When I mentioned that I am using Ambleside Online for my core curriculum this year, a faithful friend of mine messaged me with the concern that CM and AO are too evolution-friendly. Even if I use it myself I probably shouldn’t be giving other people ideas, she believes. I understand her concern, and I briefly considered it, but after looking at all my options and thinking about how I want to actually raise my kids, AO is still the best thing to fit my needs at this point. Also, it’s free.
The Charlotte Mason method is not based on evolutionary assumptions. Since the England in which Charlotte Mason lived was culturally Christian and she was (at least nominally) a Christian herself, she wrote a lot about God and Creation. But her writing is so littered with naturalistic language that it is obvious that she, like most of the smart set of her day, had already set off down the road of compromise which ends, as we now know, in Naturalism, the “scientific” religion that has fairly replaced Christianity in our own troubled times. Even if she was a true convert, she was in this way deceived, it is true. If she could have seen where Darwinian thinking led, then I hope she’d have shunned it. Lacking any insight into human souls, the most I can say for sure is that she had absorbed enough of both the naturalist lingo and the Christian culture around her for both worldviews to substantially affect her writing.
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater! Mason’s theories on education don’t seem to have much to do with evolution. So her method is still a reasonable one, and it just happens to suit my personality pretty well, so I’m going with that. Many six-day Creationist, Bible-believing, successful (meaning their kids are grown, godly, and productive members of society) homeschoolers have found CM to be quite compatible with their faith.
But what about evolution and naturalism in the books we read?
Until my friend spoke to me, I didn’t think anybody would be likely to mistake me for a compromiser. Guess I’d better clear that up. I’m not teaching my kids that there is more than one way to read Genesis, OK? We have several creation-affirming resources to draw on, our science curriculum (which doesn’t really fit with the CM method. I’m wild like that.) is unabashedly creationist, and I’m pretty well-versed in the arguments about origins myself. My kids do know how the world was made, and by Whom. If they end up unbelievers, that will be due to their own hearts, and not anything in their curriculum.
Ambleside Online is, of course, a curriculum written by someone other than Charlotte Mason. It is a community-created resource which uses Mason’s “living books” philosophy to make the world come alive to students. Many of these books do, in fact, speak of evolution, big bangs and such as truth. Because of this, my friend wouldn’t touch this curriculum with a ten-foot pole, and thinks I’m fiddling with dangerous things in doing so myself. I’ll bet a few other readers had the same thoughts, but didn’t say anything.
We do have a lot of books from secular sources in our home because, frankly, those books sometimes have better information and writing than other, “safer” books do. I’ve found that my children have no trouble at all identifying the different world-views and knowing where we stand. I’ve often found my son shaking his head over some science book, saying “That’s not right.” They know the lies when they come across them! These secular sources, far from convincing my children of evolutionary thinking, sharpen their skeptical eye toward anything written by fallen people. Reading these books with them gives me a chance to tell them both what parts are incorrect, and show them how the secular world thinks about these things.
My children are being raised in a world where we can’t go to a science center, zoo, or even a human history museum (except the Creation Museum, to which I would love to go sometime) without being confronted with evolutionary thinking. I can’t keep them from reading or hearing works that are affected by these theories. Even if I could, I wouldn’t want to. I don’t think putting my head in the sand about what the rest of the world believes is a good idea. I teach them that decent people (even Christians) are deceived by evolution, but I make sure there’s no doubt that it is a deception.
All truth is God’s truth.
My primary reason for homeschooling my children is to train them to measure everything they learn against the plumb-line of the Word of God. My purpose is not to release my children into the world with their noses turned up to every good thing that fallen man somehow manages to salvage from his broken world-view. These books used by Ambleside Online are good books, as human works go. They are not the Good Book, though, and as long as my kids are aware that fallible man wrote everything but that great Work, then I think we’re going to do fine.
When our math books (as all of them seem to do from time to time) get something wrong, or teach it poorly, I correct that, not by throwing out the entire curriculum, but by correcting those lessons. I see no problem with doing the same thing for history books that mention prehistoric men or science texts that say “millions of years.” The fact is that even our creationist friends get things wrong sometimes, not because they don’t believe the Bible, but because they are human and don’t know everything. I’m perfectly comfortable teaching my children that they are free to question everything but God’s word, even if it comes from their own mother.
Charlotte Mason, Ambleside Online, and Evolution is a post from: Get Along Home