<p>I am glad to see the discussion on this and, so far, mostly an open minded approach to the idea of teaching the bible as lit. in public schools. I heartily endorse the notion as described in the OP article. My son teaches lit in GA public schools and I’ll bet he would really enjoy teaching either class. This will be interesting!</p>
<p>Something about this really galls me.</p>
<p>The Bible IS a crucial part of our cultural and literary heritage. Kids SHOULD learn it – the stories, the poetry, the ideas. They are all really important. And, furthermore, combining the Old Testament with, say, Homer, Sophocles, and Gilgamesh, and the New Testament with Virgil and Cicero – those would be dynamite, valuable classes.</p>
<p>What do I think is going to happen? Evangelical Bible studies in the schools, of course. The kids who want that will sign up, and the teachers who want that will teach, and that’s what the school boards and legislature want, too. So there will be litigation, and the ACLU is going to be yelling “No Bible in school!” and the right is going to be yelling “We can’t even read it as LITERATURE?!” and the whole thing will be a big fat fraud and excuse for another culture war.</p>
<p>I think they should start by teaching the Koran. It is far more important to an immediate understanding of current events, and of the global political climate, and global understanding. The Bible they can pick up all around them; if they don’t learn it in school they will have their entire lives to bone up. The same cannot be said for the Koran.</p>
<p>They are completely different, Mini. The Koran is vital for current events, and the Bible is vital for literature. These are two different subjects.</p>
<p>StickerShock,</p>
<p>I’ve got to run now but I’ll try to post over the weekend.</p>
<p>“They are completely different, Mini. The Koran is vital for current events, and the Bible is vital for literature. These are two different subjects.”</p>
<p>I understand perfectly well. And plenty of folks will be exposed to literature, and have the chance to bone up on their Bible without it ever being taught in school. The same is not the case for the Koran, a school-based understanding of which is much more vital to the future of the nation and world. </p>
<p>Of course, I assume the schools will make a hash of it regardless of which they are teaching. </p>
<p>(I don’t recommend ANYONE study Vergil.)</p>
<p>“(Try fully understanding the speeches of our Founding Fathers without having knowledge of the Bible!)”</p>
<p>Depends which year. I doubt you can really understand the speeches of the Founding Fathers of 1776 (other than Patrick Henry) without a thorough grounding in deism and pantheism, Rousseau and Voltaire. To understand the Founding Fathers of 1787-1791, you might need to understand the Bible to understand what they were rejecting, and I doubt you can really get what it is they were upset about and rejecting without reading Thomas Paine’s “Age of Reason” (many of the speeches feel like long quotes from the same, though obviously they weren’t, as Paine’s book wasn’t printed until 1795); to understand the aging Founding Fathers of 1805 (after the “Great Awakening”), you would definitely need your Bible.</p>
<p>
I guess then it comes down to the question of whether schools are better off preparing students for the college study of literature or preparing students to have intelligent conversations about cultural movements and phenomena. Why does there have to be a choice? I think a class on the Bible as well as Greek and Roman mythology would be invaluable for the study of literature in college, and I think that a class on either the Middle East (including the Koran) or on World Religions and Cultures would be fantastic to prepare students for real world discussion and analysis of current events.</p>
<p>The number of students who study literature in college is relatively small, and if they are so interested in studying literature, wouldn’t that be the time to study the Bible as literature? Whereas EVERY citizen needs some knowledge of the Koran if they are not to be swayed by religious fanatics (of either the Christian or Islamic variety).</p>
<p>Intelligent conversations are definitely a good thing, but I doubt they have anything to do with what they teach in Georgia public schools.</p>
<p>There ISN’T a choice (or going to be) in Georgia because preparing kids to discuss literature was never the purpose to begin with.</p>
<p>If the motive is to bring Bible in to the class room under false pretenses then wouldn’t be against the teachings in the book?</p>
<p>Well, so let’s go all the way and not teach literaure or calculus or German, and we can replace them with classes on the Koran, filing taxes, and cooking. Relatively few students will study calculus after high school or will live in Germany, but almost all the students will at some point need to cook, file taxes, and have some knowledge of current issues.</p>
