This kind of ties in with my thinking that some re-prioritization and clean-up is most needed in the first year. I seem to recall that my slowness in getting used to a heavier reading load was part of the issue, as was the fact that the program was still being written as I got started.
I did find that both History Begins at Sumer and Never to Die are still/back in print, which is nice since both had some cool selections. Another way to cut much of this short, perhaps, is to use the ancient history sourcebook which can be bought as a companion to Starr, and which contains all sorts of useful stuff from Egyptian love poems an Akhenatun's hymn to the sun to Hamurabi's code, etc. I can't find it right off on Amazon, I'd have to find my copy and see what the ISBN is.
I think something has to be done to get at least all the way through the Greeks in the first year. That probably means reducing the megaliths, making sure that the Sumerians and Egyptians don't get out of control, reading the Iliad or the Odyssey instead of both, and reducing Thucydides to selections. Thoughts?
Humanities I: The Ancient World
core text: Starr, Ancient History, Chapters 1-21
Mohen, The World of the Megaliths (selections)
Abrams, History of Art For Young People (selections)
Jansen, History of Art (selections)
BBC video, Who Built Stonehenge?
Kramer, History Begins at Sumer
(ch. 1, 2, 16, 17)----- Epic of Gilgamesh
Mayer & Prideaux, Never to Die
(pp. 15-57, 63-80,101-166)de Camp, Ancient Engineers (ch. 1-2)
Homer, Odyssey
Homer, Illiad
Herodotus, History (Persion War parts)
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
Xenophon, The March Up Country
Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way
(ch. 11, 15)
11 comments:
I'd say cut Thucydides and Xenophon down to selections, but read BOTH the Iliad and the Odyssey. (1) As far as "great books" go, you can't get much more canonical than Homer. (2) Knowledge of those stories is (or should be!) basic cultural literacy. (3) Everybody and his brother has read them and alluded to them. Heck, the basic structure of the Aeneid is based on them.
How much overlap is there between Starr, World of the Megaliths, and Who Built Stonehenge? (And how easy is it to lay hands on that last one?) Given how little we know about that period, I don't imagine one would need to spend more than a week on it, at most two.
I really hope we can keep in the Sumerian man's poem to his fish.
Is this the entire first year? What about Greek drama? (I'd say the minimum for those should be Oresteia, Oedipus Rex, and the Bacchae.)
Also: what's in Ancient Engineers? Is that redundant in any way?
In the version I have, the Greek drama and philosophy don't come in till year two.
Ancient engineers is interesting, but could certainly be skipped.
I'd agree that the stories in the Iliad and Odyssey are basic cultural literacy. I guess I just wasn't sure about the amount of reading time required. What would you say is a reasonable reading time for a HS Freshman to read those two? I should sit down with a copy and work it out by pages.
Agreed that megaliths should be 1week max.
I was almost wondering if Xenophon could be skipped at this level. It's a great _story_ but in a sense the story aspects of history are getting covered in the earlier period's of the classical education. Kind of like the HS Humanities Program doesn't go through and have you read the entire canon of Greek myths -- since hopefully you know most of them.
I'll post what I have listed as the second year in my old copy so we'll see where it's headed. (I think things may have been got a bit more on track by the time you went through the program.)
You know whom we should consult about reading times for freshmen highschoolers? Uncle Bruce. He's been teaching the Western Literature to Dante course to freshmen for years. The syllabus is here; he does the Iliad and the Odyssey in three and two weeks, respectively. I don't recall having any trouble when I did the course with him, though I was a senior at that point.
Xenophon probably could be skipped, charming as it is. (Or put on the supplemental reading list.) I'm actually not sure if it was even on the program by the time I went through; my only specific memories of it are from when Dad was reading it aloud, but then I am often a bear of very little memory.
Hmmm. Is there actually a reading list page, or do you have to look through all the weeks and figure it out?
Actually, I think that Xenophon was added as a "we already read it, might as well list it" item in my case as well. I didn't read it again.
Um. It doesn't look like it. Though if we asked him, I bet he could produce a copy.
Yes, there was definitely revision between Darwin's version of the Humanities Program and the one which Rhinemouse and her other brother enjoyed. But the hard copies from their years are currently packed because I'm moving and who knows when they'll surface.
Your dad had a tendency to put too much into each year. Darwin was our beta tester.
Re: Darwin's remark about not reading Greek Myths in high school -- they were not assigned as individual reading, but we went through that big collection as a read aloud. (Was it by Graves?) Darn! It's packed so I can't go look it up, though I can see it on the shelf in my mind's eye.
Yes, a lot of the stuff that got listed on your transcripts was stuff we read aloud as a family.
Edith Hamilton had a good large collection of Greek mythology. And Robert Graves had a somewhat more racy (but still very good) version.
I do have a hard copy version of the program dating from 2000 (the younger sybs version) and having that in front of me (as I did not yesterday) it looks like it includes Plutarchs lives of Pericles, Alcibiades and Demosthenes and also the Greek Drama (Prometheus Bound, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, The Bacchae, Medea).
Aristophanes slips into Year II after plato -- they just did The Birds. (Which might certainly be a certain call for certain sensibilities.)
I don't think we read Robert Graves--at least, not the two-volume edition with the multiple versions of each myth. We read a book called--I think--"The Vengeance of the Gods," which included a bunch of stories from Greek drama, and we also read the Metamorphoses.
This looks familiar from the family book shelf.
Yes! That's it exactly! It's a very good book, and I think we should definitely list it as supplemental reading.
Post a Comment