My friend Bill emailed me a few days ago about a piece of legislation pending in the Texas house of Representatives that would require high schools to offer a class on the Bible if 15 or more students requested it. The Los Angeles Times story relied heavily on a Texas watchdog group called the Texas Freedom Network, which is concerned by the measure because it includes no guidelines for the curriculum other than to say that the course must be taught in “an objective and nondevotional manner,” and no qualifications for the teachers.
What most worries the group is that a survey of similar courses turned up some less than academically sound instructional practices.
A study conducted for [Texas Freedom network] by Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, found that of Texas’ 25 public school districts with a Bible course, 22 districts’ offerings had a Christian slant … one teacher showed students a PowerPoint presentation titled “God’s Road Map for Your Life.” Included was a slide called “Jesus Christ Is the One and Only Way.” Another teacher taught students that NASA had found a missing day and time that corresponded to a biblical story of the sun standing still. One school showed “VeggieTales” videos, which feature computer-animated Christian vegetables that talk.
I’m familiar with the VeggieTales series, which features mildly cautionary morality tales delivered by a collection of articulate anthropomorphic produce, one of which has a voice reminiscent of Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor, which is itself a multi-layered morality tale. Inexplicably, the series has not been translated into French.
VeggieTales doesn’t bother me too much; any high school kid whose views on religion are swayed by the song stylings of Larry the Cucumber will probably abandon Christianity for Stalinism or multi-level marketing, depending on whether the first person he or she meets the day after high school is a leeebrul college professor or a Princess House party organizer. More disturbing is the fact that someone who thinks NASA has documented a missing day — like, what, they discovered it in the lost and found at the Goddard Space Flight Center? — is teaching anything, let alone Biblical astrophysics, but maybe Larry was doling out patronage jobs to his less fortunate relatives that day.
Legislators probably shouldn’t be forcing schools to turn semi-literate chuckleheads loose on a subject simply because there’s a demand for the product, but if they must do so, they should 1) ensure that that the chuckleheads have some sort of non-chucklehead instruction manual, and 2) spread the wealth around to other students who might be able to garner a 15-person quorum in favor of other subjects. Kids at the high school featuring the NASA course work might want to do a class on The Day The Earth Stood Still (yet another morality tale) as a complement to The Day The Sun Stood Still, for instance, and that opportunity should be theirs.
Instead we have this attempt to create an unfunded mandate for schools to teach the Bible under conditions — the old dodge of throwing responsibility for the curriculum back to the individual districts — that are meant to result in the kind of proselytizing that the SMU survey has already uncovered. That’s bad enough; throw in the sort of teachers who would promulgate the NASA myth, and you have a class that not only establishes a state religion but leaves kids less informed about secular subjects than they were when they walked in the door.
People can differ about the purpose of public education but surely we could all agree that it shouldn’t be to make the students stupid.
If the Texas bill passes, we can expect a flood of similar legislation in other states. After that we’ll get a bunch of court challenges as Larry and his crusading vegetable hordes invade classrooms everywhere, followed by the inevitable cries of persecution from closet and not-so-closet theocrats who just can’t understand why a little innocent evangelizing on the public dime is such a bad thing, especially when the class is just an elective.
After that, we’ll get another round of moralizing from concerned liberals who think it’s rude to comment when someone tries to shove a religious agenda down the public maw, a tic that’s far more condescending toward people whose primary focus is religion than anything said by the relatively few people who insist that religious beliefs are invariably a symptom of mental illness. I’ve never been a single issue voter, but if I were, the issue might be whether or not a candidate takes an absolutist position regarding the separation of church and state.
Meanwhile, here tonight for your dining and dancing pleasure … Larry the Cucumber.
