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Real Books or Text Books?
Most of the books recommended by CCH for use in the dialectic and rhetoric stages (the secondary curriculum) are “real” books. They are not history texts, or science texts, or economics texts. They are real books, about history or science or philosophy or economics. Text books tell you what the main points of a subject are; in essence, they tell you what to think about that subject. Real books require you to do your own thinking, which is why they provide a superior education and training in thinking. But of course, that is also harder. It is easy to get something tangible out of text books, but how do you get something tangible out of real books?*
For example, in the dialectic and rhetoric stages, we are faced with a list of “great books” to read, like Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero’s Orations, Augustine’s Confessions, or Madison, Hamilton, and Jay’s The Federalist Papers. They intimidate homeschool parents. But we can read these works successfully with our children in our homeschools. I know because we do it every day, with the greatest great book, the Bible. The Bible is a real book. It is not someone’s text book telling us what the Bible means and what its main points are. We believe we can read it for ourselves, and our children can read it for themselves, and get something out of it. If we can do that with the greatest great book, we can do it with lessor great books, and even other books that we might use that are helpful, but not “great.” What follows is the plan we use in our homeschool to get the most out of real books in our curriculum.
Dialectic stage children can do the following work with parental help and prompting. It works well for parent and child to write the book notes together, especially in the beginning. Rhetoric stage children do much of this work on their own, with occasional parental help. Over the course of the six years, children will need less and less help as they get the hang of reading and evaluating real books.
*Much of the material from this article is a condensation, along with some of my own practical ideas, of the art of reading described in How to Read a Book by Dr. Mortimer Adler. This book is really essential for homeschoolers using real books in the secondary curriculum. Dr. Adler discusses analytical reading, note-taking, and evaluating the author’s message in detail, and also includes chapters on adjusting your reading and evaluating for epic poetry, plays, philosophy, history, etc.--different kinds of real books. We recommend it without reservation.