Thursday, October 29, 2009

educating classically and false religions

i am a far cry from a classical educator. i am enjoying classical conversations - CC (our new curriculum/class) but i don't completely fit in. i am tutoring the 2nd grade class and some of my kids as well as those in the 1st and k classes are definitely "classical". i've always idealized classical education because it is logical and thorough, BUT it seemed way to intense to start my BOYS in this model of education. so we've been charlotte mason-ish until this year. even now, the only classicalness you'll see is what we're getting from CC. in addition to doing our memory work (7 subjects, timeline, exodus 20) every day, mapping our geography, and practicing our fine arts for CC, we do math and spelling. we also read a chapter of the Bible every day, practice our hymn of the week (with mom at the piano - yikes!), study our IBLP character trait of the month, and read 1+ chapters of a missionary biography. most recently we've added abeka health,safety&manners, and abeka readers for our pizza hut book it goals. (those are comfortable for me as i grew up with abeka). the boys actually really like the readers and i am hoping it will lead to more reading on their part. they both read really well, but haven't really enjoyed doing it on their own. of course, if i'm honest, i really like reading aloud with them and would miss it if they were reading on their own. hmmm...
so the point of the post was supposed to address "classical education" as scott & i have discussed it in our kids' lives. so...
one negative we see in classical ed is that it introduces so many false gods and false religions to children at such a young age. our goal was to feed our children only TRUTH until we were confident they could understand the difference. this was an advantage we saw to homeschooling in general. so when the opportunity for CC came up, we evaluated where our boys were in their understanding before signing up. in our 8 weeks so far, the boys have memorized greek & roman "gods", the basis of hinduism & buddhism, and next week we'll learn a sentence about confucious and taoism. these have been single sentences not anything lengthy, but still we didn't want to introduce it if they weren't ready.
fortunately, what truly prepared them for understanding idol worship was reading through the Bible. as we've traveled through the old testament, we saw the israelites live in many lands where there was idol-worship and we saw the israelites themselves fall away from God over and over again. i remember the boys saying "again?!" then, the second week at our new church, there were missionaries visiting and they talked about idol worship. they talked about how even when people became christians they still sometimes kept their idols for a while. she looked right at my kids and dropped the idol she'd brought along on the floor and made a real point to them that the idol was just a "cast idol" and obviously had no power.
when we chatted with the boys before purchasing the CC book, we became confident in their confidence that there is one true God and we worship him alone. as we read our missionary biographies and updates from the missionaries we support, our hearts long for those who do not know to know Jesus. as we welcome into our home non-believers and those deceived by false religions, we recognized that they are deceived and long for them too to know the love and forgiveness of our God. as i answer emails from those seeking to know more about Jesus, the kids are seeing how we can turn to God's Word for answers to tough questions.
CC says we want "To know God and to make Him known" - i agree and believe our family is growing in both those things.

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