SOTDRT Textbooks

[gardenvarietycitizen]

I would assume the Duggars do not spend much time on history, social studies or geography considering their belief that everyone could fit/live in Jacksonville.

That's a common meme among conservative (particularly quiverfull) types who are asked about overpopulation. They like to say that everyone would fit in Texas with room left over, and that sort of thing, because they seem to have NO clue that people require not just room to physically park their bodies but also room to like, grow the food and generate the energy that they are continually consuming.

[SpeakNow]

That's a common meme among conservative (particularly quiverfull) types who are asked about overpopulation. They like to say that everyone would fit in Texas with room left over, and that sort of thing, because they seem to have NO clue that people require not just room to physically park their bodies but also room to like, grow the food and generate the energy that they are continually consuming.

Not to mention adequate space to hide yourself while dressing. Wouldn't want to defraud the gazillion men crammed in all around you. :roll:

[Glass Cowcatcher]

Not to mention adequate space to hide yourself while dressing. Wouldn't want to defraud the gazillion men crammed in all around you. :roll:

Texan speaking here, they also don't realize that much of the state is not actually very habitable. You might be able to fit all the people in, but even if the problem of providing goods for those people was overcome, they'd cluster in the livable areas and those places would become overcrowded.

[klavierspieler]

My mom had good intentions and for all the crap in Abeka books, their math books were always very easy to understand. It was just utter crap in all the others that you can't preview until you've already bought the damn book, I think... IIRC you have to order the sets via internet/mail or know someone who has the exact books you're buying. (We did video school for the one year at my house, and there was no way to not order through them. The books were so expensive for what they were, we would have been better off in private school.)

It's internet/phone ordering now. Christian schools could order one set of books for a grade to preview, but only one at a time (e.g., all the curriculum for 3rd grade at once plus teacher's keys, but not 3rd and 5th grades together unless they returned 3rd first). The only way homeschoolers could preview the books before buying is if they knew someone who used the books, or if they went to one of the yearly representative sales fairs (which might or might not be anywhere close to them).

The books are expensive, and they are pretty ruthless about debt collection. They aren't nearly as fast at refunding money though, imagine that.

(I worked in the A Beka office as a customer service rep for the one year I attended PCC, and my mom homeschooled me and all my siblings from K-12th grade with A Beka only, so I'm pretty familiar with the company.)

Edited for clarity

[Miggy]

Not to mention adequate space to hide yourself while dressing. Wouldn't want to defraud the gazillion men crammed in all around you. :roll:

:lol: :clap:

I had an imagine of all the men squashed into Texas and all the women in New Mexico and a big fence down the middle so they couldn't see each other.

[JesusFightClub]

That idea came up at my church when I was a kid, and my grandmother quickly disabused us of the notion of the Klan being a noble group. She said that in rural VA, the Klan was a bunch of ruffians who burned houses and hurt people. Per my grandma, they were only good in the way that the mobsters who terrorized shop owners by demanding "protection" and carrying out hits on those who crossed them might also be the same guys who brought around Christmas food boxes in the neighborhood.

I think this is like the IRA and the Real IRA. You could say they perform a useful service by kneecapping drug dealers and general miscreants, but the blowing up stuff and shooting folk fatally cancels it out really. Also, it's not right to attack people like that. If you know someone's dealing drugs there are systems in place to sort that out, which don't include you, your mates, some balaclavas and a gun.

(BTW, I've seen a kneecapping. Unpleasant.)

[Whydoyouask]

It's internet/phone ordering now. Christian schools could order one set of books for a grade to preview, but only one at a time (e.g., all the curriculum for 3rd grade at once plus teacher's keys, but not 3rd and 5th grades together unless they returned 3rd first). The only way homeschoolers could preview the books before buying is if they knew someone who used the books, or if they went to one of the yearly representative sales fairs (which might or might not be anywhere close to them).

The books are expensive, and they are pretty ruthless about debt collection. They aren't nearly as fast at refunding money though, imagine that.

