The Well-Educated Mind (2003) (edit title/settings)

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• 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.

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• In the classical school, learning is a three-part process. First, taste: Gain basic knowledge of your subject. Second, swallow: Take the knowledge into your own understanding by evaluating it. Is it valid? Is it true? Why? Third, digest: Fold the subject into your own understanding. Let it change the way you think—or reject it as unworthy. Taste, swallow, digest; find out the facts, evaluate them, form your own opinion.

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• What we write, we remember. What we summarize in our own words becomes our own.

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• The first step toward understanding is to grasp exactly what is being said, and the oldest and most reliable way of grasping information is to put it into your own words. To master the content of what you read, summarize.

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• 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.

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• To be informed is to collect facts; to be enlightened is to understand an idea (justice, or charity, or human freedom) and use it to make sense of the facts you’ve gathered.

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• The first task of self-education is not the reading of Plato, but the finding of twenty minutes in which you can devote yourself to thought, rather than to activity.

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• www.pinkmonkey.com and www.sparknotes.com. At www.jollyroger.com, a Web site devoted to the discussion of Great Books, you can post your ideas on message boards and wait for reactions—although, again, you have no way of knowing how “expert” other participants in the discussion might be.

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• But the journal of self-education has a more outward focus. It is modeled on the last century’s “commonplace book,” a looseleaf or bound blank book in which readers copied down quotes and snippets that they wanted to remember.

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• 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.

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1. Susan Wise Bauer (Author)

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