it really cut into our family time. I don’t know how all the other families can stand it.”
    When I told Esther that I might try a year of homeschooling, her eyes lit up. “Wait a moment. I’ve got something for you.” She left the room and came back a few minutes later with a fat, glossy hardcover book: The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home .
    â€œThis is what I use,” she said, smiling. “Or try to use. It’s a lot more than I could ever manage, but if you’re thinking about homeschooling, there’s no better place to start.”
    That evening, after settling in bed, I lifted the heavy book and plopped it onto my covers. Turning first to the final chapter, I glanced at the last page number—810, Lord help us. More of a reference book than a bedtime story. Next, I contemplated the jacket photos of the smiling authors, a mother-daughter team, Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer. Their names immediately appealed. After my fortunate experience with Montessori’s Molly Wise, I had an instinctive respect for Wise women.
    Apparently Jessie had taught Susan and her brother back in the 1970s, when homeschooling was a new and somewhat bizarre phenomenon. Susan had become a professor of literatureand writing at the College of William and Mary, but as I flipped through the book, I was surprised that they didn’t mention the brother much. I wondered what he thought of his homeschooling years.
    Within these 810 pages, mother and daughter advocated a classical education in which global history served as the guiding principle, with literary masterpieces and scientific discoveries taught in a historical chronology. The first through twelfth grades were divided into three repetitions of a four-year pattern: the ancients (5000 BC–AD 400), medieval through early Renaissance (400–1600), late Renaissance through early modern times (1600–1850), and modern times (1850–present). Grade-school children were supposed to study each time period at a simple level; fifth-through eighth-graders delved into the same subjects with increasing complexity, and by high school, students should be reading original sources in translation.
    It was all very impressive, and reminded me of another illuminating book that provided a backdrop for my homeschooling. Many secular homeschoolers point to John Holt’s Teach Your Own as their inspiration, but my own thoughts hearken back to John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography . Mill was one of the greatest intellectuals of the nineteenth century, and it all