Orthodox Christian Homeschooling: Memoria Press History Curriculum versus Lives of the Saints

The other week as I was switching my son over to some Simply Classical Curriculum by Memoria Press, to adjust some curriculum to better match his special needs, I found myself getting caught up in the marketing of Memoria Press. It started with just wanting to make sure his Latin curriculum didn't move too fast, and that his Bible curriculum was not overwhelming, to watching quite a view of the company's "round table" discussions and considering if I should switch everything to Memoria Press. What was happening to me? I have solid evidence through testing scores that that the curriculum choices I have made over the years, while nothing is perfect, have been perfectly fine. Then, it dawned on me, as I found myself consumed with a temptation. What if it isn't that Memoria Press' material is wrong, but that is pushes out something MORE important? While on the website, the curriculum might not look very fancy, the key to Memoria Press is it's very well thought out lessons plans. Just from purchasing three or so subjects, I can see things really tie together. The problem is that if I got caught up in spending an entire year on each of Famous Men of Rome, Famous Men of the Middle Ages, Famous Men of Greece, American Studies, and Geography at the same time, would there be energy left over for learning about St. Basil the Great and St. Athanasius? And not just reading a Potamitis book once at some point during childhood, but really knowing them in the same way Memoria Press wants us to learn about these other figures, like Alcibiades, or someone similar?

(I told my husband that I think for someone just coming out of public school, Memoria Press is a wonderful and great step above that, but at this point, we know too much to decide that the focus of our homeschool should be to "pass on Western Civilization" which is the main goal of Memoria Press. And again, not that is it bad, but it is just not the highest, best thing to focus our time on.)

I realized that I was dealing with a true spiritual temptation, and realized that even though my son is struggling with some things (mild autism and giftedness) I need to find a way to bring the Orthodox Christian Morning Time Curriculum back into our school in a way that works for him, in the amount that works for him, and eventually go back to the drawing board and, if I have time, design something new for him. Without the support of his older brother, now in high school and not being able to do morning time, it is a bit harder to get my youngest to do the morning time curriculum that he happily did a couple of years ago. So we started with adding back in the Saints Lives and adjusted poetry formally (though we always do prayers and spiritual reading, as far as memorizing and focusing on the facts of one saint for one to two weeks and memorizing a poem on top of that). My son finds the last section of poetry work too overwhelming (the long prayer by St. Patrick), so we are working to find new poems for just the last section. For now, he is not doing the copy-work because handwriting is such a struggle for him and his school subjects require more handwriting than he did previously, but someday we could get back to that.

I ended up putting together a draft history schedule for my son assuming he is mostly homeschooled by "paper and pencil" courses at home until high school (when he could go online or to a hybrid school of some kind.). The plan includes that during 6th-7th grade we will focus on "world history," "ancient history" "music history" and so forth, and not using Memoria Press. I plan to use with him also A Child's Guide to Composers which is a music history curriculum put out by Bright Ideas Press that I used with my children a few years back. While not an Orthodox Christian source, and some things need adjusting, this curriculum teaches how music started out being purely prayerful and liturgical until the boundaries kept getting pushed our farther and farther, until we have the "Hollywood" of today, as well as teaching about the biographies of some truly inspiring Christian composers of times past. I plan to add in some Simply Charlotte Mason composer study as well!

Another thing I remind myself is that I did not receive an in-depth classical education, but have found more important in my own journey, reading writings such as those by Fr. Seraphim Rose. I am reading a book about/by Archimandrite Roman Braga right now, that also makes many references to Ancient Greek beliefs. Contrary to what many proponents of classical education say, I have no problem understanding their references because I wasn't "classically educated" (though some degree of classical education that didn't push out the most needful things would have been better for sure). The point is that I think the amount of ancient classical history we need to have at a young age, to understand historical references and "classic literature" adequately enough isn't near as much as they think it is!