Elective Biblical course in Arizona public schools Pages 1 2 3 NEXT | |
I would say the "elective" part shields the state from the most criticism, but expect a potential lawsuit over having equal-representation of other religions and regions. I'd need to dive into the text of the final legislation to see if the language was effective at creating a neutral course, but I've been told to stop doing things I should get paid for for free... | |
Elective or not, it violates the First Amendment. If the law is challenged it'll fall. | |
Although I think that all children should study RE.. about all major religions, their history, customs and impact upon the world.. from a neutral point of view, could you explain how this violates the first amendment? | |
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. It has been repeatedly upheld that promoting a religion--and this is promoting religion--in school violates this, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The State cannot promote one religion over any other, so it's all or nothing, and the most practical course of action then is nothing. | |
Unless they claim that it's a theology course focusing on the Judeo-Christian faith. It more than likely isn't, but they could still try that route, and succeed depending on the judge who looks over the case. | |
Empowering schools with latitude to offer elective theology courses would be one thing, though still questionable. A bill specifically for the inclusion of electives based on just one scripture is quite another. Both the legislative purpose and the principal effect would seem to be the advancement of a religion. | |
Those classes are in the same place as courses on the Korean language and pre-colonial America: off to the side because they're not the most relevant option. Considering America's demographics, the Bible seems like the sensible place to start, right? And judging by modern political discourse (or on the other extreme, this forum), don't you think a little more comprehension of that particular text might be helpful? | |
No. You see, this is something you and your ilk keep failing to grasp; we've read the bible, most of us were raised Christian to some degree or another whether that was hellfire&brimstone-church-every-sunday rabid christianity or the vaguely spiritual mumbo-jumbo of Anglicanism: we just think it's a load of shite. Considering America's current political discourse; that being a political landscape where one must profess faith(Christian) to run for office almost everywhere, where "Muslim" and "Arab Terrorists" are synonymous among large swathes of the population, where Atheists are considered anywhere from "less trustworthy than rapists" to "mentally unstable", where states are trying to enact laws that shield religious children from censure when they bully another child to the point of suicide over their sexuality, where the government is advocating the forceable insertion of objects into women and releasing the personal info of patients and doctors to the public all in an effort to enforce religious(Christian) morality, where many people don't have a clue about the culture of the neighbouring state let alone a grasp of geopolitics; considering all that, I'd say a general Religious and Philosophical Education class would do you no end of good. Giving fundies, dominionists, and creatards yet another avenue to access your nation's children, however, likely won't. EDIT: Forgot something. | |
No, I do not think a way of curing cultural and religious ignorance is to further immerse students in the same culture and religion they already live in. In my view, for this to be acceptable, it has to be comparative religious studies of all major world religions at least (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism are minimum, better more, living or dead, small or large as well as secular ethics). | |
Fortunately for you, me, and the entire world, the US nor it's main demographics are based upon the bible. They are however based on an extremely selective, hypocritical reading that's more a product of the various churches and their lies, than anything that it says in the bible. But I don't think teaching kids how hypocritical followers of religions are will be the main aspect of such a course. More likely it will defend exactly that hypocrisy and try to obscure it's existance. | |
No it doesn't. This in no way establishes religion. Try again. | |
I wonder what the reaction to such an idea would be if a school offered an elective course about Islam and the Koran... | |
Your reaction here reminds me of F4LL3N's reaction to that latest creationist bill in Tennessee; my answer is the same: this would be a reasonable thing to say... if we didn't have experience with this kind of thing already. If we didn't know the people pushing it. If we didn't understand the political undertones behind it. If we didn't know the parents of children going to these schools. | |
Your statement is confusing, could you please elaborate? | |
Yes it does. | |
I've seen Terri Proud come up in a couple recent stories about crazy Bible thumper shit coming out of Arizona, sometimes described as a "rising star," which was as disappointing the first time I heard it as it is thinking about it now. It seems like it shouldn't be that easy to pander to Christian Conservatives, but it just about always is. | |
It would be a lot smarter to have a "Religious Literature" class that covers all religious texts, but there is nothing really wrong with this. | |
I don't really care, it's not mandatory, they're not forcing their beliefs into other classes. | |
I feel that this bill is a great idea BUT ONLY if there are other religions added as well. If most religions are added so that there could be one big World Religions class which I have actually pushed for at my school, that would be great because people need to be educated. However, unless they make it so that it includes all religions as an objective outward look from it rather than a sunday school style class, shut it down for the first amendment. | |
Not necessarily. We would need to see the curriculum and how it is taught to make that judgment. It's entirely possible (though personally I think pretty unlikely in the current US political climate) to teach course on the Bible's influence on society that is expressly critical and hostile to the religion. Knee-jerk condemning the class without knowing much about it is a poor choice.
