I am surprised that anyone would give anything that Robin Sampson (aka Robin Scarlata) has done a negative review. And yet, remarkably, it has happened.
The following quotes come from Eclectic Homeschool Online, and they are about Robin’s book, The Heart of Wisdom Teaching Approach.
Mrs. Sampson presents the Hebraic educational model in a well-researched and thorough manner. Her treatment of the Greek/Classical educational model stands in stark contrast as biased, superficial scholarship. I wouldn’t accept the imbalance in resources from either of my high school age students, and I certainly expected better from Mrs. Sampson. A great deal of these chapters amount to a thinly veiled attack on what the author perceives as the evil of classical education. Her campaign runs into problems with the details.
Her repeated use of poor logic antagonizes the very people (classical homeschoolers) she’s trying to convince. Her classical education bashing rests on the unstable foundation of a number of logical fallacies.
… she assumes that other homeschool parents can’t recognize the propaganda in these chapters. Perhaps this is because she doesn’t recognize that it IS propaganda.
Ouch! I think that’s gonna leave a mark.
But that’s not all! Eclectic Homeschool Online points us to John Mark Reynolds at Scriptorum Daily who gives The Heart of Wisdom Teaching Approach a thorough tongue lashing.
These groups attack a straw man by arguing against “Greek education” and advocating “Hebrew education.”
… [I]t is easy to demonstrate … that good intentions on sites like “Heart of Wisdom” combined with bad information are not going to help the Christian home school movement.
It is an abuse of history to argue that the varied educational methods that produced thousands of years of Church leaders are simply “pagan.”
The problem with the “Heart of Wisdom” argument is not the intentions, but the reasoning.
Which Greeks? The atheists? The ones who welcomed Paul at Mars Hill (Acts 17), because he had the answer to their philosophical questions that had prepared the way for their reception of the gospel? The Platonists? the neo-Platonists? The Cynics? The Stoics? The Epicureans? They agreed on so little that making a chart of their beliefs as a unified whole is absurd.
One would be hard pressed to find a single doctrine on this chart that would command a majority of Greek philosophical support. It should disturb home school folks tempted to believe these folks that [Robin’s] chart is just wrong . . . not wrong from a worldly point of view, but wrong factually.
The fact that this chart can rapidly be shown false not just in some small details … but in almost every point should cause the home school mom to lose faith in it.
The Heart of Wisdom folk risk reading books to educate their children in a way that guarantees that their children could not write the books they are reading.
There’s a lot more that is said at Scriptorum Daily. Robin Sampson and the homeschooling parents who use the Heart of Wisdom program are really taken to task.
Not to change the subject very much … here’s a recent interesting and instructive post on Robin’s blog for you: Should Homeschoolers Teach Logic? (This might be a better link.) Yeah, we did and will, but who knows if they should. Does it really matter all that much? I should get started on it with my daughter; the end of the school year is looming. We used Traditional Logic with my son and my daughter will go through it also. We only use Book 1 because … um … maybe it’s because I kind of listen to my kids and let them decide on a great many things pertaining to their education once they are upper teens. My son took one look at the second book of Traditional Logic and said that it went into it further than he was interested in going into it. I think that part of it was the format changed a fair bit and the lessons seemed to be less practical than the first book. But that was a few years back, and my memory is fuzzy.
If you want to buy it:
Traditional Logic, Book 1, Student (35% off special, limited time only)
Traditional Logic, Book 1, Key
Traditional Logic, DVDs (24% off special, limited time only)
Traditional Logic is easy to use, simply set up, takes about a semester. I just threw it in with the English class. It’s decent training for the mind. If your student wants to learn logic, and many do, then it’s probably the best product on the market for homeschoolers. For those homeschooling for reasons other than religious, the religious flavor of the program is probably skippable in the first book of the series but not the second.