Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Education Policy

  • Homeschool Textbooks and University Admission

    It’s been a few days since this was front and center, triggered by the presentation of an expert report by Dr. Michael Behe, but I wanted to write a few notes about the issue of admissions at UC and homeschooling. There’s an article ACSI v. Stearns, aka Wendell Bird vs. UC on Panda’s Thumb article here. I agree with the criticism of the textbook content. In addition, here’s an older article that contains a good summary:
    Culture war pits UC vs. Christian way of teaching : Religious schools challenge admission standards in court    .

    My issue is not with the assessment of these textbooks, but rather with priorities and appropriate diversity in education. I was homeschooled eight out of 12 years through high school, and the four years in formal schooling were spent in a very conservative Christian school. I knew nothing about evolution except that it happened and it took a long time. My textbooks on science were deficient in all the areas noted. On the other hand, I took a GED and went on to college and graduate school. I had no difficulty with science or math courses (as in getting As with no exceptional amount of study), and when I began to study the appropriate material, I had no difficulty coming to understand evolution, at least sufficiently for my needs as a non-scientist.

    My question on this issue is this: Can this possibly be the most pressing issue in admissions at UC or any university? Is there some ongoing problem with home schooled students failing out of introductory biology? I’m not saying that any university shouldn’t have standards, but I am wondering if this is more about academic culture than about standards. I’m not certain from reading what I see, but while I often deplore what certain home school parents do (lax discipline and schedules, very narrow curricular material), there are also many, many parents who home school quite effectively, and whose children are well above standards.

    I was never in a situation of playing catch-up in any of my classes from the moment I entered college. I moved to upper division courses in my second semester (with some annoyance to the academic affairs committee). Any deficiencies in my curriculum were easily overcome by the fact that I knew how to study, how to sort out information, and was ready to pick up new material in a hurry.

    I’m not sure of the legal aspects of this case, but to me it seems appropriate to keep the diverse options open. I oppose teaching creationism and intelligent design in high school classrooms, because I think in the limited time we should teach consensus science and do it as well as possible. Evolutionary theory is the overwhelming consensus. But in addition, I believe it’s important that people who disagree with me have options, if they’re willing to put in the time and money. Private schooling and home schooling are two of those options. They have to pay for it. They have to live with it.

    If there is some evidence of home schooled children struggling with their college courses because of deficient curricula, then there’s a point here. Otherwise, I’d let the results speak for themselves.

  • Academic Freedom and ID

    Intelligent Design advocates are trying to make us believe that their struggle is primarily about academic freedom, about allowing a new idea to get the examination it deserves, and about ensuring that people are not persecuted for their beliefs. Similar arguments are used from the high school level on up, with the phrase “teach the controversy” setting the tone. People attuned to fair play like the sound of “teach the controversy.” It sounds like a fine idea–whenever it’s done in somebody else’s sandbox.

    Recently a firestorm has arisen in the blogosphere over the decision at Iowa State University to deny tenure to Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez. You can find some of the controversy via the following links:

    I don’t have any new revelations from the Gonzalez case. The arguments over the facts surrounding it are going full steam around the various blogs involved. I want to think just a bit about academic freedom, priorities, and how serious we are about them.

    You see, I don’t think the ID people put a high priority on academic freedom as such. What they put a high priority on is freedom specifically for their point of view. That is not actually all that uncommon. Most of us get hostile about attacks on freedom of speech when the person speaking does not support our particular point of view. When we despise them, it’s much harder. This isn’t a left or right phenomenon. When I see footage of a KKK demonstration, at some level I’d really like to see their mouths forcibly shut and have them hauled off the streets. I feel even more strongly about the Westboro Baptist people (not to be associated with any other variety of Baptist), who protest at funerals.

    But I have a stronger belief in freedom of speech. I think that in the long run we are worse off if I get to cart the people who anger me at the most basic level off to jail. For me, freedom of speech is more important. The ACLU is frequently criticized for supporting free speech for people who are despicable, but their finest work, in my opinion, is done when they are under attack from the right and the left. They stand up and demand freedom for people that they themselves despise.