(I worked in the A Beka office as a customer service rep for the one year I attended PCC, and my mom homeschooled me and all my siblings from K-12th grade with A Beka only, so I'm pretty familiar with the company.)

Edited for clarity

Around here if you are part of a homeschool group there is a pretty good chance someone is using this type of material and will be more than happy to share it with you. Joining a homeschool group or going to a park day/play day is pretty easy, you just need to show up!

Where I'm at now, I'm also able to order 'A Beka' material from the library. (Some is special order and needs to be shipped from out of district but they can get it for you!)

[Annette]

I saw that video last week and facepalmed. I was homeschooled K-12 using all the books shown in the video. I can't believe I read all that racist, ignorant garbage. For what it's worth, however, I have always scored well on standardized tests. I got a score of 32 on my ACT exam. It would have been 34-35 if not for my math score of 27 pulling the average down. I have always been a voracious reader, so I am sure that helped me round out my knowledge base. When I was kid, I would bring home an armload of books from the library every week. I kept that up until I left for college.

While the math curriculum was fairly good, I do wish I had had real teachers. I enjoyed math, and I think I could have done much better and been more advanced if I had someone to ask questions of and explain things to me. I also crapped out of chemistry and physics halfway through the books when it got too difficult and I had no one to help me. My mom didn't monitor my work, so she had no idea I had just stopped doing them. Thanks a lot, Mom.

[Terrie]

A Beka is not accepted as adequate for many subjects by the California state college system (especially things like history). They haven't accepted those courses since at least 2005.

[mirele]

A Beka is not accepted as adequate for many subjects by the California state college system (especially things like history). They haven't accepted those courses since at least 2005.

The court case is ACSI v. Stearns. Here's a brief rundown:

On October 12, 2010, the Supreme Court declined (PDF, p. 12) to review Association of Christian Schools International et al. v. Roman Stearns et al., thus bringing the case to a definitive end. The case, originally filed in federal court in Los Angeles on August 25, 2005, centered on the University of California system's policies and statements relevant to evaluating the qualifications of applicants for admission. The plaintiffs — the Association of Christian Schools International, the Calvary Chapel Christian School in Murrieta, California, and a handful of students at the school — charged that the university system violated the constitutional rights of applicants from Christian schools whose high school coursework is deemed inadequate preparation for college.

http://ncse.com/news/2010/10/end-acsi-v-stearns-006258 (more at the link)

[SoybeanQueen]

What the hell at the comments about Africa. Did they miss the bit in Acts where the Ethiopian converts? And the fact that historically Africa has been heavily Christian and the home of most Coptic Christians? But then they probably consider Coptics not to be true Christians, because if Catholicism is a false religion than Orthodoxy certainly is.

Depends. If they need an example of how Christians are persecuted in the world, then yeah, Coptic Christians count.

[SisiL78]

I absolutely cannot stand when Christians cry persecution. For goodness sakes, of all people to know what real persecution is they should know as their ancestors have been persecuting everyone in sight for the past two thousand years. They cry about not being wished a happy Christmas every time they buy some piece of plastic junk at a store. That's not friggin' persecution. Christians whether they be in Cossack, or Crusader form have been murdering people in creative and disgusting ways for millenia. They burn other Christians as well as Jews, and Muslims at the stake for not believing as they do. They tortured, raped, and pillaged Jewish towns from Spain to Russia. They wouldn't let non-Christians own property (or if they did own property it would be stolen from them) or work at certain jobs. They thieved and murdered their way into prosperity. Then when they seemingly ran out of people to persecute in Europe they went over to the Americas to murder, torture, rape, and pillage the Native American cultures. No treaty they signed with North American Indians went unbroken. They even invented new ways of murdering tons of people; forced marches across the country carrying diseased blankets.

But, they have the nerve to cry persecution. Argh.

[IceQueen]

I went to a fundie lite elementary school that used A Beka. I asked my teacher to elaborate on why we didn't learn about the big bang like I did in my old public school. I was told scientists weren't saved. I'm glad we only went there one year. But in the schools defense I went their for 2nd grade and 3rd grade in my public school was pretty much a repeat of what I learned (not including science). I'm not sure if that's how bad our public schools are or how good the A Beka curriculum is.