I don't think having the class be specifically about the Bible in and of itself prevents the class from being neutral. There are more important factors to consider. After all, if a high school offers French, Spanish, and German as foreign language options (as my high school did) but fails to offer Arabic, Chinese, or Hindi-Urdu despite these languages being much more widely-spoken than French and German, we can't necessarily say that the school is not neutral toward languages. There are many factors that can play into what courses a school offers, not least of which are the teachers with expertise available and student interest in the subject. If 2000 girls in rural Idaho want to learn French because they think it's romantic and aren't don't even know what Hindi-Urdu is, and the school can't find a qualified Hindi-Urdu teacher, we can't say they aren't neutral toward languages just because they don't teach it. While I agree that offering knowledge of a broad range of religions and philosophies would be ideal, I would argue that requiring teachers to teach about religions and philosophies they don't know well (or may even be hostile to) is a much bigger threat to the class's neutrality. I say this having taken a religious survey class taught by a teacher who was clearly uninterested in one of the religions on the syllabus. But this leads us to what I think is the bigger problem, and that is that the state is mandating that schools must teach a subject in order to counter an alleged opinion by a number of teachers. First, this means that if there truly is no demand for the subject at a particular school, resources will have to be wasted on it anyway. Second, it means that these alleged Bible-hostile teachers are being expected to teach a class on the Bible without training or expertise. This is a recipe for disaster. I'm devoting an enormous amount of time, money, and energy into getting qualified to be a teacher - and my subject isn't even a content subject, it's my native language. And it's still a tremendous effort because there's so much that goes into teaching well beyond just knowing the subject that is to be taught. And there's so much background knowledge that needs to be learned to understand why certain things must be taught. To just propose that a teacher can pick up a syllabus in any given subject and do that subject justice simply by following a textbook is doubly insulting- it shows a disregard for students' needs to not have their time wasted by an unqualified teacher and it shows contempt for the teaching industry itself. The real problem here is not that a class is being offered or that the class exclusively focuses on the Bible; the problem is that some politicians in the state capital think they know enough about how education works to just dictate procedures to hundreds of schools. The real problem is some guy in the state capital who may not know pedagogy from potato chips has the power to override teachers and administrators- people we demand be flawless experts in their trade and then provide embarassingly low pay and benefits to because they don't meet the arbitrary outcomes decided in capitol buildings. We need to as a nation get away from this notion that teaching is an unskilled profession. That is of course, unless we are comfortable ceding the world's number one position of power and dominance to other countries because our future generations of children are poorly-educated. | |
Utah already has this in the form of seminary class for Junior High and High School. For one period a day, students can go to a class in a separate building to learn more about the Bible and the Book of Mormon. It does not contribute to your graduation at all and is completely voluntary. I do not have a problem with this, even if the class gave some sort of "elective" credit. | |
thats almost statewide really, they also have it in Arizona, Colorado, and California, even in Russia. but whether or not you can leave the campus varies between school districts, some offer release time and others make it to were you have to go before or after school. | |
I snipped the needless rant and made your post bullet points. a) You come close to establishing the entire reason to agree with me. You lump together multiple groups of people with very different experiences with Christianity and somehow figure they've all had plenty of the Bible and could not possibly learn anything new about the events of the Bible or the beliefs of people (that we discuss every day in these forums) by getting a non-preaching look at the content of the book. b) Then you pretty much agree with me that some sort of classes addressing religion would incredibly helpful to modern society. c) Then you do the thing where you assume Christians are mentally incapable of doing anything for the reasons they claim and there's always a insidious brainwashing motivation.
Annnd two people making that assumption...