    There are some similarities in academic freedom. I see this from a slightly different perspective because I was homeschooled, and then completed both undergraduate and graduate work at private schools (Walla Walla College and Andrews University respectively). These are Seventh-day Adventist institutions, and are not only conservative, but in the area of origins are (or at least were) generally young earth. I started as a young earther myself with a view of Biblical inspiration that was compatible with inerrancy.

    During my studies I came to reject both inerrancy and young earth creationism. But that wasn’t where I got into trouble. My studies had nothing to do with that. Where I got into some difficulty was in the area of comparative literature. Just what of the Biblical text is original, and what might have its source, either literarily or in terms of ideas, in other ancient near eastern literature? When it came time to write my thesis, it turned out that due to timing, we could find two, but not three professors who were open to my research subject. I am a controversy avoider, so my adviser and I did a count, we demoted my thesis to “project” and I took four more hours of classwork, completing a non-thesis MA. Now there’s no reason to sympathize with me here. The university was private, religious, and I was writing a thesis in Biblical studies. I took the path of least resistance and took my degree. But just beyond the edges of my path of least resistance I knew there was the fact that academics are not entirely free.

    Should academics be entirely free? That depends on what one means by freedom, and the range over which the problem is discussed. In discussing freedom of speech, I argue that speech should be almost entirely free. I accept obvious exceptions such as incitement. But there are those who will argue that one’s speech cannot be free unless one is provided a platform. I see that differently. I don’t have to provide a platform to everyone, no matter what they have to say. They can provide their own platform.

    I believe that applies even more in academic freedom. For some people, academic freedom means that no matter what a person teaches, no matter how bizarre, no matter how untested, they should have a university platform from which to say it. Now they don’t usually make such a broad claim. What happens in fact is that when my favorite idea is not given the hearing that I think it deserves, I yell “academic freedom.” But academic ideas are not created equal. Professors are not equal. In general those in academia approve of standards of some type. They just want those standards to let them in and keep others out.

    But I don’t see academic freedom threatened by one wrong decision on tenure at one university. (Note that I am not calling the decision on Gonzalez at ISU wrong. Let’s call this a hypothetical wrong decision.) First, there are numerous universities. Other people who are denied tenure go find themselves more fertile ground. Students then examine various universities and decide where they want to get their education. A pattern of wrong decisions on tenure would be destructive of any academic program in the long term. Good decisions will tend to make a strong department. DIs blog has just such a suggestion.

    Intelligent Design activists could try to model the type of behavior they advocate by creating departments at their various religious schools and seminaries that include “Darwinists” and atheists, and of course Christians of various other denominations to “teach the controversy” in all of their various departments. I think Baptist schools should have Methodist professors to “teach the controversy” about baptism by immersion. Certainly, Richard Dawkins should be a regularly invited speaker for programs at seminaries to “teach the controversy” over the existence of God.

    You may think I’m joking. I truly believe that Christian education could do with a huge dose of the academic freedom that is now advocated for public and/or secular institutions. I’ve carried out such projects in Sunday School classes and small groups. I recommend Bible study with commentaries from traditions that get on your nerves. Anything that will tend to prevent inbreeding.

    At the same time there need to be boundaries. Another popular definition of academic freedom is freedom from criticism. The inverse of that is the definition of any criticism whatsoever as “persecution.” Scientific ideas need to be tested and challenged. Amongst the questions that should be raised are whether the idea itself is a scientific idea that generates explanations and new questions that can be objectively studied and tested. Few people would argue that an astronomy department should grant tenure to someone who believes that the earth is flat, or that the sun revolves around the earth, or that the earth is the center of the universe. Few would argue that a chemistry department should invite an alchemist to teach or grant him tenure.

    Where one draws the line is going to be difficult. Most importantly, however, different departments are going to draw that line in different places, and thus we will get to see how things work. It may be sad for people refused tenure who might have deserved it, though I suspect if someone truly deserved tenure and was refused, they will find an institution to grant it. It may be sad for the students who study at the university that makes a series of poor decisions. But those students also have a choice of where to study.

