Saturday, March 6, 2010

The Media Just Doesn't Get Homeschooling

In an AP story I found on foxnews.com, someone evidently discovered that a lot of the most popular science textbooks among homeschooling parents do not promote Darwinian evolution. Early in the article we find this:

Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth's creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children "religious or moral instruction."
No surprise there—that's why they homeschool! The public indoctrination centers (a.k.a., public schools) promote and propagandize the theory of evolution while trying their very best to demean and squash any thought that an all-powerful and all-knowing God created everything.

The majority of the rest of the article then whines about the fact that some homeschoolers—presumably that other 17%—don't want their children taught about Creation. Why such people would choose to use Christian science materials is beyond me, unless it is because such books do such a good job of teaching science overall.

One of the two books featured in the article is the Biology (3rd ed.) text from Bob Jones University Press, my alma mater. I am somewhat familiar with the first two editions of the Biology book, and I am even now using their 3rd edition 7th grade Life Science textbook with my daughter. This is an absolutely top-notch textbook in every way. If the Biology text is even half as good as the 7th grade text—and I strongly suspect it is—it will still be one of the very best Biology textbooks around.

The "reviewers" used by the AP in this article demean these texts; one said he would give the books an F. They clearly equate "good science" with slavish devotion to evolutionary theory. This is one of the greatest errors of our age. The mass of evidence points to a Creator far more powerful than we comprehend, not to an existence that came about by some happenstance or chance.

And if parents want to teach this to their children, more power to them.

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