[chaotic life]

I have long refused to use ABeka for homeschooling because it was so lousy academically so clearly biased and dishonest.

That said, I took a state history class last fall, from a PhD professor who espoused all of the same garbage about slavery as what is in ABeka. He and I went rounds on more than one occasion. He wasn't dumb enough to outright praise the KKK, but he certainly downplayed them as well intended but ill displayed protectionism. It was a state uni, but I always felt I was a fundie in disguise with his PhD just the same.

[DifferentGurl]

Out of all my homeschooling textbooks, "History of the World in Christian Perspective" was the most fundie. I think someone just mentioned A Beka as being bias...I just looked at the back just now and saw it was indeed A Beka. I thought it was from some other publisher. :?

Anyways, some of "History of the World in Christian Perspective"'s "great" quotes:

*A section heading called "Evolution, Humanism, and the Destruction of Man".

*"The most important part of culture is how people relate to God."From taking Intro to Sociology, I know that a person's relationship to God or Allah or whatever God they worrship ( if they worship one at all ) is just one part of culture and may or may not be the most important part of culture.

*"The New Deal introduced the U.S. to socialism". *rolls eyes*Sometimes government intervention is necessary in an economy!

*It pretty much ignored what the "five good emperors" of Ancient Rome just because they persecuted Christians. I only learned more about them after I went to the library.

*"The Distortion of Christianity Was the Most Important Characteristic of the Middle Ages." And the rampant disease, war, ignorance, and illeteracy wasn't? *sarcasm*

Overall, when it wasn't being biased, it was actually a sound history book. Just hate it when it becomes biased toward Liberals and Non-Christians. So happy when my parents sent me to a public online school.

[YPestis]

I have a friend who told everyone that her father explained that the Klan was originally created to beat up on wife beaters and people like that, that it wasn't a hate group. Yeah, no one believed her, and I'm not sure she believed it herself, but she came from a family with Klan association and it was probably a way to justify their participation by current family members. Fundies are certainly not the only ones who try to justify the Klan's existence.

[Kaylee]

There were times when the Klan did beat up wife beaters, drunks, etc, but that wasn't the primary purpose. The original Klan was formed to terrorize blacks, Northerners or people suspected of being sympathetic to them. The 1920s Klan was more of a money racket and attempt at gaining political power than anything else and they attracted a lot of members (estimated at up to 15% of the eligible white protestant US population) by claiming to be a Christian fraternal group that did public service and supported things like Prohibition and free public schools. This is where people get the idea of the "benevolent" Klan from but, while they publicly disavowed violence, they were violent as well and very anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant. The Klan form the 1950s onward pretty much dropped all pretense of being anything but a terroristic hate group and even the groups that don't use violence directly usually praise it and seem to advocate for it when a person can get away with it.

[chaotic life]

There have been three rises of the KKK. The original banding of the orgnization came from the Knights of Mary Phagan. They formed to lynch A Northern Jewish man accused and convicted (though his conviction was overturned post-humuously nearly 100 years later) of raping and killing one Mary Phagan.

From that point onward, they were primarily aboutt terrorizing people. Just because they sometimes terrorized those society might deem derserving of being terrorized never altered their focus in any three of their uprisings.

They organized lynchings, mobs, and terrorism agains blacks, jews, northerns, Catholics and others they considered persona non gratis. There's no escaping that history, no matter how you try to.

Of course, only in America do we take the macabre symbolic monument of an organization so evil and turn it into a modern theme park. It always strikes me as profane to drive past Stone Mountain and see it a themepark now.

[SisiL78]

The lynching of Leo Frank was one of their most famous lynchings, but I thought that they had lynched before? FYI, I think Leo Frank's conviction was going to be rescinded and hence the "reason" for the lynching. He was blamed for the murder simply because he had been her manager at the pencil factory where she worked, and it was seen as popular to blame the Jew who no one wanted around from the get go.

Our country has such an ugly history, its shameful that there are people who are trying to hide that instead of learning from it. Some of the right wing history books on the market right now just make all of American history look happy and shiny as if this country and its people never did a darned thing wrong.

