Marmee's curriculum in arts of love and survival includes far more than  skills and values of cooking and other housekeeping chores. As if following recent advice from psychologists Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, "to break false images of perfection, to invite [girls'] most urgent questions into conversation, into relationship,"(17) her curriculum takes the form of evening family rituals, by means of which she teaches them habits fundamental to the art of learning love and survival: sharing experiences with each other, thinking aloud about them in the retelling, risking and taking honest criticism, helping each other along with encouragement and praise, recognizing explicitly what each has learned through daily difficulties and triumphs, applying a playful and imaginative spirit to the hardest learning tasks of all: such as overcoming humiliation, disappointment, shyness, vanities, raging tempers, laziness, spitefulness, selfishness. As the girls grow older, such ritual events give way to their exercise of those learning habits on their own initiative, especially the habit of seeking and taking advice about problems and decisions affecting their own and others' love and survival. This change marks her daughters' growing capacity and responsibility for their own learning of her curriculum, central to any concept of her teaching achievement.

Against the potentially grim seriousness of her sacrificial Protestant regimen, the materials of Marmee's curriculum also include ritualistic gestures which, in becoming known to her daughters as part of her own affectionate character, make a repeated point of family love, good cheer, and personal pride as important habits of active self-expression: for example, always making sure they have "nice pocket-handkerchiefs" as they leave home or always standing at the window to watch them walk down the street each morning and affectionately waving at them just before they turn the corner. Thus Marmee's curriculum in love and survival takes shape not only from Bunyan's moral concepts like "the City of Destruction" and "Apollyon," but most especially from Marmee's own feelings about herself and her daughters. Her thoughtfully constructed curriculum includes more than texts and mental or physical skills; it includes emotional skills, attitudes, dispositions, habits, and values, as well as body language that speaks to her daughters through the physical senses and from the heart.