The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had
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- ISBN13: 9780393050943
- Condition: New
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Product Description
An engaging, accessible guide to educating yourself in the classical tradition.
Surrounded by more books than ever, readers today are frequently daunted by the classics they have left unread. The Well-Educated Mind, debunking our own inferiority complexes, is a wonderful resource for anyone wishing to explore and renovate the mind’s capacity to read and comprehend the “greatest hits” in fiction, autobiography, history, poetry, and drama.
Far from tossing readers into the swarming sea of classics and demanding that they swim, this book offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres, accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the close of each chapter—ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Paul Gilroy—preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital relations between very ancient traditions and contemporary writing.
Based on the same classical method as Bauer’s terrifically successful The Well-Trained Mind, The Well-Educated Mind provides not only a thorough grounding in the classics but also a widely applicable foundation for self-education.
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A nation would seem to be in distress if the supposedly educated part of its population are writing book reviews with words like “aliteracy” such as did reviewer D Becker.
It just shows one should never place much store in print.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I read through the first half of the book and was raring to go- ready to buy my first book from the “fantastic list”. I couldn’t choose whether to go with the Novel list or the History list, so chose to check them out in person first before building my choice.
Much to my shock the first selections (Bauer insists you read them in order) within either of these genres (Don Quixote and The Histories by Heroditus) are HUGE!! My heart sank nearly immediately, but I was detemined to try it.
I sat down with both in the store and read the first few pages. Then, a light went off. It dawned on me that I had no desire whatsoever to A – spend the money on these books B – read them.
My life has progressed such that I am no longer in school and forced to read what I am not inclined to. That’s one of the fantastic things about growing up – I can read whatever I want to.
For me, the time I would have spent on these books would be more enjoyable reading about a new leisure activity or learning about world religions or learning a foreign language, or pretty much anything else. Even, G-d forbid, reading a Tom Clancy novel (which Bauer conveys are beneath her).
This is an appealing concept, but the thought of limiting what you read and what order you read them is suffocating. There were some excellent tips on retaining what you read and she encourages you to keep learning even if you are out of school. I advocate that, certainly, but I’m an adult and my time is so crunched, the time I spend reading should be fulfilling and enjoyable, not something to dread.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
This book is a stuffy and pretentious effort of a bibliophile to lionize the value of certain books as being essential to the development of a learned mind. Though she doesn’t state she has is tradionalist in her concept of education-and I doubt she has done much reading about the history or philosophy of education, Ms Bauer promulgates a dated, simplistic and “additional directed” kind of learning by reading “fantastic” books. She must have either not read or establish worthless the works of the transcendentalists like Emerson, or the pragmatists like Dewey, or works of the Frankfurt school as her orientation to books fails to consider the orientation of these movements. In addition, though she suggests the reader take careful notes she mentions nothing about marginalia, or thoughts about scaffolding ones reading with advance organizers or visual organizers or any advanced thoughts about journaling via Progiffs at a journal Workshop. For a name who wants to tell others how to be well read- she seems to have not done sufficient reading, from my viewpoint. So to me her book lacks a lot of virtue. In additions, she doesnt want books to free the reader to go beyond the limits of books into developing their own understanding as the educational theorist Howard Gardner advocates in The Disciplined Mind. On that point Dewey, too would consider her kind of learning too bookish to be of genuine value.Genuine learning from books requires more reflection and engagement with real life then Bauer seems to know. It seems to me as Dante said she has become rich in books-and on the breadline in herself. This results from her orientation of revering books lacking critically, freely and fully digesting them. Bibliphile-heal thyself!
Books can be used to further learing if the right approach is taken. In my mind, the leader shows that she has failed to approach her book thoroughl-she is agreed to partial knowledge and hence she has “einschrankunged” to use Heideggers term not only the reading process and what can be gained from the books she mentions but the learning experience, as well.
Whats most remarkable abnout this book is the authors failure to do much reading of the reading research literature which is reasonably rich and developed.
Bauer fails to know thoughts as prominant as Barthes notion of readerly vs writerly texts. She doesnt know what Balzac and additional authors with respect to “”textual anxiety”-that authors thoughts dont permanently translate well into words. Bauer is a logocentric as she fails to know the reading proces regularly involves use of images- the “dual code processing” or any of Simply place this book is “one dimensional” and “disenchanting” as the leader failed to do much research-much reading about the reading experience. She also fails to know that some like Julia Cameron in The Artists Way know reading too much or too regularly can stifle creativity. With books like Bauers its understandable why we have aproblem with aliteracy in this country. This books value lies in providing an annotated bibliography of some classics-beyond that it just bears witness to the authors ignorance and failure to approach the theme of reading with virtue
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
i was deceived by the title. it was mostly a reading guide and not some sort of survey of the “classics.” plus, i’ve read better reading guides
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
The market segment for Susan Wise Bauer’s “The Well-Educated Mind” is clear: it’s a guidebook and cheat sheet for book club members, primarily women. And the book falls into the category of self-improvement that middle-aged women (who reflect they’re too educated for Oprah) are so obsessed with nowadays.
Borrowing from Hegel’s “thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis” argument, Ms. Bauer believes there are three main outcomes of reading: first is the ability to know the text, second is the ability to criticize the text, and third is the ability to formulate one’s own viewpoint. She clarifies how to read different genres, and provides a cheat list of books to be read from these genres. In this way, her book is a cross between David Denby’s “Fantastic Books (which I also abhorred for its pretentious sophomoric induglences) and Cole Notes.
There is nothing original nor appealing in this glorified self-help book.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5