What are the most important (history, philosophy, etc.) books for the home educator to read?

Think: “things the teacher needs to know so he or she can avoid misleading his or her students”.

I am of the possibly naive opinion that being in possession of certain facts and historical perspectives is an important protective factor against destructive ideologies. I also have the goal, often cautioned against, of trying to ensure that my progeny’s values and beliefs have at least some continuity with mine, and that they not adopt ideas that are antagonistic to their own patrimony, or harmful to their own wellbeing or that of their descendants. So I would like to be well-equipped with knowledge that I can teach to my children to achieve these goals. But one cannot teach what one does not know.

So, filling in the appropriate caveats yourself, if you could make a top N reading list for home educators that would begin to equip them to understand our modern condition enough to convey as much truth of the situation as possible to their charges, what would be on your list? I am especially interested in accounts of history and ideas, but am open to whatever people think is important. I am not particularly interested in pedagogical theories or techniques unless they’re exceptionally good; here I am more interested in the WHAT rather than the HOW of teaching in this thread.

Some examples of books might be:
- historical accounts that give lie to current narratives — there are many such books, so I’d love to find the most compact reading list that still provides very high coverage of relevant eras
- old books, essays, or first person accounts that chip away at modern temporal provincialism and myopia regarding moral innovation
- books that provide the history and context of various ideas, especially those most currently relevant
- key cultural artifacts to absorb so as to maintain continuity with what is great from the past
- stories, biographies, or autobiographies of people who seemed to have really figured something important out that we probably need to incorporate
- insightful analyses of where things are heading and how to prepare for them

I tend to think a basic literacy is the first step, and more fundamental than digging up works that challenge popular narratives. In that sense, I think it doesn't particularly matter which works are selected to impart the basic skill of reading, since part of that must be also instructing in how to read. (This is what makes it difficult to pass on values, perhaps, since an antagonistic approach is what you are trying to pass on.)

My rants against fiction and especially children's fiction are a frequent staple of this kind of discussion. Once I saw it, I couldn't un-see that the vast majority of children's literature is written with intent to retard and propagandize rather than to educate. I include even supposedly wholesome authors like CS Lewis in this. There's something evil right out of the gate in writing for an audience you suppose is not as sophisticated as yourself. You inherently write to reinforce that power dynamic by hiding your actual reasoning and presenting a fake just-so story. After WW2, when the "adults" decided that reality itself was unacceptable and we had to escape into literal nonsense (eg dr Seuss and his like), it gets much worse. Always check the "early life" section on authors' wikipedia pages, and watch the patterns.

The problem with fiction in general is that your imagination simply isn't as good as God's. All the made-up details will just be nonsense that at best takes up space in the mind of a child, at worst deceives them fatally about the nature of the world.

All that to say, yes historical accounts, especially not of our own time or not of our own society, are best. You want something that isn't trying to make up some bullshit to deceive you in particular. Far-away writers don't have as much intent or ability to deceive a 21st century audience, so form good datapoints for triangulation of an independent and trustworthy worldview.

Here's a few I find great:

* Homer. The Iliad and Odyssey are just the sort of thing kids can become obsessed with (especially in picture book form) but were something that very serious adults once took seriously as some of their most prized wisdom.

* The Bible, especially old testament, read not as a ponderous sacred text with which you are supposed to do a moralism, but as interesting stories that carry truth about a far away time and place and their own interactions with universal truths.

* Various old historical accounts (Bernal Diaz "Conquest of New Spain" is quite good, Einhard's Charlmagne is interesting, Livy, Plutarch, Secret History of the Mongols, etc.)

* Various other epic poems and other semi-fiction not-of-our-time like the Eddas, Beowulf, etc.

* Modern literature that's actually good literary fiction can be quite good. Basically the classics are such for a reason, but I'd generally say anything after WW1 is suspect and after WW2 must be presumed to be garbage.

* When they get older, the philosophical canon.

My rants against fiction and especially children's fiction are a frequent staple of this kind of discussion. Once I saw it, I couldn't un-see that the vast majority of children's literature is written with intent to retard and propagandize rather than to educate. I include even supposedly wholesome authors like CS Lewis in this. There's something evil right out of the gate in writing for an audience you suppose is not as sophisticated as yourself. You inherently write to reinforce that power dynamic by hiding your actual reasoning and presenting a fake just-so story. After WW2, when the "adults" decided that reality itself was unacceptable and we had to escape into literal nonsense (eg dr Seuss and his like), it gets much worse. Always check the "early life" section on authors' wikipedia pages, and watch the patterns.

