My New Most Favorite Thing

I bought this little gem at a used curriculum sale for one dollar. "So what?" you say, but if you look it up on Amazon, you'll find that it is not easy to get, and if you can find it, it's usually sold for an exhorbitant price. Why is this book my New Most Favorite Thing? Because it is so delightfully un-P.C.

It was written in the early 20th century, soon after World War I, by the headmaster of Calvert School, who from their founding have provided missionary homeschoolers with curriculum. That's not the reason I like the book though. I'm not a Bob Jones type Christian Homeschooler. I'm more of a Regular Joe homeschooler, which I fear is pretty rare. I tire easily of radical points of view. I'm just as put off by the "never sit your child down and make them read a book" radical unschooling philosophy, as I am by the "never let your child even entertain the thought that the world is older than 6000 years" radical Christian philosophy. I find them unreasonable. I don't like unreasonable things.

I think this book knows for whom it was written, and is painfully unaware of how unfairly it's innocent little viewpoints would be viewed almost 100 years later by an audience nearly suffocating on Orwellian new speak. It was quite a reasonable book for its time, and if our present society wasn't so brainwashed into stupifying moderation by it's fear of offending the too easily offended, and if our present society hadn't lost it's sense of humor because of these fears, it would be a reasonable little book for children today.

My little book would be on trial today for it's patriotic nationalism:

"but the Jews wanted a real king as their enemies had and other nations who were their neighbors. Strange they wanted a king which so many countries have tried to get rid of--we should think they would have preferred a President as we have."

My little book would be on trial today for its apparent bigotry:

"We don't know how nor when nor where colored people first lived, though it is interesting to guess."

and

"If your name is Henry of Charles or William, you are probably an Aryan. If it is Moses or Solomon, you are probably a Semite. If it is Shufu or Rameses, you are probably a Hamite."

(I do discuss these ideas with my children. Interesting about the "colored people" remark- this is not a Young Earth book. It talks about the Big Bang theory, and Neolithic man. It's strange to me that the author wouldn't entertain the thought that primitive man emerged in Africa as well as the Middle Eastern regions. So I did discuss this apparent ignorance with my kids.)

My little book would be on trial today for viewing history from a Christian perspective:

"The Greeks believed in many gods, not in one God as we do and the Jews did, and their gods were more like people in fairy-tales than like divine beings. Many beautiful statues have been made of their different gods, and poems and stories have been written about them."

I do appreciate how the author addresses the children with the assumption that they are Christian and yet allows them to truly delight in learning about other religious beliefs in a light-hearted way. Chuckling was allowed, without fear of being branded a bigot. It was okay to have a point of view, and find other's points of view strange, new, and intriguing, make a judgement on it, and perhaps get a laugh. Today if an educator said some of these things he would be sent off to reprogramming. If certain points of view are repressed and censored, how do we have dialogue and debate?

My little book might have gotten called archaic and gotten relegated to some out-of-print section on Amazon, and that is sad because so many children wouldn't get to read gems like this:

Chapter 41

Nightfall

It was 500 o' Clock by History Time.
Night was coming on.
The Dark Ages had begun.
At least, that is what people call it now. But people didn't call it so then.
Crazy people don't think they are crazy.
Ignorant people don't think they are ignorant.
So the Dark Ages didn't think they were dark.

Or this:

"Well we have now reached the seventh century--the six hundreds, and we are to hear of a man who to make a change in the whole world. he was neither a Roman nor a Greek nor a Frank nor a Goth nor a Briton. He was neither a king nor a general, but only a ---
What do you suppose?
A CAMEL-DRIVER!
And he lived in a little town called Mecca in far-off Arabia. His name was Mohammed. Mohammed went on an errand for a wealthy Arabian lady, and the lady fell in love with him. although he was a poor camel-driver and only a servant and she was rich, they were married."

The author goes on the write about Mohammed's vision of the angel Gabriel and how muslims pray, how Islam grew. He paints a pretty picture, but he is also honest about how eventually people were being converted by the sword.

"But very soon they began to force others to become Moslems whether they wanted to or not. Like the highway robber that says 'Money or your life,' they gave every one a choice. 'Money or your life, or be a Moslem!' This may seem a strange way for people to make others believe their religion, but the Moslems said that Allah wanted all people to be Mohammedans, and didn't want anyone who was not."

Hillyer tells about their defeat in France, but shows that in 110 years they had gone from a vision to a religion that "had conquered and converted the whole of the country bordering from the Mediterranean from Constantinople all the way round the southern edge and as far up into France as Tours."

This headmaster really does seem to tell the Whole History of the World as we know it, from Ramesis to Catherine the Great, from the Babylonians to the American Revolution. He includes great scientists, discoverers, musicians, revolutionaries, villians and heroes. And he ends his book with a warning about war:

Someday man...will invent something a million times more powerful than gunpowder or dynamite--something so explosive that when discovered by some Mr. Swartz it will blow him, his house, his town, his country, and the whole world to kingdom come--and that will be the end of this little spark off the sun."

and an image that gets me choked up:

"Perhaps you looked through a microscope at what seem to be wars between germs. As germs might look up at the eye of the microscope through which we watch their life and death struggles, and wonder what is up above on the other side looking down at them, so we may look up at the the blue eye of heaven above us and wonder what all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful being up there is watching our own life-and-death struggles here below.
Our little world, which seems so immense to us, is really only a tiny speck, only one of countless other specks floating in space; it is like one of the tiny motes which you may see any time in a sunbeam that shines in at the window. Who has an eye so keen that he can count the moving motes in such a beam of light? Who would miss one such grain of dust if it should disappear? So this grain of dust we call the World and all of us who live upon it could vanish without ever being noticed!
This story ends here, but only for the present, for history is a continued story and will never end."


This is a book for kids, and I have learned so much more from it, than I ever learned in my college world history class, and in such an entertaining and enlightening way, that I can't put it down. I'm jealous that I didn't get this opportunity in elementary school.

I forgive my little book for it's lack of sensitivity and it's cultural bias. It's sparked in me a love of history that I wouldn't have otherwise known, given my children something to talk about and investigate with wonder.