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.