Creationist home school curriculum isn’t just inaccurate — it’s really, really dumb

A popular curriculum used by home-schooled students has drawn criticism for inaccurate, misleading information and an over-reliance on rote memorization, but those aspects may not be the worst things about it.

A lot of the material that children are exposed to in the Accelerated Christian Education is just astonishingly stupid, according to a former Christian fundamentalist.

Blogger Jonny Scarmanga shared some of the multiple-choice questions he found in some ACE packets used by British home-school students Monday on the blog, Leaving Fundamentalism.

In one question aimed at 9- or 10-year-old fourth-graders, students are given this example: “Children played happily in the water spout.” They are then asked to define a water spout from three examples: “a stream of water,” “two dry ducks” or “playground.”

Another example shows that “Elisabeth Howard sat and listened carefully.” Students are then challenged to identify whether Elisabeth Howard is “a kind of airplane” or “a missionary.”

Still another question asks 12- or 13-year-old seventh-graders to identify whether sports coaches, piano tuners or librarians “can touch the lives of their students.”

If that sounds like a trick question, that’s because it is.

“The correct answer, for those puzzled, is piano tutors,” Scaramanga writes. “It’s not that ACE doesn’t believe that sports coaches or librarians can touch students’ lives. The point is that the exact sentence, ‘Piano tutors can touch the lives of their students,’ has previously appeared in (an ACE packet), and the student is expected to remember this. Verbatim regurgitation of previously seen material is the entire point of the ACE system.”

The ACE curriculum relies on thousands of these multiple-choice questions to imprint the materials in students’ memories.