<p>Yeah, Georgia’s intentions may not be entirely pure, but if they can’t teach a class on the Bible without preaching, I highly doubt they can pull off a class on the Koran. Students read the Bible in Religion and English classes in secular high schools all over the country, and in many areas there aren’t problems with preaching or anything of the sort. As I’ve said, I think both are useful texts of which to have a knowledge.</p>
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<p>Okay, the discussion has turned to what I thought it would. Mini, you should not assume what you are not privy to…Please give the people of Georgia a bit more credit.</p>
<p>The motive of teaching the bible is as stated in the article…it is a piece of literature that has shaped our culture and been an enormous influence for ages. It’s worthy of being taught as an elective.</p>
<p>BTW, my d in her public HS, DID study other world religions besides Christianity.</p>
<p>Please, churchmusicmom. You are straining credulity.</p>
<p>I give the people of Georgia plenty of credit, but I doubt the Georgia legislature is significantly more intellectual than the Pennsylvania one. And the interest of the Pennsylvania legislature in high school curriculum is pretty much exhausted by trying to make kids more patriotic, trying to get those reading and math scores up, and trying to sneak religious worship in (although, frankly, that’s not such a big deal here because religious schools offer a popular and politically powerful alternative). Powerful state legislators do not worry about whether high school kids are getting an adequate grounding in the fundamental literary and philosophical texts of Western Culture, and even if they do, they don’t take any action for fear of roiling the waters. And electives? How many high school electives are the subject of specific state legislation? Could it be that there’s some more big-ticket political motivation here?</p>
<p>And, as for teaching the Bible as literature . . . if someone actually stood up in a Georgia public school and taught the Bible as literature, the Georgia legislature would be screaming for his head within 48 hours. “Literature” involves fictionality, irony, nonliteral meaning, questions of intent, ambiguity, cultural context, stylistic analysis to determine authorship . . . all qualities I’m sure Georgia is anxious to highlight in the Bible. (And let’s not even start on the sheer volume of sex in the-Bible-as-literature.)</p>
<p>So, sure, the Bible deserves to be taught as literature, and it deserves to be taught as the Bible. Every educated person in our culture should be familiar with it. What it shouldn’t be taught as, in a public school, is the literal Truth. And dollars-to-donuts that’s what the legislature intends to happen.</p>
<p>I suspect that the introduction of this piece of legislation has something to do with other manipulative shenanigans going on in the GA general assembly right now. I am out of town and not reading up on the latest, so bear with me. But before I left, they were introducing some legislation to try to require an ultrasound for all women seeking abortions in GA. Now I don’t want to turn this delicate thread on its thread by bringing up abortion, but what I am saying is there may be some back-door politicking going on to push one of these pieces of legislation.</p>
<p>I see nothing wrong with a literature and history of the Bible class per se. But the problem is going to come in when they actually try to teach the literature and history of the Bible…for example, the numerous similiarities between the parts of the Old Testament and older, pagan texts, or that there’s considerable evidence that Moses didn’t author all five books of the Pentateuch.</p>
<p>It was pretty disturbing for me to hear these things as a college student in one of those type classes. I can’t picture the firestorm that’s going to be unleashed if this information is made available to the children of Bible Belt parents via the public schools. I think many of the parents are going to be up in arms if the Bible is taught as anything but sacred text.</p>
<p>What kind of “literature” should it be taught as? Creative fiction? Soft-core porn? Epic poem, like one of the Icelandic sagas? Science fiction? Which genre? Is it “literature in translation”? Which one?</p>
<p>Which history? That the Jewish Bible didn’t exist until almost a thousand years after Moses? That there are two contradictory creation stories? That the New Testament as we know it wasn’t put together as a book until several hundred years after the fact?, and that there were plenty of other gospels left out? That the Jewish Rabbi that Jesus is sometimes said to be doesn’t appear in a single Jewish text of the period?</p>
