Susan Wise Bauer Quotes

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The only men ruthless enough to fight against tyranny were themselves inclined to it.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome)
Civilization began in the Fertile Crescent, not because it was an Edenic place overflowing with natural resources, but because it was so hostile to settlement that a village of any size needed careful management to survive.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome)
Pippin ordered Childeric III tonsured and sent to a monastery, where he died five years later, the last of the Merovingians.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
Pippin was crowned the first king of the Carolingian dynasty in the city of Soissons, in a brand-new sacred ceremony that involved anointing with holy oil in the manner of an Old Testament theocratic king.*
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
The idea that fast reading is good reading is a twentieth-century weed, springing out of the stony farmland cultivated by the computer manufacturers.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had)
The goal of classical self-education is this: not merely to “stuff” facts into your head, but to understand them. Incorporate them into your mental framework. Reflect on their meaning for the internal life.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded))
A debt-free bachelor's degree is, as it turns out, priceless: As Jane Austen puts it, it sets you up forever. My friends were still paying off their school loans in their forties. I never had any school debt at all. Because I had no debt, I could choose my life, and choose my adventure.
Susan Wise Bauer (Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education)
the twelfth-century Song of Roland, which turns the bloody incident into a major conspiracy between the Arabs of Zaragoza and a traitor within Charlemagne’s own camp.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
Technology can do a great deal to make information gathering easier, but it can do little to simplify the gathering of wisdom.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded))
Today, most people "go to work." But back at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "going to work" was a brand new idea. Families had always worked together in their homes.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
The initial small step is simple: Rather than making a sweeping determination to tackle the Great Books (all of them), decide to begin on one of the reading lists in Part II. As you read each book, you’ll follow the pattern of the trivium. First you’ll try to understand the book’s basic structure and argument; next, you’ll evaluate the book’s assertions; finally, you’ll form an opinion about the book’s ideas. You’ll have to exercise these three skills of reading—understanding, analysis, and evaluation—differently for each kind of book.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had)
What is classical education? It is language-intensive—not image-focused. It demands that students use and understand words, spoken and written, rather than communicating primarily through images. It is history-intensive, providing students with a comprehensive view of human endeavor from the beginning until now. It trains the mind to analyze and draw conclusions. It both requires and develops self-discipline—the ability to tackle a difficult task that doesn’t promise an immediate reward, for the sake of future gain. It produces literate, curious, intelligent students who have a wide range of interests and the ability to follow up on them. The Well-Trained Mind
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home)
To be female and on the throne during the collapse of a Medieval Kingdom generally elicited accusations of lust, corruption, and general visciousness., The queen's sex life becomes a convenient explanation for the end of an era.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
William Penn planned to use this land for a colony where Quaker ideas would be followed. He wanted the settlers to be like brothers, all equal to each other. The capital city would be called the City of Brotherly Love--in Greek, Philadelphia.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
When you read, you develop wisdom—or, in Mortimer Adler’s words, “become enlightened.” “To be informed,” Adler writes in How to Read a Book, “is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded))
No one likes to be condescended to, so it’s hardly surprising that so many high school students develop a loathing for the modernist novels they’re forced to read in senior English and go to the movies instead. (Movies have plots, after all.) They’re being good postmodernists.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded))
As you read, you should follow this three-part process: jot down specific phrases, sentences, and paragraphs as you come across them; when you’ve finished your reading, go back and write a brief summary about what you’ve learned; and then write your own reactions, questions, and thoughts.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded))
