All Authors
Susan Wise Bauer received her B.A. and M.A. from the College of William & Mary and her Ph.D. in American Studies from William & Mary, where she taught writing for a decade. She was homeschooled herself through high school by her mother Jessie Wise, and co-authored The Well-Trained Mind with her. She is the publisher at Peace Hill Press and the creator of the Writing With Ease and Writing With Skill curriculum series.
Key Ideas
- →Classical education follows the trivium: the grammar stage (facts and foundational knowledge), the logic stage (critical thinking and analysis), and the rhetoric stage (articulate expression of ideas)
- →Children naturally move through these three stages, and education works best when it aligns with, rather than fights against, their developmental trajectory
- →History is the spine of a classical education — all other subjects connect to and are illuminated by the great sweep of human story
- →Reading widely in primary sources and great literature develops a mind capable of handling complexity and ambiguity
- →Homeschooling is not a rejection of education but a recovery of the historical norm — the majority of great thinkers through history were educated at home or in very small groups