A part of my class Lecture
I'm taking an online class, and this is part of one online lecture I thought was funny and disturbing. The class is Religion in American Public Schools.
"I conclude by quoting from and commenting on a guest column that high-school student, Chana Schoenberger published some years ago in Newsweek magazine (1993) (This was reprinted in the 1998 edition of Finding Common Ground 7.11-7.12). In her essay, "Getting To Know About You and Me," Chana describes her experience as one of twenty teenagers who spent five weeks during the summer studying acid rain at the University of Wisconsin at Superior as part of a National Science Foundation Young Scholars program. Represented among the students were eight religious traditions: Jewish, Roman Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, Methodist, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, and Lutheran. Chana was amazed at the degree of ignorance regarding other people's religions among this otherwise outstanding group of students.
On the first day, one girl mentioned that she had nine brothers and sisters. "Oh, are you a Mormon?" asked another girl, who I knew was a Mormon herself. The first girl, shocked, replied, "No, I dress normal!" She thought Mormon was the same as Mennonite, and the only thing she knew about either religion was that Mennonites don't, in her opinion, "dress normal."
My friends, ever curious about Judaism, asked me about everything from our basic theology to food preferences. "How come, if Jesus was a Jew, Jews aren't Christian?" my Catholic roommate asked me in all seriousness. Brought up in a small Wisconsin town, she had never met a Jew before, nor had she met people from most other "strange" religions (anything but Catholic and mainstream Protestant). Many of the other kids were the same way.
Do you still practice animal sacrifices?" a girl from a small town in Minnesota asked me once. I said no, laughed and pointed out that this was the twentieth century, but she had been absolutely serious. The only Jews she knew were the ones from the Bible.
According to Chana, "Nobody was deliberately rude or anti-Semitic, but I got the feeling that I was representing the entire Jewish people through my actions." She winced at the thought that many of her new friends would go home to their small towns believing that all Jews liked Dairy Queen Blizzards and grilled cheese sandwiches, since that was true of all the Jews they knew (in most cases, Chana herself and the one other Jewish student enrolled in the summer program).
The most awful thing for me, however, was not the benign ignorance of my friends. Our biology professor had taken us on a field trip to the EPA field site where he worked, and he was telling us about the project he was working on. He said that they had to make sure the EPA got its money's worth from the study-he "wouldn't want them to get Jewed."
Chana recounts her astonishment that this professor, who, in her words, "had a doctorate, various other degrees and seemed to be a very intelligent man . . . apparently had no idea that he had just made an anti-Semitic remark." She and the other Jewish girl in the group wrestled with the question of whether they should say something to him about it. They agreed that they would confront him, but neither of them ever did. No doubt Chana speaks for countless students of all ages and grade levels from around the country when she writes that, "For a high-school student to tell a professor who taught her class that he was a bigot seemed out of place to me, even if he was one."
As Chana herself explains, she had always been under the impression that in America we are expected "to respect each other's traditions." Yet as she correctly observes, "Respect requires some knowledge about people's backgrounds."
As we have seen in this class, if the only thing we know about our neighbor’s religion is based on some joke we heard about the priest, the minister, and the rabbi, we’re probably not going to be in a very good position to understand, let alone respect, that person’s religion. Clearly, without some basic knowledge about the world’s religions - about why “those people” wear what they wear, about why they eat or don’t eat what they do, about why they celebrate this or that holiday, about why they support or oppose this or that public policy or political candidate - it becomes all too easy to caricature and trivialize the religious beliefs and practices of our fellow citizens, especially those who belong to a religious, racial, or ethnic community that is different from our own. How long can a civil society survive in such a climate of ignorance and misunderstanding?"
"I conclude by quoting from and commenting on a guest column that high-school student, Chana Schoenberger published some years ago in Newsweek magazine (1993) (This was reprinted in the 1998 edition of Finding Common Ground 7.11-7.12). In her essay, "Getting To Know About You and Me," Chana describes her experience as one of twenty teenagers who spent five weeks during the summer studying acid rain at the University of Wisconsin at Superior as part of a National Science Foundation Young Scholars program. Represented among the students were eight religious traditions: Jewish, Roman Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, Methodist, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, and Lutheran. Chana was amazed at the degree of ignorance regarding other people's religions among this otherwise outstanding group of students.
On the first day, one girl mentioned that she had nine brothers and sisters. "Oh, are you a Mormon?" asked another girl, who I knew was a Mormon herself. The first girl, shocked, replied, "No, I dress normal!" She thought Mormon was the same as Mennonite, and the only thing she knew about either religion was that Mennonites don't, in her opinion, "dress normal."
My friends, ever curious about Judaism, asked me about everything from our basic theology to food preferences. "How come, if Jesus was a Jew, Jews aren't Christian?" my Catholic roommate asked me in all seriousness. Brought up in a small Wisconsin town, she had never met a Jew before, nor had she met people from most other "strange" religions (anything but Catholic and mainstream Protestant). Many of the other kids were the same way.
Do you still practice animal sacrifices?" a girl from a small town in Minnesota asked me once. I said no, laughed and pointed out that this was the twentieth century, but she had been absolutely serious. The only Jews she knew were the ones from the Bible.
According to Chana, "Nobody was deliberately rude or anti-Semitic, but I got the feeling that I was representing the entire Jewish people through my actions." She winced at the thought that many of her new friends would go home to their small towns believing that all Jews liked Dairy Queen Blizzards and grilled cheese sandwiches, since that was true of all the Jews they knew (in most cases, Chana herself and the one other Jewish student enrolled in the summer program).
The most awful thing for me, however, was not the benign ignorance of my friends. Our biology professor had taken us on a field trip to the EPA field site where he worked, and he was telling us about the project he was working on. He said that they had to make sure the EPA got its money's worth from the study-he "wouldn't want them to get Jewed."
Chana recounts her astonishment that this professor, who, in her words, "had a doctorate, various other degrees and seemed to be a very intelligent man . . . apparently had no idea that he had just made an anti-Semitic remark." She and the other Jewish girl in the group wrestled with the question of whether they should say something to him about it. They agreed that they would confront him, but neither of them ever did. No doubt Chana speaks for countless students of all ages and grade levels from around the country when she writes that, "For a high-school student to tell a professor who taught her class that he was a bigot seemed out of place to me, even if he was one."
As Chana herself explains, she had always been under the impression that in America we are expected "to respect each other's traditions." Yet as she correctly observes, "Respect requires some knowledge about people's backgrounds."
As we have seen in this class, if the only thing we know about our neighbor’s religion is based on some joke we heard about the priest, the minister, and the rabbi, we’re probably not going to be in a very good position to understand, let alone respect, that person’s religion. Clearly, without some basic knowledge about the world’s religions - about why “those people” wear what they wear, about why they eat or don’t eat what they do, about why they celebrate this or that holiday, about why they support or oppose this or that public policy or political candidate - it becomes all too easy to caricature and trivialize the religious beliefs and practices of our fellow citizens, especially those who belong to a religious, racial, or ethnic community that is different from our own. How long can a civil society survive in such a climate of ignorance and misunderstanding?"