    But in the end, the fact that we have a very large academic community in many institutions under many different organizations will tend to bring things out to better conclusions. The ID community is itself proving how free ideas are through their ability to keep the waters stirred in public discourse even while they claim academic persecution. If rejected by all of academia, one can, as a last resort, write popular books.

    And there is where I think the real failure of the ID community lies thus far. They are more anxious to play the PR war than to demonstrate their ideas. I personally don’t think they will ever be able to do so. I think their ideas are philosophical and religious despite their claims. But the one way to push the scientific community into seeing their work as science is to work on their formulations to provide testable material and then get into the lab or the field and test those predictions. If the existing publications won’t publish, publish those articles yourself. Build a substantial body of research literature that demonstrates your claim that you’re being frozen out. I don’t think you can, but that’s the proper way to gain acceptance for a scientific idea, and it’s the proper response to skepticism.

  • Brokeback Mountain for Kids

    For some balance on the incident of showing Brokeback Mountain to middle schoolers, check out this post on Pursuing Holiness. I really can’t comment much since I haven’t seen the movie, but the phrase “age appropriate” (or in this case, not so much age appropriate) makes sense to me.

  • From the Land of the Deluded

    A couple of weeks ago I made the mistake of trying to reply to a point in Plantinga’s review of The God Delusion, and got caught. The first commenter on that post suggested I should read the actual book “if only to be able to evaluate reviews of a different book going by the same title.”

    Well, I have now read the book, and it was less irritating than I expected, though my expectations were fulfilled. In general, I was not surprised by anything Dawkins had to say. This should not be shocking considering that I have studied Christian theology fairly extensively for a non-theologian (I remind readers that my field is Biblical studies, not theology, and thus at theology I am an amateur), and I have also read a good bit of Dawkins’s writing, and I am very fond of it, even though I recognize that I am precisely the type of Christian theist for which he has the greatest contempt. This latter point is repeatedly emphasized in the text of The God Delusion.

    There is, however, one way in which the book is worse than I expected. I linked earlier to a post by Bruce Alderman, in which he performed a humorous source analysis on this text. I got a good laugh out of it, but at the time I was assuming it was pure humor. Having read the book, I think I can build on his analysis.

    Bruce’s H source writes much like the Richard Dawkins of books like The Blind Watchmaker. He does surgery on ideas with a laser scalpel, coming to specific points, and then rebuilding the structure with care and precision. You may disagree with his conclusions, but you normally do so by debating his premises, not by criticizing his logic. Such a person presumably wrote most of chapter 5. There, even though I disagree with some conclusions about religion in general, we find an excellent presentation of Darwinian explanations for the evolution of religion, or a propensity to religion in humanity.

    I originally intended to say that Bruce’s A source, contrary to H, uses a shotgun approach, but on further reading and reflection I don’t think that is an adequate description. The approach would better be compared to the use of a blunderbuss, a weapon to which I was introduced by Tolkien in “Farmer Giles of Ham.” There the question of what a blunderbuss is received this response:

    Indeed this very question, it is said, was put to the Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford, and after thought they replied, “A blunderbuss is a short gun with a large bore firing many balls or slugs, and capable of doing execution within a limited range without exact aim. (Now superseded in civilized countries by other firearms.)

    However, Farmer Giles’s blunderbuss had a wide mouth that opened like a horn, and it did not fire balls or slugs, but anything he could spare to stuff in.

    The aforementioned farmer Giles of Ham used a blunderbuss on a giant with the result that:

    . . . By luck it was pointed more or less at the giant’s large ugly face. Out flew the rubbish, and the stones and the bones, and the bits of crock and wire, and half a dozen nails. And since the range was indeed limited, by chance and no choice of the farmer’s many of these things struck the giant; a piece of pot went in his eye, and a large nail stuck in his nose.

    “Blast!” said the giant in his vulgar fashion. “I’m stung!” . . .

    So DawkinsA has loaded his blunderbuss with whatever was available, pointed it in my general direction (or perhaps I stuck my face in front of it), and fired. And thus, in the words of the giant, “Blast! I’m stung.” Well, actually, not so much, and unlike Tolkien’s giant I have no inclination to turn aside.

