Way back when, before John Dewey got his grubby little hands on education, the children of the United States were given the best education this country has ever seen. Between roughly 1865 and 1915 children were taught in their one-room schoolhouses from a most excellent series of textbooks called the Eclectic Education Series. The EES included such classic books at the McGuffey’s Readers, Ray’s Arithmetics and Thalheimer’s Histories – textbooks still sought after and used by homeschooling families today. The reason they’re still used? Excellent content. So you might ask why in the world would the public schools stop using them if they were so wonderful? Here’s your answer.
It is a sad story: After WWII, John Dewey, the head of the Teachers College at Columbia University launched an all-out campaign to "reform" education. Dewey was a humanist, a socialist, and an atheist. He saw the McGuffey Readers and the entire EES as threats – they emphasize patriotism, traditional values, and the Bible. Dewey believed, in his own words, that public schools should be the "State established church." Dewey viciously attacked the textbooks of the day as "antiquated" and he was able to successfully bring about their demise, as well as the demise of quality public education. –from the Dollar Homeschool website
Anyone who will claim that religion has nothing nor ever has had anything to do with education has clearly ignored history. But that is another topic for another post.
My family and I received a complete e-book set of the Eclectic Education Series from Dollar Homeschool. They sell this series on their website for $159.00, a savings of $56 if the subjects were purchased separately. ( you can see a list of the books included here) At almost 1.5 GB of pdfs, this is a large amount of textbooks – over 70 in all! Dollar Homeschool has linked all the books together in the series with pdf integrated bookmarks allowing you to easily access every book from the bookmark menu in your pdf reader, such as Adobe Acrobat.
My thoughts? I love the EES. It’s a shame they were ever given up. I will definitely use these books throughout our homeschooling journey. The series covers all grades from primary to high school and includes texts that today are covered in college!
Dollar Homeschool provides the valuable service of collecting all these textbooks and providing them in an easy to use format, e-books. The bookmark menu that connects the ebooks in the pdf reader is a handy tool to have. It makes flipping between books quick and painless.
I was, however, surprised to learn that most of these books can be found in ebook format available for free at various places on the web. Dollar Homeschool offers a service to the homeschool community by compiling the books and making them easily accessible. Be warned, some of the books were missing pages and were only fixed for future customers or sent to current customers who asked about them. I’m not a big fan of this. I expected better service.
If you are pressed for time (and as homeschoolers, who’s not?), purchasing the EES series from Dollar Homeschool can be justified. It’s an amazing set. But if you have the time and know how, I would suggest scouring around for the public domain versions. You’ll probably provide yourself the same customer service you would’ve received from Dollar Homeschool.
-Sara O’