Why don't we just use Catholic American Curricula?
Update 2019: our family's experience of choosing GCSEs
Some people reading this website might wonder what it's all about: in other words, since there are perfectly good - and , moreover, Catholic - curriculum programmes and resources available from America, why waste our time with secular English qualifications? It's true that not one of the books a child will use to prepare for a GCSE exam in the UK will come from a Catholic publisher or have any explicitly Catholic content. How, the argument goes, can can that possibly compare with filling up your child's curriculum with Catholic books - be they books teaching the faith, or maths, or botany?
Those are exactly the thoughts which ran through my own mind when my oldest son reached 13 and we had to decide which path to follow for secondary school. Up until then we had used a lot of American books (Saxon Maths, Voyages in English, Apologia science, Baltimore Catechism etc.) and several families we knew were sticking with the US route all the way through to 18, aiming for a High School Diploma and not a GCSE in sight. In fact at that time I only knew of one Catholic family following the UK route, and one other, like us, still discerning. I spoke to many parents: in every case, they praised the American courses and had few if any good words for the GCSEs. I was very torn as to what to do: my head, filled with all this advice, was telling me to go the US route; my heart, in the midst of much prayer, was pulling towards GCSEs. It wasn't making much sense.
In the end, obviously, we chose the English route. Why? It may sound simplistic but it actually really matters to us that we're English, not American, and we simply wanted an English education for our children. I know there may appear to be little difference between US and English education since we all speak the same language, have the same aims, share the same Catholic faith and so on, but I think that in some areas there are quite significant differences, both ideological and practical.
When we decided to go down the GCSE route we hit some problems arising from the fact that we'd used American materials. For example, aside from the tendency to use American spellings and to have a very un-English approach to grammar (diagramming, anybody?!), the shift from American to English maths proved a bigger problem than we had expected (and our son was very good at maths). Other parents have found the same difficulty. In other words, we discovered that the methods of teaching were often much more different than we had expected.
This difference is probably best illustrated by the fact that a good number of the popular American courses are very much 'school in box'. You sign up for a year's work, you receive a set of workbooks, you work through them and then move on to the next year's work. I have heard of several American families whose children are considered to be 'advanced' or 'accelerated' because they have completed the year's work in half a year and moved on to the next, the accumulation effect meaning that they might reach 'High School ' level two or three years early. But what this means in terms of actual learning and intellectual development is harder to identify. As one writer put it, there is a danger that 'a curriculum in a box can produce a mind in a box'. In other words, an ability to work through a set of workbooks and score well in a test does not necessarily correspond to (and may actually diminish) a developing ability to think critically, that is, to apply one's own intellectual powers to the subject at hand, whatever it may be. The American education system seems to be particularly good at producing such curricula, 'from K-12' as the sales pitch goes, and to be very good at marketing and selling them to home-schoolers too.
Of course, this limitation is not exclusive to American curricula and it may quite reasonably be argued that teaching to the test is what GCSEs are all about. Indeed, school curricula in general, be they English or American, tend to emphasise box ticking over 'real learning'. I have plenty of friends in Higher education who would testify to this: they lament that so many children who perform exceptionally well in standardised tests such as GCSEs have often been so well-trained to learn to the test that they are almost incapable of critical, independent thought - that is, of thinking outside the box! Yet it is this ability to use one's mind creatively and constructively which is needed in higher education, particularly in the humanities.
The only way to avoid this (whether you use American or UK books) is to encourage your children to engage critically with the materials in front of them, which means that you have to do this too. When my first child was four and we had only just started home-educating, I sat him down with an off the peg phonics work book. After a few pages he stopped and said, 'But Mammy, this doesn't make sense.' I looked and found that he was right - that part of the book was confusing and badly conceived. At that point I had two choices: first, to say, 'Just do the work you have been set and don't argue about it', or, second, to say, 'You know, you are right, that part is a bit silly isn't it? Let's skip it and go on the to the next part.' I chose the latter option and I've been crossing out exercises, pages and even whole chapters in textbooks ever since. If you don't think a piece of work is worth doing, the chances are it will be of little value to your child: if you use the materials critically, your child will learn to do that too (of course this makes life a bit harder - you'll find your 11 year old trying to convince you that the next page in his maths textbook really isn't worth doing...)
Ultimately, this is a personal decision. In the end we decided that if we were going have to tweak an educational system to suit our needs, it might as well be the English one with which we were familiar, rather than an American one which was completely alien to us. Choosing the English system meant, of course, having to somehow make it work for us as a Catholic family with a broadly 'Classical' approach. In a sense that is what this website is - our own answer to that problem. The whole point of the approach I'm suggesting here is that so long as your general sweep of education is broad, and encourages sound critical thinking, teaching to the test for half a dozen GCSEs won't be a big issue. The crucial thing is not to make GCSE courses the foundation, heart or summit of your child's education, nor to think that of themselves they will produce a well-educated person (no matter how many high grades are acquired along the way). Whichever route you choose, keep the real education process and the useful qualifications separate in your own mind, and help your child to do this too.
