I am Torah observant and interested in your curriculum. I believe the Bible supports a flat earth and not a globe. I have a big problem with so many of the science books because of this. Can I please ask your opinion on this issue?
We completely understand your concerns. It is not easy to find a curriculum that will teach truth, one which we can trust when teaching our children. We absolutely do not feel any parent should teach things that they feel violate Scripture
We do not teach a flat earth. We do teach that the earth is a globe, but that the earth YHVH created is the center of His universe, rather than the sun. We encourage our customers to see a geocentric option (other than sun-centered or flat earth), which fits Scripture very well and answers many objections to a heliocentric earth, but it also has evidence in what we can observe in the world around us.
We have looked through our curriculum to see where this would affect you. To the best of our knowledge, the only subjects that would be affected would be geography and science.
For Geography, this would possibly affect our lessons on map making. You can download the following three lessons to get an idea of how we teach it:
We have 4 years of Science. In Year 1, we cover the days of creation. Year 2 covers the Flood. Year 3 covers science that appears in the rest of the Scriptures. Year 4 covers the lives of major scientists and compares what they believed with Scripture.
In Year 1, we cover astronomy during our section on what was created on the fourth day. We do not discuss flat earth at all. However, we do compare a sun-centered (heliocentric) universe with an earth-centered (geocentric) universe. You may download the following lessons, so that you can see what is discussed:
In Year 2 of science, we use the following website as our “textbook,” so you may want to look through it, to see what they teach as well.
At this time, we are still in the process of writing Years 3 and 4 of science, but we are planning at least a short unit about flat earth during Year 3, and possibly again in Year 4. We plan to present arguments both for and against the theory, in a similar style to how we discuss heliocentricity and geocentricity in Week 15 of Science Year 1 (above), so that families can make their own decisions based on Scripture.
Our goal throughout our curriculum is to use Scripture as our primary textbook and compare all things to it! We try to help the students research for themselves to find the answers, rather than just give them answers directly. I’m sure we don’t always succeed, since we all have blind spots and preconceived ideas — even us! 🙂 However, we also hope that those who are teaching will just use our curriculum as a suggestion, not as dogmatic truth which you MUST teach.
P.S. If you would like to study more about geocentricity and the Bible, download the Geocentricity Primer or the full Geocentricity textbook by Dr. Gerardus D. Bouw.
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