Homeschooling

Our family takes a simple approach to homeschooling, one which centers on finding good books and reading them together with our children. You can read more about it here. Over the years we've found some books that we think are particularly good for study, and we thought some of you might find them helpful as well.

Introduction to reading

Just starting out? We've tried many introductory reading programs, and most of them were good, but none gave us more pleasure than the Pathway series of readers, written for Mennonite schoolchildren. We like the peaceful agrarian settings, the small but important moral dilemmas faced by the children in the stories, the simplicity and gentleness of the writing. In these stories, getting cross with one another is a very serious thing! But one that is always handled quietly but firmly.

We have grouped the Pathway readers into four groups, by level: Level K, Level One, Level Two, and Level Three. You can buy the books for a level as a package, or you can buy the individual books as you need them.

Advanced reading and writing

For most of us, reading and writing will be peripheral to making a living. So once we have mastered the grade-school mechanics of those subjects, is there any reason to continue studying them? Here's one: reading is a good way to edify ourselves, and writing is a good way to edify others. The better we become at both, the easier it is to edify and to be edified.

We recommend the following books not because they will teach you to be a world-class reader or writer (although they are capable of doing so), but because spending even a little time with any of them can greatly improve your skills in both areas. We also think they are good vehicles for teaching your children to be better readers and writers.

  • How to Read a Book truly is, as the subtitle says, "The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading and Writing." Written nearly seventy years ago, its guidance has yet to be improved on.
  • How to Read a Poem is a solid guide to the mechanics of poetry which explains what poets are up to, the techniques they use to get where they want to go, and the reasons why poetry is uniquely suited for expressing certain kinds of important ideas.
  • Simple & Direct takes a very simple principle—be sure say what you mean, no more and no less—and applies it to every aspect of writing, teaching you to strip away the rhetorical devices that obscure our ideas so that they are conveyed clearly.
  • Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace complements Simple and Direct by teaching techniques that produce effective, memorable, and enjoyable writing.

Economics

There's plenty that can be studied about economics, but we don't think that most of it is profitable. Still, there are a few basic economic concepts that are not simple common sense, and it helps to know them. Most modern introductory texts go much too far in thoughtlessly celebrating the free market without examining its flaws, so as an introduction we recommend Economics for Helen by Hilaire Belloc, who was a free-market skeptic.

Belloc's book is sufficient, but we have two books to recommend to folks who find the topic interesting. One is Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt , a badly named but very good book that clearly explains why government economic policies always do more damage than good. The other is The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, the book which is the foundation of modern economic thinking; we don't suggest that you read all of this very readable book, but just enough to prove to yourself that primary sources aren't all that scary to read.

  • Economics for Helen is Hilaire Belloc's economics primer. We like it especially because it is very skeptical of classic free-market capitalism and offers a non-socialist alternative.
  • The title of Economics in One Lesson is misleading, since the book explains not economic theory but the way in which one particular misunderstanding underlies just about every bad government policy in existence.
  • The Wealth of Nations is one of the great classics of economics, an influential work by a noted eighteenth-century philosopher and political economist which was the first systematic formulation of classical English economics.

History

We think that the study of history is very important; it is an excellent way to develop a deeper understanding of human nature, as well as the principles of God's economy. But for the most part we don’t recommend histories that survey time periods, civilizations, or nations—they tend to be superficial, neglecting deeper issues as they parade huge armadas of barely related facts past the reader. Better to pick a sold history that focuses on a single event, or carefully traces a single trend down the corridors of time, teaching you something new about how the world works.

So we recommend that your goal not be to learn about history, but to read in history. Don't bother dividing the history of the world into four arbitrary eras —ancients, medievals, early moderns, late moderns—and then set out to check off one era every year. Decide instead how important history is to you, and consequently how much time you want to spend on it. Then think about how you want to allocate that time. If you are fascinated by your Scottish roots, and want to develop a similar fascination in your children, then by all means seek out histories and biographies that will teach these specific things; not only will you be steeped in things Scottish, you will learn just as much about human nature and God's economy as you would from some other in-depth historical study.

