Neoclassical Education, The Well-Trained Mind, and Why Aristotle Wins (Ad Navseam Ep. 28)

Meta Description: Join Dr. David Noe and Dr. Jeff Winkle in Ad Navseam Episode 28 as they welcome the legendary Dr. Susan Wise Bauer. From her time as a Hebrew “Class Champion” to the founding of the modern classical education movement, discover why she prefers “neoclassical” to “classical,” why Aristotle beats Plato, and how a pregnant writer convinced W.W. Norton to publish The Well-Trained Mind.

Introduction: Springtime in the Vomitorium

Welcome back to the “Vomitorium,” listeners! It is Episode 28 of the Ad Navseam Podcast, and your hosts, Dr. David Noe and Dr. Jeff Winkle, are broadcasting from a Vomitorium that feels decidedly less like a bunker and more like a room with a view. The sun is shining, the lake outside is sparkling, and for once, spring is actually in the air in Michigan.

Normally, Michigan weather likes to lull its residents into a false sense of security—inviting them out of the “Cyclops cave” of winter only to whack them over the head with a blizzard. But today, the hosts are optimistic. They are comfortable enough in their friendship to discuss the weather, or even just “inanities,” which Dr. Winkle suggests might be the true mark of a good relationship.

Before diving into the heavy intellectual lifting of the episode, Dr. Winkle offers a special shout-out to listener Max Wiggins of Boca Raton, Florida. Max wrote in with a request to honor the memory of his mentor, the legendary Latinist Reginald “Reggie” Foster, who passed away on Christmas Day 2020. Foster was a titan in the field, a man who kept the Latin language alive for thousands of students. To Reggie and all the Reginaldi who carry on his passion: Salvete te.

The Opening Quote: Context is Everything

To set the stage for a conversation that ranges from education to the history of medicine, Dr. Winkle pulls a quote from the Hippocratic Corpus. It is a reminder that in the ancient world, context—weather, geography, and environment—was everything.

“Whoever wishes to investigate medicine properly should proceed thus: in the first place to consider the seasons of the year and what effects each of them produces… Then the winds, the hot and the cold, especially such as are common to all countries.”

This focus on the environment will become a crucial theme later in the episode as the discussion turns to the history of sickness.

Meet Dr. Susan Wise Bauer: From Musician to Hebrew Champion

This week, the hosts take a brief hiatus from the wanderings of Odysseus to welcome a true heavy hitter in the world of education and history: Dr. Susan Wise Bauer.

While many know her as the author of The Well-Trained Mind or The Story of the World, her background is a fascinating tapestry of disciplines that defies easy categorization. She began her academic journey as a music major, a pianist who loved to practice but realized she “hated performing”. This led her to switch to English, where the “performance” happens on the page, and eventually to theology.

Dr. Bauer studied Ancient Near Eastern languages and literature at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. It was there that she encountered the legendary Old Testament scholar Meredith Kline. Dr. Noe and Dr. Bauer bond over their shared memories of Kline, a man known for his idiosyncratic vocabulary (he loved to hyphenate words in a Germanic style) and his intimidating “Day of the Champion” exams.

In a moment of delightful academic triumph, Dr. Bauer reveals that she was once the “Class Champion” in Hebrew—a language she loved far more than Greek. While Dr. Noe, a Greek partisan, is heartbroken by this admission (“You’re breaking my heart, Susan”), Dr. Bauer explains the thrill of writing out Genesis 1:1 in Akkadian cuneiform, describing it as “reaching back through time and touching something really… touching the core of something”.

The “MacGuffin”: The Origins of The Well-Trained Mind

How does a historian and Semitic scholar become the face of the modern homeschooling movement? As Dr. Bauer explains, her work in education was something of an accident—or perhaps the “MacGuffin” of her career.

Dr. Bauer was home-educated herself starting in 1972, long before it was mainstream or even explicitly legal in many places. Her mother, a certified teacher dissatisfied with the available options, invented a classical education from scratch for Susan and her siblings. Years later, when Dr. Bauer wanted to replicate that education for her own four children, she and her mother sat down and wrote out a 12-year plan.

