I found this a bit odd:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1579246141/002-1822139-3077631?v=glance&n=283155
This type of thing, the insertion of biblical messages into math and other subjects, isn’t typical of Christian schools, is it?
Are there home ec book with recipes that say things like “Now, beat the eggs until they are stiff, much like the Romans beat Jesus, until he was dead and turned stiff.”
I went to a private Christian school for a few years, and for the most part they managed to keep the religion and schooling seperate, and I’m pretty sure we used books that any other school would use.
Now homeschooling is a completely different beast. I wouldn’t be surprised if that book was sold primarily in homeschool bookstores.
I can’t speak from firsthand knowledge, but in my area there are a number of Calvinist-based christian schools, and they do state in their public advertising that they infuse all subjects with material from the bible. From one of the local school’s literature:
I can’t say I agree with their view of the bible, but heck, if you’re going to take the bible literally, I expect you’d want to involve it in everything you say and do and teach.
I forgot to point out, the quotes on that Amazon page are from a reviewer, so there’s the possibility they are not accurate.
It comes from BJU Press, which is owned by Bob Jones University. According to their website, it is intended for homeschooling. Interestingly, that page recommends a book called Journey Through Genius, whose BJU Press webpage focuses on the more eccentric people featured therein. It almost seems to discourage creativity.
Robin
Maybe I’m a bad person, but when I look at BJU, I don’t think Bob Jones.
I attended a Christian school for five years. It was an independant school which used a cirriculum designed by a Christian school association.
Yes, Christian messages were stirred into every aspect of the cirriculum. At young ages, the story problems in mathematics would often be worded along the lines of, “If Suzie has three Bibles to give out to her friends who need to hear the Word and gives away two, how many Bibles does she have left?” In highschool, the texts went on to explain things like calculating insurance rates, but carefully noted that some Christians don’t believe in using insurance because it shows a lack of faith in God to take care of them. I was not taught algebra, calculus, or any other form of higher mathematics.
Science, of course, was a complete and utter joke. Evolution was derided, but they gave none of evolutionists’ arguments, relying on long-debunked examples like the Piltdown man. Texts would say things like “God designed these leaves to get energy from sunlight . . .”
Literature consisted only of Christian books like “In His Steps” and “Martyr of the Catacombs”. Most of them were utterly terrible. I remember this one series of books we had to read by this Christian author who wrote historical fiction about the struggles of Protestant groups. Her writing made Danielle Steele look like a Pulitzer Price candidate. In eleventh grade, they exposed us cautiously to some “classics”, such as (I swear I shit you not) “Heidi”. “Heidi” had a disclaimer pasted in the front cover warning that the ideas therein were not necessarily those of the school.
We had health studies, which focused primarily on nutrition (with the helpful hint that if you’re ever a poor missionary, you can survive on peanut butter.) They had one text on reproduction, which had on the first page a picture of a wedding, and thereafter focused on the reproduction of chickens. There was no indication how the sperm actually got to the egg.
Music consisted of us standing on the back porch singing along to tapes of Christian singers.*
English was relatively straight-forward, except the sentances we were to parse were usually overtly Christian. I remember one example clearly, “I would never want to be called a heretic.”
History was grossly edited. The Pilgrims (who were apparently the only ones on the boats) were loving Christians who only wanted to share the Light with those heathen Indians who kept unaccountably slaughtering them. I remember when we were taught about the Enola Gay. One of the pilots was quoted as saying, “My God, what have we done?” which they said was a prayer. We learned about the Holocaust, with a sad note of how many Jews had perished without hearing the message of Christ and now were suffering eternally.
All in all, if I were not a voracious reader, I’d be an utter ignoramus.
I tutored my neighbor’s daughter (who goes to a Christian school). Her algebra book had all kinds of little Christian messages in it. One of them was about the number 0. The book said “0 has no value…just as you’re life would have no value if you don’t accept Christ as your savior.”
I’m a little leary about the Fundies messing with mathematics. Look what they did to science!
I went to a very conservative Christian school and we didn’t have any “God” in our math. The only difference in any class was having prayer or devotional in first period.
Damn. I went to Catholic school and we never had to deal with shit like this.
Of course, if these are from BJU, then us Catholics* are just a bunch of heathen statue-worshippers.
