Eclectic Education Series

I was sent the Eclectic Education Series from Dollar Homeschool to review for you. This is quite a whopper of a thing! I hardly even know how to describe what is included in this product.

Imagine if you will, that you could go back in time and have your children educated in the one room schoolhouses of 1880. With the EES series, you sort of can! EES has collected from the public domain over 50 of the books and texts used in the rural American schools from 1865 and 1915.

Now, just because a thing is old does not make it good. The same applies to a new thing. Age does not make a thing great. The content is what matters. Many, many of the things in this bundle, in my opinion, are priceless gems that have been long buried, like the McGuffey’s Readers for instance.

However, after looking over the science and grammar, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable using only what EES offers, especially as science has had many advances over the years and language is a living, evolving thing. Of course the study of grammar from the 1800’s is interesting, and certainly a worthwhile endeavor, thought probably not comprehensive for a child of this modern time.

The thing EES is offering is the service of finding and compiling all of these amazing resources; scanning them and putting them into a PDF document for you to purchase on CD for $159.00. The documents themselves appear as an old textbook would. The typeface is of an older style and some of the pictures are faded. Occasionally a page is not scanned in properly, though EES is working to fix this.

In theory, there is enough material to educate an entire family’s children for the entirety of their education, pre-college. In practice, I think some more up to date materials would need to be offered. I was very, very impressed however with the level of the high school material. This is not easy stuff!

The place to start with EES to figure out how to implement it in your homeschool would be to read Successful Teaching in Rural Schools, and then move on to the Manual of Methods. One of my favorite reads was the Nature Study book. I so love the idea of Nature Study but have never quite figured out how to incorporate it into my school. This book gave me some great tips.

You can go here to get a complete list if what EES has to offering in this bundle. You can go here to find out more about Eclectic Education in general, and you can click on the icon below to see what others on The Crew had to say.

Happy Homeschooling!