One of the most frequent questions I receive about my world literature curriculum, Exploring the World through Story, is how it approaches the study of religious narratives like the ones in Levels D-F. Specifically, secular parents are concerned about how the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are handled. (For the record, I have never had anyone express concern about teaching children about the Buddha or traditional Chinese religion, and only one complaint, from a Christian mother, about a Hindu story.) Given that a majority of US homeschoolers—53%, according to a recent Pew Research report—chose home education so that they could provide religious instruction to their children, it’s understandable that secular homeschoolers are wary of religious bias in curriculum.
As I make clear in the introduction to EWS:
EWS is a secular curriculum. As such, it makes no claims for or against the validity of any religious belief.
When it comes to education, secular means different things to different people. For some, it means no mention of religion at all. For others, it means that religion will be actively critiqued according to the standards of materialism, atheism, or some other philosophy. More commonly, it means that religion is treated as an aspect of human culture, along with language, art, political structures, and yes, science. EWS falls under this last definition of secular, which is also the one that has been used in the US public schools as part of our national commitment to the separation of church and state.
My goal for EWS is to present the most influential stories from each tradition, in age-appropriate adaptions, to prepare students to read world classics with understanding in high school and beyond. In addition, I hope students come away from the program able to recognize key figures, holidays, symbols, and idioms related to each of the nine traditions studied in Levels D-F. In other words, the program is designed to increase reading comprehension, develop cultural literacy, and, I hope, encourage a healthy appreciation of human diversity.
With these goals in mind, EWS approaches these stories as stories, exploring literary features like character development, narrative structure, conflict, and figurative language. The program uses neutral, academic language to describe all of these stories as wisdom tales, defined as “teaching stories that affirm cultural values—often of a religious or moral nature—through the medium of imaginative narratives.”
The category of wisdom tales encompasses sacred stories from the whole range of the world’s
spiritual traditions, ancient and modern. It includes scriptural narratives as well as
stories sometimes designated as myths or pious legends. It also includes popular oral
narratives (folktales) with a didactic or moral purpose.
Teaching religious narratives as literature means that EWS discusses a literary character named “God” in the Hebrew scriptures, just as it discusses characters named Krishna, Rama, Jesus, Muhammad, Siddhartha Gautama, Guanyin, and Chang’e as literary figures. The Teaching Notes, written for parents, explain how these different figures are viewed within their own religious contexts, without the assumption that families using the curriculum will view them the same way. Nor does it privilege one tradition over another, by treating the Abrahamic faiths as “real religions” and dharmic or indigenous traditions as somehow less important or serious—or, conversely, by assuming that Christianity has cornered the market on misogyny, racism, or colonialism. The Teaching Notes also present mainstream academic explanations and interpretations of the stories, which may not line up with the traditional understandings of them within their respective traditions. For example, several of the stories contain miraculous birth narratives about religious figures (e.g., Jesus, Krishna, Buddha), and these are clearly designated in the notes as pious legends. Similarly, I note when a religious narrative, like the Exodus, does not match the historical record.
I have made every effort to present the texts of different cultures as objectively as possible. For example, EWS assigns separate books for the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian New Testament as a way to emphasize that Judaism is a tradition in its own right. Sometimes, concerns about bias have meant passing up #ownvoices texts. In a very few cases, it was simply impossible to find an in-print, affordable text at the right reading level that did not come from a religious publisher or an author writing for their co-religionists. In those instances, I have done my best to offer strategies for parents to avoid inherent bias or offset it when sharing the books with their children.
Like all great literature, these stories sometimes contain troubling elements. Indeed, part of their importance is to show how people have understood and grappled with conflict, tragedy, and injustice. In the advanced levels, which are written directly to students in middle and high school, I do not shy away from pointing out misogyny, colorism, ableism, and other issues that arise in the texts we study. For students in elementary school, however, I place commentary on these issues in the Teaching Notes for parents to address as they see fit. Parents, not curriculum providers, have the responsibility to determine and pass on their values to their children, and I trust parents to have the common sense to do that without my dictating leading “discussion questions” to them.
As a person assigned female at birth and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I am painfully aware of how much violence has been, and still is, inflicted in the name of religion. I empathize deeply with parents who are still healing from the effects of toxic religion in their own lives and who consequently struggle with the question of how to teach their children about religions that have caused them harm. My sincere hope is that EWS can be part of the answer to that quandary.
Copyright 2025 by Drew Campbell, Ph.D. All rights reserved.
Drew Campbell, Ph.D., has worked in education since the 1980s and holds degrees in German literature and language from Bennington College and Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Campbell is the author of Living Memory, I Speak Latin, and Exploring the World through Story, and co-author of How to Homeschool the Kids You Have. A former homeschooling parent, classroom teacher, and school administrator, she now works as an independent curriculum developer at Stone Soup Press.