The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had by Susan Wise Bauer
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003-08-17), 444
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The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer
- Chapter 1 - Training Your Mind
- From Jefferson: we can fill our “chasms of time” (14) with useful study
- Mortimer Adler: reading allows us to participate in the “Great Conversation” of ideas (16)
- Francis Bacon: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested” (18)
- Classical Education is divided into three stages, the Trivium
- grammar: foundational knowledge
- logic: analyze
- rhetoric: express your own opinion
- She emphasizes the importance of being deliberate and focused
- “Engage no the mind in the intense pursuit of too many things at once” - Isaac Watts (20)
- Friedrich Schleiermacher described that wide-ranging, unsystematic reading left his mind “like Chaos, before the world was created (21)
- Set a time for study
- morning
- 4 days per week
- Don’t focus on visible achievement, but on the act of thinking
- Chapter 2 - The Act of Reading
- “to be enlightened is to understand an idea and use it to make sense of the facts you’ve gathered” (25)
- concern about speed:
- reading is the life-long process, so you don’t need to do it all now
- serious reading is not trying to assimilate as much info as possible, but to understand a few important ideas
- But, some points from speed readers may be helpful
- move your eyes smoothly across the page
- scan the page for context
- “prior knowledge makes reading easier” should be encouraging: read chronologically and it gets easier
- Chapter 3 - Keep a Journal
- “What we write, we remember. What we summarize in our own words becomes our own.” (36)
- journal for self-education should be modeled after “commonplace book”: quotes and snippets you want to remember
- jot down notes/quotes as you read
- after reading, write a brief summary of what you read
- white your own thoughts/questions
- “He who is seeking to know himself should be ever seeking himself in external things” -Bronson Alcott (37)
- the goal is to not stuff facts in your head but to understand them
- Lydia Sigourney: “At the close of every week, abridge in writing, the subjects that you deem most valuable” (38)
- Notes while reading
- Write the title of the chapter. Read the whole chapter without stopping. Write down phrases that stand out to you
- Summarize each section in your own words
- Glance over your summaries and write your reactions
- Chapter 4 - Final Preparations
- serious reading is hard work: but can be broken down into manageable steps
- Grammar
- Just read and keep reading
- Underline and take notes on your book
- When first starting read: title page, table of contents, back cover, preface if by the author/translator (but not others who would be offering an opinion before you get to see the text)
- Don’t take extensive notes on first reading. Stop at end of each chapter and write a sentence
- Jot down questions as you read
- Assemble your summary sentences into an informal outline
- Give the book a title (4-7 words) and descriptive title to capture what it is really about
- Logic
- Reread the difficult and important sections
- Dig deeper into the book’s structure
- Ask: How well did the writer succeed?
- Rhetoric
- So what? What does the writer want to you do/believe/experience?
- Engage in purposeful conversation to fix knowledge firmly in the memory
- book groups
- find one other person who will read with you and discuss with you
- discussions by letter can be helpful if you are formal and purposeful in your writing
- You can check up on other people’s opinions of works after you read: Modern Critical Essays
- stop by a professor at a local university
- Notes on her lists by category
- “When you read chronologically, you reunite two fields that should never have been separated in the first place: history and literature” (51)
- it provides you with a continuous story
- Don’t feel bound by the lists: add or subtract to match your interests
- Also pick how much to focus on each: some to digest
- “When you read chronologically, you reunite two fields that should never have been separated in the first place: history and literature” (51)