I wrote a blog entry regarding The Frugality of Home Education. It was in response to one of the comments left on my post titled "Dancing with The Flying Tightwad." You can't read it because I deleted it. No gettin' it back once that is done. That's okay because I will give you the gist of the story here.
In highlighting how I homeschool with frugality in mind, I also noted the flipside of frugality. That is trying to support the good vendors who supply the good, Catholic Curriculum we like to use. I remembered a site that (I thought) listed the "red flags." As in the anti-catholic materials that are sold by major curriculum providers. If I had just looked to their second page, I would have noticed that the very phonics program we use was listed there! For cryin' out loud! When I purchased that program a few years ago, one of the attractions for me was that it was created by a Catholic Homeschooling Mom!
On the 4Real Learning boards, it was revealed that the author of the Red Flag site also finds the Charlotte Mason Method anti-catholic. WHAT???? Gimme a Break!
We use some of Charlotte's Methods here. I am a convert to our Catholic faith, but I would like to think I could recognize something blatantly Anti-Catholic. It seems that the "redflag list" does include some genuine tips to recognize Anti-Catholic literature. For example, I cannot argue with this tip:
Romanism, Romanists, Papists - these words are meant in a derogatory fashion. Catholics neither call themselves Papists or Romanists, nor do they claim they adhere to Romanism. We are Roman Catholics or a member of those Rites in union with Rome (for example, the Byzantine Rite.)
In discerning which literature or curricula will benefit our family, I ask myself these questions:
1. Will it cause our children to doubt or question their faith at a young age? If yes, then it is certainly not worth space on our shelves or worse a place in their minds.
2. Does it direct to or reflect the Good, the True or the Beautiful?
3. and of course, will it benefit the education of any of our children?
2 comments:
Don't fret. We all make those kinds of boo boos from time to time. That lady really is a nutcase, btw. Glad you recognized it in the end.
What the author of that particular website might be interested to know is that exposure to those Bob Jones and Abeka history books were actually instrumental in my children and me becoming Catholic. We were evangelicals with an ecumenical bent. We could see how unfair their presentation of Catholicism is and hence started to read other books (like the early Church Fathers) to balance it out. Of course reading the early Church Fathers is dangerous to your Protestant status.
I must say that I have Catholic friends who have used those history books as well. I think it has helped their children begin to answer Protestants when they make the claims that they do against the Church. Of course it does require a bit of training and utlilising Catholic resources to refute the claims the books make, but isn't that part of what we do as homeschoolers? I always taught my kids that textbooks, or any book other than sacred scripture (or the dogmaticaly defined doctrines of the Church) could have mistakes in it. It was often fun to find the mistakes. Then when they went off to college they knew that their textbooks or professors might be in error as well.
I do believe that Catholic teaching should permeate the curriculum, it's how it permeates the curriculum that is important. If we simply assume that any book that has an imprimatur, or comes from a Catholic publisher is going to do the job for us we may be very mistaken. Some books from Catholic publishers (notably religion books published by Sadlier) may not have heresy in them, but the way that they are written could easily lead a child into heresy simply because of what they leave out or the way they word things (trust me I taught religion in a Catholic school that used them, and I had to do a lot of explaining to undo some misconceptions they produced). Parents need to remember that textbooks are our servants, not our masters and that we use them only as a means to an end, not as an end in themselves.
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