Kudos to the Greenfield School Committee for having reservations about approving the application of Providence Christian Academy to open a school in Greenfield where a white supremacist agenda will be advanced. What happens in a private “Christian” school should be everybody’s business.
The Abeka curriculum proposed to the School Committee originated in Florida at the Pensacola Christian Academy in 1954 for use in home-schooling. The curriculum was further developed and published in Texas beginning in 1972 for use in “Christian” schools that proliferated after the U.S. Supreme Court ended segregation. (I have difficulty visualizing Jesus advocating for segregation.)
Abeka’s history curriculum is tainted with white supremacist ideas. In Abeka’s and the curricula of similar publishers, slavery is characterized as Black immigration. The acceptance of homosexuality in the United States is referred to as cultural decay and a result of declining American values. Diversity is neither taught, accepted nor reflected in the student bodies of these schools. The belief in Christian nationalism and white supremacy generates what is taught.
The science curriculum is a total farce since Abeka’s view is that the Bible trumps science. After reviewing Abeka’s eighth grade science textbook “Science: Earth and Space,” retired environmental geologist Daniel Phelps states, “Any teacher or homeschool parent using this textbook is committing educational malpractice.”
Each state and local community has the responsibility to educate, not indoctrinate, its children. This includes, in large part, teaching them the skills required to live happily and productively in a scientifically and socially complex world that they share with a very diverse population. To deprive the children of this fundamental education is to abdicate our responsibility.
The greatest problem facing this country today is ignorance. That does not mean lack of intelligence. It means lack of excellent primary and secondary education. Ignorance of scientific facts leads, among other things, to the inability to understand how our behavior has impacted the earth and the atmosphere around it.
Being isolated from all who are unlike us makes us ignorant of the fact that the richness of the world’s population and culture lies in its diversity. Ignorance of the fundamentals of American democracy and the nature of American government, laws and court structure leads to the fiasco we witness in the news daily.
It is no surprise that the states with the lowest education levels measured by the percentage of high school graduates are those characterized predominantly as “red states” (Google the topic.) It is also no surprise that Massachusetts is first at the opposite end of that same list.
Perhaps in the future, laws might be proposed that require private and home-schooled students to submit to the same standardized tests that public school students are required to take. That may be the only way that states, cities and town can fulfill their obligation to educate the children within their borders and combat ignorance, and to make parents aware of how deficient their children’s education may be.
Susan Shauger of Buckland is a retired elementary school teacher and principal and an attorney.