I was hoping to put this post off a bit longer, but the emails were coming hard and fast and I knew it was time to address it.
But, I will be perfectly honest with you…I am nervous to talk about this.
I am writing this post to hopefully explain why our family is no longer doing Sonlight.
You see, I thought I had made a good decision. I wrote several posts on the matter…several posts that top Google searches for the keyword “Sonlight.” I affected people’s lives.
And now I must come back and say we have changed our minds.
Humility hurts.
What I said in my Six Weeks of Sonlight posts is still true. The curriculum has many pros and many fans, and the things that worked about Sonlight for our family REALLY worked. But the cons that I spoke of here began to outweigh the pros. Prayerfully, Ty and I sought a new direction.
Because so many of you have asked, here is a partial list of the reasons why we feel led to change our course:
*We were only using Sonlight for History. It is a hefty price to pay for a History curriculum alone.
*We do not agree with many of the books (non-fiction and fiction both) theologically and/or based on our worldview. You’ll remember, I thought I could handle this with a lot of dialoguing; however, Ty and I became quite convicted that those sorts of things ought not to be even introduced into our children’s minds except through the worldview lens we espouse.
*Sonlight’s Christian educational philosophy is different from ours. They want to steep the child in understanding of other cultures and religions and then teach them to judge rightly. We want to steep our children in the Bible and knowledge and wisdom of God and then teach them about other cultures and religions from that perspective.
Now here’s my caveat…
Just because we are changing course does not mean I think everyone using Sonlight should quit. I listened in on a webinar last year in which Sarita, the author of Sonlight, spoke from the heart with such grace and God-filled words, I have no doubt she is a believer and wrote the curriculum with only the best intentions. However, because of our family’s desire to glean knowledge rooted and grounded in the Word of God from start to finish, we are required to take a different path.
As the Lord leads us in our new curriculum choices, I will share them here; not in the hopes that you will follow me, but with the desire that you would also focus your homeschool on Him…no matter what path you take.
Whew, so many replies! I’m stealing a few minutes, so I’ll try to come back and read the replies here later. First, I wanted to tell you that some of the links in this post are “dead,” meaning when I clicked on your link for cons of SonLight, nothing came up.
Okay, second, I’m so glad you posted this. We tried to start with SonLight, but something about the way the lessons plans were structured didn’t sit right with me. Also, I could not agree with you more about thinking you could handle dissecting the meat from the bones, so to speak, by dialoguing, but my goodness it’s time consuming! I’m more like you in this respect, I think – I’d rather teach my children a good solid foundation from a Biblical worldview, and then let them view all other things through that lens and have the dialogue when they’re old enough that we can have an honest dialogue (not mama-monologue that eats half our school time). It unsettled both my husband and me that so many of the books through SL were from secular sources. We had heard so many good things about it from a literary standpoint (and I’m a bookworm), but it just didn’t translate to our family, our kids, and our vision for home education.
I’m so glad I found this – I have been feeling like I must apologize when I tell people that we didn’t love SonLight, but this post made me realize that I’m not crazy, lol!
Lauren,
Secondly, I had wanted to love Sonlight as much as everyone else seemed to, but I just couldn’t stomach what I was seeing. I’m glad to know I am not alone!
Hello! First of all, thank you for letting me know some of them were “dead.” I fixed those.