TEXTBOOKS:
Messages Subtle
and Not So Subtle
By BJU Press
Sometimes you can see a book's agenda by what authors put in and sometimes by what they leave out.
How do you know what your textbooks are really saying?
I
RECENTLY SURVEYED SECULAR TEXTBOOKS and
found the following topics discussed: the oppression and
subjugation of women by the male “establishment”; the
glorification of pop culture icons including rock/rap/R&B
stars, humanist authors, and fierce feminists; the acceptance
of evolution as scientific fact; the affirmation of the primacy
of environmentalism. And it’s not just the secondary text-
books that worry me. Secular elementary books routinely
encourage students to “be your own person” and “think of
yourself first.”
So, what to do? To redeem our children’s minds for God’s
glory requires us to acknowledge that “in him [in God]
we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28), that
whatever is done must be done “heartily, as to the Lord”
(Colossians 3:23). This acknowledgment makes significant
the use of explicitly Christian textbooks—those texts that
do more than merely purport a “moral emphasis” or tack
a Bible verse onto the title page. A thoroughly Christian
textbook helps a parent to support the spiritual growth of
her child and to equip that student for God’s service.
Why are Christian texts so crucial? Foremost, Christian
texts promote a biblical worldview. For example, when
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discussing the women’s rights movement of the ’70s, a
Christian history text would not include a poem proclaiming
disappointment as “a woman’s lot” or praise a woman’s “right
to choose,” as I saw recently in one secular text. Instead, a
Christian textbook factually discusses the positive and nega-
tive outcomes of the movement, basing all such evaluation
on Scripture. Christian textbooks do not, as do their secular
counterparts, include statements that deny God as Creator
(“millions of years ago,” “before civilization got started”) or
that worship “the creature more than the Creator” (Romans
1:25, 28–32) by proclaiming humans the “greatest destroyers
of all time” or apocalyptically stating that the earth is in the
midst of a “garbage crisis.” In short, using a Christian text, a
parent can spend time teaching rather than unteaching.
Sometimes more harm is done by what is left unsaid. A
secular science textbook discusses babies and bees and
rainbows but never mentions the God who made them
all (Genesis 1:1; John 1:1–3). It is this absence of even an
acknowledgment of God that is perhaps most telling—and
most damning—for the reader. For how can a student,
daily bombarded with humanism, materialism, hedonism,
socialism, and pragmatism, withstand the unstated premise