July 20, Mark Chancey, professor of religious studies at SMU Dallas, for a piece critical of proposed Texas school curriculum that infuses Bible teaching. Published in the San Antonio Express-News under the heading Proposed new Texas curriculum plays religious favorites: https://tinyurl.com/mttj6ms7
As Texas neighbors draw the spotlight for increasing the Bible’s place in public schools — a new Louisiana law requires display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom and Oklahoma’s state superintendent has declared that every teacher “will be teaching from the Bible” — the Lone Star State is quietly pursuing its own strategy to the same end.
The State Board of Education is considering a new language arts and reading curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade called Open Education Resources that includes a surprising amount of biblical content, much of it promoting some religious views over others.
By Mark Chancey
As Texas neighbors draw the spotlight for increasing the Bible’s place in public schools — a new Louisiana law requires display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom and Oklahoma’s state superintendent has declared that every teacher “will be teaching from the Bible” — the Lone Star State is quietly pursuing its own strategy to the same end.
The State Board of Education is considering a new language arts and reading curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade called Open Education Resources that includes a surprising amount of biblical content, much of it promoting some religious views over others.
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To be sure, as Commissioner of Education Mike Morath has noted, lessons about religion make up a relatively “small piece of the content pie” in this curriculum. But that piece of the pie has a very pronounced flavor: the Bible gets more attention than other sacred texts, Jesus gets more attention than other religious figures and Christianity gets more attention than other religious traditions. Indeed, aside from Judaism, living traditions other than Christianity are rarely discussed. This curriculum provides more information about ancient Greeks and Romans than about modern Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs.
These materials start teaching Bible stories to our state’s religiously diverse children as early as kindergarten. Lessons on the Golden Rule and the Good Samaritan would instruct them not only “about the right and wrong way to act,” as one puts it, but also to look to Jesus as an authority figure. Similarly, a lesson on Genesis ostensibly dedicated to religion’s impact on art is more likely to be taken by 5-year-olds as an explanation of how God made the world. One lesson even suggests that if Goldilocks had simply heeded the teachings of Jesus, she would have left those poor bears alone.
Though the curriculum frequently uses phrases like “in the Bible story” or “according to the Bible,” such wording does little to offset the impression that it is presenting stories about divine activity as straightforward history. When a teacher tells first graders that “along the journey to the Promised Land, Moses received many messages from his God,” students are likely to take the story at face value.
Later materials that tackle Jesus’ virgin birth, crucifixion and resurrection follow the same literalistic fashion. Lest children miss the religious points of such stories, the curriculum also devotes 14 fifth-grade lessons to the classic Christian novel “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” an allegory about Jesus.
The curriculum also includes a surprising number of factual errors. Contrary to its claims, for example, Constantine did not establish the first church in Rome or make Christianity “the national religion of the Roman Empire,” and the Council of Nicaea did not determine the contents of the New Testament. The frequency of errors on religion-related topics does not inspire confidence in the accuracy of lessons on other subjects.
The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that public schools can and should teach about religion “objectively as part of a secular program of education.” Religious literacy helps students understand not only art, literature, music, film and history but also, in our increasingly diverse society, each other.
Unfortunately, Texas’ proposed curriculum veers instead into religious preferentialism. The irony is that some of its lessons about the Bible, properly reworked, might well be appropriate for older pupils. But when those lessons are aimed at our youngest, most impressionable and most vulnerable students, it is hard to avoid the sense that agendas other than cultural literacy are at play.
Texans have until Aug. 16 to review the curriculum at the State Board of Education website and offer comments at texasresourcereview.org/public-comments.
For those who believe public schools are for all children, regardless of religion, the time to weigh in is now.
Mark Chancey is a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University.