Yet because we can read the newspaper or Time or Stephen King without difficulty, we tend to think that we should be able to go directly into Homer or Henry James without any further preparation. And when we stumble, grow confused or weary, we take this as proof of our mental inadequacy: We’ll never be able to read the Great Books.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded))
Anthropologists can speculate about human behavior; archaeologists, about patterns of settlement; philosophers and theologians, about the motivations of “humanity” as an undifferentiated mass. But the historian’s task is different: to look for particular human lives that give flesh and spirit to abstract assertions about human behavior.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome)
In fact, far from being phonetic, hieroglyphs were designed to be indecipherable unless you possessed the key to their meaning. The Egyptian priests, who were guardians of this information, patrolled the borders of their knowledge in order to keep this tool in their own hands. Ever since, the mastery of writing and reading has been an act of power
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome)
Scientists who grapple with biological origins are still affected by Platonic idealism today; Charles Lyell’s nineteenth-century geological theories still influence our understanding of human evolution; quantum theory is still wrestling with Francis Bacon’s methods. To interpret science, we have to know something about its past. We have to continually ask not just “What have we discovered?” but also “Why did we look for it?” In no other way can we begin to grasp why we prize, or disregard, scientific knowledge in the way we do; or be able to distinguish between the promises that science can fulfill and those we should receive with some careful skepticism. Only then will we begin to understand science.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory)
One of the first Italians to give a name to the reawakened interest in Greek and Roman learning was the poet Petrarch, who announced early in the 1340s that poets and scholars were ready to lead the cities of Italy back to the glory days of Rome. Classical learning had declined, Petrarch insisted, into darkness and obscurity. Now was the time for that learning to be rediscovered: a rebirth, a Renaissance.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople)
Underline in your books, jot notes in the margins, and turn the corners of your pages down. Public education is a beautiful dream, but public classrooms too often train students not to mark, write in, disfigure, or in any way make books permanently their own. You're a grownup now, so buy your own books if you possibly can. In my opinion, a cheap paperback filled with your own notes is worth five times as much as a beautiful collector's edition.
Susan Wise Bauer
The Huns had arrived at the distant edges of the western world. To the Romans, who had never seen them, they were as frightening as earthquake and tsunami, an evil force that could barely be resisted. Historians of the time had no idea exactly where these frightening newcomers came from, but they were sure it was somewhere awful. The Roman historian Procopius insists that they were descended from witches who had sexual congress with demons, producing Huns: a “stunted, foul and puny tribe, scarcely human and having no language save one which bore but slight resemblance of human speech.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
As each German and Italian and Frankish nobleman arrived in Constantinople with his own private army, ready to cross over the Bosphorus Strait and face the enemy, Alexius had demanded a sacred oath. Whatever “cities, countries or forces he might in future subdue . . . he would hand over to the officer appointed by the emperor.” They were, after all, there to fight for Christendom; and Alexius Comnenus was the ruler of Christendom in the east.1 Just as Alexius had feared, the chance to build private kingdoms in the Holy Land proved too tempting. The first knight to bite the apple was the Norman soldier Bohemund, who had arrived in Constantinople at the start of the First Crusade and immediately became one of the foremost commanders of the Crusader armies. Spearheading the capture of the great city Antioch in 1098, Bohemund at once named himself its prince and flatly refused to honor his oath. (“Bohemund,” remarked Alexius’s daughter and biographer, Anna, “was by nature a liar.”) By 1100, Antioch had been joined by two other Crusader kingdoms—the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the County of Edessa—and Bohemund himself was busy agitating the Christians of Asia Minor against Byzantium. By 1103, Bohemund was planning a direct attack against the walls of Constantinople itself.2 To mount this assault, Bohemund needed to recruit more soldiers. The most likely source for reinforcements was Italy; Bohemund’s late father, Robert Guiscard, had conquered himself a kingdom in the south of Italy (the grandly named “Dukedom of Apulia and Calabria”), and Bohemund, who had been absent from Italy since heading out on crusade, had theoretically inherited its crown. Alexius knew this as well as Bohemund did, so Byzantine ships hovered in the Mediterranean, waiting to intercept any Italy-bound ships from the principality of Antioch. So Bohemund was forced to be sneaky. Anna Comnena tells us that he spread rumors everywhere: “Bohemond,” it was said, “is dead.” . . . When he perceived that the story had