    Those who haven’t dealt with the vagaries of source and redaction criticism will perhaps get less amusement from Bruce’s analysis or from my aside, but those who have will recognize the stylistic differences that can make one wonder what happened between one passage and the next. I think this is also the problem that resulted in the exchange in the comments to my previous post. Basically you can get two completely different impressions from reading this book. The first is of a proposed dialog which invites a broad range of people who are opposed to placing religious dogma above science, of indoctrination, of forcing religious beliefs on people, and of limiting the freedom of scientific inquiry. The second is of a desire to suppress religion if it is possible to do so by any means short of violence, and describes all people of any variety of religious faith in disparaging terms.

    There is one basic element that I fully expected, and did in fact find. For Dawkins science is all there is. There is no supernatural of any kind, and his use of the term “supernatural” is not so nuanced as that of some theologians. For him, “supernatural” is anything that cannot in theory at least be fully investigated by scientific means.

    Thus he occasionally indicates that he is not arguing against the guy in the sky with a beard concept of God, yet in practice he is arguing against the philosophical equivalent. His God must be measurable and explainable in natural terms, thus any attributes one supposes God might possess that do not fall within that scope are automatically dismissed.

    Dawkins operates with a thoroughgoing ontological naturalism. This is it. If I were to allow him that assumption, generally implicit, we could simply say, “That’s the ball game.” And in fact most of the book is superfluous for the simple reason that Dawkins never allows a supernatural definition of God to come into play at all. Despite what he says, God is not a hypothesis. He would be a rather bad hypothesis if he were one.

    While Dawkins does not believe in God, he appears to believe he has god-like powers. Repeatedly he suggests that the religious faith of scientists or other thinkers whose work he appreciates were not really sincere, but rather went along with their time. Such is the case with Kant (footnote to p. 231, quoting A. C. Grayling favorably), Mendel (p. 99 becoming a monk was ” . . . equivalent of a research grant.”), the American founding fathers (p. 39 – “. . . the greatest of them might have been atheists. Certainly their writings on religion in their own time leave me in no doubt that most of them would have been atheists in ours.”).

    It’s astonishing how easy it is to know what someone would have been years after the fact!

    In my view, more even than an attack on belief, this book is an attack on moderation. By moderation I mean any system that does not automatically push for the extremes, but recognizes that there are a range of positions between. I do not mean that one has to accept that those other positions have an equal claim to truth; I simply suggest recognizing that they exist. Dawkins wants the conflict to be between fundamentalists of any religion and atheism. He objects to being called a fundamentalist atheist, but this very attitude suggests that in some ways the title fits. My experience with Christian fundamentalists indicates to me that if you disagree with them in any little thing, you are the enemy. I’m often called an atheist by such people because I accept the theory of evolution. Dawkins has problems with all of the folks in the middle, with moderates being a frequent target. (For notes on my view of moderation, see Moderate Thinking.)

    I’m going to divide this response into several posts, though I will post them all together. A directory follows, though you can find the entire series by choosing category The God Delusion.

    So from the land of the deluded, let me present just a bit of a response. I’m not an apologist. I’m frequently embarrassed by what Christian apologists have to say. My apologetic is very simple, and we sang it in the Easter Sunrise service at my church: “You ask me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart.” It’s subjective. I don’t expect it to convince you. But it’s what I bring to the table. Categorize me as a deluded simpleton, but a joyful one!

  • Religious Rights Bill in Colorado

    It is very important not to assume what a bill will actually accomplished based on its title. Titles are generally designed to put a positive spin on the contents of the bill in the hopes that people will not read further or seriously consider the consequences of what is actually proposed.

    A new bill in Colorado has precisely that problem. There are a number of issues in terms of implementation, but I want to look at one particular line:

    NOT BE REQUIRED TO TEACH A TOPIC THAT VIOLATES HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND NOT BE DISCIPLINED FOR REFUSING TO TEACH THE TOPIC;

    Matt Young at The Panda’s Thumb comments:

    Realistically, what subject besides evolution will spur a great many parents, teachers, or students to opt out of a lesson? Enough, that is, to interest the legislature? None. I find it very hard to believe, then, that this bill is not a cover for undermining evolution in favor of a narrow religious agenda.

