The kids and I sit down each Thursday morning to read a chapter of “From Dawn To Decadence” by Jacques Barzun. This is a unique book. Mr. Barzun’s writing style reflects his native language and so is interesting for my kids to hear, his word choice stretches my kids’ (and my) vocabulary each week, and each chapter gives us something to talk about and evaluate. The more we read in this book, the more it exercises our critical thinking muscles. Not because Mr. Barzun is illogical, but because his writing draws us in and begs us to question and evaluate the last 500 years of western culture.
When I was preparing to homeschool through high school in a classical style, I thought I would perhaps need outside classes to help my kids with history and literature, given my background in math and science. Growing up I thought that history was boring and writing was too hard. Now I realize that the history I was given to read as a child indeed was boring and one-sided and in fact mentally deadening, and the way I was taught to write was positively awful. I also figured out that with the help of good books, and a little bit of dedicated time each day, I was able to get to the point of understanding and enjoying both history and the art of writing. My timeline for being ready to lead my children through high school still has a few more years to go, but my children caught up to me. They can write better than I, understand how to craft a story or an argument with better precision, and love and retain history more strongly than I ever did.
And so here I am with two middle schoolers who are inexplicably entering the rhetoric stage (basically that’s analysis and independent thought) and we are going through the history and literature texts together. Between the three of us, the experience blossoms into a wonderful exploration of the past and it’s effect on current culture. Each new book we read together begins with a struggle. It is difficult to read, difficult to understand, and as a result difficult to analyze. But over the period of weeks, I find that all three of us are understanding and finding new meaning and connections from the book.
And now back to the wonderful book by Jacques Barzun. We are only as far as the few chapters, and take each reading slowly, since the writing is so dense and every paragraph we stop reading and talk about Mr. Barzun’s viewpoint and other points of western culture that support or weaken his arguments.
I highly recommend this book, even if you are just going to read it yourself and not with your children. Tying all points of western culture together (music, literature, fine art, poetry, plays, technology, science, religion) with history makes for a wonderful stretching of your mind. Whether or not you agree with Mr. Barzun’s perspectives, you will emerge from this book with a broadened outlook and hopefully better able to analyze and assess life today.