gone far enough, a wooden coffin was made and a bireme prepared. The coffin was placed on board and he, a still breathing “corpse,” sailed away from Soudi, the port of Antioch, for Rome. . . . At each stop the barbarians tore out their hair and paraded their mourning. But inside Bohemond, stretched out at full length, was . . . alive, breathing air in and out through hidden holes. . . . [I]n order that the corpse might appear to be in a state of rare putrefaction, they strangled or cut the throat of a cock and put that in the coffin with him. By the fourth or fifth day at the most, the horrible stench was obvious to anyone who could smell. . . . Bohemond himself derived more pleasure than anyone from his imaginary misfortune.3 Bohemund was a rascal and an opportunist, but he almost always got what he wanted; when he arrived in Italy and staged a victorious resurrection, he was able to rouse great public enthusiasm for his fight against Byzantium. In fact, his conquest of Antioch in the east had given him hero stature back in Italy. People swarmed to see him, says one contemporary historian, “as if they were going to see Christ himself.”4
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople)
Abram—Ibrahim, in the Arabic spelling—was the first to worship Allah, the one God, rather than the stars, the moon, or the sun.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome)
Part of the school dilemma results from an over-focus on testing results; home educators are free from that pressure, so you won’t have to decide between test prep and expository writing.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home)
Classical self-education demands that you understand, evaluate, and react to ideas. In your journal, you will record your own summaries of your reading; this is your tool for understanding the ideas you read. This—the mastery of facts—is the first stage of classical education.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded))
practice this skill with this book.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded))
See Chapter 37 for more on BC/BCE and AD/CE.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 1: Ancient Times: From the Earliest Nomads to the Last Roman Emperor)
So Clovis married a princess from one barbarian tribe—Clotilda, a Burgundian. He fought other tribes and forced them to accept him as a leader. He defeated the last Roman soldiers left in Gaul. He convinced other Frankish chiefs to swear allegiance to him. And eventually, he ruled over all of Gaul. His empire became known as the Frankish Empire. Today, we call this part of the world France, after the Franks
Susan Wise Bauer (The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child: The Middle Ages: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of the Renaissance)
began to establish their own kingdoms, all over the land that once
Susan Wise Bauer (The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child: The Middle Ages: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of the Renaissance)
In fact, reading is a discipline: like running regularly, or meditating, or taking voice lessons. Any able adult can run across the backyard, but this ability to put one foot in front of another shouldn’t make him think that he can tackle a marathon without serious, time-consuming training. Most of us can manage to sing “Happy Birthday” or the Doxology when called for, but this doesn’t incline us to march down to the local performing arts center and try out for the lead in Aida. Yet because we can read the newspaper or Time or Stephen King without difficulty, we tend to think that we should be able to go directly into Homer or Henry James without any further preparation. And when we stumble, grow confused or weary, we take this as proof of our mental inadequacy: We’ll never be able to read the Great Books. The truth is that the study of literature requires different skills than reading for pleasure. The inability to tackle, unaided, a list of Great Books and stick to the project doesn’t demonstrate mental inadequacy—just a lack of preparation.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded))
It is normal for a fifth-grade aged student to be writing at a third-grade level, reading at a fifth-grade level, and doing math at a seventh-grade level. A child who succeeds at two subjects and cries over the third may still be showing immaturity—and the answer may be to drop back to a lower level in only the third subject.
Susan Wise Bauer (Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education)
if a “disability” really only becomes a problem in one setting—our factory-model K–12 system—I’d challenge that label.
Susan Wise Bauer (Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education)
This King of the World didn't reign alone. His wife, Mumtaz Mahal...traveled with him everywhere, helped him govern his kingdom, and worked with him to plan out his military campaigns. She kept his seal...and every decree that he made went to her to be approved.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
When it was time for the king and queen to leave the palace, Henrietta refused to come out of her room. She declared that she couldn't attend a Protestant ceremony. When Charles's noblemen tried to force her through the door, Henrietta punched her fists through the glass windows of her room!
