Teaching History and Providence
As a sort of follow-up to my previous post about teaching history, I thought I would add a note on what I am emphatically not going to be teaching my children. I’ve been reading The Catholic Homeschool Companion, and while many of the essays are good and helpful, there was one that I think is extremely misguided. In it the author strongly recommends teaching history as the workings of God’s Divine Providence. I’m not disagreeing that God is working in the world, rather I’m disputing that we can know what is/are the cause(s) of a particular historical event and why it might have happened that way. As an example of what I mean, I’ll cite what the author of the essay discusses. She taught her children that God opened up the Americas for exploration during the Protestant Reformation so that the Catholic Church could expand and be protected while it was under attack in Europe. How could we possibly know this? This strikes me much more as a Christian “just so” story rather than anything even remotely resembling the study and retelling of history. How does a description like this aid the child’s thoughts and intellectual development? How does it enhance their curiosity? It also completely washes over the legitimate problems the Church was experiencing in the practices of some of her people. It is all just so simplistic it boggles my mind. (As you can probably tell!)
Coincidentally (or perhaps providentially 
) I read a section in the Catechism of the Catholic Church about Divine Providence on the same day I read the essay I mentioned above. I know that only a couple readers here consider this any sort of authority at all, but I’m going to quote it anyways, rather than just blathering on and on about this topic.
We firmly believe that God is master of the world and of its history. But the ways of his providence are often unknown to us. Only at the end, when our partial knowledge ceases, when we see God “face to face”, will we fully know the ways by which - even through the dramas of evil and sin - God has guided his creation to that definitive sabbath rest for which he created heaven and earth. (CCC 314)
mrsdarwin on 31 May 2007 at 1:38 pm #
There’s a history book popular among Catholic homeschoolers that takes much the same view. I was supposed to read it when I was a teenager, but eventually I couldn’t take the simplistic historical analysis anymore. I definitely wouldn’t present that kind of silly scholarship to a child who was still forming ideas about historical trends and events.
The quote from the CCC is a nice antidote to providentialism, I think.
Sarah on 01 Jun 2007 at 11:30 am #
Great post. I couldn’t agree more! Some of the history books we used as kids had a bit of that perspective (from an Evangelical point of view), and we found it unconvincing and irritating, even at a young age. It felt like God and Jesus were forced into all the little cracks, just to make it a ‘Christian’ textbook. Mom *and* the four of us kids found it a bit ridiculous sometimes… often definitely a stretch. And yes, often “How can we possibly know that’s why, or how, or when God was working in that specific way?”