Update 2019: our family's experience of choosing GCSEs
Some people reading this website might wonder what it's all about: in other words, since there are perfectly good - and , moreover, Catholic - curriculum programmes and resources available from America, why waste our time with secular English qualifications? It's true that not one of the books a child will use to prepare for a GCSE exam in the UK will come from a Catholic publisher or have any explicitly Catholic content. How, the argument goes, can can that possibly compare with filling up your child's curriculum with Catholic books - be they books teaching the faith, or maths, or botany?
Those are exactly the thoughts which ran through my own mind when my oldest son reached 13 and we had to decide which path to follow for secondary school. Up until then we had used a lot of American books (Saxon Maths, Voyages in English, Apologia science, Baltimore Catechism etc.) and several families we knew were sticking with the US route all the way through to 18, aiming for a High School Diploma and not a GCSE in sight. In fact at that time I only knew of one Catholic family following the UK route, and one other, like us, still discerning. I spoke to many parents: in every case, they praised the American courses and had few if any good words for the GCSEs. I was very torn as to what to do: my head, filled with all this advice, was telling me to go the US route; my heart, in the midst of much prayer, was pulling towards GCSEs. It wasn't making much sense.
In the end, obviously, we chose the English route. Why? It may sound simplistic but it actually really matters to us that we're English, not American, and we simply wanted an English education for our children. I know there may appear to be little difference between US and English education since we all speak the same language, have the same aims, share the same Catholic faith and so on, but I think that in some areas there are quite significant differences, both ideological and practical.
When we decided to go down the GCSE route we hit some problems arising from the fact that we'd used American materials. For example, aside from the tendency to use American spellings and to have a very un-English approach to grammar (diagramming, anybody?!), the shift from American to English maths proved a bigger problem than we had expected (and our son was very good at maths). Other parents have found the same difficulty. In other words, we discovered that the methods of teaching were often much more different than we had expected.
This difference is probably best illustrated by the fact that a good number of the popular American courses are very much 'school in box'. You sign up for a year's work, you receive a set of workbooks, you work through them and then move on to the next year's work. I have heard of several American families whose children are considered to be 'advanced' or 'accelerated' because they have completed the year's work in half a year and moved on to the next, the accumulation effect meaning that they might reach 'High School ' level two or three years early. But what this means in terms of actual learning and intellectual development is harder to identify. As one writer put it, there is a danger that 'a curriculum in a box can produce a mind in a box'. In other words, an ability to work through a set of workbooks and score well in a test does not necessarily correspond to (and may actually diminish) a developing ability to think critically, that is, to apply one's own intellectual powers to the subject at hand, whatever it may be. The American education system seems to be particularly good at producing such curricula, 'from K-12' as the sales pitch goes, and to be very good at marketing and selling them to home-schoolers too.
Of course, this limitation is not exclusive to American curricula and it may quite reasonably be argued that teaching to the test is what GCSEs are all about. Indeed, school curricula in general, be they English or American, tend to emphasise box ticking over 'real learning'. I have plenty of friends in Higher education who would testify to this: they lament that so many children who perform exceptionally well in standardised tests such as GCSEs have often been so well-trained to learn to the test that they are almost incapable of critical, independent thought - that is, of thinking outside the box! Yet it is this ability to use one's mind creatively and constructively which is needed in higher education, particularly in the humanities.
The only way to avoid this (whether you use American or UK books) is to encourage your children to engage critically with the materials in front of them, which means that you have to do this too. When my first child was four and we had only just started home-educating, I sat him down with an off the peg phonics work book. After a few pages he stopped and said, 'But Mammy, this doesn't make sense.' I looked and found that he was right - that part of the book was confusing and badly conceived. At that point I had two choices: first, to say, 'Just do the work you have been set and don't argue about it', or, second, to say, 'You know, you are right, that part is a bit silly isn't it? Let's skip it and go on the to the next part.' I chose the latter option and I've been crossing out exercises, pages and even whole chapters in textbooks ever since. If you don't think a piece of work is worth doing, the chances are it will be of little value to your child: if you use the materials critically, your child will learn to do that too (of course this makes life a bit harder - you'll find your 11 year old trying to convince you that the next page in his maths textbook really isn't worth doing...)
Ultimately, this is a personal decision. In the end we decided that if we were going have to tweak an educational system to suit our needs, it might as well be the English one with which we were familiar, rather than an American one which was completely alien to us. Choosing the English system meant, of course, having to somehow make it work for us as a Catholic family with a broadly 'Classical' approach. In a sense that is what this website is - our own answer to that problem. The whole point of the approach I'm suggesting here is that so long as your general sweep of education is broad, and encourages sound critical thinking, teaching to the test for half a dozen GCSEs won't be a big issue. The crucial thing is not to make GCSE courses the foundation, heart or summit of your child's education, nor to think that of themselves they will produce a well-educated person (no matter how many high grades are acquired along the way). Whichever route you choose, keep the real education process and the useful qualifications separate in your own mind, and help your child to do this too.