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
[The Great Fire of London] hesitated, and it finally began to flicker out. But four-fifths of London had been burned...Londoner John Evelyn, weeping, wrote in his diary, "London was, but is no more.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
Despite the starvation and the hard work, some of the prisoners realized that life in Australia was actually better than life back in England. In England, they had been beggars with no way to get land of their own.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
...there were three men for every woman in Australia! Australia needed women. A committee in London was formed to send young women to Australia for only five pounds.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
Like Peter the Great, Catherine liked many of the ideas of the West... She bought many western customs to Russia. She rewrote Russia's confusing, ancient laws so that her people would have more rights... She opened new schools and started the first college for Russian women. She even made a woman the director of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Susan Wise Bauer
A college boy from Massachusetts named Eli Whitney came south... Eli liked machines, and he liked solving problems.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
Across Europe, millions of people worked at home along with their whole families. If the mother and father wove cloth, the children worked too: a ten-year-old sorted cotton; a teenage daughter spun thread; an older son tended the sheep and sheared their wool. Even a toddler might help by winding thread carefully onto a roll! When the family finished making their cloth, they would travel to market and sell it, using the money to buy food and tools. In the summer, they might spend more time tending their garden plot of carrots, cabbages, and beans; in the winter, when frost covered the ground, the family would go back to making cloth all day long.
Susan Wise Bauer (History for the Classical Child: Early Modern Times, Audiobook REVISED EDITION: Volume 3, Early Modern Times: Audiobook REVISED EDITION)
Now, weavers who worked at home couldn't get anyone to buy their cloth unless they sold it for less. Since they made less money from each piece, they had to work longer. Weavers worked for sixteen hours a day, their fingers sore and their eyes red -- and still couldn't make enough money to buy food.
Susan Wise Bauer
Luddites broke hundreds of machines and shut down dozens of factories. To the poorest factory workers, Luddites were heroes!
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
As time went on, Tecumseh saw that other tribes were willing to sign treaties with the whites, "selling" land in exchange for gifts. Again, Tecumseh grew angry. "We do not own the land!" he told his followers. "Land is like air and water. No one owns it. We all use it in common!
Susan Wise Bauer (The Story of the World: Early Modern Times from Elizabeth I to the Forty-Niners Activity Book 3: History for the Classical Child (Story of the World: History for the Classical Child))
The founding of the military orders was the closing act of the drama begun by Constantine at the Milvian Bridge. Marching into Rome under the banner of the cross, he had taken a powerful and mysterious theology and bent it to his own purposes. It had promised unity; he needed unification. It had promised ultimate victory; he needed earthly victory at once. It had promised an identity that transcended nationality and language; he had needed to overcome nationalism. Most of all, he needed to convince his soldiers, the people of Rome, and the enemies who threatened him that he was driven by something higher and more noble than simple ambition. Probably he needed to convince himself as well. Christianity gave Constantine freedom from guilt over his conquests at the same time that it lent him the zeal he needed to pursue them. Seven hundred years later, the military orders did exactly the same thing for the men who joined them and gave them a rule to spell out precisely what they would gain. That marriage of spiritual gain and political power would shape the next five centuries and the painful and protracted divorce between the two the centuries after that.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
The days of kings and lords first began to lose their brightness when philosophers and scientists realized that the ancient Greeks, who had long been held up as the wisest men in the world, were sometimes wrong.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
Galileo was one of the first scientists to use the scientific method. Instead of accepting old ideas, he carefully observed the world around him, and then tried to make a theory that would explain his observations.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
In his scientific notebook, Newton wrote, "Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas." That is Latin for, "Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
In [Two Treatises of Government], John Locke explained that he had discovered universal laws that could predict how people should act. Every man and woman, Locke wrote, was equal. Every human being had, by "natural law," the right to seek "life, health, liberty, and possession.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
Isaac Newton, John Locke, and many other men and women in England and Europe began to... believe that universal laws, discovered through observation, governed every part of human life. Today, we often talk about these ideas as "Western ideas." Sometimes, we talk about the years when these ideas became popular as the "Enlightenment.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
So the king of Denmark, Christian IV... was a skilled general and a smart man. He was filled with energy; according to popular rumor, he only stopped drinking to exercise, and only stopped exercising to drink some more.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Story of the World: Early Modern Times from Elizabeth I to the Forty-Niners Activity Book 3: History for the Classical Child (Story of the World: History for the Classical Child))
[Albert of Wallenstein] loved war. He was very tall and skeletally thin, usually dressed in sinister black, with a single streak of red. "[He is] unmerciful," wrote the astronomer Johannes Kepler, describing Wallenstein, "devoted only to himself and his desires...covetous, deceitful...usually silent, often violent.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
[The Han Chinese] gathered to oppose their Manchu overlords, shouting, "Keep your hair, even if you lose your head!