    Perhaps my past experience with very narrow religious groups gives me some perspective on the possibilities here, but sex education comes to mind immediately. But more importantly I know people who regard numerous works of classical literature as evil, and who could well claim it was a violation of their conscience to have to teach those. In effect, the bill hands over the curriculum to the individual conscience of teachers.

    I would suggest that a better plan is for those who feel they cannot handle the public school curriculum to go either the private or home school route. I don’t mean to be nasty here, or to suggest that the public should have no involvement in curriculum decisions. I believe parents and the public should be very much involved. But a public school teacher needs to teach the curriculum provided. Free speech rights do not mean that every individual has the right to modify the curriculum. It’s a public process. The teacher’s free speech is not impaired by this, in my view, simply because the government fails to provide a platform.

    The public schools exist as infrastructure, to produce citizens educated to a certain level. An individual teacher cannot be permitted to distrupt that process because he or she cannot conscientiously teach some subject matter that is required. The proper response is to find a job that he or she can conscientiously do.

    While I’m at it, I would suggest to Christian parents that the best time for your children to get their first exposure to ideas you find objectionable is while they are still at home. At that point you can respond with your own beliefs on the matter. Your Sunday School classes can teach on it, and your youth leaders can provide instruction as well. The child then gets a choice. If the sex education class doesn’t cover abstinence in the way you’d like, you can provide that instruction. If you disapprove of evolution, arrange to have your beliefs taught through the auspices of your church, or in your home. Parental involvement is tremendously important. Use it!

    I hope people will consider these issues and a number of other troubling points of this bill, especially if, as predicted, similar bills are introduced in other states.

  • How God Impacts Science

    There’s been a bit of a dust-up around the blogosphere about this over the last few days to a large extent amongst people involved in science professionally in one way or another. Since I’m not responding directly, I will only note that I read of this debate through Dispatches from the Culture Wars, and you can find links at Ed’s current post, Clarifying the Moran Debate.

    Since I’m called a theistic evolutionist, though it is a term to which I have previously objected, I thought I’d make a few comments on how God and scripture impact the way I look at science. I can’t say “the way I do science, because my field is Biblical studies, and not one of the natural sciences.

    My answer to the question could be either “lots, in every way” (to paraphrase Paul in Romans 3:2), or “not at all.”

    (more…)

  • More on Evolution Conflict

    Ed Brayton has again weighed in on the framing of the conflict over science education. I agree with the way in which Ed has laid out the issues, and strongly recommend reading his piece.

    As an advocate of sound science education, I would like to repeat some things I’ve said before, but that are often forgotten in discussion.

    I am not opposed to free speech for intelligent design advocates. In fact, I see them exercising free speech all the time. What I would suggest they do about the peer reviewed publication is to simply establish one or more publications with peer review and publish scientific research in those publications. If it is done well, scientists will begin to read and respond to the new evidence they present. Of course I think the reason they are not generally published in peer-reviewed journals is because they are not doing research that is worthy of such publication.

    Further, I have no problem with ID being discussed at the college or university level to whatever extent the people who are teaching there want to discuss it. I went to college at a place where young earth creationism was a regular topic. Nobody is actually being repressed here, no matter how loud the whining becomes.

    But more important than my perception of repression or its absence–after all, I could be totally wrong–is the simple fact that there are other avenues open. In this age of the internet and various easy print publication opportunities, it’s quite easy to get something into print. But the real complaint is not getting published or not, it’s where one is published, or how much respect one gets from scienfic colleagues.

    That respect from scientific colleagues, however, has to be earned. And earning it is hard work. New ideas do work their way into the scientific community only slowly, and most new ideas get thrown out in the process of discussion. That is appropriate. One can argue that there should be more room or less room for new ideas, but ultimately, science must test ideas thoroughly before they are accepted.