*I was raised Catholic, but I’m no longer practicing.
I only went to private school through 5th grade, not long enough to do permanent damage. Our classes were mostly the same as what I saw from my public-schooled siblings later on, with the exception of Bible class and the absence of sex ed. Though now that I think of it, there was no science to speak of, mostly just Health/Nutrition. Math was normal History normal, English normal-ish. They didn’t much care what we read for book reports and such. Good thing since my favorite book series was about shape-shifting aliens taking over people’s brains. Only thing was in class, we used readers, rarely full-text novels, as some parents were incredibly fundamentalist and could object to anything.
A former coworker described the math textbooks that the school her ex-husband was sending their daughter to. The math problems were things like “A room is 5 crosses by 16 crosses. What is the area of the room?” Needless to say, the coworker said that her daughter was dumb as a post. I can see working religion in by having a problem like, “Solomon’s temple was 50 feet by 100 feet. What was the area of the temple?” but substituting something vague like “crosses” for feet?
Oh my.
And to think I’ve gone all this time without seeing the connection between the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra and Fundamentalist Christianity.
Is this what comes of trying to make math relevant?
If that one reviewer is describing the book accurately, it sounds like a basically sound math text written by someone with a one-track mind, who can’t go five minutes without somehow tying in his favorite subject, however inappropriately.
And it makes me wonder what a math textbook would look like written by someone with a different obsession—say, by a Star Wars fanatic, or a sex maniac, who kept trying to relate everything to his own particular idee fixe.
By the way, MsRobyn, Journey Through Genius is a very good book, and there’s nothing specifically Christian about it.
Han does the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs. Chewie does it in 18. If Luke can do it in half the time of the others added together, how many parsecs does it take Luke?
I’m not touching the other one. :eek:
I’ll put it on my reading list.
I didn’t think it was particularly Christian, but the description on the BJU Press website made it sound like they’re focused on the eccentricities rather than the genius. It’s as though they want you to think the eccentricity is sinful and all you need is Jesus to keep you on the straight and narrow.
Robin
[hijack]
A town in the area where I grew up has a jewelry store named “Buddy’s Jewelry.” They recently added awnings to their windows with “BJ” written in large, lovely cursive letters…
[/hijack]
I didn’t know anything like these ultra-Christianized textbooks existed. I wonder if this particular book, being a pre-calculus text, addresses the issue of which graphing calculator Jesus would use.
What’s objectionable about this? You mean Spirit in the Sky isn’t a Christian song?
Denis Leary’s your dad? Wow! Nice to meet you! 
Is this educational ridiculousness exclusive to the US? Can I escape it by moving to, say, Canada or Europe or Australia? Not that I plan to have any direct or even indirect involvement with these schools, but honestly it makes me a little uncomfortable that some day I could depend on someone who went to a school like that.
Jesus, of course, would use an HP-48GX. Though he’d keep an HP-49+ around too. He probably has a TI-86 somewhere too because in college his teachers were so narrow-minded as to make TI-86 programs and make downloading them mandatory for the class. Bastard college calculus teachers. I hope he skipped over them on his “To Save” list.
It’s my understanding that A Beka math books (which is affiliated with BJU somehow or other) mostly just has inspirational quotes on the pages. Some are from the Bible, others from famous leaders and so on.
I’ve heard one or two people talk about how whenever they teach a subject, it’s important to show the child how God wants this particular subject to be learned by showing a relevant Bible verse. For something like zoology, you’d look up a verse about a good man who cared well for his animals, and thus you could infer that zoology is a worthy branch of study. (As a Mormon, I have this covered in a much simpler manner with scriptures such as “Seek ye out of the best books wisdom, seek learning, even by study and also by faith…”)
Anyway, I go to a homeschool support group in which I am the only non-evangelical. It might interest y’all out there to know that BJU/A Beka materials are disliked by all the members for their dull repetition. Now that homeschool materials of every kind are abundant and there is so much more choice, BJU’s market share is dwindling fast. For a long time, they were popular because they were almost all there was.
On the contrary! From the page linked to in the OP: “Jesus Christ expects His disciples to be eccentric, since living a Christlike life is not normal in this world (Titus 2:14).”