Homeschool Curriculum Update: Why I’m Tossing the (not so) Good and The Beautiful
If you’re in the middle of the school year and figure out something’s not working with your curriculum, throw it away! Just kidding. But actually, that’s what I decided to do in this case.
Read on to find out about what we’re throwing out and what we’re going to do instead.
When we began our school year, we didn’t buy a lot of curriculum, but started with what we had to get a good idea of what would still work and what we still needed.
While most of my original choices as previously shared in the Homeschool Curriculum Picks post were a good fit, we ran into some snags with my youngest son’s curriculum.
We had been using The Good and the Beautiful for language arts and math the previous year, and while he didn’t really enjoy it because of all the wordiness which meant lengthy preliminaries before finally getting on with the lesson’s activities, we were dealing with it by skipping over most everything except the review pages in math and skimming through and hitting the highlights in language arts.
Then I started noticing some questionable symbols and references. As in, masonic symbols. Symbols I noticed in the math curriculum were the eye of Horus (all-seeing eye), sun god, and fertility goddess. This was a unit on Africa, so not entirely out of place, but they used these symbols as an exercise for children to draw lines of symmetry on. In other words, it wasn’t just a “here are some symbols that might be seen in Africa,” but rather it has the child spend time studying these symbols and drawing on them.
There was also reference to eating insects as a “good source of protein” (which sounds like the WHO agenda that we should eat bugs to “save the planet” and “prevent global warming.”) One statement like that isn’t that big of a deal in general - we can obviously talk about that with our kids and share how different cultures eat differently, but it’s still not an agenda I want normalized in my children’s curriculum. And with a “neutral” curriculum sharing their opinion on something like that, it makes me wonder what else would potentially pop up down the road. Maybe things I wouldn’t even know about because my kids would be working more independently at that point.
There are also yoga poses used as exercise breaks throughout the language arts curriculum. Here’s why we don’t do yoga. And finally, someone reached out to say that if you look at the curriculum as a whole, it has become full of esoteric symbols, like bees, owls, sun, moon, and stars, etc. that weren’t there in previous versions.
Now, you could say these are all innocent things. That they don’t mean anything in and of themselves. And perhaps the people who put them there did so without thought. (kind of like in Disney movies?? ok, I digress) But when you start looking into the origins and beliefs of the Mormon church, it becomes clear that any LDS members on the curriculum team are well aware of what these symbols represent.
Once I shared some of my findings and concerns publicly, others began sharing things they had noticed as well along those same lines. Namely, that the LDS church was founded by Joseph Smith, a freemason.
Brigham Young (of BYU fame) was also a freemason. And while masonry fell out of favor with LDS for a time, it is now acceptable for both men and women LDS members to become freemasons. Interestingly, this testimony from an ex-mormon points out the similarities between freemasonry and mormonism. Maybe this is obvious, but freemasonry is Satanic.
So the fact that mormonism is linked with freemasonry fits with the esoteric symbolism and messaging I had been noticing in the curriculum.
Now, I have not read the book of Mormon, but have read some of the LDS beliefs, and there are many of concern including that humans can become gods by their good works, Jesus is the result of a relationship between God the Father and god the mother, that they are the only true church, and many other non-biblical, non-Christian ideas. Also, if you go to the LDS page, you’ll find that the beliefs stated are very vanilla. You really won’t find out what they believe other than that they are “Christian” and share many similarities to what other Christians believe. Sound familiar?
I have noticed some LDS quotes in the curriculum, including one by L. Lionel Kendrick who also said, “When Adam and Eve partook of the fruit, they made it possible for all to gain knowledge.”
Sounds like a lie straight from the mouth of Satan…because it is!
And while that was not the quote my son was supposed to do for copywork, I don’t believe it’s safe to study someone who teaches blasphemy such as this!
In summary, there are so many different possibilities of error being interwoven in from the various religions and worldviews involved in this curriculum, many of which are not Christian, that I don’t personally feel comfortable using it and risk planting those seeds in my children’s minds as normal and okay. Especially as their characters and beliefs are being formed.
So for now, we are taking a step back and using sort of a unit study approach coupled with a bit of curriculum I had leftover from my older kids. And moving forward, I will most likely get curriculum that is just math or just phonics without other underlying principles mixed in.
Edited to add:
Please remember that while I am sharing what I found and the decision I made based on those facts, you are welcome to make your own decision. I gain no compensation or popularity for sharing this information. Quite the opposite. I am simply sharing in case it helps someone else.
Like this post? You’ll probably like these too…