    And that leads me to the place where I do not think that ID has a place–the high school science classroom. Why? Very simply I believe that the high school curriculum is packed enough with consensus science, and that it should be limited to that. Let new ideas be discussed elsewhere and when a scientific consensus arises, that will be time enough to add that material to the high school science curriculum.

    Framing the debate a s religion vs science, however, makes this difficult, no matter which side frames the discussion in that fashion.

    (Note: Read Ed’s piece before you comment here. I’m only making a small subpoint.)

  • Wisdom, Discernment, and Creation

    My Breaking Christian News E-Mail tipped me off to this article on http://www.worldnetdaily.com”>WorldNetDaily titled End creation-evolution debate in your home. This sort of thing amazes me and makes me very, very concerned. The article advertises a new printing of the book Bishop James Ussher, The Annals of the World.

    Now I certainly do not mind seeing an old book reprinted, but even the title of the article makes ridiculous claims for this book. It will certainly not settle anything about creation-evolution debates. One should be warned by someone giving a month and day for the creation of the world based on texts that are at best written in years and with considerable doubts about those.

    But the article also calls this book “. . . a favorite of homeschoolers and those who take ancient history seriously.” That is simply incredible. Practically the entire field of ancient near eastern archeology has been created since that book was written. It is, itself, a historical artifact, and not a good source for the facts of the history of the world or of their interpretation. If homeschoolers are being taught history in this fashion, we have a great deal to be worried about.

    This is not wisdom and disernment. This is gullibility. I was homeschooled myself. Understand that I’m not criticizing homeschooling as such, though I do believe that many people try to homeschool who have neither the skills nor the discipline for it. But I am criticizing the use of materials that are not appropriate to the task for which they are used.

  • Literary and Artistic Snobbery

    I recall my first college English class when I informed the professor that I was going to write on patriotic elements in the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson. He made it clear that he would prefer a different author; for some reason Tennyson didn’t match up. He also made it clear he’d prefer a different theme, that he thought patriotic poetry was a less kind of poetry. The kind of battle between my professor and me continued through the semester and even to his critique of the paper (he graded it A-), in which he lamented my espousal of Tennyson’s themes. But I truly appreciated Tennyson and I still do.

    I had a friend who was a musician. His pet peeve with me was my appreciation for Franz Joseph Haydn. My single favorite piece of music of any type and any period is Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E flat. My favorite oratorio is Haydn’s Creation. Now my friend would allow that those were acceptable music, but I also like Haydn’s concerti and symphonies as well, and he thought those had been produced by cookie cutter. Sorry! I still like them.

    In art, I recall the day that a monument was put up at my alma mater to four students who had been killed in a car accident. I was working as a teaching assistant in a nearby private school, and remarked to my students that it looked to me more like someone had forgotten to haul out the garbage. The great art appreciaters, however, were ready to praise it as a great artistic accomplishment, and I was informed by a few folks that I was horrifyingly irreverent.

    To extend this on literature, an area a bit nearer to my heart, there are a number of “classics” that I simply don’t find all that interesting or useful. In many cases I still regard them as important, simply because they have impacted many people. It just happens I don’t like them. After that first college English class, I was able to avoid further annoyance because of a change in academic requirements. I was allowed to take a course in literature in any major language offered, and I did so in French. Let me note that I didn’t enjoy reading Les Miserables in French or English. In political science I was assigned selections from Dostoevsky. Sorry! Not interested. I read what I had to, and I did find some value in it, but nothing that would make me put it on a “must read” list.

    In fact, I started way back in college calling those “must read” lists “snob lists.” They simply reflect the personal tastes of one particular person, and I see no reason to regard their taste as particularly binding on me. Now I would note that if you can’t read the books on their list, or you haven’t tested the waters to see what you actually like and will benefit from, then perhaps you ought to work your way through a few. Note that I have read a bit of Dostoevsky and substantial amounts of Victor Hugo (the latter in French), and thus didn’t lay them aside without some consideration.

