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 The Worldview Big Tent by Ruth Beechick Worldview is the big tent over all that you do in homeschooling. This good news is that you don’t need a special course called worldview. Your mind can pull together instead of fracturing left and right toward all the academics you are trying to teach. I may allow for arithmetic to be separate from worldview. Only philosophers of math know how to pull it into the tent, but for most of us it’s easier just to teach children the math. Everything else should be dominated by our biblical worldview. Some good teen retreats and seminars on worldview are out there, and some other teaching materials, too. These help particularly the students who didn’t think enough about worldview in their earlier schooling. The task for homeschoolers is to think about it in every topic they study. Some moms looking over curriculums to buy commented that most of them just touched on the Bible. The Bible was related to the topics only here and there. And the moms were happy to find books that were more thoroughly Bible related. Here we consider some areas to pull into the tent. Bible. To match everything with the Bible, children must first know the Bible well. One family recently said, “We’re going to double the time we spend studying the Bible.” You can read and discuss the Bible itself in family times together. In addition, you can get free ready-made lessons by using one or two radio programs that reach your area. After a broadcast, each child must tell something he learned from it. He can take notes during the program to help him remember what to report on. Before the next broadcast, remind yourselves briefly what was on the day before. Open Bibles to the book being studied. Gather pencils and paper. Several good programs concentrate on Bible teaching. I like one that begins the teaching immediately after a one-line introduction and doesn’t use a lot of the half-hour on selling books, asking for donations, and such. You can choose one or possibly two programs to use for day-by-day Bible teaching. You may occasionally hear something that you’re not sure is totally biblical, but that would happen with books and curriculum also. Those occasions can prompt further study. Talk with your pastor, or check things with the Bible yourself. E.D. Hirsch, Jr. and team researched the content of all kinds of writings and concluded that the Bible dominates all other books in our Western civilization. Hirsch wrote, “No one in the English speaking world can be considered literate without a basic knowledge of the Bible.” They produced the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, and Bible items in the dictionary took more pages than the chapter on “mythology and folklore” and almost as many pages as all other “literature in English.” Unfortunately, the Bible items were removed from the follow-up books. Teachers wanted a grade-by-grade listing, so they compiled their lists, and “What Every Second Grader Should Know” and others in the series were produced for public schools with no Bible items in them. Other listings, besides the graded series, also omit the Bible. So if you use any of those books, you need to add much Bible to return to the thrust of the original research. Science. Many curriculum ads say that you can learn from their courses about the world God created. If that’s all the Bible touching they do, the moms mentioned above would not be happy with them. Any science book, Christian or not, can’t help but teach about God’s creation. In science, children need a good understanding of the non-evolution view, called creation science. You must read some creationist books and discuss these issues enough in your family that you thoroughly clarify your views on evolution versus biblical creation. Students are unprepared for today’s world if they only state they do not believe in evolution; they need to understand what’s wrong with evolution. By reading creation books, students actually learn evolution better than their peers whose schoolbooks just claim, without any evidence, that biological and botanical and cosmological and every other kind of evolution happened. Young-earth (a few thousand years old) versus old-earth (billions of years old) is a major topic to understand. Noah’s Flood and what it did to Earth’s geology is another important topic. Science is exciting when learned from a biblical view. History. History, too, is infected with evolution in most books. You can detect that when a book posits long periods of “prehistory” during which agriculture and language and other skills develop. The Bible shows that Adam knew agriculture and language in the first generation. Immediately after the Flood, Noah and family also had those skills. Early history is muddled in most books unless they match the Bible’s teaching in Genesis. Only there can we find the true history of the world’s most ancient days. After the early days, we read about Israel beginning with Abraham, growing strong with Moses, becoming great under David and Solomon, declining under later kings and captivities. After Israel, come the Gentile kingdoms, and the prophet Daniel outlines those in chapter 2. They begin with Babylon, which conquered Israel. Next are Persia, Greece, and Rome. Jesus came during Roman times. Daniel continues through broken Rome, where we are now, and ends with the stone cut without hands that breaks in pieces all the world’s kingdoms and sets up a kingdom that will never be destroyed. A Bible framework for world history looks like this. Pre-Flood time: Adam to Noah Early post-Flood times: Noah to Abram Israel: Abraham to captivity Gentile kingdoms: Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, broken Rome Christ’s kingdom During the early post-Flood times we learn of the tower of Babel and the scattering of peoples. So you could take some side trips to China, the islands, and Americas if you want. Recent researches are showing more about how those areas became populated, but much is uncertain and much is controversial. Schoolbooks give undue attention to Egypt and little attention to Israel—if they mention it at all. In the Bible we see Egypt alongside Israel, and it is out of power for a long time after the exodus. Israel was the greatest power in Solomon’s time. Bible chronology puts David and Solomon about 1000 BC and Abraham about 2000 BC. Creation is about 4000 BC according to the “young earth” chronology. Use those dates as “anchor dates” and let everything else flow around them. Don’t put undue emphasis and time on learning dates. A good many of them in a good many books are wrong anyway. Language. Before our age of too many books, people often taught children to read directly from the Bible. Even today a boy can learn that Jesus begins with J at the same age he learns that his name Ben begins with B. Beyond beginning phonics, children learn numerous literature characteristics from the Bible. They learn metaphors such as we are the sheep and Jesus is the shepherd. They learn types, which, in contrast to metaphors, are separated by time. God bringing his people out of Egypt is a type of his bringing us out of the slavery of sin. Parables are a sort of metaphor. They are stories that use analogy. At about fourth grade age children can understand analogies. Poetry is different from prose. And Hebrew poetry has features different from English poetry. A main one is couplets, two lines that say the same thing but say it in different ways. The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Both lines say that creation speaks of God’s greatness, but they use different words to say it. Straight prose narrative is not poetry. If more people understood that, we would hear less often that Genesis 1 is poetry. It isn’t. But if people call it poetry, then they think they can’t really understand what the poet is saying, so they change it around and make it say anything they want. If we read it as prose narrative, the meaning is very clear. Those literature words show a few language learnings that children gain from the Bible. If they memorize and talk with you and sometimes write, they learn all the main uses of language—reading, speaking, writing, understanding, and thinking. Without even trying, they also learn good grammar, much spelling, and lots of vocabulary. You can forget about separate courses for each of those language items. Too much homeschooling is cluttered with those unnecessary slices of language. For grammar, I say drop in a small unit or two during the teen years. Before that, children do not need it separately. They learn grammar from good reading and from talking with you (with your occasional corrections). Other Social Studies. Government, religions, family, and all other topics should come under the big tent too. Either learn them directly from the Bible or compare those other readings with the Bible. The worldview tent includes them all. And there’s no mystery about teaching worldview. It’s just teaching what the Bible says about everything. © by Ruth Beechick 2009 Dr. Ruth Beechick has written much on how to simplify language teaching. Parts of this article are adapted from A Biblical Home Education and from World History Made Simple: Matching History with the Bible. Did you Know?
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