“ATI is not user-friendly.”

That was the opinion of one former Advanced Training Institute (ATI) student, now an adult, who skimmed over the materials that our parents had to work with. He was right.

The Wisdom Booklets are the foundation of Gothard’s homeschool curriculum. There are 54 of them, and at a glance, they’re pretty impressive. They’re based on the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5, 6, and 7). Each booklet uses one or two verses to springboard into discussions of language, math, medicine, law, and history. With pictures and graphs and illustrations, each page seems to illuminate how God’s word permeates every aspect of our lives. It was an ambitious undertaking, and Gothard’s presentation is excellent.

Homeschooling was just emerging from its pioneer days when Gothard launched his program, and it’s easy to see why ATI appealed to parents who needed guidance to educate their children. The problem was that Gothard didn’t actually provide much guidance.

He issued a “Parent Guide Planner” with each booklet, but the planners provided very little practical help in teaching the concepts—especially since parents were supposed to teach the same material to all of their children, regardless of age.

Back in my student days in the early 90s, families were expected to complete one booklet each month, and eight or nine over the course of the school year. Once a family finished all 54, they started back over with the first one and went through them all again.

Gothard made a big fanfare over families who completed their Wisdom Booklets—especially those who made it through the whole set. One favorite tactic was to have families testify about how God sent them troubles and trials that exactly matched what they were studying in that month’s Wisdom Booklet. So studying about the eye meant that they discovered their youngest needed glasses. While learning about God’s provision, their van died and God provided a new one without their having to go into debt for it.

(By the way, I’m more honest than Gothard. My examples are mostly fictional, based on memories; but hundreds of ATI alumni can vouch for the fact that these testimonies were a real thing. Gothard’s anecdotes were completely unverifiable, and he passed them off as actual support for his points.)

So when an ordinary ATI mother found the Wisdom Booklets overwhelming and frustrating, she hesitated to complain. All those other mothers were doing fine. Obviously they didn’t have a problem with the Wisdom Booklets. In fact, they were so in tune with God that he sent them extra lessons in “life’s classroom” to reinforce the principles. “Maybe,” she thought, “the problem isn’t really the Wisdom Booklets.”

“Maybe the problem is me.”

And that was a terrifying thought. Although it was mostly invisible to outsiders, there was a real, heavy pressure within the ATI culture to uphold the standards. For instance, Wisdom Booklet #18 admonishes:

If an observer can find any inconsistency [in a godly Christian’s life], he then has a reason for not accepting that standard for himself. He concludes, “If it doesn’t work for the one who has it, why should it work for me?”(WB 18, pg. 737, first edition.)

Therefore, very few people dared to admit they had problems with the material.

Gothard made it very easy to conclude that the problem “isn’t the system; it’s me.” Parents and students alike were used to doubting themselves. The Wisdom Booklets cultivated that attitude, starting with the Wisdom Quiz.

Each Wisdom Booklet began with one of these quizzes. The questions were worded to elicit a certain answer, which was then shown to be wrong. On the copy of Wisdom Booklet #18 that I’m using, there are eight questions. The student who took the quiz got only three correct. That was par for the course.

There’s nothing like failing a “wisdom quiz” every month to make you distrust your own instincts.

ATI was not user-friendly. It wasn’t designed to be. It was designed to condition thousands of people to doubt their own abilities and look to Bill Gothard for the right answers.

ADDITIONAL ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES
An ATI Education: Introduction
An ATI Education, Chapter 1: Under the Umbrella
An ATI Education, Chapter 3: Thou Shalt Not Trap the Eye
An ATI Education, Chapter 4: The Law of Grace
An ATI Education, Chapter 5: We the People Under Authority
An ATI Education, Final Chapter: Guilty Silence