“Teaching Scripture In Public Schools — Anything But The Bible?”
Welcome back!
[This is the continuation of a series of posts beginning with "Should The Bible Be Taught In Public Schools?" about the decision by the Texas State Board of Education to authorize the teaching of an elective course on Bible in public high schools. It brings to the surface just about every question imaginable about the relationship between religion, politics, and the Bible.]
1. Comment. An individual expressed the belief that knowledge of Biblical stories would be advantageous to understanding allusions/archetypes of literature, but finds the course necessarily limited. The individual suggests a complementary course in Greek/Roman mythology.
Agency Response. The agency has maintained language as filed as proposed. State law and rule do not prohibit the teaching of a course on Greek/Roman mythology.
2. Comment. An individual stated that mythologies of the Norse, Greeks, Romans, and Babylonians as well as the holy works of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam had an enormous impact on Western literature and should be included in this course as well.
Agency Response. The agency has maintained language as filed as proposed. State law and rule do not prohibit the teaching of suggested additional courses. Comments
These two comments and the official responses to them point out how much our current rules, laws, and practices have complicated any effort to reach consensus about the place of the Bible in our shared public lives.
They point out the unintended consequences of efforts to restrict teaching the Bible in public schools. The Texas State Board of Education has no such restrictions for other religious books or mythologies.
This leads to all sorts of interesting and disturbing situations.
I used to live in the Bay Area of California. The local paper—the Contra Costa Times—published an article claiming that children in the Byron school district were being forced to adopt Muslim practices at the same time they were not allowed to wear crosses or say the name of Jesus.
You can read the original article that was republished in newspapers and on the internet as well as responses to the claims in the story in “Mandated Teaching of Islam in California Public Schools-Truth! & Fiction!”
I have made a few excerpts from the article.
The message says “Public Schools Embrace Islam – A Shocker.” It focuses on seventh graders in Byron, California, and says that although students in a growing number of public schools cannot wear crosses or utter the name of Jesus, they are being required to attend an intensive three-week course on Islam including mandated study of the tenets of Islam, the important people of Islam, wearing of a robe, adopting a Moslem name, and staging their own Jihad. It says that the California-required course uses a textbook that says a lot more about Islam than about Christianity and quotes a teacher who says she couldn’t teach Christianity like that and can’t even say the name of Jesus in the classroom, but the seventh graders are learning how to pray to Allah. Mandated Teaching of Islam in California Public Schools-Truth! & Fiction!
Tom Adams, the administrator for curriculum framework at the state education department, told the Contra Costa Times that state guidelines (for seventh grade) do include a unit on Islamic civilization in the medieval world, however, it should be an academic approach on the historical significance of the religion. It should not be construed as an endorsement of it. Mandated Teaching of Islam in California Public Schools-Truth! & Fiction!
How the guidelines are implemented in the classroom is largely up to the teacher and critics say that in many classrooms, Islam has been emphasized while other religions, such as Christianity and Judaism, have sometimes been hardly touched upon. In an article on WorldNetDaily.com, Diana Lynne said that other parents in California have reported Islam-related activities that have caused them concern. One parent says her daughter was indoctrinated about Islam for four months while in seventh grade in Elk Grove, California. She said one day, she arrived at school to find a banner in front that said “There is one God, Allah, and Mohammad is his prophet.” She says she had also seen children chanting from the Koran and praying. Mandated Teaching of Islam in California Public Schools-Truth! & Fiction!
Whatever the truth and fiction of this particular situation in Byron, it highlights some of the difficulties involved in teaching religion in public schools.
What is particularly ironic in the comments and responses in the Texas State Board of Education situation is that the rules and prohibitions against teaching the Bible in public schools do not apply to other religious sacred books, such as the Koran.
Although I don’t usually use the term “politically correct,” this is exactly the kind of situation in which the language of “political correctness” most applies, which complicates the whole effort to teach the Bible in public schools.
In the many years I subscribed to the Contra Costa Times, I noticed an evolution in how it treated Christian religious topics. I observed that Christmas and Easter—two major Christian holidays—were never mentioned on the front page. If they got any mention at all, it was about food drives to collect toys for poor children or meals served to the poor, but never on the front page. The paper didn’t publish articles about Christian belief or practices at Christmas or Easter services. Meanwhile, the religious practices on holy days of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and other non-Christian groups received prominent treatment.
