Susan Wise Bauer Quotes

The only men ruthless enough to fight against tyranny were themselves inclined to it.

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.

Pippin ordered Childeric III tonsured and sent to a monastery, where he died five years later, the last of the Merovingians.

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.*

The idea that fast reading is good reading is a twentieth-century weed, springing out of the stony farmland cultivated by the computer manufacturers.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Technology can do a great deal to make information gathering easier, but it can do little to simplify the gathering of wisdom.

deceit became a way of life:

The good general not only deceives the enemy himself, but assumes that his enemy is always deceiving him:

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

began to establish their own kingdoms, all over the land that once

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.

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.

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.

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.

Self-education begins where school education ends,” she wrote sternly.3

the Ajanta Caves,

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.

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

But Dhu Nuwas’s letter gave birth to a rumor that still lives. The kingdom of Himyar had long ago spread across the old territory once governed by the Sabeans, whose queen had journeyed north to see the great Israelite king Solomon in his capital of Jerusalem. And Dhu Nuwas was said to have sworn his oath to the Christians on the Ark. Perhaps the Ark of the Covenant, lost long ago, had in fact been taken down into Sabea by descendents of the queen, and Dhu Nuwas’s oath meant that he had the Ark in his possession; and perhaps Caleb, plundering the capital city of Himyar after his victory, took the Ark back across the Red Sea into Axum. It is still rumored to rest there, in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, in the ancient capital of the Axumites.

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.

A classical education requires a student to collect, understand, memorize, and categorize information.

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.

But the hundred-plus years during which France and England fought are characterized by a deeper conflict than mere territorial battles: “The King of England,” says Jean Froissart, “had long wished for an opportunity to assert his right to the crown of France.” When Philip V had resurrected the old Salic Law to take the throne of France away from his niece, he had inadvertently provided a way for the English king to take the French thone. Philip V’s end run around his niece’s right to rule France had led to the barring of his own daughter, his sole child, from the throne, and the appointment of the new House of Valois in the place of Hugh Capet’s descendants—leaving Edward III, son of Philip’s sister Isabelle, as the sole remaining monarch of direct Capetian descent.

The Assize of Clarendon became the foundation of English criminal law, and the notion at its center is the core of modern Western legislation: the peace of a realm is, in itself, an entity that can be offended; crime is not a personal, but a national, problem. It was a brilliant and nation-changing piece of legislation, pushed through by a man whose restless energy gave him flashes of insight far beyond his century.

Tangut-Chinese dictionary (A Timely Gem), containing the earliest complete bilingual glossary in the world.*

The Magna Carta, the Great Charter confirmed by John at Runnymede, bears the date June 15, 1215;

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.

One obedient slave is better than three hundred sons,” an eleventh-century sultan had written, “for the latter desire their father’s death, the former his master’s glory.

By 1340, in other words, renaissance was so far advanced that it had become visible. Historical eras are never recognizable when they begin; they can only be seen in hindsight. The Renaissance, as the following chapters will show, was rooted in the twelfth century.

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.

The Italian pope Nicholas V had just issued a papal bull called Dum Diversas. In recognition of the expense and effort that the Portuguese had put into exploring the African coast, the Church gave official approval to the enslavement and sale of Africans by the Portuguese crown—a sanction confirmed again three years later in the charter Romanus Pontifex.

Historians do not normally speak of the Age of Enslavement, but in hindsight we can see that the decrees of the 1450s shaped the futures of three continents and began a whole new story.

Dialectic: the rules of systematic thinking and inquiry laid out by Aristotle.

Aristotle offered the possibility of truth without God, of reason without faith.

The Nile River is a long river in Africa. At the top, it splits into several different little rivers and runs into the Mediterranean Sea.

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

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

bubonic plague.

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

Abram—Ibrahim, in the Arabic spelling—was the first to worship Allah, the one God, rather than the stars, the moon, or the sun.

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.

practice this skill with this book.

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.

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.

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.

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

See Chapter 37 for more on BC/BCE and AD/CE.

people want children to be creative before they have any knowledge or skill to be creative with.

worship

Cities grew up on rivers because it was easy to ship food, metals, wood, and other goods up and down the water. It was much easier to go by water than to drag heavy loads over land! The cities in Mesopotamia used the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers to trade with each other. But they didn’t just trade with each other. They also traded with countries to the east. And one of the countries they traded with was India. The people of India also used a river as a road. Their river was called the Indus, and the land around the Indus River was called the Indus Valley.

A century and a half after the Great Army of the Vikings landed on English shores, the island had finally fallen under Scandinavian rule.

He had extended his scepter into the realm of the ineffable.

Charles the Great’s blood kin no longer sat on the throne.

halves of the Frankish land, Eastern Francia and Western Francia, would never be reunited.

THE INVADERS WERE VIKINGS: young adventurers from the Scandinavian lands, sailing out from the cold towns that could barely support their fathers’ families.

This shift was a phenomenon known as the Medieval Warm Period, or the Medieval Climactic Anomaly.

Charlemagne

Pax Nicephori.

With the death of the last Tang emperor, the inside of China had disappeared and only the outside remained.

During his reign, the first mythical histories of Japanese kingship, the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, were written.

But then the gods had given man a gift—the leadership of the imperial house.

the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,

which protected the tomb of Jesus, commemorated as the site of the resurrection,

and Golgotha, the hill of crucifixion.

The enormous stones were hacked to bits with axes, and the rock itself was removed from the city.

al-Hakim ordered the great Christian complex built by Constantine destroyed:

with walls eighty feet thick protecting them and five hundred Buddhist monasteries inside.

The kingdoms of the Franks, the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, and the British, 481–531

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

the next historical period, the Yayoi, which ran (after a century or so of transition) from 300 BC to around AD 250.

However, by AD 270, Japan had at least one monarch and one royal family.

The Yamato dynasty ruled the flat fertile plain on the largest island:

Khosru reorganized the now vast expanse of his land, dividing it into quadrants

placing a military commander over each:

There was no chance now that Christianity would spread eastward into the Arabian peninsula.

a period known as the Rule of the Dukes.

Sui Wendi had restored China to unity with his two-pronged strategy: first words, then swords.