It's the trifecta! Seriously, though. If you accept the possibility of good coming from the general idea, and you understand that it's for elective courses that can't hurt anyone who doesn't volunteer, even if you assume the people pushing for it are full of crap and just trying to force their religion on kids, why not just let it go and see what happens first? It's the possibility of something good without really any possible harm (unless you can tell me how it's harmful... without slippery slopes). | |
Elective. In other words, voluntary. And actually that's a pretty valid social studies topic. For that matter any religious couse is a valid social studies VOLUNTARY subject. But this particular course even more so as it doesn't require you to believe in anything or even learn about a specific religion, you are learning about the influence of that religion on western culture, which I'm sure everyone will agree was a rather profound influence (for good or for bad is another different question of course). | |
I'm aware and I've made note of it in the OP from the very start. | |
okay? did you know that American mythology classes do not touch on Christian,Jewish,Muslim,Buddhist or many other mythologies and mainly focuses on Greek,Egyptian and ancient Nordic mythologies? should we overhaul that class as well to include more mythologies from cultures? | |
"Mythology classes"? Are we talking about public schools right now or college courses? Because you really shouldn't conflate the two. | |
public schools, believe it or not the US offers classes meant for college students in public school. | |
In that case? No, I don't want them to overhaul the mythology class (although more mythologies wouldn't hurt, sure). | |
Then the residents of Arizona need to get together and express an interest about similar classes. I'm not even sure how much interest there is in this class since it appears to come from the top down, but it sure doesn't help to spend even more time and resources on additional classes just for the sake of "equal time" if no one even cares about going to such elective classes. | |
I'm usually on the "Militant Athiest" side of this discussion, but even though this could be seen as a thinly veiled version of teaching religious values in schools, I'm actually for it. While there are calls for all parts of the subject to be taught there are some things that have to be taken into account, which indicate that this is the current best way of starting a program like this. The cost of providing courses on all the alternatives to Christianity would be too high, and most of the kids would only take the christian ones anyway. I'm actually pretty happy for something like this to exist so long as all parts of the history and influence of the religion are taught (Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, Ireland etc) along side things like the influence on modern society's laws and customs. | |
How is it "meant for college students" to show a diversity of literature in literature classes (mythology is often taught as part of literature-- Greek plays, for instance)? | |
I want an Elective Neo-Pagan class right this instance, man. So unfair. | |
Not getting what you want doesn't make it unfair. If you seriously want an elective Neo-Pagan class, talk to someone about setting up an independent study. I did an independent study on Pre-Columbus Native American society and aside from the fact that my sponsor made no effort to guide me and in my youthful naivety I ended up citing some sources that were utter bullshit, it was an excellent experience. Because if you demand the school create a Neo-Pagan class just for you, that's pretty much what you'll be doing anyway. It's pretty unlikely that your teacher will know anything more than you do about Neo-Paganism anyway, so all you'll be doing is working from a textbook. If one even exists. | |
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Another bill has been passed to put more Bible into public schools, this time in Arizona; it only needs to be signed by Jan Brewer at this point from what I understand:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/12/arizona-bible-course-bill_n_1422129.html
It is about elective courses on the Bible and its influence on the West that are to teach in a very "restrictive" manner to retain neutrality. But how can a bill that specifically puts elective Bible studies into the schools retain neutrality?
Don't get me wrong. I went to school in Germany. I attended RE classes. I think RE classes are very important to get a baseline understanding of all world religions and as many smaller ones as the time allows and get a little bit of insight into their histories, too.
But this bill is specifically about elective Bible courses. Where is the neutrality? Where are the elective studies on other religions, like Islam or Hinduism and their worldly effects? Where are the elective studies on secular ethics and philosophy, people like Kant or Mill?
This bill is a bit of a different can of worms due to its elective nature than many other bills that actually literally try to force Christianity onto students. It is not invading science classes to do so, for one thing. But retaining neutrality it is not.
Now, what is so faulty with this is that nobody is depriving children of anything by not allowing religion in schools, of course. There are sunday schools, there are church visits etc.. This argumentation is obviously flawed and will only appeal to people who already agree: "needs more Bible".
If you want to put religious education into schools (which I would actually agree with), it needs to be done even-handedly. There is a lot of ignorance about Islam, for example, fanned by media scaremongering, that proper education might affect. There is a lot of ignorance on Eastern religions. There is a lot of ignorance on older religions. But this bill is only about the Bible.
I don't believe for a second that when this passes these courses will remain neutral, historically accurate and critical. The very way the Bible is praised by the creators of the bill makes me doubt that premise immediately despite their assurances. I think this will be abused to hell.
Whaddayall think?