Anne Gebhardt’s kids are learning about geography -- in her dining room in Bedford, Texas. It’s not your typical schoolhouse, but it’s one that Gebhardt says is serving her six children well. "We can teach our religious values to our children freely,” says Gebhardt. “We can teach anything that we want."Yes, we can teach that a flood once covered the entire earth, even though there is not a scrap of evidence for it. We can teach that the earth was created six thousand years ago, even though there is not a scrap of evidence for it. See, we can teach anything we want!
I sympathize, though. We homeschool our children because of the terrible quality of the public schools and the astronomical prices of the private schools but we make dang sure what they do get from the home school curriculum is a good education in the arts, humanities, language and civics in the process. Having said that, my wife and I are currently debating what to do about the advanced part of the science section because it covers, you guessed it! Creationism. I have told my wife that I will not challenge our ten and eight year olds but I will provide an alternate perspective if asked. I do not want them to have to choose at this age and I don't want to turn them away from God because of my detestation of recent earth creationism.
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This is such a tough point! I'm home schooling too, and our boys are too young for that to matter quite yet... But I'm trying to prepare myself. The hard part isn't the evolution curriculum; the hard part's the Bible one.
ReplyDeleteWe are recently homeschooling too, for non-religious reasons - we ended up pulling out of public schools for what is a long story! I am struggling with history curriculum in particular. I haven't done any science yet b/c we found a science class taught by the local university (we are lucky).
ReplyDeleteI just read this article and noted that only 36% do it for religions reasons, yet they have an example family is not really representative of the whole population and is yet again propagating a bad stereotype!
ReplyDeleteI'm in much the same predicament, although my children are in Kindergarten and 1st grade. We are currently using Abeka and I know the day is coming. I'm definitely interested in knowing how you plan on handling the science portion. Even in these grades there have been a couple places where creationism was hinted. I've nearly considered using the science portion of a secular curriculum, it's just that Abeka is so neatly packaged and integrated together. I've tried to answer questions in an age-appropriate way. They already know that dinosaurs lived a long, long time ago and that people came along later. I've been expecting questions about how that relates to Genesis but those questions have yet to be asked.
ReplyDeleteLike a Child, I wonder about that statistic. I know many, many people who home school their kids and honestly don't know anyone who is doing it for secular reasons. Many people may be in our shoes, doing it because the public schools are terrible but also because of the secular nature of the public school curricula. That statistic may count those people oddly.
ReplyDeleteWtanskley, I agree. It is, in some ways, easy to teach the science. But how do you teach a ten-year-old the subtleties of a non-literal interpretation of Genesis? Somehow “Here, Marcus; go read this Conrad Hyers book” won't exactly work. I envision a conversation something to the effect of “Well, kids, there are several different interpretations of the creation story. Your school takes one and I take a different one.” The harder part will be to explain why their view of scripture affects how they view science—especially since they will be getting it from their teachers.
ReplyDeleteDaniel,
ReplyDeleteMy kids used the Apologia set of books which, I will have to admit, did teach them some good botanical facts. But, there is this undercurrent of bad science beneath it.
At our old church, there were a few homeschoolers probably for religious reasons, but most of the congregations went to private schools, many for religious reasons b/c there are good school districts here. The best school district is pretty expensive, and we live in a neighboring one that is good (just not as good). Our motivation to pull out was due to excessive anxiety issues provoked by her activity levels. In my limited 4 months of homeschooling, I have not met anyone that homeschools for religious reasons (but we are in the midst of a church hunt, so I don't really know any Christians that homeschool).
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure kids would have any particular difficulty accepting a less literal interpretation of Genesis, if it's explained that way, since they are probably more used to thinking in stories than adults are. I've been watching the BBC series "Earth: the Biography" and "Prehistoric Earth: A Natural History" with our 12 year old just to provide a sort of framework.
ReplyDeleteHi Mike. I think, based on some limited conversations with my kids that you are right but if they go to school and get hammered with this idea that natural science has come to the wrong conclusions because of what the Bible says and that it is wrong to accept evolution, they get mixed signals. I have watched some documentaries with my kids and now my oldest is caught between learning about the natural world and wanting to please his teacher.
ReplyDeleteLike a Child, almost everyone in my church that home schools does so for religious reasons and when my wife goes to the local Homeschooling curriculum fair, all of the sponsors are local area churches and there is a pervasive air of “the right kind of science” in all of the booths.
ReplyDeleteMaybe part of it the region of the country in which we live—Tennessee.
I didn't mean to imply that it's easy to teach science, of course... Just that it's hard to find a curriculum that matches an appreciation for the Bible with an appreciation for science. I'm almost certainly going to have to cook my own by using (1) an entirely secular evolution text (2) a historical study of religious doctrine and (3) teaching my own Bible study. I want to inculcate in my children an appreciation for other people's points of view, not so that they believe those views, but so that they know why a statement of belief in evolution will often be automatically interpreted as a statement of complete textual liberalism with respect to the Bible (a problem shared by fundamentalists AND, sadly, by the early articles in Biologos, although I'm happy that the problem has been reduced, as recent articles seem to explicitly recognize the existence of views that hold the possibility of internal harmony of Biblical text even while recognizing the truth of evolution).
ReplyDeleteI have a LOT of work in front of me. A huge part of that work is identifying my own views.
Wow. I imagine it must be difficult to be a theistic evolutionist in your area. We are in central nc, and with two universities nearby, so that helps, although we have had a difficult time finding a church too. The church we left had an advertisement for an intelligent design conference right as we were leaving. The homeschooling community here is somewhat polemical, with those that do it for religious reasons and those that are unschoolers and crunchy, although i have met a few homeschoolers in our shoes.
ReplyDeleteOur kids have been homeschooled their entire academic careers - they are 12 and 15. I stressed for a while about science, but my daughter (age 15) seems to take the differing interpretations in stride. My 12 year old is still pretty concrete in his thinking, so we haven't talked much about origins. We used Singapore Biology with my daughter and then I added in some extra stuff about evolution. It's in her Bible education that we're really focusing on how to interpret scripture. Neither of my kids wants to study science so they aren't interested in lots of details. Anyway, the moral of this story is that my kids have done better than I expected with such a relaxed approach to the whole topic.
ReplyDeleteCatherine
I will try to also take a relaxed approach. I told my wife that I will not challenge them on what they learn until they are capable of formulating coherent ideas about it.
ReplyDelete