Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?
On this 4th of July, the country faces divisive problems, including losing democratic public schools that collectively open their doors to children from families of all faiths, including agnostics and atheists.
And there’s a drive to replace teachers with nonprofessionals like tutors and volunteers who believe teaching is a breeze and that children should be Christian and reject anyone who fails to look and act as they do.
Along with the drastic decision to remove Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court broke down the wall of Separation of Church and State in public schools, which could change the way schools work, and how they welcome children with differences, inching us closer to a theocracy.
Remembering Bible Wars
In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Court weighed in favor of Coach Joseph Kennedy’s “right” to pray in the Bremerton High School locker room before kickoff and on the field at the end of games.
Especially troubling is that the Justices wrote falsehoods about the case, namely that Kennedy prayed quietly without disturbing anyone.
The reality is that students surrounded him, and the school district officials never mistreated and fired Kennedy. They accommodated him by placement on paid leave for refusing to listen to school administrators.
Incredibly, six justices, all Catholic, except Gorsuch who is Episcopalian, appear to want to put Christian prayer back into schools despite the fact that there can be extreme differences between Christian churches.
Do they not know the history of the Philadelphia Bible Riots?
In 1838 the State Legislature of Pennsylvania passed a law stating that the Protestant King James Bible was a mandatory textbook in public schools. This meant Catholic children in public schools would now have to read from a book their faith did not approve; children who refused were likely subject to ridicule.
In 1844, fighting broke out between Protestants and Catholics in Philadelphia; a number of people died in the violence and several Catholic churches were burned. Similar conflicts erupted during the 1850s in Boston and other parts of New England. In the early 20th century, liberal Protestants and their secular allies battled religious conservatives over whether students in biology classes should be taught Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Catholic parochial schools resulted from mistreating Irish Catholic school children who sought a public education.
Catholics also have a troubling history of religious indoctrination. We’re reminded recently of the gruesome legacy of the residential schools for Indigenous children. Catholic religious orders ran schools forcing children into cultural assimilation in the name of religion.
In America, children and families with various cultural backgrounds have the freedom to worship the way they want, and public schools should honor this. Students and staff shouldn’t be subjected to another person’s beliefs or by anyone proselytizing to join their religion in school.
Evangelicals: Teachers as Christian Soldiers
Evangelical Southern Baptists, who once implored families to remove their children from public school, decided to take over those schools by putting Christians on school boards and working from the inside to push back on the legality of the Separation of Church and State.
A 2006 report in the Memphis The Commercial Appeal described a Baptist Church conference about issues that give Christian soldiers [teachers] their marching orders (Sparks).
The meeting, sponsored by the Christian Educators Association International, a group claiming they’re nondenominational and neutral, slammed the NEA along with the ACLU for doing more to ruin our country than anyone else.
They expressed concern with the gay and lesbian agenda, but schools have always been a reflection of society and its changes. Teachers and their unions work towards inclusivity, helping all children to feel welcome in their schools.
Tax Dollars for Religion
The Supreme Court also struck down a Maine law Carson v. Makin, that kept parents from using vouchers for children’s education at religious schools. Vouchers to religious schools increased with NCLB, and religious charter schools, sometimes set up in churches, further broke the Separation of Church and State.
It paves the way for those who hate public education and teachers, like the President of Michigan’s ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, Dr. Larry Arnn, who recently disparaged public school teachers as the Tennessee Governor sat by and said nothing.
Arnn said:
- “The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”
- “They are taught that they are going to go and do something to those kids…. Do they ever talk about anything except what they are going to do to these kids?”
- “In colleges, what you hire now is administrators…. Now, because they are appointing all these diversity officers, what are their degrees in? Education. It’s easy. You don’t have to know anything.”
- “The philosophic understanding at the heart of modern education is enslavement…. They’re messing with people’s children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them.”
- “You will see how education destroys generations of people. It’s devastating. It’s like the plague.”
- “Here’s a key thing that we’re going to try to do. We are going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child because basically anybody can do it.”
Demeaning teacher professionalism in public schools allows for replacing teachers with cheaper, untrained individuals who believe teaching is easy and can readily indoctrinate their religious beliefs to children.
Hillsdale College has its curriculum and teacher training program. They have been supporters of President Trump, and Hillsdale backers include the DeVos family and celebrity Pat Sajak.
Hillsdale has 24 charter schools in 13 states and Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee recently invited the college to start 50 schools using public funds, including $32 million set aside for charter facilities (Saul, 2022). Hillsdale is working with state leaders across the country.
