One of the questions we are most often asked at Providence Extension Program (PEP) is: “Why do I have to take the Humanities Core as a package? Why can't I just take an English class or a History class?”
At Providence Extension Program , we equate quality education with knowledge and virtue. We believe that our people are better prepared for Christian living and interaction with the world when this focus upon developing character and competence is strengthened in their teens rather than becoming minimized to emphasize vocational preparation.
Our goal is for our students gain the ability to reason biblically, to think logically, and to discern truth across all of the disciplines of study. In order to accomplish this goal, a deliberate progression of knowledge and competencies has been set up from Core A through Core F.
Our Humanities Core A and B classes study origins and foundational assumptions. George Orwell wrote: “He who controls the past controls the present; he who controls the present controls the future.” The beliefs that people have about their origins often determine their destiny. Our Core A students learn about the foundations of God's order in Genesis Thought, the origins of peoples and nations in Geography, and foundational principles of literature and writing in Composition and Literature. In Core B, the Western Thought component is a detailed study of the Old Testament, which informs all of the Scripture and Christian thought. The History component is World History, which particularly focuses on the peoples and nations prior to 1500. The Composition and Literature component continues to introduce different genres of reading and writing. During these years, one of our purposes is to build a foundation of knowledge about the origins and foundational assumptions of peoples, nations, cultures, and religions. This is why we focus so much on the Ancient world. The beliefs and presuppositions of this period can be seen in each subsequent development of civilization.
In Humanities Core C, our students learn more specifically about Christian Worldview and worldview assumptions. Every person, culture, and belief has a set of underlying assumptions by which they interpret everything. While in the ultimate sense, we would deny that “perception is reality,” there is some basis to this cliché. Our students are challenged to evaluate texts and media according to the beliefs that they present (or that are unstated) about God, man, creation, purpose and meaning in life, history, and the end of all things. They learn the Biblical answers to these questions and also encounter many unbiblical answers to these questions. Our history component focuses more specifically on American History – the foundational assumptions that guided the beginning of our nation and how have those been carried out by subsequent generations. And for our Composition and Literature component devotes attention to the fundamentals of literary analysis and the mechanics of writing.
We continue to build upon the foundation that has been laid in the first three years of PEP in Cores D, E, and F. During these years, our students study the history, literature, and thought of the ancient, medieval and early modern, and modern/postmodern periods, respectively. The ideas and assumptions that they have learned about so far are now applied to the study of the history, literature, and thought of these time periods. What they learn is that there is a cumulative development of thought and ideas. Each successive generation builds upon the next. Students have the opportunity to trace the origin and development of ideas across cultures and generations, and to see that good ideas have good consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences.
Each one of these years of the Humanities Core is critical, and an integral part of the whole. And each of the classes is integral to the whole as well. We do not think about facts in isolation from each other, but as they are related to other ideas and information. And since our minds work in this fashion, we believe that it is essential that we teach and structure our curriculum in this manner.