A Little Rebellion Every Now & Then

I like to think that I have an unique opportunity in homeschooling, in that I get a chance to present the ‘real’ facts of history to my kids from the beginning. They won’t have to learn the truth (as opposed to myth) at a later age, or at least that would be the ideal.

What I don’t understand, particularly, is why so many people that ‘do’ neoclassical and classical education are so bloody religious. I suppose it’s still just a function of the fact that a majority homeschoolers are religious, but the fact remains that it’s difficult to find non-religious suppliers of various curricula.

I don’t stick to my guns as much as I might should; when a religious curricula is the only thing that can be found to accomplish a certain goal, I’m going to purchase it and then modify it. I won’t when it comes to something like science, but that’s a discussion for another day. The thing is that most suppliers are religious, and when there is a place like Sonlight or Veritas recommending a book… well, how can I know if they’re recommending it in spite of its ‘worldliness,’ or is it because it has some inherent conservative bias?

Because it’s not really enough for something to be secular. I’m a liberal. Very nearly a yellow-dog Democrat. You get the idea. I have opinions and I’m not entirely ignorant about history, for example. So when a book is recommended about, say, Vietnam, how do I know what the bias is? Is it recommended for being even-handed, or is it really a treatise against the counterculture and the anti-war protests that occured here while the war went on in Vietnam? Short of purchasing the books, how can I know? Amazon doesn’t always have reviews that eludicate things. My library is decent enough, but rarely has the books about which I have the most questions (of course).

Because, really, it’s somewhat hard to take seriously the recommendations of a catalogue that compares the Holocaust to the Japanese persecution of Christians during the same time period. At the same time, I do know that some of their recommendations are normal, factual books, because I do own them, having seen them in the bookstore, or because I have read them, checking them out from the library.

The thing is, I don’t have the time to do oodles of research for every subject. I have a life beyond homeschooling, and even if homeschooling were the only ‘thing on my plate,’ I’m still not sure I would have the time to determine which of 200+ supplemental history books is appropriate or not for any given topic.

In summation: Bugger.

I’ve spent most of my day today working on history plans for next year. Mapping out not just what to cover each week - that would only take an hour at the most. No, I’ve been recording supplementary history reading and corresponding literature selections and projects and audiobooks and then figuring out how to break that down into a cohesive whole.

For the record, too, this is no where near the first time I’ve gone through SOTW and the Activity Guide. I’ve read both the main book and the AG through at least once each. Then I went through and marked what books were available at the library. Another time, I went through WTM and marked down the books there that weren’t in the AG and which ones of those were available at the library. Then I picked what books I wanted to own. I put them on Gillian’s amazon wishlist and we’ve been slowly collecting the majority of them. I also previously had made a sheet in my notebook with the week, dates, chapter(s), a list of the bare minimum (review/narration, map work, coloring page, and if there were pages listed, UBWH), and then the aforementioned Additional History Reading, Corresponding Literature Selections, Projects, Audio, and then a tenative schedule for both history and reading/literature.

So what have I been doing today? Typing it all in. Tweaking. Updating. Adding in the specific dates as they correspond to our school calendar for next school year. I have another hour or so of work before I set it aside until right before school starts. It’s a good thing I’m almost done, because I need to get started on adding books to Gillian’s wishlist for SOTW Vol2 before her birthday (in August).