Teaching the Bible in Texas Schools
Remember last year, when the Texas legislature voted to make a class in the Bible as literature mandatory for every public school in the state? Well, this September that bill will come into effect. And so, once again, most of the people commenting on the subject are revealing their deep confusion about literature, education, religion, and the First Amendment.
Some Texans are very pleased with the new legislation. Tyler resident Laura Tucker says, "I think it is a good thing because a lot of kids don't have that experience, and they already want to take prayer out of school as it is, and you see where our kids are ending up!" Others, like Havis Tatum, disagree: "I don't want anybody teaching their religious beliefs to my child unless they want to send their child to my house and let me teach them my religious views." On the one hand, both of these opinions miss the point. The class in question is on the Bible as literature, not the Bible as science or as history. On the other hand, if you look at the statements of the people who wrote and supported the bill, it has been pretty obvious all along that "literature" has been little more than a rhetorical shoehorn for getting Christianity into the public school classroom. The popular confusion on the subject emerges even more vividly when the article quotes John Keeling, social studies chair at Whitehouse High School. He points out how such a Bible course may help students to see the extraordinarily pervasive influence of the Bible in the general culture - a good pedagogical goal. But he also adds a disclaimer that is supposed to be reassuring to secularists, but which is couched in such hesitant language that it instead becomes faintly sinister: "The purpose of a course like this isn't even really to get kids to believe it, per se, it is just to appreciate the profound impact that it has had on our history and on our government." I must point out that "even really" and "per se" have no place in that statement.
Unsurprisingly, atheist blogger PZ Meyers has picked up on the story, although he also gets some things wrong. He reports that "Texas will require its students to take a Bible course"; actually, the course will be an elective. Meyers also adds that teaching the Bible "would be a great thing if the teachers brought a properly skeptical attitude towards it." The problem here is that skepticism is an irrelevant criterion in a literature course: you do not come to a more sophisticated understanding of a literary text by being skeptical about its truth claims. A fruitful discussion of Hamlet in an English class does not take the form of a debate on the existence of ghosts.
Anyway, I expect the ACLU will be following developments pretty carefully over the coming school year, and I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for news of further developments. The crucial question is whether the teachers and administrators of Texas understand what a literature course is. As long as they do what they are ostensibly supposed to be doing, I will have no complaints. But since I have yet to encounter anyone commenting on this topic who understands the purposes and boundaries of the literature classroom, I don't have particularly high hopes.
Some Texans are very pleased with the new legislation. Tyler resident Laura Tucker says, "I think it is a good thing because a lot of kids don't have that experience, and they already want to take prayer out of school as it is, and you see where our kids are ending up!" Others, like Havis Tatum, disagree: "I don't want anybody teaching their religious beliefs to my child unless they want to send their child to my house and let me teach them my religious views." On the one hand, both of these opinions miss the point. The class in question is on the Bible as literature, not the Bible as science or as history. On the other hand, if you look at the statements of the people who wrote and supported the bill, it has been pretty obvious all along that "literature" has been little more than a rhetorical shoehorn for getting Christianity into the public school classroom. The popular confusion on the subject emerges even more vividly when the article quotes John Keeling, social studies chair at Whitehouse High School. He points out how such a Bible course may help students to see the extraordinarily pervasive influence of the Bible in the general culture - a good pedagogical goal. But he also adds a disclaimer that is supposed to be reassuring to secularists, but which is couched in such hesitant language that it instead becomes faintly sinister: "The purpose of a course like this isn't even really to get kids to believe it, per se, it is just to appreciate the profound impact that it has had on our history and on our government." I must point out that "even really" and "per se" have no place in that statement.
Unsurprisingly, atheist blogger PZ Meyers has picked up on the story, although he also gets some things wrong. He reports that "Texas will require its students to take a Bible course"; actually, the course will be an elective. Meyers also adds that teaching the Bible "would be a great thing if the teachers brought a properly skeptical attitude towards it." The problem here is that skepticism is an irrelevant criterion in a literature course: you do not come to a more sophisticated understanding of a literary text by being skeptical about its truth claims. A fruitful discussion of Hamlet in an English class does not take the form of a debate on the existence of ghosts.
Anyway, I expect the ACLU will be following developments pretty carefully over the coming school year, and I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for news of further developments. The crucial question is whether the teachers and administrators of Texas understand what a literature course is. As long as they do what they are ostensibly supposed to be doing, I will have no complaints. But since I have yet to encounter anyone commenting on this topic who understands the purposes and boundaries of the literature classroom, I don't have particularly high hopes.