That plan became the manuscript for The Well-Trained Mind. Dr. Bauer shares the hilarious and harrowing story of getting the book published. Her agent sent the proposal to W.W. Norton, a prestigious independent publisher known for academic anthologies. Norton was interested but skeptical. They feared this homeschooling author might be “too weird to promote”—specifically, they worried she might be a “religious nutcase”.

So, an eight-and-a-half-months pregnant Susan Wise Bauer traveled to New York City to meet the editorial board. Feeling “like the Wall of China” as she waddled into the office, she sat down with the senior editors and proved that she was, in fact, a serious educator. The meeting was a success, Norton published the book, and to their surprise, it became a massive hit that is now approaching its 20th anniversary.

Classical vs. Neoclassical: A Crucial Distinction

One of the most important takeaways from this episode is Dr. Bauer’s argument that we should frankly use the term “Neoclassical” rather than “Classical” education.

Why the distinction? Because, as Dr. Bauer notes, “this is not what the Greeks and Romans were doing”. If we tried to replicate exactly what the ancients did, it would not be useful in the 21st century. The sheer volume of human knowledge has expanded so vastly that modern educators must make choices the ancients never had to consider.

Dr. Bauer defines this Neoclassical approach by what it is not:

It’s Not Just Content: Unlike the E.D. Hirsch model (“What your 5th grader needs to know”), classical education isn’t just a checklist of facts to be mastered.
It’s Not Content-Free: Unlike the Dewey model, you do need to master a body of knowledge. Content is still vitally important.

The Goal: The true goal of classical education is to teach the mind to ask the right questions—to find the gaps in the argument. It is about “teaching minds to not settle for simply received information, but to say what hasn’t yet been explored”.

Plato vs. Aristotle: Why Aristotle Wins

This leads to a philosophical showdown between the two giants of antiquity. Dr. Bauer admits that in her personal pantheon, she ranks Aristotle higher than Plato.

Plato: Believed that change was decay. He pointed up to the Forms, away from the messy reality of earth, viewing change as a movement further away from the ideal.
Aristotle: Was the first person to ask why things change. Why does a kitten become a cat? Why does a seed become a tree?

By asking “Why?”, Aristotle opened the door to science. As Dr. Bauer puts it, “We would not have science if it were not for Aristotle. We wouldn’t have evolution… we wouldn’t have Darwinism”. He represents the inquisitive spirit of the “Neoclassical” student who investigates the world, rather than just accepting it. As Dr. Noe notes, referencing Raphael’s School of Athens, if you were going to grab a drink with one of them, you’d definitely pick Aristotle—the most brilliant biologist to ever write on literature.

The History of Medicine: From Hippocrates to Germs

Dr. Bauer’s current research focus is on the history of science and medicine, specifically how our understanding of sickness shapes our worldview. She outlines a massive shift that occurred around 1890, moving from the Hippocratic Model to the Disease Entity Model.

The Hippocratic Model (400 BC – 1890 AD): For over 2,000 years, medicine was about the body’s interaction with its environment. There was no “disease” per se, only sick people. To get well, you had to balance your humors by adjusting your diet, environment, and habits.
The Disease Entity Model (1890 – Present): With the rise of Germ Theory (Pasteur, Lister), sickness became an external invader. The goal became to isolate the germ and kill it.

Dr. Bauer points out that this shift had profound social consequences. The period between the discovery of germs and the invention of antibiotics (approx. 1890–1945) was an era of intense fear. It gave us paper cups, Saran Wrap, and obsessive household cleanliness. But darker still, it gave us segregation and eugenics, as people feared that “different bodies played hosts to different kinds of germs”.

Life on the Farm: Lambing and Writing

The episode concludes with a glimpse into Dr. Bauer’s personal life on her 100-acre family farm in Virginia. She describes the reality of “responsible meat eating,” which involves raising and processing her own animals—a task so hard it makes you eat less meat.

She also shares her unique writing schedule, which is dictated by the seasons. During lambing season (which she has wisely shifted to later in the spring to avoid freezing weather), she writes in the early morning darkness. But if she goes out at 5:00 AM and finds three new lambs, the writing day is over. It is a life of rhythms, much like the seasons Hippocrates wrote about.

The Gustatory Parting Shot

To wrap up this feast of ideas, Dr. Noe leaves us with a thought from the 20th-century Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang, perfectly suited for a discussion on culture and upbringing:

“What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?”

Valete!