Title: Catholic homeschool curricula has whitewashed world history. Is it too late to fix it? | America Magazine
Headings: Catholic homeschool curricula has whitewashed world history. Is it too late to fix it?
Catholic homeschool curricula has whitewashed world history. Is it too late to fix it?
Finding Blindspots
Whitewashing the Spanish Conquest
Slavery and Racism in the United States
How Do Catholic Home-Schoolers Respond?
Staying Away From Catholic Home-School
A Moment of Opportunity

Content: Ms. Carroll is careful to point out that, while she sought “to emphasize the great triumphs of Catholic history,” she would “not hesitate to point out times when Catholics, and even leaders of the Church, did not act in harmony with God’s will.” When I was growing up, this approach to history did not strike me or my friends as particularly odd. Nor did we recognize the many problems that it created, the first of which was to present an often whitewashed, triumphalist account of history that downplays the crimes of Europeans, especially Catholics, while largely ignoring non-European cultures. It emphasizes the struggles of Catholics while often minimizing those of other groups. These books and others with similar viewpoints have affected how at least two generations of Catholic home-schoolers understand history. But now some hope to dismantle this legacy. “ We stopped carrying Anne Carroll’s books six or eight years ago,” Everett Buyarski told me. Mr. Buyarski is the director of academic services for Kolbe Academy, a California-based Catholic home-school program with around 2,000 students. “ One of the things that’s nice about Anne Carroll’s books is that most secular textbooks tend to be pretty negative about the Catholic Church. Those books try to correct that, and in many ways they overcorrect that.