As an observer of religion, I became aware of this bias against acknowledging the religion of the majority population. In an effort to be unbiased against minorities, the paper practiced bias against the majority.
The second commenter claims that “the mythologies of the Norse, Greeks, Romans, and Babylonians as well as the holy works of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam had an enormous impact on Western literature.” It’s true that these mythologies and holy works have had influence, of varying degrees, but none of them has impacted Western society as much as the Bible.
And so we have a situation in which the religion of the majority of the population—and the sacred book of that majority—are treated as topics that must be controlled carefully, while the beliefs and holy books of other religious groups have no such guidelines.
As I continue to ponder the effort by the Texas State Board of Education to set guidelines to teach the Bible in public schools, I see no simple solution to the multitude of problems involved in this effort.
I remain convinced that any education that does not include the Bible would be equivalent to teaching students to read English using only the consonants and not allowing anyone to teach the vowels. The vowels are part of the alphabet and part of the language. To leave them out is to leave out a significant part of teaching anyone to read English.
The Bible has been an integral part of Western history—far more than Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim scriptures. No one can be truly educated without it. But HOW to teach it in public schools in a way that respects freedom of religion—for Christians and non-Christians alike—remains the question. I don’t pretend to know the definitive answer.
Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
I’m not sure there ever will be a definitive answer to how to teach the Bible without influencing the religious beliefs of the student.
A huge part of the problem is that saying a person is objective about a subject is to, in essence, say that they lack full understanding and information for the simple reason that the only way to gain a somewhat complete understanding of a subject is immersion in that subject which forces that person to be so close to the subject that they lose objectivity about that subject and become subjective.
You cannot gain understanding without becoming subjective. Objectivity and complete understanding are mutually exclusive.
Of course, I’m biased and subjective on this subject of learning/understanding.
- John
Thank you John. You have said it extremely well here.
Your observation that “you cannot gain understanding without being subjective” is profound.
Kalinda Rose Stevenson
Galileo derived his law of falling bodies not by being subjective, but by being wholly objective.
He theorized that objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass, which can be seen with a feather and a penny in a vacuum in a high-school science class. (or Apollo astronauts on the Moon using a feather and a wrench)
From his experiments we’ve got accelerated motion described and later a theory (yes, a theory folks) of gravity, which is indifferent to whether you’re subjective about it or not.
distance (S) is proportional to time (T) squared
This to me is of greater value than a bunch of contradictory, unsubstantiated claims made by the numerous authors of the so-called Good Book
http://www.thesharkguys.com/2008/09/19/sarah_palin_yabbadabba_science/
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your comment. What you are describing is the difference between teaching scientific theory, which can be tested, measured, and reproduced, and teaching any system of belief, which is subjective to the core.
The reality is that religious beliefs are inherently contradictory, and cannot be tested and measured the way Galileo could test the theory of gravity. (And you are exactly right to emphasize the word “theory.” In science, a theory is a model based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning. It is not equivalent to anyone’s guess about something, which is the more common connotation of the word.)
The reality of our world is that many people live their lives based on what they believe the Bible (or other sacred scripture) teaches, and they want to impose their beliefs on other people. The question then becomes, what is the responsibility of schools to teach students how to recognize that beliefs are inherently subjective? What does an educated populace need to know to be able to recognize when political decisions are made on subjective religious grounds?
The political reality of the United States is that creationists are taking it as their mission to run for school boards, to demand that creationism be taught instead of evolution. And it’s not just creationism that is on the agenda.
My concern in all of this is that the teachers who will teach the Bible in public schools don’t recognize their own subjective biases, and will teach the Bible as if it were as true as the law of gravity.
And because the religious beliefs of candidates are so quickly labled off-topic, we can have candidates for public office who don’t know how to recognize the difference between objective and subjective, but we are not supposed to talk about how their unsubstantiated religious claims will be the foundation of their political decisions.
However subjective, contradictory, and unsubstantiated its claims, the Bible is a potent weapon in political life. The only defense against misuse of the Bible is to teach people to recognize subjectivity when they see it.
You might be interested in the post about teaching evolution and creationism in public schools. http://kalindarosestevenson.com/main/should-both-evolution-and-creationism-be-taught-in-public-schools_226
Kalinda Rose Stevenson