Public Schools for All
America requires schools that accept all children no matter their beliefs. Public schools should ensure that all children learn what they need to succeed in life, and if parents want something different, they can choose a private or parochial school.
The Separation of Church and State should remain sacred in democratic public schools.
This July 4th, our ever-evolving country, and the public schools that reflect America’s diversity need help. Every effort should go into creating educational institutions that are top-notch and where teachers are well-prepared to address the needs of all children without infringing on their religious freedom.
Happy 4th. Stay safe.
References
Sparks, J.W. (2006, July 15). Teachers group offers faith help for classroom. The Commercial Appeal.
Saul, S. (2022, April 10). A College Fights ‘Leftist Academics’ by Expanding Into Charter Schools. The New York Times, Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/hillsdale-college-charter-schools.html.
Thank you for this. It’s vitally important to our country. I have been in education in Texas for 40 years and can not believe how backwards everything has become.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Mary.
Interesting that the shootings and major behavior problems in our public schools all started after scripture was banned.
Chris, I don’t plan to change your mind on this, and I know a lot of Christians think like you,
But there have been many societal changes outside of school that could account for school shootings.
For the record, I’ve also known schools that have afterschool Bible groups and have prayed around the flag pole. But those are voluntary and don’t pressure those who have different beliefs to join.
Public schools should accommodate all children. I don’t think there’s any way to fairly get around that.
Chris is the literal example of how religion retards critical thinking. When you belong to a religion that tells you to dismiss logic and reason in favor of faith and obedience, it’s not that big of a leap for worshipers to accept a difference kind of mythology.Just one google search would’ve shown how ignorant his claim is. A Virginia study launched in response to reports of a surge in school bullying across the country following the 2016 presidential election found an increase of abuse in areas of the state that voted for President Donald Trump compared with those that supported his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
Who brought us this problem? Oh yeah, Christians like Chris.The study, which was undertaken by Francis Huang of the University of Missouri and Dewey Cornell of the University of Virginia and published Wednesday in Educational Researcher, a journal of the American Educational Research Association, analyzed data from a school climate survey taken by more than 150,000 students from across Virginia.
Looking at student responses around bullying from 2015 to 2017, researchers found higher rates of bullying and teasing in areas that voted for Trump compared with those that voted for Clinton.
In fact rhetoric has changed the way hundreds of children are harassed in American classrooms. his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.
What’s more, the researchers found that the difference in rates of bullying between the areas emerged only after 2015.Student responses in 2015 showed “no meaningful differences” between areas, the researchers said in their study. But by spring 2017, responses from seventh- and eighth-graders in areas that supported Trump suggest that bullying rates were 18 percent higher than in areas that voted for Clinton.
Students in areas favoring Trump were also 9 percent more likely to say that children at their schools had been teased because of their race or ethnicity.. Trump’s words, those chanted by his followers at campaign rallies and even his last name have been wielded by students and school staff members to harass children
The Post found that Trump-connected persecution of children has never stopped. Even without the huge total from November 2016, an average of nearly two incidents per school week have been publicly reported over the past four years. Still, because so much of the bullying never appears in the news, The Post’s figure represents a small fraction of the actual total. It also doesn’t include the thousands of slurs, swastikas and racial epithets that aren’t directly linked to Trump but that the president’s detractors argue his behavior has exacerbated.
In other words Chris’s faith complicity with white supremacy has spread t their children. Chris just wants more none white children bullied . Which leads to more mass shootings.
There is a fundamental, philosophical conflict between Christian religion and education:
The teaching and learning of content and procedural knowledge have nothing – absolutely nothing to do with “faith”. They cannot and should not share the same stage. If as secular educators, we imposed our facts and our evidence to question the dubious nature of their faith, religious leaders would be outraged. So why are they getting a pass to conflate their faith with our facts?
Well said, Rick. Absolutely agree.
Many of these moves by the Courts and politicians in some states are a continuation of disrespecting teachers and their skills as well as the complexity and difficulty of the job of teaching. They are also moves to undermine public schools by taking away funding from them and using those funds for private charters. Very sad. This push reminds me of what I have learned in books and talking to Chinese guides when I was in China about the Cultural Revolution in China where the revolutionaries thought skill or expertise for a job was irrelevant.
I fear for our country and the future of our citizens. Is there a push to keep people ignorant? I am afraid that might be what is in the backs of the minds of the Supreme Court members who voted to to allow financing of religious schools in Maine and the ruling on the Coach praying on the field in the Bremerton School District. You can also see this at work in the denigrating comments of politicians about teachers’ intellectual level.
Your association with what’s happening here to what happened in China raises extra concerns. I agree with everything you say, Nora. Thank you!