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
[Louis XIV] announced that he would now rule absolutely, without a council of advisors... No French king had ruled without advisors for almost a hundred years. And no one believed that this elegant young man... would be an efficient ruler.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
During [Louis XIV]'s reign, France became the largest and most important nation in Europe.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
Louis XIV had sent hundred of soldiers--all men--to New France. These soldiers wanted to start families... But there were six men for every woman... [Louis XIV] announced that he would pay young Frenchwomen large amounts of money if they would go and live in the colonies. Many young women accepted the King's offer...
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
[Peter the Great] also wanted women to take off their veils and mingle with men at social gatherings. He even wanted them to have tutors and be educated like men.
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
And who would be willing to travel through hundreds of miles of wilderness, risking capture, carrying a letter telling the French to retreat? A young Virginian volunteered. George Washington, only twenty-one years old... found a wilderness guide and a translator to accompany him and set off...
Susan Wise Bauer (Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3))
Patrick Henry argued that according to British law, no British citizen could be forced to pay a tax unless his representative... in Parliament agreed. But since there were no Americans in Parliament, the colonies didn't have representation. Any tax passed by Parliament was illegal...
Susan Wise Bauer (The Story of the World: Early Modern Times from Elizabeth I to the Forty-Niners Activity Book 3: History for the Classical Child (Story of the World: History for the Classical Child))
Those Amazing Musical Instruments! Your Guide to the Orchestra Through Sounds and Stories.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home)
Levine, Robert. The Story of the Orchestra: Listen While You Learn About the Instruments, the Music and the Composers Who Wrote the Music!,
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home)
Someone had to make sure that farmers, who grew more grain than their families needed, would sell food to the nonfarmers (the basketmakers, leatherworkers, and carpenters) who grew no grain themselves. Only in an inhospitable and wild place is this sort of bureaucracy—the true earmark of civilization—needed. In genuinely fertile places, overflowing with water and food and game and minerals and timber, people generally don’t bother.3
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome)
The people who lived along the Nile were called Egyptians. Early in Egypt’s history, there were two Egyptian tribes who lived along the Nile. The Egyptians who lived in the north, in the Nile Delta, were called the “Lower Egyptians.” The Egyptians who lived along the straight part of the river, further south, were called the “Upper Egyptians.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 1: Ancient Times: From the Earliest Nomads to the Last Roman Emperor)
bubonic plague.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child: The Middle Ages: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of the Renaissance)
Newton wrote, “Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas.” That is Latin for, “Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth.” When
Susan Wise Bauer (The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 3: Early Modern Times)
God made this country for us,” he wrote to Governor Grey. “If it were a whale, we might slice it in half. But it cannot be sliced. We will have to fight for the land that lies between us.” Governor
Susan Wise Bauer (The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 3: Early Modern Times)
This is a book. Only make-believe. Remember?
