Sonlight Curriculum

It appears that I’ve finally truly gotten the attention of the folks over at Sonlight Curriculum: http://www.sonlightblog.com/2009/04/questionable-content.html.

But it appears their answer to american history books with negative and/or inaccurate portrayals of Native Americans and the treatment of Native Americans by whites is to put an oft-overlooked warning comment in a teacher’s guide rather than doing the work to find better books.

My husband, bless his English-German soul, came up with a much better analogy. He likened the children reading the books, or hearing them read-aloud, to a jury. The prosecuting attorney is the author of the poorly written book. The teacher is the defense attorney and the defendants are the American Indians.

The jury hears a passage presented by the prosecutor that American Indians were vicious, aggressive and without cause (they are reading Matchlock Gun, for example). Suddenly, the defense jumps up and whips out their teacher guide (if they remember) and shouts, “Stop! The American Indians were protecting their homes. Treaties had been made that whites ignored. Frontier people knew they were encroaching on Indian lands and they did so with the government’s backing.”

The judge turns to the jury and says, “Please disregard that passage the prosecutor just read. Go on, Prosecutor, and continue your argument.”

The prosecutor smiles slyly and continues reading the riveting, informative and engrossing literature while the American Indian sits in her chair with no voice. The jury, being children, are engrossed with the story and have completely forgotten the defense’s sermon. The jury, being children, are riveted by the images their minds are creating as they read the story and those images stay with them for a very long time, if not forever. Especially, since the defense is always harping on them to do their chores, to stop hitting their sibling, to brush their teeth and get to bed, to learn their multiplication tables and now not to listen to everything in the book they read to learn what really happened in American history.

I started on this journey as my daughter and I began reading the historical fiction assigned to us through the Sonlight Curriculum’s American History 3/4 program. I made sure to back up Bulla’s Pocohontas book with a selection of others, including nonfiction as Bulla’s book does the Disneyfied version of Pocohontas. I also was careful about presenting the first Thanksgiving. But, after reading Caddie Woodlawn, Matchlock Gun and Skippack School (amongst others) my daughter said to me, and I do quote her, “I am sick and tired of these terrible books about  these so-called mean Indians. I want to read a book that is told by an Indian child. Not all Indians were bad and besides, the whites were stealing their land.”

And so since she was right, and I was sick of them also, we began our search. And, we are still searching. We have found some excellent resources, including Debbie Reese’s blog and Cynthia Leitich’s website.

So, why should we care if Sonlight has children reading “terrible books” as my daughter calls them. Well, we care because both of my great-great grandparents were mixed blood. And we care because we are Christians and God calls us to be truthful, honest and compassionate to and about all of the people He created. We care because American Indians are still suffering as a result of the actions our white ancestors enacted upon them. We care because we care about children, whether they be white or Asian or black or Indian.

Why wouldn’t Sonlight worry that one, just one, of the children being taught American history through their curriculum might be American Indian?

Sonlight is using primarily books that were published years ago, some of them decades ago. If you look closely, they are primarily Newberry award winners; as if that makes them instantly okay. I think if Sonlight did the work, and they could have done it this past year, they could come up with a much better curriculum. But I got my new catalogue and I see none of the books have changed. And so I threw it out.

I think it is our God-given responsibility to educate ourselves as to what really happened in American history and to honor God by teaching our children the truth, whether we use historical fiction, nonfiction or textbooks.

I am 45 years old, and I just learned that Thomas Jefferson, whom I’d always admired, had a fervent policy to wipe out the Shawnee Indian, not just remove them. He wanted them dead and gone. He authorized giving them disease-infested blankets. He speculated in Indian lands.

And I never knew it until I read Colin Galloway’s book The Shawnees and the War for America. This is not something I should have found out on my own, after all I was an AP student in American History and graduated from college.