/lit/ - Literature

My wife was homeschooled and has some profoundly deep gaps in her knowledge. She has fairly high intellect, excellent memory, and good proclivity for the integration of new knowledge and problem solving. But there are things that are unfathomably absent in her repository of knowledge: she did not know how to find California on a map, she did not understand how time-zones work, she doesn't recognize references to Shakespeare, or even the standard-issue American Lit any schooled American knows. Beyond this, any understanding of world history, philosophy, or the arts is entirely superficial and comes from her subsequent community college education.

She has grown tremendously from the tepid and shallow pool of knowledge in which she began. Her mother "taught" her and her brothers, but really just avoided lessons and faked test results--she had no real knowledge of her own to impart upon them. Her childhood was devoid of the reciprocity many of us enjoyed as we were academically rewarded for our curiosity. I believe when she had to take the ACT to apply for college her score was something like 14. She virtually had no formal education until she got into a community college and eventually transferred to a 4 year bottom-tier university.

She is very inquisitive and interested in overcoming these limitations. I ask you this: where do we begin? What can I do to form a sort of long-term curriculum with her to develop these interests? Bear in mind that she does lack some of the discipline and self-confidence to struggle through a rigorous regimen of typical /lit/ fare. I was a child with a strong autodidactic streak and vicious self-reliance in intellectual matters, so I do not know exactly how to relate to her struggle and thus I feel like I may overlook some things. My goal here is just to help her develop an intellectual foundation that honors her actual intellectual abilities, and to free her from the handicap of inadequate education.