The Parents' Library

How to Use This Library

A parent can't read everything; a parent can read the right things. The books below were chosen by 3 tests: they are true to the evidence, they serve the formation of a free, strong and good human being, and they can be used. Each stage guide carries its own list; this page gathers the whole library and adds the ancient sources and the scholarship behind them. Begin with one book for your child's present stage, one ancient text, and the Temple's own pages.

Plato's rule governs the children's shelf: what enters the young soul stays, so choose stories that are true, beautiful and strong, and that show the Gods as the Temple knows them, sovereign and good. No book replaces the parent's voice reading aloud.

The Foundations: For Every Parent

• Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, tr. Gilbert Highet, 3 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1939-1944). The great history of Greek education as the formation of the whole human being, from Homer to Plato.
• H.-I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, tr. George Lamb (Sheed and Ward, 1956; French original 1948). The ancient school, its stages, teachers and methods, from Homer to the end of antiquity.
• Plutarch, Moralia I, tr. F. C. Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library 197, 1927). On the Education of Children, How the Young Man Should Study Poetry and On Listening to Lectures in one volume: the ancient handbook of the parent.
• Quintilian, The Orator's Education, Book I, ed. and tr. Donald A. Russell (Loeb Classical Library, 2001). The first years of learning, the nurse, the parents, play and the refusal of the rod.
• Kent Hoffman, Glen Cooper and Bert Powell, Raising a Secure Child (Guilford, 2017). The science of the secure bond, made practical.
• Alison Gopnik, The Gardener and the Carpenter (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). The parent as the one who tends a living thing.
• Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk (Rawson, Wade, 1980). Cooperation without threats, at any age.
• Laurence Steinberg, Age of Opportunity (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). The adolescent years as a second window of formation.

Books by Stage

Each stage guide gives its full list with notes. 3 books from each:

• The Hearth, Ages 0 to 2. Hoffman, Cooper and Powell, Raising a Secure Child; Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl, The Scientist in the Crib; Winnicott, The Child, the Family, and the Outside World.
• The Awakening Will, Ages 2 to 4. Faber and King, How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen; Siegel and Bryson, No-Drama Discipline; Davies, The Montessori Toddler.
• The Awakening of the Intellect, Ages 4 to 9. Trelease, The Read-Aloud Handbook; Bauer and Wise, The Well-Trained Mind; Gray, Free to Learn.
• The Tested Intellect, Ages 9 to 13. Stixrud and Johnson, The Self-Driven Child; Lahey, The Gift of Failure; Haidt, The Anxious Generation, read alongside its critics.
• The Training of the Adult, Ages 13 to 18. Steinberg, Age of Opportunity; Jensen, The Teenage Brain; Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers.

The Ancient Sources in Good Translations

Scholarship on Childhood in Antiquity

• Mark Golden, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990; 2nd ed. 2015). The lives of Athenian children: birth, family, school, festivals and death.
• Beryl Rawson, Children and Childhood in Roman Italy (Oxford University Press, 2003). The Roman child from birth to the toga of manhood.
• Jenifer Neils and John H. Oakley (eds.), Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past (Yale University Press, 2003). Childhood in Greek art, with the choes, the toys and the rites.
• Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 1998). What children actually learned in the ancient school.
• Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2001). The ancient classroom seen through the schoolbooks of Egypt.
• Richard Hamilton, Choes and Anthesteria (University of Michigan Press, 1992). The festival at which Athenian children received their small jugs.

The Stories of the Gods for Children

• Told aloud, from 3. Short tales of Zeus, Athena, Hermes, Heracles and the Gods of the Pantheon, told by the parent in the Temple's understanding; Aesop's fables.
• Read aloud, from 5. Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire, D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths (Doubleday, 1962); Roger Lancelyn Green, Tales of the Greek Heroes (Puffin, 1958) and Tales of Ancient Egypt (Bodley Head, 1967); Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853); Aesop's Fables, tr. Laura Gibbs (Oxford World's Classics, 2002).
• Read alone, from 8. Charles Kingsley, The Heroes (1856); Padraic Colum, The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles (Macmillan, 1921); D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths (first published as Norse Gods and Giants, Doubleday, 1967).
• From 10. Rosemary Sutcliff, Black Ships Before Troy (1993) and The Wanderings of Odysseus (1995); Padraic Colum, The Children's Homer (Macmillan, 1918); W. H. Weston, Plutarch's Lives for Boys and Girls (1900).
• From 12. Edith Hamilton, Mythology (Little, Brown, 1942); Rex Warner, Men and Gods (MacGibbon and Kee, 1950).
• From 14. Homer and Hesiod in full translation; Plato's Apology and Crito; Xenophon's Choice of Heracles; Marcus Aurelius.

The Temple's Own Readings for the Family

• Theoteknia. The parent and child bond between the Gods and human beings: the foundation of Zevist parenting. For parents, and for children from about 10.
• Children Ethics, Procreation Ethics, Marriage Ethics and Education and Learning. The Life Ethics of the family.
• Parenting Ethics. The simple rules of each stage.
• Paideia. Education as the sacred forming of the soul, from Plato to Plutarch.
• Satya, Ma'at and Arete. The Truth, the Order and the road of ascent: the pillars every child is raised upon.
• Noble Speech and Good Manners. The training of speech and conduct.
• Music. The art the Ancients placed first in the education of the soul.
• The rites: The Amphidromia, The Zevist Baptism, The Ephebeia and Initiate Your Soul. To be read by the parents long before each rite, and by the young person before the Ephebeia.