[Kaylee]

The lynching of Leo Frank was one of their most famous lynchings, but I thought that they had lynched before? FYI, I think Leo Frank's conviction was going to be rescinded and hence the "reason" for the lynching. He was blamed for the murder simply because he had been her manager at the pencil factory where she worked, and it was seen as popular to blame the Jew who no one wanted around from the get go.

This. The KKK was originally founded in 1865 and was involved in lynchings and all sort of vigilantism and terrorism, but had disbanded and mostly disappeared by the 1880s or 1890s. The lynching of Leo Frank was used to launch a revival which is known as the "Second Era" Klan - it happened months after Frank was lynched but many of the earliest Klan members had been members of the "Knights of Mary Phagan". This is the Klan that got so big and well-known and where most of the well-known Klan symbolism originated (the "fiery" cross, uniform white robes & hoods, and the klorans or rule/ritual books that are still used today).

As for Leo Frank, there was a lot of evidence coming out that he was innocent, the courts had already commuted his sentence from death to life in prison and certain politicians and newspapers were fanning up mobs against him and had people furious that he would not be facing the death penalty. The weird thing is that most of the evidence pointed to the night watchman being the real killer and it was that watchman, Jim Conley, who provided the most damning testimony against Frank during the trial. The jury and members of the public refused to believe he might be lying because they didn't think a black man was smart enough to invent or stick to a story as complicated as the one he told on the stand if it was not true.

[JesusFightClub]

Interesting. There have been multiple incarnations of the IRA too.

I'm not making a moral equivalence between the 'Ra and the KKK, cos there ain't one. I'm just interested in parallels between the organisations. I'm hunting around for a thesis topic for my Masters, and this is a fascinating trail. There are a lot of issues with it, however, one of which is the above - I do not want to draw parallels between the 'Ra and the KKK politically. There are some similarities but far more differences. I'm still inclined to go with INLA/32 County Sovereignity Movement/RIRA but I need to see straight with that one.

[B5SnowDog]

Texan speaking here, they also don't realize that much of the state is not actually very habitable.

Man, no kidding. I was on a road trip with my parents a couple of weeks ago and we drove through the panhandle twice. There's a whole lotta nothing.

[chaotic life]

There was a KKK organization during Reconstruction but it was never formally organized, nationally connected nor did it last past Reconstruction. The KKK as we know it today was the organization that took the name from the groups that had existed in Reconstruction and re-stablished it in the second rise in 1915. That organization has declined in influence and membership since the 1930s but is the same organization today that it was from it's inception in 1915.

In Reconstruction, the main focus was to stop black power and black vote. They targetted blacks, scalliwags and carpetbaggers primarily. There certainly were lynchings but that organization NEVER claimed to be attempting to enforce social order, since they were specifically targetting the black vote. The second rise of the KKK did consider themselves a vigalante social order enforcer in the South. They were racist pricks, but it made them feel better.

As for evidence in the Leo Frank case, the only real evidence that ever existed was the testimony of the black janitor caught carrying Mary Phagan's body to the basement who claimed Leo Frank made him dispose of the body. His testimony was always suspect, and there was no real evidence beyond it.

[desertvixen]

quinoa mama, and anyone else interested in how the Klan could have been seen as benevolent (by the Klan itself, anyway) should check out Behind the Mask of Chivalry by Nancy Maclean. It looks specifically at the Klan in Athens, GA using membership records and such, but definitely touches on how they perceived themselves as arbiters of morality and goodness. We had to read it for a class I took last semester, but it's pretty interesting on its own.

[Conuly]

As for evidence in the Leo Frank case, the only real evidence that ever existed was the testimony of the black janitor caught carrying Mary Phagan's body to the basement who claimed Leo Frank made him dispose of the body. His testimony was always suspect, and there was no real evidence beyond it.

Blacks trumped Jews? Funny, I would've pegged it as the other way around. Or is it "Accusations against either are always okay, even if the rest of the time we wouldn't've believed it from That Guy"?