I believe it was the summer I was ten that my family first started in the Advanced Training Institute. For those not familiar with it, the curriculum itself uses a unit-study approach based on the Sermon on the Mount. However, that's a bit inadequate as ATI and its parent organization, IBLP, are much, much bigger than a curriculum, more like a cross between a denomination, a parachurch ministry, and an international hotel chain.
Those who are familiar with it are probably expecting me to either launch into a paean to its virtues or a diatribe on its evils, but I am not going to do either. It had its good and bad points, and I certainly owe some very important things in my life to it, chief among them being meeting DOB. Most of the good and bad things I have also encountered elsewhere, in various combinations. Life's like that; no organization is as good as its partisans think, or as bad as its enemies fear; and they are all much less powerful than they look.
One immediate benefit was that my college-graduate sister came home to study with us, which was great fun and a great challenge to me. I had never really had the chance to get to know her before, as she was nearly ten years my senior and up until that point had not been home schooled. It was always my goal to find some word or corner of knowledge that she didn't already know. This was very difficult when I was ten. (It became much easier once I went to law school.) My best friend and I finally stumbled on "ecchymosis," which did indeed stump her.
The next summer it also prompted all of us except the two youngest to travel back east for one of the annual conferences; this was my first chance to see the Northeast and Washington, D.C. and it was a wonderful and memorable trip, even though it was conducted on the budget principle that we could either eat at a restaurant or sleep in a motel on any given day, but not both. I loved Plymouth Plantation and the Smithsonian especially. After awhile, though, I was enthralled by any exhibit that was air conditioned.
I enjoyed being able to study all together; even though we were learning at different levels, having the same topics to study helped tie us together as a family. On the other hand, in retrospect, I think for the age I was, I would have learned more studying science and history in a sequential manner. Unit studies were great at showing the interconnectedness of all knowledge, but not so useful at showing the internal logic of each subject. I think there's a time and place for both. Plus, it seemed like we kept hitting on some particular topics over and over, while others never got covered.
The ATI curriculum places the Bible as the central book of study. With this, I fully agree. However, I don't think one has to force the connection. Not every fact from every subject has to be studied by means of analyzing the Biblical principles and analogies involved. They may be there; they probably are there. But it gets tedious and ultimately trivializes the Bible to insist that they must be found and marked down or no further will we go.
I also question the approach to false ideas and philosophies, though I reserve the right to change my mind on this. I don't think it's true that we can just study the truth and then we can just reject evil when we see it. For one thing, rejecting evil is not enough: we also need to refute it, and that requires some knowledge of it.
For another thing, we cannot simply assume that we have the Truth. Our impressions and concepts are formed by influences we cannot see or trace: comments, actions, and attitudes of those around us. Such things influence even how we read Scripture. Some careful learning of various philosophies and approaches helps us challenge our own assumptions; we may discover that an idea we thought we pulled straight out of the Bible really came from quite secular presuppositions we imposed on the Bible.
On the other hand, I do agree that we cannot blindly trust our own reason to take us wherever it will, because it could take us almost anywhere. So I do understand the concern. But I want my children, someday, to be able to take strong meat because they have exercised their senses to discern good and evil.
I should clarify that my parents were not especially restrictive or disapproving about what I studied, once they knew I could think critically about what I read. Indeed, they often asked me to preview or critique things for them. With the family penchant for lively debate, there was plenty of chance to develop critical thinking skills. But it didn't come from our curriculum.
One thing that was on the whole good, however, was the way ATI encouraged looking for alternatives to mindlessly attending college. This emphasis can be overdone, but it resulted in various young people creating various alternative programs to get training much cheaper and at much less personal cost. One of those programs was the Oak Brook College of Law, about which more later. | 