Tuesday, July 4, 2023

A Classical Education

Going into 6th grade, I was so excited! 

Science, history, Bible and literature were all going to be connected. I had found a plan we could follow from the beginning of time- literally.  

One of the beautiful things about the Bible and history curriculum was that they were published by the same company- but history was being presented from a neutral standpoint. So many homeschool history curriculums are presented from a Biblical worldview. And while I have no argument with them, they just weren't going to be a good fit for my family. 

While my husband and I believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God; we are both of the opinion that it is not a book of science. Yes, we believe that God SPOKE and it came to pass- but the Bible doesn't explain just what took place in that process of coming to pass. Neither does it utterly specify creation took place in the length of six days, as we know a day. Being that scripture also speaks of a day to our Father, like a thousand years is to us; we believe there leaves some room for interpretation.

We needed the story of creation and the study of history to be separate, so our oldest could draw his own conclusions. Hence the beauty of a classical education. All ideas are presented, and it's up to the student to draw conclusions and outcomes on their own. The ideas presented are neutral in their presentation- but all are presented. 

Our science book, I was just as excited about. It was so thorough and informative. But it wasn't like so many science textbooks I had seen over the years of my own education. It draws on the presentation of wonderful reference materials as Usborne, Kingfisher, and DK. Which if you are familiar with these three publishers- they are rich in information, facts, visuals, relevant and even hands-on, in some cases. His studies would be anything other than boring or just reading page after page of some textbook. It was written by a homeschool mom whose own college education was science; and wanted to present to her own daughter. Experiments, memorization, timelines, and all so happened to fall inline with a lot of the history studies we were doing for sixth grade. 

Ancient history. I had looked through all of the history that he had studied in previous years, and if you recall, I had been able to get a pretty good picture from the local school district's website. Truth be told, there hadn't been to the subject. History, rather social studies, had all been wrapped up in Language Arts curriculum. I won't lie, that was disappointing. It meant that the lessons he'd learned about our wonderful human history had been limited. I learned that the topics covered had also been limited to just our country's history or even current events. Why are our first through fourth graders learning how to relate to their world through the craziness of it? I get that they are running into it on a daily basis, but really? So much of it seemed to be topics that elementary kids did NOT need rolling around in their brains. YET. 

But I digress...

Back to ancient history...

Beautiful. The curriculum was astounding. It created and cultivated a kid that told me, word-for-word: "history is my favorite subject". It made my year. Leave off that I am myself a history lover- just the fact that he went from loving science and math to history. He fell in love with the beauty of OUR story. 

Wonderful. Breathtaking.

(To see links and pictures of the curriculum, click here.)

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