Editorial Review
"Outstanding...should be on every home educator's reference bookshelf."—Homeschooling Today This book will instruct you, step by step, on how to give your child an academically rigorous, comprehensive education from preschool through high school. Two veteran home educators outline the classical pattern of education—the trivium—which organizes learning around the maturing capacity of the child's mind: the elementary school "grammar stage," the middle school "logic stage," and the high school "rhetoric stage." Using the trivium as your model, you'll be able to instruct your child in all levels of reading, writing, history, geography, mathematics, science, foreign languages, rhetoric, logic, art, and music, regardless of your own aptitude in those subjects.
Newly revised and updated, The Well-Trained Mind includes detailed book lists with complete ordering information; up-to-date listings of resources, publications, and Internet links; and useful contacts.
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Customer Reviews
Look for the 1st Edition 
2008-08-04
This is an excellent guide that EVERY homeschooler should have. HOWEVER, the 1999 edition has better resource lists in it, because it was written before Bauer and Wise began publishing their own Language and History books. I checked out the 1st edition from the library and LOVED it. I was a bit disappointed to get the 2nd edition (2004). I don't like the fact that they now recommend their own books, and don't recommend much else that would compete with their own series in these subject areas.
The Well Trained Mind 
2008-07-24
This book helped motivate me and give me the resources to feel confident about homeschooling my daughter. I would highly recommend it.
A Must-Read for Anyone Considering Home-Schooling 2008-07-22
"The Well-Trained Mind" has been a very informative read and strikes true with many of my own ideals about what a good education should be. The resource lists are amazing and those alone should be enough for anyone to by this wonderful reference material. The authors are very honest about how much effort and energy are required for home-schooling, but by the end of the book the reader is left feeling as though they could take on the world.
An Excellent Resource For Parents 2008-07-06
Joanne Scaglione, author:
The Big Squeal: A Wild, True, and Twisted Tail and teaching guide;
Bully-Proofing Children: A Practical, Hands-On Guide to Stop Bullying;
Living The Secret Everyday: My Secret Workbook
This is a must-have tool for any parent of a homeschooler or for that matter of any school-age student. Filled with great information on curriculum and strategies; I recommend it very highly.
Good book 
2008-07-03
I found this book to be very helpful in giving me the knowledge to educate my children at home. Very thorough yet I would have loved an update.Some book or reference books were out of date.
My short, simple and to-the-point review 2008-06-27
"Outstanding...should be on every home educator's reference bookshelf."—Homeschooling Today This book will instruct you, step by step, on how to give your child an academically rigorous, comprehensive education from preschool through high school. Two veteran home educators outline the classical pattern of education—the trivium—which organizes learning around the maturing capacity of the child's mind: the elementary school "grammar stage," the middle school "logic stage," and the high school "rhetoric stage." Using the trivium as your model, you'll be able to instruct your child in all levels of reading, writing, history, geography, mathematics, science, foreign languages, rhetoric, logic, art, and music, regardless of your own aptitude in those subjects.
Newly revised and updated, The Well-Trained Mind includes detailed book lists with complete ordering information; up-to-date listings of resources, publications, and Internet links; and useful contacts.
excellent resource 2008-06-20
This book was exactly what I was looking for regarding information on "classical" education. Very Beneficial.
MUST HAVE 2008-06-01
This book is a must have for anyone who is even thinking about homeschooling. It has helped me beyond words.
Save Your Money 
2008-05-02
I read this book twice- the first edition was the first homeschooling book I ever read. While it did inform my thinking, more often than not it left me saying, "Geez, these ladies are SCREAMING for an editor". Besides being repetitive and verbose, it is abominably organized.
The "How to Do It" sections in particular read in a confused, spiraling, and ultimately pointless manner. (Oh, and a note the authors and their editor: the word "notebook" is not a synonym with the word "binder".)
Both the meat of the book- the outlined methods- and the decent part of the book- the resource lists- are so poorly organized that it makes the book extremely cumbersome. The resource lists, in particular, are nearly incoherent, even when the recommended book/curricula are truly good.
Since my reading of the first edition, I have read widely about education in general and homeschooling in particular. With this hindsight, I would strongly suggest that any new homeschooling parent (or even anyone who is just interested in educational philosophies) read the Moores, Beechik, Mason, Holt, Gatto, and Montessori, as well as at least one other book outlining the trivium BEFORE committing to any educational approach.
I checked the second edition out of the library because I remembered it had a ton of resources listed. To my extreme chagrin, many of the core resources (a.k.a. "spines") mentioned it the first edition have been replaced with books written by the authors themselves. While this is slick marketing, it is, quite simply, anti-education. I have found most of these new spines to be of inferior quality to the original recommendations- they read as though they were hastily churned out.
In seeking the resource list from the first edition, I went online, where I found that not only have the book's authors contrived to make it unavailable, a veritable cult of personality has sprung up around this book. It's weird, and a little creepy.
For example, the Peace Hill Press website (the company that publishes the Wise/Bauer books) continously exhorts you to buy directly from them, even though their prices are most uncompetitive, ostensibly because they offer such a great service to homeschooling families in publishing. Yeah. Uh huh. Riiiight.
And, as much as logic is lauded in the Well-Trained Mind (which is as it should be; logic is vital), the obessive, faddish crowd that has swarmed around this book overlooks much of the contradictory and faulty logic found throughout both the book and the associated websites.
(For example, online you can read one of the authors write, that "Careful thinkers do not make blanket statements." Great, considering that is, in itself, a blanket statement, which reveals the stator to be... well, something of dolt.)
But, back to the lack of logic and continuity within the book: even though the authors extoll the virtures of flexibility and individually tailored learning, they include pages (and pages!) of rigid, overstuffed schedules- daily, weekly, and yearly. Now, to be perfectly fair, on their websites the authors claim to always have known that the schedules were stupid, but that their publisher insisted that they be included. This has the distinct smell of B.S. to me, since, #1, the schedules are still in the second edition, and #2, while I don't know much about publishing, I'm pretty sure that when you OWN the press that prints your books, you have some control over the publisher's wants.
The notion that living foreign languages should take a back seat to Latin might be the most asinine idea in this book. Should a well educated person learn enough Latin to understand English root words and common Latin phrases? Absolutely- BUT much of this knowledge will come out of learning Spanish, which is incredibly useful. Also, learning some Latin after already having grasped (and hopefully, having spoken) some Spanish will make the task that much easier. Finally, the notion that Latin should be started in third grade, yet living foreign languages should be put off until the middle grades or later is in direct contrast to every other language education book I have ever read.
The sections about college are a waste of time. It would take pages to explain how and why their take on college is entirely useless, so I will simply suggest that these sections be disregarded in their entirety.
There are some good ideas within this book, but I found the best ones (narration, using living books) to be cribbed from Charlotte Mason.
My main caution against this book is not to be caught up in the fervor that surrounds it. It's just a trendy tome filled with fifty cent words, not the be-all, end-all of classical education that it claims to be.
the only homeschooling book you need 2008-04-28
this is the best homeschooling book out there. i have spent tons of money and time on most of the other well known homeschooling books amazon promotes, and nothing compares. i have sold the rest at the used book store. i should have borrowed them at the libary! just keep this one and all the other books written by and recommended by these authors.
