As a state-trained teacher with many years’ experience working with a wide variety of curriculum options in a wide range of educational contexts, I believe that Jean Balchin’s article entitled ‘Escaping the Cult of Accelerated Christian Education’ paints a highly emotive, superficial and twisted view of what is a globally-recognised education option of the highest academic calibre.
The author’s scathing review appears to be based on her personal rejection of a “religious” Judeo Christian worldview in favour of a post-modernist philosophy.
The Accelerated Christian Education curriculum is made available globally to any individual or organisation which wishes to make use of it. It is Biblically-based, but no education ever takes place in some sort of moral vacuum. As the nature of education is inextricably rooted in the nature of truth, all education is therefore fundamentally religious. Consequently, what distinguishes one curriculum from another at its root level is its underpinning religious bias.
Within a theoretical context, one could imagine a young person being locked away in a cupboard for 10 or 11 years with nothing but the A.C.E. curriculum and no other human interaction or intellectual input. If one was to do so, it would be logical to assume that the outcome would be a young person who held a conservative, Bible-Belt Baptist point of view. However, much the same could be said of a student who had been locked away in the same cupboard with nothing but the current NZ state school curriculum. But in the real world, how likely is this?
Given that the aim of any education is to influence thinking , the question is not “is my child being brainwashed?”, but “who is brainwashing my child?” As a homeschooling parent, I have never been afraid of educational material coming into my home that I disagree with, as it has given us as parents the chance to discuss with our children what we believe and why, as opposed to what we don’t, (an opportunity that few parents of students in state schools have).
Nevertheless, Jean Balchin seems to assume that anybody who touches the A.C.E. curriculum turns their brains off, and that students are somehow disgorged at the end of their education as naïve, intellectually-stunted, religious morons.
Can you really ascribe racism to A.C.E on the basis that comic strips show black students in black neighbourhoods going to black schools? Is that a deliberate attempt to teach racism, or is that depicting the actual reality of life on the ground in the area in which the PACEs were written (remembering that in the first instance they are produced for a local, American market)? I would suggest that harmonising relative proportions of ethnic identities in comic strips for the sake of political correctness is simply disingenuous.
To be defined as “homophobic” because one does not accept homosexuality is a perversion, pun intended. A phobia is fear. Few Christians I know have a fear of homosexuality – they simply reject it as a lifestyle because it is contrary to the teachings of the Bible. In rejecting a lifestyle one does not necessarily reject the person. I would have thought that the Christian attitude of accept-you-but-not-necessarily-your-beliefs-and/or-practices” demonstrates a more open-minded approach than that shown by Balchin, who clearly assumes “queer” lifestyles, evolution, feminist theology and unfettered (safe) sex to be divine and any contrary view to be evil.
While A.C.E. clearly and unashamedly takes a creationist standpoint in regard to science, it also discusses at length the issue of evolution. Although I have been involved in state education at primary, intermediate, and secondary level in various capacities for many years, I have never once heard student given any other viewpoint to even consider apart from evolution.
In conclusion, Balchin fails to mention the vast numbers of A.C.E. students just in New Zealand who have gone on to succeed in all walks of life. Jean Balchin may personally reject one worldview in favour of another, but to attempt to marginalise and discredit others on that basis is intellectually arrogant and presumptuous in the extreme.
Roy Herbertson
Whangarei