The problem with fiction in general is that your imagination simply isn't as good as God's. All the made-up details will just be nonsense that at best takes up space in the mind of a child, at worst deceives them fatally about the nature of the world.

All that to say, yes historical accounts, especially not of our own time or not of our own society, are best. You want something that isn't trying to make up some bullshit to deceive you in particular. Far-away writers don't have as much intent or ability to deceive a 21st century audience, so form good datapoints for triangulation of an independent and trustworthy worldview.

Here's a few I find great:

* Homer. The Iliad and Odyssey are just the sort of thing kids can become obsessed with (especially in picture book form) but were something that very serious adults once took seriously as some of their most prized wisdom.

* The Bible, especially old testament, read not as a ponderous sacred text with which you are supposed to do a moralism, but as interesting stories that carry truth about a far away time and place and their own interactions with universal truths.

* Various old historical accounts (Bernal Diaz "Conquest of New Spain" is quite good, Einhard's Charlmagne is interesting, Livy, Plutarch, Secret History of the Mongols, etc.)

* Various other epic poems and other semi-fiction not-of-our-time like the Eddas, Beowulf, etc.

* Modern literature that's actually good literary fiction can be quite good. Basically the classics are such for a reason, but I'd generally say anything after WW1 is suspect and after WW2 must be presumed to be garbage.

* When they get older, the philosophical canon.

This post (#1204) from this other thread (#1202) made me want to revisit this, particularly this quote:

> But reading old books will always been an activity for the vanguard intellectuals. The town mayor and the Chief Operating Officer aren't gonna sit down and read Ibn Khaldun, and frankly they shouldn't have to. Eventually we also need a mechanism to get everyone else to benefit from this stuff instead of getting everything from the Yuval Hararis and Claudine Gays of the world.

This is exactly what I was getting at when I asked what history books the _home educator_ (i.e., me) should read, but most respondents to my query responded as if I was asking what the _homeschooled student_ should read. These aren't unrelated questions of course, and maybe it's my fault for wording the question poorly. Mea culpa.

Although what books students should read is also an interesting discussion to have, I wasn't talking about that, because my kids mostly aren't really there yet -- they're too young to read or listen to a lot of history for adults, or the classics, but they still have a lot of great questions that I want to give correct answers to. We have read some old history books for kids (written before WW2) that seem not too fluffy, certainly less so than a lot of modern stuff, but I haven't found a lot of those.

What I really wanted to know is: what are the top N first-order books, for the smallest possible N, that would give me, myself, a person with an average American education in history and the humanities, and not a lot of spare time (like the town mayor or COO mentioned above), the best and most truthful overview of important parts of history and related fields -- because one can't teach what one doesn't know.

It's a tall order, but as a homeschooling parent of many, I don't really have time to read a dissertation's worth of history books or frankly, most of the classics, even though I'd like to. I have a finite amount of time to get up to speed understanding history before my kids age out of listening to me, so that I can make sure I give good answers to their questions and guide them to quality information. I do have the sense that the Yuval Hararis of the world are giving bad information (but I haven't read him), so what are the Greatest Hits of History (or anthropology, political theory, etc.)?

For example, and I may regret giving this example as it may be a bad one, I recently read a book called "A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought The Civil War" by Thomas Fleming, and I thought it explained that era in a way that jibes with reality much better than what most kids are being taught about it. I feel like, now, after reading that, I don't really need to read a ton more books about the causes of the American Civil War, though I could be wrong about this. Now I just need to find books like this for the other top 50 or so important historical events or eras and I'll feel better positioned to guide my young ones through history and the humanities, until they're ready to dive in on their own.

This comment starts to list some books that may be in this category, I just want to flesh it out more:

> Various old historical accounts (Bernal Diaz "Conquest of New Spain" is quite good, Einhard's Charlmagne is interesting, Livy, Plutarch, Secret History of the Mongols, etc.)

All that said, I do appreciate these responses because the question they answered is also of interest to me.

Here's some suggestions which I found extremely valuable and grounding myself. I'll try to keep it to things which are shorter, and practical for a busy man to read.

