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I just stumbled upon this website, and I’ve never been happier to find out that something exists. I knew there had to be secular homeschoolers out there somewhere, I’d just never met them before. On their forums, you’ll see posts written by homeschooling parents who are concerned about giving their children the best education possible without indoctrinating them with a religious ideology.
Seeing posts about finding good secular textbooks and syllabi and such has restored some of my faith in homeschooling as an educational method.
This is not to say that religious parents shouldn’t homeschool, or even that they shouldn’t teach their children about religion, but I’ve experienced varying degrees of terrible religious indoctrination through homeschooling texts throughout my education as a child. I’d like to see more homeschooling parents make a conscious effort to avoid biology and history books that focus on Genesis, and high school health texts that completely skip the topic of sex ed. As the person in charge of your child’s education, you owe it to your child to find the least biased sources you can. If you teach religion, it should be separate from other subjects.
On a completely unrelated note, I realize I’m returning from a bit of a hiatus. I’ve been doing temp work that’s made me change positions several times in the past few months, and that, combined with holiday business, has made it difficult for me to do anything on a schedule–but that’s changing. My most recent position is more long term, so I’m about to have a pretty consistent schedule for at least the next few months–longer if this leads to a permanent position. I’ll be blogging once a week again soon.
Feel free to leave a comment. All opinions are welcome. Just be respectful and think things through before posting.
Happy thinking!
Nancy
Outgrowing and Out-learning Religion 
Hi, I think it is the awesome privilege of homeschooling to be able to teach whatever we think to our kids. I also believe every book is biased. Whether they are biased in the way we believe might be the reason we take offence with the heavily ‘religious’ textbooks.
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That’s a valid point. I do think though that there’s a huge variety of textbook quality out there, and while even the better ones are biased, the bad ones are horrible. Parents can definitely make good and bad textbook choices regardless of the constant presence of bias. I’ve experienced both.
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I hear ya. Have you seen Apologia’s science texts?
Funny that you say ‘good’ and ‘bad’…an indication of bias;) i see bias everywhere…when I was particularly religious & when I have not been. There’s a lot of mediocre curriculum out there. What are some of your favourites?
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I think Apologia was one of the texts my mom rejected (thankfully from what I’ve heard) but I knew (fairly sheltered) students who used it, and they didn’t like them. I haven’t actually seen their science texts though. What are they like?
And you’re correct. I’m biased just like everyone else.
As for my favorite mediocre curricula, I’m trying to remember the name of my biology curriculum. It required me to read my textbook’s explanation of evolution, then read an encyclical that a pope had written “to get the Catholic perspective.” The textbook (also Christian) wasn’t too bad as I recall, but the syllabus would do things like that.
I had an American History textbook called Christ and the Americas that pretended to be fairly comprehensive, but which focused primarily on Catholic history in the New World, skipping Protestant contributions sometimes in order to leave room for the more obscure Catholic ones. The worst by far though was the LIFEPAC high school health text. It consisted of several workbooks which (at least at the time) contained outdated information about things like diet and exercise, and which bothered to include a passage from the bible about how women should wear their hair long, but didn’t bother to even mention reproductive health–not even in an abstinence-only capacity. It was supposed to be a fairly comprehensive high school health text as far as I could tell, and most of what I learned from it was useless.
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Great website! I’m also a secular homeschooler, and I joined a Facebook group at a friend’s recommendation called Secular Eclectic Academic Homeschoolers. They have a website, as well: http://seahomeschoolers.com. I’ve found some excellent resources and reviews on their pages.
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Hi Chavva, thanks for your comment! I’m thrilled to find out that there are other organizations like the one in my post. I wonder if there are regional organizations as well.
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I don’t know much about online communities but when I lived in the Boston area I taught science to a group of secular homeschoolers who were doing it for educational and family, not religious, reasons. It changed my opinion of homeschooling completely.
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That’s really interesting to me. I honestly wish I had met more homeschoolers like that. I knew a few families that homeschooled because their children had some special needs that they felt required more one on one attention than the school could give. That’s definitely a pretty good reason. A lot of the homeschoolers I met didn’t feel religion was their main reason for doing it, but at the same time it permeated every subject they studied to the point where it became their reason as the years wore on.
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Hooray!! I’m so glad you found us, Nancy!! I’m not stalking you, I swear, I just get a “ping” in my inbox anytime someone links to our community. 😀 Thanks a ton for the shout-out on your blog, though.
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Hi Kerry! Thanks for your comment. I’m a homeschooling alumna who became secular as an adult, so seeing your website just brought together two things that are very important to me and I just had to share it. Keep up the good work!
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