<p>All fun stuff, of course. I doubt there is a single Georgia legislator who had this in mind. How do they plan to “certify” the teachers who are to teach this stuff?</p>
<p>A school in TN (according to the local news) will offer a bible class next year. My first thought was, why not also offer a class on the Koran, the Torah, the etc? Then I realized, I live in Tennessee.</p>
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Rejected the Bible? Hardly. They certainly DID reject Paine’s Age of Reason.</p>
<p>The religious beliefs of the Founders spanned a wide range. But most attacked the abuses of power & attacks on liberty amongst clergy. Not belief in a Creator. Even the Deists among them were from the English tradition, where God was not viewed as some distant, uninvolved being. Most of the Founders held beliefs in a Creator who doled out punishment & deserved worship. It is important to not classify them as Deists or Unitarians using today’s definitions. Those philosophies have changed drastically over time. Unitarians claim John Adams as one of their own, but his beliefs would not fit at all in today’s Unitarian belief system, particularly their failure to recognize the divinity of Christ. Adams claimed that if the Bible were used as a nation’s only book of laws, utopia would result. He greatly admired the Bible and its teachings. Jefferson followed the teaching of Jesus, even stating that if His followers TRULY followed HIS teachings, we’d be in great shape. He jumped around among different sects, forever questioning, never quite seeming to find a suitable formal religion to practice.</p>
<p>Let’s not play games & call the Founders Deists if the intention is to mislead, or present them as rejecting the divinity of Jesus or the teachings of the Bible. As with every issue of the day, they engaged in spirited debate over religion & its place in our nation, writing hundreds of letters back and forth. It would be disingenuous to pick a quote here and a quote there and turn that into “proof” that any given Founder advocated a rejection of religion.</p>
<p>If my children want religion they can find it in a house of worship. I am happy my DD attends an afterschool Bible club, but I don’t want to ever see the firestorm teaching one religion’s version of the Bible would bring on.<br>
You know who goes to this Bible club? Evangelical, Catholic and Jewish kids. They discuss morality, loving God, find common ground and eat cookies.
I love this town.</p>
<p>“The religious beliefs of the Founders spanned a wide range.”</p>
<p>I think you miss the subtlety - the same founding fathers believed different things in 1776 than they did in 1789 than they did in 1805.</p>
<p>NOWHERE did I call a single founding father a deist. I could make that argument - I didn’t. But the differences among them (and within each one) are vast - by the time of his death, Washington (often cited as one of the most Christian of the founding Fathers) refused to accept communion in his own church.</p>
<p>My kids studied the old and new testaments in English class at a non-religious private school with mostly Christian and Jewish students, but other major world religions represented. While the teacher did not shove the text down their throats as (a-hem) gospel as some posters seem concerned will be the case in Georgia, there was an explicit acknowledgement that different students related to the text in different ways in that some of the students in the class saw some or all of the text as sacred or as revealed truth whereas for others, the text had no religious applicability whatsoever. </p>
<p>I can only speak for my kids, but I think that they benefitted tremendously from the experience. The depth of their understanding of the basic documents and beliefs of Judaism and Christianity increased, and they were able to understand their own religious tradition better in terms of contrasting traditions. (They had studied Islam and Buddism in elementary school.) They also gained deeper, respectful insight into the beliefs of their classmates. Finally, when they study literature and history, in which an understanding of religion and the Bible is not insignificant, a clear benefit is evident. </p>
<p>All that said, I would have been exremely upset if the Bible had been presented from a dogmatic perspective that either denied its religious significance or pushed a particular religious interpretation. I come from an era when we were all expected to pray in public school, using prayers and songs of a religion different from my own, and dealing with this sort of coercion and marginalization is not an experience I would wish for any child.</p>