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded))
Chapter Three The Rise of Aristocracy In Sumer, around 3600 BC, kingship becomes hereditary AFTER THE GREAT FLOOD, the Sumerian king list tells us that the city of Kish—to the north, surrounded by cornfields
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome)
Some children respond to our educational matrix with This is my natural home. But there’s a whole range of mismatches between that matrix and the rest of the actual human beings who are funneled into it. Just past I’m good at school, we find I can do this, it’s just boring, progress through I can do some of this, but other parts of it are a complete mystery to me, continue on to If I grit my teeth I can probably squeak by, and end with I am stupid. I can’t do this. It’s just unending torture that I can’t get out of until I graduate. If your child falls anywhere on this mismatch spectrum, there’s a very good chance that the problem is school, not your child. And this is most definitely not the message that most struggling learners receive. Our current school system, as Sir Ken Robinson explains in his wildly popular TED talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?,”3 was designed to produce good workers for a capitalistic society. Built inextricably into that model is the assumption that “real intelligence consists [of a] capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning . . . what we come to think of as academic ability.” Deep in “the gene pool of public education,” Sir Ken concludes, is the unquestioned premise that “there are only two types of people—academic and nonacademic; smart people and non-smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they’re not, because they’ve been judged against this particular view of the mind. . . . [T]his model has caused chaos in many people’s lives. It’s been great for some; there have been people who have benefitted wonderfully from it. But most people have not. Instead, they suffer.
Susan Wise Bauer (Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education)
Further Reading For the Children’s Sake: Foundations of Education for Home and School by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay The Brave Learner: Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life by Julie Bogart The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids by Sarah Mackenzie Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child’s Education by Susan Wise Bauer A Gracious Space: Daily Reflections to Sustain Your Homeschooling Commitment by Julie Bogart Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler’s Guide to Unshakable Peace by Sarah Mackenzie Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life by Peter Gray Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv How to Raise a Wild Child: The Art and Science of Falling in Love with Nature by Scott D. Sampson Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World by Ben Hewitt Project-Based Homeschooling: Mentoring Self-Directed Learners by Lori Pickert Let’s Play Math: How Families Can Learn Math Together—and Enjoy It by Denise Gaskins The Art of Self-Directed Learning: 23 Tips for Giving Yourself an Unconventional Education by Blake Boles Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type by Isabel Briggs Meyers and Peter B. Myers
Ainsley Arment (The Call of the Wild and Free: Reclaiming Wonder in Your Child's Education)
nomads.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 1: Ancient Times: From the Earliest Nomads to the Last Roman Emperor)
In a special file cabinet drawer or dedicated file box, keep six file folders for each high-school student. Label them: Course Descriptions Books Read Papers Written Recommendations Extracurricular Activities Other
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home)
worship
Susan Wise Bauer (Story of the World, Vol. 2: History for the Classical Child: The Middle Ages (Second Edition, Revised) (Vol. 2) (Story of the World))
people want children to be creative before they have any knowledge or skill to be creative with.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home)
Let me offer my own experience. I went to a dreadful college. My bachelor's degree was accredited, but I'm so embarrassed by my undergraduate alma mater that I don't even put it on my resume. (You'd be surprise how few people ask.) I went there because my parents, to the frank, didn't know that I should aim higher; because they were very conservative, and thought it would be a safe place for a sixteen-year-old freshman; because my grandfather loved the school; because we were broke, and the school offered me a full tuition plus room and board scholarship.
Susan Wise Bauer (Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education)
He was forty years old, and for six years he had been struggling to claim the crown of the imperator. Less than twenty-four hours before, he had finally beaten the sitting emperor of Rome, twenty-nine-year-old Maxentius, at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Constantine’s men had fought their way forward across the bridge, toward the city of Rome, until the defenders broke and ran. Maxentius drowned, pulled down into the mud of the riverbed by the weight of his armor. The Christian historian Lactantius tells us that Constantine’s men marched into Rome with the sign of Christ marked on each shield; the Roman* writer Zosimus adds that they also carried Maxentius’s waterlogged head on the tip of a spear. Constantine had dredged the body up and decapitated it.1
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
Authority is all very well, but no man should assume that he’ll automatically be gifted with it because of his birth. Wisdom, not birth, qualifies a man to rule. The people of Kish may have mourned because their king Etana was childless.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome)