—Book 6 of Polybius's Histories. An account of the Roman Republic's constitution as viewed by one of its evangelists.
—George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, and Paul Graham, What You Can't Say. Two excellent essays about navigating the political constraints on speech and thought in the modern world.
—The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is a classic for a reason. Filled with civic wisdom in a way that's distinctive of its time, very readable, and very short.
—What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July, by Frederick Douglass. A very different picture of what today gets called "racial justice". (Douglass would be furious at the the suggestion that justice needs any special adjectives.)
—Secrets By The Thousand, Harper's Magazine, 1946. An account of U.S. government and industry cooperating to expropriate the intellectual property of defeated German firms.
—Read a few of the Amarna Letters at random. Gives a very interesting picture of ancient god-kings trying to conduct international statesmanship while harassed with petty interpersonal problems and logistical friction.
—Lives of Boulton and Watt by Samuel Smiles, and the autobiography of Henry Bessemer. Two very good accounts of the early industrialists, written well before the managerial revolution and the current hyperfinancial understanding of business and economics, which I'm recommending even though they're hefty books. If you're pressed for time then pick one and don't bother with both.
—Don't Be A Sucker, a 25-minute antifascist propaganda film from 1946, which earnestly portrays an older—and in my opinion far superior—version of liberalism.
—In a similar vein, Modern Arms and Free Men by Vannevar Bush. A short book written soon after the war, notable for cleanly advocating for "democracy" in the sense of "rule by the demos" in a way that's an extremely powerful contrast to the mandarinate that gets called "democracy" today, and for casually assuming that democracies are industrially more efficient than autocracies because of their greater freedom, completely the opposite of the last ~fifteen years of discourse.

Most or all of these are available free online.

>>1226

Maybe it's because we've just read it again, but there's a special place in my library for "Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy". The question of what the hell happened leading up to Plato to cause him to basically start western civilization is essential to understanding our situation and much of our history. It's a decent study of ancient greek culture. A great deal of this has to do directly with the question of education, as well.

One of his favorite sources is Robert Drews, who's pretty solid on matters of ancient greece.

I'll add Ibn Khaldun's Muqadimmah to my list of good pre-modern classics of history now that I know what you're looking for. It was intended to teach history as a general field of inquiry, and has quite a bit of interesting theory. Though it's dry and theoretical and rather opinionated rather than giving you a great understanding of any particular time in history.

>>1228

The Muqaddimah is truly excellent, but it's a very big commitment. My copy is 1500 pages across three volumes. For the reader who's pressed for time, I'll mention N. J. Dawood's abridged version, which some sharp friends of mine have enjoyed.

I think we are doing a poor job answering OP's original question. OP Anon is interested not in works of philosophy or theory (like the Muqaddimah), but works of history, that lay out facts.

>For example, and I may regret giving this example as it may be a bad one, I recently read a book called "A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought The Civil War" by Thomas Fleming, and I thought it explained that era in a way that jibes with reality much better than what most kids are being taught about it. I feel like, now, after reading that, I don't really need to read a ton more books about the causes of the American Civil War, though I could be wrong about this. Now I just need to find books like this for the other top 50 or so important historical events or eras and I'll feel better positioned to guide my young ones through history and the humanities, until they're ready to dive in on their own.

Perhaps OP you could make it easier on us by providing a list of historical events that you want to fill in? Maybe a list with items like

*WWII -- Causes, Europe
*WWII -- Causes, Asia
*WWII -- Prosecution
*WWII -- Atomic Bomb Stuff

Then people could make their recommendations.

P.S. I strongly recommend one other book on the American civil war--or rather, the decades long lead up to. Freehling's The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854.

Just thinking out loud here, but with regard to this question I have a thought regarding history and philosophy for the home educator, I'm curious as to what you guys think.

Looking at who my own genealogical ancestors were, how historical events affected them, makes certain historical events and certain ideologies or philosophies more visible for me than others. But I've moved around, as did they, and so I've adopted other philosophical and historical ancestors along the way. Moreover, circumstances have changed since my genealogical ancestors were alive.

So perhaps the most important books for anyone to read at this particular juncture are those that contribute to an understanding of the internal logic of the liberal democratic world order, and then to work backwards to those books that contribute to an understanding of previous legitimizing ideologies such as the the Roman mandate of Jupiter Optimus Maximus or the Chinese mandate of heaven. The earliest historical victories of the ideology to examine then become, in chronological order, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American revolution of 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789, and one can extend this further to various other revolutions depending on how much one has been affected by each of them, seeing their influence on, for instance, the Russian and Chinese revolutions, WW1, WW2, and so on. But the three earliest ones seem most fundamental and therefore most important to consider as events.

>>1263
> The earliest historical victories of the ideology to examine then become, in chronological order, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 ...

I know pushing things back is always a temptation, and one sometimes to be resisted, but I wonder if the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 ought not to be at the head of this list.

