Help Me Get Over the Mythology Hump

We study this later in highschool. I have similar concerns. However, we do cover events (ex. Trojan Horse, etc.) and the geography/Paul’s journeys, etc.

Becca<><

I understand.  I too have some issues with studying this.  If your conscience is telling you that it’s not the time to do this, I think it’s best to listen to your conscience.  Paul stated,  “So I strive always to keep my conscience clear before God and man.”  Acts 24:16. You can always return to it when their older and, like Becca said, just cover the events and people during those time periods. 

Everyone’s situation is unique and only God can truly tell you exactly what your family needs.  Trust that He will lead you in the right direction.

I made the choice to gloss over mythology and just focus on history with my 3rd grader.  Our entire discussion of it was a few sentences in a book. basically she knows all the ancients had polythesitic religions and we won’t go any farther than that until she’s older.  At this rate we’ll hit the ancients the second time around when she’s about 13-14. We’ll see if she’s ready to cover it then, and with how much depth. 

We were using TruthQuest when we studied Greece and Rome and it was great.

Go with your feelings if you’ve prayed about this.  But at some point, enough to be able to understand literary allusions at least.  It’s really tough to make headway in Romantic literature or poetry without knowing who all the mythical figures are!!!  My boys actually presented me with a well reasoned paper at one point on why they shouldn’t spend as much time on mythology as I had originally assigned them (we were doing AO at the time which is very mythology-heavy) but when they hit high school they admitted they needed to know more so we did a refresher and then kept a good mythology reference around for looking up the ones they did not know.  These stories are a cultural shorthand in our civilization.  We don’t have to believe them to learn to understand allusions to them.

One thing I believe very deeply is that children should be taught Truth before teaching false gods or evolution, etc. We spent the last several years making sure My dd knew old testament history. Now she is 8 yrs. old. At this point I am making sure I preview anything with mythology. We are in ancient Egypt this year and so far every time we read about one of their false gods she is quick to point out how tragic it is that they would believe that way. One thing I love with the SCM history modules is the fact that you are learning Bible history along side secular. I have been getting ready for the next few years of Greek and Roman history. Because of all the mythology content my dh and I have decided to condense the two into one year at this age. We don’t want to avoid mythology altogether because we feel that to really understand a culture you must understand a little about how and what they believe and worship. However, we do want to be selective as to which ones are studied at this age. For instance, the story where the father builds wings for he and his son to escape captivity, but the son keeps flying higher until the sun melts the wings…… This story could teach against pride. Stories about throwing babies into fire to make them a god with powers…… These are the type we plan to avoid for now. I also have gone to book stores to personally look at any mythology book I plan to buy. I have saved myself some frustration because several have had very demented pictures that I don’t think my daughter would “appreciate”.

I don’t think anyone here would say teach lots of mythology BEFORE Bible.  🙂  BUT here is a poem that we just studied in English with my 7th and 11th graders:

http://www.shmoop.com/ode-nightingale/poem-text.html

It’s a lovely poem, a favorite of mine.  But I defy anyone to make any sort of serious study of it without bumping up against a mythological allusion!  This one even also has Biblical allusions.  🙂  

Not to even mention that current political and journalistic discourse is full of phrases like “opening Pandora’s box”,  “Caught between Scylla and Charybdis” or even “between a rock and a hard place”   “She is a Cassandra”   “That is his Achilles’ heel”  “That’s a Trojan virus”  “Herculean effort”  “Don’t fly too close to the sun”  “He’s got the Midas touch’  “listen to the siren call”  “She’s a Penelope”  “bacchalian party”  “Atlas Shrugged”  🙂  The world is full of it, and you’ll miss a lot if you are clueless.  Any of these above phrases can call up a rich story to add limitless meaning, just like the allusions in the poem I cited above—we’d miss so much richness not get half the enjoyment of the poem if we had no clue!  Actually since we aren’t experts, we looked up Hippocrene, not remembering her.  But it sure helped that we didn’t have to look up every allusion in the poem.  

Now, I’m not arguing that you must teach all of this to eight-year-olds.  I don’t.  But IMO it IS a part of setting your children’s feet in a large room, preparing them to draw maximum meaning from the literature and discourse they will be encountering all their lives.  These stories are part of Western civilization, having influenced writers since ancient times, right up to the present day.  Christian children are, and should be, first and foremost Christian children—but that does not rule out their also being educated beings who understand a lot about present culture because they understand basic mythology.