By the time the Han empire fell, its control over its lands in old Choson had shrunk to a single administrative district: Lelang, centered around the old city of Wanggomsong—modern Pyongyang.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
Two years after taking the throne, in the year 380, Theodosius declared that Nicene Christianity was the one true faith, and threatened dissenters with legal penalties. In doing so, he called into being a single, unified, catholic (the word means universal, applying to all humankind) Christian church.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
Leo did not depend only on this letter to establish his authority. He appealed to the throne, and in 445, Valentinian III (still dominated politically by his magister militum Aetius) agreed to make a formal official decree that recognized the bishop of Rome as the official head of the entire Christian church. Leo the Great, the bishop of Rome, had become the first pope.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
Rome was without an emperor and without a general. Three days after Maximus’s death, on April 22 of 455, the Vandals arrived at the city and broke through the gates.3 For fourteen days, the North African barbarians roved through the city, plundering and wrecking so thoroughly that their name became a new verb: to “vandalize,” to ruin without purpose.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
the Ajanta Caves,
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
spank
Susan Wise Bauer (Story of the World, Vol. 2: History for the Classical Child: The Middle Ages (Second Edition, Revised) (Vol. 2) (Story of the World))
Self-education begins where school education ends,” she wrote sternly.3
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded))
In the same year as the great naval defeat, Marwan faced both an uprising in Syria and another rebellion in Khorasan. Some of the rebels wanted a descendent of Ali to occupy the caliphate; since Ali’s death, a strong subcurrent within Islam had insisted that only a man of Ali’s blood could properly carry on as his successor (the followers of this current, who also believed that a successor of Ali would be spiritually and supernaturally fitted to rule, were known as Shi’at Ali, the “Party of Ali”). Others, willing to cast their net wider, argued that the caliphate should simply go to a member of Muhammad’s clan, the Banu Hashim: they were known, generally, as Hashimites.6 The revolt in Khorasan soon spread through the entire province, taking it out of Marwan’s control.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
Ali—the Shi’a—had called for a caliph of Ali’s blood. Neither time had their voices been strong enough to triumph against the majority, known as the Sunni. So the party of Ali, rejecting the caliphs as illegitimate, had exalted its own series of leaders: not caliphs, but imams, religious leaders who refused to swear allegiance to the caliphate. The Shi’a (a relatively small group who lived within the Sunni majority, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in a state of minor war) were willing to obey their imams without question. They believed that the Prophet himself had designated his successor, and that each imam had the God-given, infallible knowledge that allowed him to designate the next successor. The imams could not make mistakes, because they were filled with the wisdom of the Divine.3
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
Methodius and Cyril had set out to free Moravia from the Franks. Instead, they freed Bulgaria from both Rome and Constantinople; but neither lived to see this.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
The old ways were past. Vladimir had wiped out the past and transformed the warrior alliance of the Rus into a state. He had created a new Christian Russia, one that could stand as full ally to Byzantium and take its place as equal to the kingdoms of the west.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
Song Renzong, anxious to encourage trade, helped this sensible practice along: sometime early in his reign, a royal office was established in the city of Chengdu to print these receipts in set amounts. The woodblock receipts, circulated through the markets of Song China, served as the world’s first paper money.14
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
prince”):
Susan Wise Bauer (Story of the World, Vol. 2: History for the Classical Child: The Middle Ages (Second Edition, Revised) (Vol. 2) (Story of the World))
pigs
Susan Wise Bauer (Story of the World, Vol. 2: History for the Classical Child: The Middle Ages (Second Edition, Revised) (Vol. 2) (Story of the World))
We know very little about the earliest days of the Wa. There is no written history from the ancient cultures of Japan; its oldest historical account, the Kojiki, was not written until the seventh century AD. Archaeologists, working from objects rather than stories, speak of the first era of Japanese history as the “Jomon period” Jomon means “cord marked,” and during the Jomon period, the inhabitants of the Japanese islands marked their clay by pressing braided cords into it.
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade)
The first task of self-education is not the reading of Plato, but the finding of thirty minutes in which you can devote yourself to thought, rather than to activity.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded))
Technology can do a great deal to make information gathering easier, but it can do little to simplify the gathering of wisdom. Information washes over us like a sea, and recedes without leaving its traces behind. Wrestling with truth, as the story of Jacob warns us, is a time-consuming process that marks us forever.
Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded))
fat,
Susan Wise Bauer (The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child: The Middle Ages: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of the Renaissance)