Since your reading in history should be driven by your family's background and interests, we can't offer a comprehensive selection of history books that will suit you all. But we often run across worthwhile histories in our own reading, and some of them are sure to prove valuable to many of you. The books listed below are solidly researched and argued, straightforward to read, and worthy of close study; we recommend them to anyone who is interested in the topics they discuss.

  • The Basic History of the United States tells the story of our country in a straightforward manner, not burdened either by statist propaganda or by starry-eyed idealism about the founders.
  • Basic American Government is a study of government as laid out in the United States Constitution, rather than as it exists today.
  • Summer For the Gods tells the story of the Scopes Monkey Trial, a small, well-documented historical event where three cultural tensions converged—belief in a created order vs. scientific materialism; fundamentalism vs. modernism; activist government vs. individual liberty.
  • Evangelicalism Divided argues that the quest for Christian unity in the 20th century was a disaster, actually increasing division and dissension among the faithful.

The best history is biography, stories of how valiant men and women behaved when faced with exceptional circumstances. And the best of that has to be autobiography, where the stories come to us directly from the protagonists. Some folks may shy away from history told in the first person because the telling is not likely to be “objective.” Truth be told, any historical account will be driven by the writer’s agenda, and so no more discernment is needed to read autobiography than any other kind of history. To complement Carson’s Basic History of the U.S., we’ve gathered some of our favorite first-person accounts.

Art and Culture

It wasn't so long ago that all art was Christian art. Now what passes for art is decidedly anti-Christian, and Christians have generally declared themselves to be anti-art. A primary means of giving glory to God has been abandoned to the heathen. Things are not as they should be, but it will take sustained and arduous effort to put things right. The following books are all suitable for children during the last two years or so of their studies. Together they do a good job of explaining what art should be, how it has been perverted, what those perversions tell us about the modern world, how to avoid being tainted by those perversions, and what sorts of things can be done to put things right.

  • State of the Arts examines a question that surely very few people are asking, namely, What role should the fine arts play in the Christian life?
  • How Should We Then Live? is a comprehensive examination of the condition and direction of Western civilization, from ancient Roman times to the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, up to our present scientific Atomic Age.
  • Modern Art and the Death of a Culture offers a Christian perspective on the cultural turmoil of the radical Sixties and its impact on today’s world, especially as reflected in the art of the time.
  • All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes sets out to answer the following questions: What is popular culture? Where did it come from? What forces shape it into what it is? How does it influence Americans in general and Christians in particular?

Modernity

Our books on modernity might also be thought of as describing non-Christian doctrine. Making a study of the world’s lies can be tedious and frustrating, but it is also an important defense against those lies, and ultimately glorifies God by reminding us of the world’s foolishness. We carry a few books that will make it easier for you and your children to thread your way through the swamps. They are suitable for students sixteen and older (although Ideas Have Consequences will require slow and careful reading).

  • The Disappearance of Childhood, Amusing Ourselves to Death, and Technopoly are three important books by our favorite cultural analyst Neil Postman.
  • The Abolition of Man is a brief but thorough refutation of relativism, a philosophy that continues to plague us.
  • Postmodern Times examines how postmodern ideas have gripped the nation’s universities, which are busily turning out lawyers, judges, writers, journalists, and teachers who embrace and promote the notion that truth, meaning, and individual identity simply do not exist.
  • Modern Fascism examines a philosophy which came to full form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but whose roots reach much further back into history and which continues to send out its tendrils into modern Western culture.
  • Ideas Have Consequences shows clearly that the results of modern thinking aren’t merely disappointing but disastrous—and that they are an inevitable consequence of modern thinking.

Classic Literature

We gathered these inexpensive editions of classic works to go along with Peter Leithart's literature study guides. (The guides can be obtained from Canon Press.)

William Shakespeare

Jane Austen

Dante Alighieri

Ancient plays and poems