>>1266
>>1263
I was going to say the English Civil War seemed like one of the first big blows for liberalism. The Peace also seems relevant. In any case the point stands: maybe study the historical genealogy of our own system. But if I can refine the prompt somewhat, I'd say it would be a mistake to study the history of liberalism as if it was representative of the history of our own system. If you want the history of the actual system we live under which is not just liberalism, The New Deal, World War Two, and "the 1960s" are crucial. Our material pattern of life, our political and moral taboos, and our most powerful ideological currents all date from those events.

I'm curious though why you >>1263 recommend studying the historical genealogy of our own system in this context. Not that it doesn't seem like a good idea, but it seems like you had some deeper logic in mind that didn't entirely come across.

>>1267
>I'm curious though why you >>1263 recommend studying the historical genealogy of our own system in this context. Not that it doesn't seem like a good idea, but it seems like you had some deeper logic in mind that didn't entirely come across.

>>1009
>books that provide the history and context of various ideas, especially those most currently relevant

I was probably somewhat inspired by Mr. Burja's article on why civilizations collapse. When collapse happens, we see how social technologies actually work and how they sustain other institutions that are now floundering. When I saw this post again I was drawn to the words "most important" and "home educator".

Both educators and intellectuals directing society are supposed to be responsible for propagating the social technology memes that sustain society forward in time. They also often overlap. I can't remember where got this idea from, but one can regard the memes as a kind of life in itself, which live and reproduce on human beings. Based on OP's prompt then the most important books might be those that provide the philosophical foundations of the world we live in.

In our case the dominant meme-organism of world we live in is the American culture established after WW2, so if we want the history of this system that's where we would start. This post-WW2 version of American culture is the version that is spreading worldwide, with some adjustments after the mass adoption of the smartphone. But we know that this version has some serious issues, the most critical one being that it appears to consume its own substrate. To extend the analogy a little further, one even could say that this version may have acquired cancerous mutations.

This particular meme-organism wasn't always hostile to life. In fact, liberal democracy enabled many technological advances in human society. If we want to arrest what appears to be a looming collapse, then we need get to how it works at its foundations. The theorist in me wanted to select a few events that are analogous to phase transitions in physical systems. At phase transitions, one observes changes in macroscopic behavior and coherence of a system, for example, the freezing of ice, where liquid water becomes a more ordered state.

Prior to the arrival of liberalism, the most common kind of legitimizing doctrine in human societies was some form of divine right. My rough model is that the revolutions are the points at which the new legitimizing doctrine, social contract theory, has established itself as the new way of ordering the system. Effectively when the water appears to have frozen over, at least, enough that it can handle the pressure from people skating on top or something like that, this might need more working out. But I think it makes sense to study the whole transition, from when the idea first arises (ice nuclei form), to when it is the new way of ordering the system (the water has frozen over). Of course humans are much more complicated than water molecules in the sense that our interactions in different activities are influenced by different doctrines, so one could categorize these different ideas that are most relevant to our society (free markets, division of powers, separation of church and state), and examine the transitions in each case. As for which books are the best for providing the history and context of each of these important ideas, well, I was hoping that you guys could help with that. This schematic is quite rough and probably could use more work anyway.

+1 for old books.

The following are some histories which have greatly shaped my understanding:

- History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides (5th century BC). Read it as a recounting of human nature and for the dialogues. The best part is that there are public domain English translations: the 17th century original by Hobbes (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0247%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D1), and a mid-19th century one by Richard Crawley (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7142/pg7142-images.html). Some newer translations also add value; for example, the Rex Warner translation (mid-20th century, published by Penguin Classics) has a superior depiction of the Corcyran revolution.

- The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig (mid-20th century). This is an autobiography from the perspective of the old middle class in Austria-Hungary, covering the time before WWI, WWI itself, the interwar period, and the early stages of WWII. This history should be mandatory reading in order to understand certain aspects of the current trajectory of the 20th and 21st centuries.

- The Illusions of Progress, by Georges Sorel (early 20th century). The best way I can describe the first part of the book is that it is effectively a "memetic history" of ancien regime (18th century) France. A summary cannot suffice.

>>1226
>What I really wanted to know is: what are the top N first-order books, for the smallest possible N, that would give me, myself, a person with an average American education in history and the humanities, and not a lot of spare time (like the town mayor or COO mentioned above), the best and most truthful overview of important parts of history and related fields -- because one can't teach what one doesn't know.

I wanted to select OP's refinement of the prompt for the newcomers. My interpretation of this prompt is that we want to determine what is important to us, and I think that would start with understanding what the ideological foundations of our current regime are. There are definitive points in history at which particular doctrines of political legitimacy establish themselves, and we can look into the genealogy of these doctrines to understand their foundations.