This post is written by my adult daughter, Alyssa Knutson, who was homeschooled from 1st grade thru 12th grade. She is currently a college student at The Master’s University. In it she shares her experience using Worldviews of the Western World from Cornerstone Curriculum, a high school worldview curriculum that integrates history, literature, music, art, government, philosophy, economics, science history and more!
An Unstable Time
Fourteen is an unstable age. For me, it was particularly unstable.
My faith was shaken by leaving my childhood church and battling with the teenage emotional turmoil that accompanies puberty. I needed truth to cling to in the storm, but it couldn’t be the assumed truth of my parents. It had to be my truth. But the world is full of so many versions of truth.
The church move had shone me that even Christianity is fractured into many denominations and cults. I needed a foundation of my own to stand on. I needed a grid through which to judge all the other truths that were leaving undeniable inches of curiosity.
Starting Points
Around this time, my mom asked me if I wanted to do a curriculum called Starting Points for my last year of middle school. I didn’t know the journey my “sure” would take me on.
I was not insulted that the curriculum brought me back to the basics of Christianity with books like Know What You Believe and Know Why You Believe. This was exactly what I needed. I was introduced to the concept of competing worldviews with the book The Deadliest Monster which uses the stories of The Strange Case of Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein to understand how Christianity compares to other ideologies.
As I got into Starting Points, I lapped up everything Starting Points taught me like a golden retriever at a bowl of water after a dizzying spell of chasing its tale. I am certain I splashed on the floor a lot of the knowledge Starting Points was trying to impart, but what got into my mouth refreshed my soul.
I also began to understand that no story—from fiction or history—is neutral; every story has some version of truth (worldview) at its foundation. This concept fascinated me. When my mom asked me if I wanted to continue the Cornerstone Worldview series with their high school curriculum, I was ecstatic.
Worldviews of the Western World
Worldviews of the Western World arrived at our door in a heavy cardboard box. The unboxing of new curriculum is a telling ritual. A student can remove the books with a sense of dread, each thud of a textbook on the table echoing like a window closing the student into a stuffy classroom. Usually, this occurred for me when we unboxed the dreaded health textbooks. Or the unboxing process can be done in a frenzy when the student imagines all the new places the books and kits will take them.
Unboxing Worldview was something different. I extracted each book with the care of an archeologist lifting broken pottery from an excavation. Every book promised to challenge me. There were titles in the stack that I knew were notorious for their difficulty. Who’s not intimidated by Plato’s Republic or Augustine’s City of God? But I also knew that each title promised reward.
The next three years of my schooling would be consumed by Worldviews of the Western World as I completed all three sets of curricula, sometimes participating in a class sometimes going it alone. I went on a transforming journey through the entirety of western thought, watching as worldviews pushed history from one age to another.
The journey was so much more than memorizing dates and writing books reports. I was forced to think critically about each event and major literary work in history. For example, why did the American Revolution succeed and the French Revolution end in Napoleon’s dictatorship? What are the major worldviews behind The Communist Manifesto or The Old Man and the Sea? Why is abortion and eugenics accepted in our present culture? I wrestled with all these questions, and more like them, with Francis Schaeffer and David Quine as my guides.
I must admit that this curriculum was challenging—having to read all 880 pages of Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh MacDowell lead to a few migraines—but at the end I had no doubt in my mind that the Bible was true and that I could defend my claim to its truth.
This curriculum is not sheltering. I had to face the nasty reality of fallen man trying to find truth apart from the Bible. But I was taught to bring the light of the Truth with a capital “T” to those worldviews. My time studying Worldviews of the Western World prepared me to face the fog of ideas in this world.
Preparation for College
It also set me up for college in a way I did not fully appreciate until I was sitting in my Essentials of Christian Thought class at the Master’s University. My professor announced that we would be reading How Should We Then Live by Francis Schaeffer, and the class groaned. I, on the other hand, relaxed when I realized this class would be a condensed version of what I spent my high school years studying. I flipped through my note packet for the class and saw words like existentialism, nihilism, and realism which had already become part of my vocabulary. It is impossible to spend time under the teaching of Francis Schaeffer while doing Worldview without picking up those terms.
Another example is my college World Literature class whose syllabus failed to intimidate me after my Worldview training. I had already descended into the Inferno of Dante’s Divine Comedy and sat with Milton in Paradise Lost. My philosophy class felt like a refresher of all the philosophies I wrestled with during high school. And when my philosophy professor asked to watch two movies and analyze the worldview behind them, I was excited to use the skills I had honed with Worldview.
I say all this not to my credit but to the credit of the Worldview curriculum. I believe that any student who absorbs the knowledge found in Worldviews of the Western World will have a similar college experience to mine.
Laying a Foundation for Life
The Worldview curriculum creates a foundation of philosophy, history, literature, and science that prepares students for the storm of worldviews that inevitably bombards them once they leave the homeschool environment. Students will recognize the current individualistic culture as a reinvented form of humanism from the Enlightenment. They will stand in an art museum and have Francis Schaeffer’s voice reminding them that modern art is an expression of the post-modern loss of absolutes. All of the sudden Jackson Pollock’s art makes painful sense.
They will catch the worldviews in the movies they are watching, even as they find their inability to just enjoy the story annoying. Did you realize that Thanos is a Naturalist? Or that Dr. Strange represents a battle between Materialism and Eastern Spiritualism?
They will see the major events of history as the consequences of battling worldviews. Or at least that’s what Worldviews of the Western World did for me.
You can find even more homeschool curriculum reviews here.
Hi! Just curious, how much were you able to understand and complete on your own? Were your parents able to dialogue with you easily? Were they familiar with the classics? I’m fascinated about the idea of reading books along with my high schooler that I haven’t read before but I’m intimidated about leading discussions over the material. I want to start this curriculum this fall with my 9th grader, who is also 14, and of average intelligence, as am I. Thoughts, tips and help appreciated! Thanks!
Worldview is do-able by oneself—I did Starting Points and Worldview 3 predominately by myself—but there are disadvantages to going it alone. The questions in the Worldview workbooks aid the student—and the parent if they are involved—in understanding the material being covered. In Worldview 3, I covered a lot of complex philosophies and works of art by myself, and I felt like I got a good grasp on all of them thanks to Quine’s questions. However, I would say that those questions work best when used as spring boards for some form of discussion. The two biggest disadvantages I encountered were, one, not having an ally to navigate the confusing sections with and, two, not being able to share my enthusiasm for what I was learning. I didn’t need a teacher per se; I needed a fellow traveler.
I would recommend reading the material with your student and, when possible, listening to the recordings so you can engage in discussion, but don’t be intimidated by the thought that you have to be the teacher. The woman who taught my class for Worldview 1 and 2 made it very clear that she was learning right along with us. She read the material for the week and then go over the questions in the workbook, emphasizing the ones she chose to. She also let our discussion flow organically as us students started connecting the worldview we were learning about with things happening in our current world. There were times we asked her a question that she wasn’t sure about, so we looked it up together. It was in those moments I learned the most.
~Alyssa Knutson
hi, Alyssa! I was wondering what are you majoring now that you are in college? And how hard was it for you to transition from being homeschooled to being a full-time college student? I did the transition last year and I was surprised with how easy I took it. I felt like I should have had troubles, but I ended up not having any.