A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the Twenty-First Century Paperback – September 1, 2009

Oliver DeMille voices the need for a generation of leaders to be thoughtfully trained in our homes today. This is a message that homeschoolers need to hear! I don't know when I've seen another book that communicates with such clarity, purpose and vision the powerful potential of homeschool.
I find myself nodding my head and marking passages that sound like something I might have said--and DeMille says it so well. TJEd gives clarity and purpose to the decision to homeschool, and a template that can be applied by any family to achieve their goals.
I refer to it often as a handbook to help me further my own studies, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in quality education. Parents, teachers, and students alike will be energized by this exciting book. --Rebecca Kochenderfer, author of Homeschooling for Success: How Parents Can Create A Superior Education For Their Child; Senior Editor, Homeschool.com, the web's #1 homeschool site & Forbes Best of the Web Top 45 winner

As a cofounder of Acton MBA, I believe our future rests on how we inspire the next generation of leaders to educate themselves safe from the meddling of assembly line schools.
Oliver DeMille's book, A Thomas Jefferson Education, has reminded me that master teachers believe that each child who walks into their classroom is a genius, waiting to be discovered. --Jeff Sandefer, Founder and Faculty Member, Acton MBA, A Princeton Review Top-3 Program

Like most homeschooling parents, I found it difficult not to fall into doing conveyor-belt education at home, using grades, grade-level materials, and checklists. After several years of doing this, I had successfully helped one of my children go from Core phase into Hate-of-Learning phase, where her main goal was to get the schoolwork done, as quickly and with as little effort as possible, so she could have her time back. It was awful.
As I discovered and began to understand the Seven Keys of Great Teaching as presented in the Thomas Jefferson Education book (and DeMille s presentation on the Seven Keys), I realized why I had been so successful at creating a hate-of-learning student. Her textbooks were so boring, even I could not stand reading them. We were focused entirely on content, not time. Home education had become so complex, there was no time for simplicity. The results were tedium and frustration. I found that it is very, very hard not to do to my children what was done to me by schools.
Now, having applied for several years albeit imperfectly the Seven Keys... , along with many other ideas gleaned from the TJEd book and related materials, my children are thriving. They really don t know or care what grade they are in, and they never say the word schoolwork (except by accident). We study as a family, and the Love of Learning phase is truly exciting.
My older children have been successful in Great Books programs in college, and I, myself, have taken time to read and study more than I ever would have thought possible. As you might imagine, I am profoundly grateful to Oliver DeMille and his co-authors for opening this world of educational thinking, life to me.
It is now my great privilege to be able to speak to parents and teachers around the world, and help them rebuild their education paradigm, pointing them to the same source of wisdom that I was so fortunate to find. --Andrew Pudewa, Director of the multi-award winning Institute for Excellence in Writing

Oliver DeMille is a founding partner of The Center for Social Leadership, and the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling co-author of LeaderShift. He and his wife Rachel have eight children.