    Now I hear the same sort of thing in terms of Bible translations. One should read the KJV because it’s superior literature. But why is the KJV superior literature. Even if I regard it as an excellent translation for its time and place and a major achievement, which I do, why should I now regard it as a superior translation? Literature professors and literary snobs will point to superior elements in its language and style, but superior for whom? I have never even been able to get these literary elitists to discuss the objective basis at all. It is, to them, simply obvious that what they appreciate in literature is superior. So what if other readers don’t really comprehend any of this additional value. It’s still superior.

    And I can agree with them in one sense. For English professors and literary elitists, it probably is. I have to confess to appreciating the style of the KJV. But I have found that modern readers just don’t understand it. Even many of those who profess to love it and to think it’s the greatest, aren’t actually getting any value from those stylistic features. The passage may be wondrously translated, but it’s wondrously translated into something that simply flies right past most readers.

    I could suggest that they all learn how to appreciate that sort of literature, get to know the vocabulary and the archaic grammar. After all, it’s also helpful in reading Shakespeare (another author who doesn’t make it to the top of my reading list). But my question is this: In today’s world is learning 17th century English a priority for my children and grandchildren?

    The answer is, absolutely not! I would like them to be able to express themselves well in contemporary English and communicate with friends and neighbors. I would like them to be able to read well. I would like them to have the technical knowledge necessary for the modern world, especially computer literacy. Liberal arts are simply losing a race with time. It’s not that the goals of liberal arts are bad, it’s that culture is growing and changing, and there are lots of works of contemporary literature that need to be examined and read, but educators want to spend their time on a snob list of “things every literate person should have read.”

    We would get much further in teaching our children to read if we dealt with the more important things–the things involved in current living first. That obviously includes reading and writing. After that, those who have the time and inclination can proceed to the literary antecedents of the things they deal with. I know that the literary crowd will bemoan the fate of those people who are not well acquainted with Shakespeare, or who don’t know the King James Bible, but history is moving forward and there are going to be allusions in current writing to things most folks have never read. One of the wonders of the internet is that we can look such things up quickly.

    In practical terms, I’m saying that I’m going to read what I consider important, and I’m going to appreciate the art, literature and music that I appreciate (logicians, get off!), and when it comes time to vote on budgets, I’m going to be voting for people who are very practical and down to earth about their selection. (Warning: Don’t try to get rid of the arts; but consider contemporary material right alongside all those wonderful classics.)

  • More on Bible in Public Schools

    Ed Brayton calls attention to a Texas Freedom Network report on the teaching of the Bible in public schools. Not surprisingly, the report is not good. Bible teaching is constitutional under certain specific circumstances, largely amounting to requiring that it be taught as an academic subject in a non-sectarian way. The recommendations by the Texas Freedom Network, available at the link I provided, are good ones, if public schools are going to teach Bible courses.

    I have previously commented, however, and I continue to believe that it is not best to have Bible courses in public school. I still continue to believe that is the best policy. That doesn’t mean that the Bible shouldn’t be mentioned. I think it will find an appropriate place in literature, history, and comparative religions, for example. But a class specifically in the Bible presents problems.

    From the point of view of a conservative Christian, the possibility that Biblical criticism will be taught is a serious issue. What view of the Bible is to be taught? Should it be taught as inspired? Inerrant? Mythology? Each of those issues will differ depending on the particular religious view of the teacher. It will be difficult to find teachers who can teach the Bible in a neutral manner. I am practically certain, for example, that I could not give fundamentalists a fair hearing in class. In my view, academic study of the Bible makes such things as Biblical inerrancy and a literal understanding of such material as the antedeluvian material so improbable that I would have a hard time presenting them as having any kind of validity outside of faith. A rational person might believe they were historical material, but that would come from a faith position.

    From the point of view of any non-Christian, I think there is an overwhelming probability that a course will be taught from at least a generally Christian viewpoint. Even thought I think the Texas Freedom Network’s suggestions are good, as far as they go, but even though such a Bible class would be constitutional, I think it would be better to leave teaching of the Bible as a separate subject at the Elementary and High School level to churches, synagogues, and religious schools.

    As a part of other classes, I think it could and should be done appropriately. The Bible is involved in a substantial portion of our history and literature, and that background shouldn’t be lost. But that can be accomplished effectively as part of classes in those other subjects.