Texas legislators will tomorrow take up a controversial bill requiring all public high schools to offer elective Bible courses. The debate over HB 1287, "Elective Courses in History and Literature of Old and New Testament Eras," comes in the wake of a much-publicized Time magazine cover story endorsing Bible courses in public schools.
Learning about the Bible's influence on western literature, history, art and culture may seem benign, maybe even beneficial, but that is not this bill's true purpose. Its true purpose, critics charge, is to bring religious (read: Protestant) education back into the public school classroom.
The bill's sponsor, Rep. Warren Chisum (R-Pampa), claims the measure seeks to "accommodate the rights and desires of teachers who wish to teach and students who wish to study...the Old or New Testament..." and to familiarize students with the stories, recorded history, literary styles and customs found in each holy text.
Chisum's bill is a dangerous solution in search of a problem. Students already have the right to study and discuss the Bible outside of class. Public school teachers do not have the right, and their desires are irrelevant, to teach religion during the school day.
Furthermore, the bill does not provide a specific curriculum or teaching standards and does not adequately protect students from indoctrination, discrimination and proselytization.
It requires teachers to use the Old and New Testaments and the fundamental text and says school boards may recommend, but not require, teachers to use secular or non-Judeo Christian sources to help students put the Bible in a larger context. Teaching the "contents of...and history recorded by the Old or New Testament..." using only the holy text opens the door to teaching it as secular history.
On the flip side, critics fear that schools or teachers who seek outside sources will adopt a teachers' guide by the North Carolina-based National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS), which is written from a fundamentalist Christian viewpoint and is rife with inaccurate "history" and attacks on church-state separation.
Not only does the bill require that the Old and New Testaments be the basic textbooks, it allows schools and teachers to choose which version of the Bible they will use. Teachers are all but guaranteed to pick the sectarian version they're most comfortable with, the one in which they believe. Bias and personal belief will naturally seep into the lesson, clouding any requirement that students be taught objectively about the Bible.
The bill "protects" students' religious liberty by not requiring them to study from any specific version of the Bible, but this only provides students (and parents) with a false sense of security.
Think back to your school days. How would you fare if your teacher used and tested from one version of a textbook and you studied another? Your performance would suffer, even if the differences were ever so slight. Now replace the textbook with a religious text, a sacred text that cannot be taught as truth in public schools. The exemption is admirable (and constitutionally necessary), but it doesn't matter from which scripture the Catholic, Mormon or Jewish students study from if it's different from the teacher's choice.
The bill tries to protect students from indoctrination, proselytization and discrimination by banning these things from the curriculum or classroom, but requires no state oversight. We know how easily some public school teachers can slip from teacher to preacher, it's incomprehensible to think schools aren't required to hold their teachers accountable to these already lacking standards.
It's important for students to learn about religion's influence on literature, history, art and culture. It can be done legally and respectfully if schools use the utmost care, but Rep. Chisum's bill throws caution (and the law) to the wind. The Texas legislature should throw this one out the window.