33 Jaw-Droppingly Stupid Multiple-Choice Questions from the Christian Education Curriculum
December 11, 2013
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Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) is a fundamentalist curriculum
founded in Texas in 1970. It started as a program for private Christian
day schools, but it has been hugely successful among conservative home
schoolers. Today, ACE claims it is used in “6,000 schools and thousands of home educators in over 140 countries.” It’s also used in government-funded voucher programs in several US states.
Two. Dry. Ducks.
7th grade (12-13 years old)
12th grade (17-18 years old)
ACE has always taken its fundamentalism very seriously. In his 1979 book Rebirth of Our Nation ACE’s
founder Donald Howard wrote, “Fundamentalism is intellectually sound.
It has always prevailed in periods of great intellectual enlightenment.
It is the only sound an logical solution to the existence of the
universe… I am a fundamentalist. If I can be any more fundamental than
fundamental, that is what I want to be.” Today, ACE views imparting
these fundamental beliefs into children as its primary purpose.
Howard later wrote “We do not build Christian schools primarily to give a child the best education nor to teach him how to make a good living. Teaching him how to live and to love and serve God are our primary tasks.”
He wasn’t kidding.
I went to an ACE school for almost four years. By the time I left, I
was certain that it was against God's will for governments to provide
healthcare, evolution was a conspiracy to destroy Christianity, parents
were morally required to spank their children, and science could prove
that homosexuality was wrong. But worst of all was the feeling
uneducated; I still struggle with self-conscious fears about gaps in my
learning. ACE workbooks consist of simplistic fill-in-the-blank and
multiple choice questions. And these questions are often hilariously,
spectacularly bad. Howard later wrote “We do not build Christian schools primarily to give a child the best education nor to teach him how to make a good living. Teaching him how to live and to love and serve God are our primary tasks.”
He wasn’t kidding.
4th grade (9-10 years old)
But no special women, obviously.
They’re particularly strong when it comes to people…
Two. Dry. Ducks.
There’s a bloody picture!
7th grade (12-13 years old) 
IMPORTANT: The
correct answer, for those puzzled, is piano tutors. 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 the PACE, and the
student is expected to remember this. Verbatim regurgitation of
previously seen material is the entire point of the ACE system.
ACE never uses female pronouns in PACEs. Everyone is male… until they start talking about homemakers.
9th grade (14-15 years old)
The title is actually On the Origin of Species…
From a history PACE on the discovery and colonisation of America:
Ah, the old Darwin-caused-Hitler implication again.
12th grade (17-18 years old) 
Um, I might have been getting a bit irritated by the time I got to that last one.
I found plenty more 12th grade questions with no plausible distractors, but none of them made me laugh. Stuff like this:
Mind you, by this point, it’s all starting to seem less funny.
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