A review by s_books
A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the Twenty-First Century by Oliver DeMille

2.0

I have a Classics-based education and I felt that while the aim of this book may be commendable, it was both too self-serving (e.g. the number of times the author brought up George Wythe college) yet too lacking in detail for most people who would be looking read it (e.g. parents considering a classics based homeschooling or people interested in a classic liberal arts education for themselves). The two tips I thought this book offered that you don’t see too much in other books on the same subject were: 1) there are classics in every subject (some other books feel like they skip a bit over math and science and don’t really touch at all on subjects like psychology or business, leaving them to “higher” education); 2) to learn a foreign language by reading that language’s classics in the actual language — to a certain extent this would have to be done with more “modern” classics to be of true help (think of how difficult it would be trying to learn English through Shakespeare or Chaucer as opposed to a writer from the last century or so), however, I think the idea itself is interesting and not really dealt with at all in many similar books.