Posted in Homeschooling

My daughters might not like math, but they love history!  And they especially love The Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer.  I always buy the bulk of our new homeschooling resources when we get our tax refund, and this year we completed buying everything SOTW.  We now own all four volumes in both book and CD format, and every activity guide.  The girls love doing the sheets and do them entirely on their own.  I am not even sure they would consider it school!

Mary was especially happy to get the CDs, because Gabrielle would always beg her to read the books out loud.  Mary said that she would rather read the book than listen to Jim Weiss.  I really like Jim Weiss - I have heard him several times in person - and I keep meaning to listen to his version but haven't gotten around to it yet. 

They really have learned a lot, and they remember it too!  I was reading them something from their English book that mentioned the ancient city of Biblos, and Gabrielle exclaimed, "Oh, we know about Biblos! From Story of the World!"

History in school for me was rather inadequate, probably made worse by the fact that I don't like taking history classes.  History as I remember it consisted of "Well, we'll do some study of ancient Greece and Rome, because that's the basis of our country, and then, well, we'll skip the fall of Rome, because that doesn't bode well, and then nothing much happens until Columbus discovers America, and then we will cover everything that happened on the North American continent until the end of WW2, because it's the end of the school year and we don't have time for anything more, and that ends on a good note because we won that war.  Oh, and nothing important ever happened in South America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, or Australia, so don't worry about that." 

So, in 2001, I bought Christ the King, Lord of History and Christ and the Americas and read through them.  I read all of history, in order, from a Catholic perspective, for the first time. It was very interesting! Well, SOTW Volume 4: The Modern Age was lying around a week or so ago, and so I started reading it.  The girls kept asking me, "Why are you reading our book?"  And so I told them, "There is a lot of information in this book that I never learned."  Which of course brought up, "Well, why not?" (for the answer, see above note about my history education!)

Volume 4 covers from the Victorian Age to the end of the twentieth century.  It is 470 pages of people killing other people for usually no good reason.  It is filled with fights for independence to end tyranny, only to lead to those same people tyrannizing others.  It is quite honestly, a depressing read. (Shh! don't tell my husband - I am not supposed to read depressing things when I am pregnant!)  For the first time, I understand why people say that they would not want to bring a child into this world.

Juxtaposed with this, I was also reading a children's biography of St. Benedict.  He lived around 500 AD, and was the monk who first wrote a rule of life for his monastery.  He also taught about peace.  Towards the end of his life, God granted him a vision.  "He saw the trials that someday would plague the world.  He heard the tread of millions of marching men.  He saw bloody battlefields, weeping widows, orphaned children.  He saw crafty men in high places, their hands heaped high with the profits of war.  And he saw, too, that only a few people would dare to make his motto, 'Peace!', their own" (Saint Benedict: The Story of the Father of the Western Monks by Mary Fabyan Windeatt).

It really made me wonder if St. Benedict's vision had been of the twentieth century.  Can you imagine having a vision of something 1500 years in the future?

Honestly, however, I think that Susan Wise Bauer did an extremely good job of explaining how things got the way they are over the last hundred years.  I did not know the background of many things, like why Korea is divided into north and south, or, umm, really why anything is the way it is in Africa, South America, or Asia.

My other thought while reading the book was this:  imperialism continues to the present day.  A main theme in SOTW 4 was the carving up of Africa, Asia, etc, and then later the inevitable fights for independence.  The attitude of the European powers seemed to be, "You are not important and we are, so we will take control of your land for you."  But isn't that exactly what happened with my history education?  "You are not important, so we don't need to study you."  I thank Susan Wise Bauer for writing a history of the whole  world, so imperialism doesn't continue with my children's generation, and maybe we can work on that whole peace thing that St. Benedict was into as well.