All posts by Adam Laats

Should Liberals Teach the Bible in Public Schools?

Usually, when we hear pleas for the teaching of the Bible in America’s public schools, they come from conservative evangelical Protestant activists.  Today, though, liberal scholar and friend of ILYBYGTH Mark Chancey makes the liberal case for teaching the Bible in public schools.  Do you buy it?

Chancey attracted attention a while back for his study of the ways public schools in Texas teach the Bible.  Too many of them, he concluded, teach a sectarian theology.  Too many public school programs, he found, don’t teach students about the Bible, but rather try to tell students what to believe about the Bible.

Recently in the pages of Religion & Politics Chancey outlined the ways the Bible should be taught.  He offered an eight-point outline of the ways good public-school Bible programs work.  Everyone interested in religion, he argues, should staunchly support the teaching of the Bible in America’s public schools.  To do it right, though, schools need to learn from the successful Texas programs he saw in his review.

What do good public-school Bible programs do?  Here are Chancey’s pointers:

  • They relied on resources informed by a broad range of biblical scholarship, not just the scholars of one particular religious community.

  • They informed students about the unique features of the Bibles of different traditions (Jewish, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox).

  • They were intentional in exposing students to biblical translations associated with different religious traditions.

  • They were sensitive to the different ways various religious communities have interpreted particular passages and did not present one tradition’s interpretation as normative.

  • They recognized the importance of biblical texts as ancient historical sources without lapsing into a tone of assumed historicity.

  • They discussed the Bible’s moral and theological claims without presenting them as authoritative for the students.

  • They recognized that the Bible is not a science textbook.

  • They treated Judaism as a religion in its own right and not merely as the foil or background for Christianity.

I never learned squat about the Bible in all my public-school experience.  Part of that might be geography.  I grew up in the liberal heartlands of suburban Boston.  Chancey’s study focuses on the Bible teaching in Texas.  I know there are plenty of conservative religious folks in Boston, but the history and culture of Boston’s public schools differs in enormous ways from that of other regions.

I agree wholeheartedly that educated people should know about the Bible.  But here is a question for ILYBYGTH readers: should liberals push for more Chancey-style Bible education?  That is, should liberals encourage their local public schools to teach about the Bible, even as they don’t try to cram Biblical Christianity down students’ throats?  Or is that too eerily similar to mainstream scientists who might agree to teach “problems with evolution” in public-school science classes?

In other words, we might all agree that students should learn the real scientific debates about evolution, just as we might agree that students should learn about the Bible.  But the history of controversy over the teaching of evolution—just as with the history of controversy over the teaching of the Bible—has made it difficult if not impossible for liberals to support the teaching of scientific debates over evolution.  Too often, because of political meanings, teaching the “debate” over evolution has been code for teaching religious ideas in science classes.  Is the same true here?  If public schools attempt to teach about the Bible, would it tend to devolve into cramming religion down students’ throats?

Professor Chancey says no.

 

2 Comments
by Adam Laats on January 10, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible and Prayer in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 10, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/01/10/should-liberals-teach-the-bible-in-public-schools/

Learning by Discipline

What should schools do with students who behave badly?  Who assault other students?  Who treat teachers disrespectfully?

A new announcement about school discipline from Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder might drive some conservative pundits to distraction.  Discipline, the two leading officials of the Obama Administration announced yesterday, must be more sensitive to student background and more responsive to individual situations.  Blanket zero-tolerance policies, they proclaimed, lead to worse school discipline, not better.

Those zero-tolerance policies, however, grew out of a groundswell of popular conservative opinion throughout the 1980s and 1990s.  Conservative commentators and activists long complained that schools treated students too gingerly.  Good old-fashioned discipline, some conservative writers insisted, would help return schools to their proper role.  Instead of being places where polite students and teachers cower and wince at the domineering swagger of loud-mouthed punks, schools should be calm and orderly places where infractions of the rules are not tolerated.

Some studies have demonstrated the central importance of a reinvigorated school discipline to many conservative parents in the 1980s.  One Stanford study[1] of two new fundamentalist schools in the 1970s and 1980s found that leaders put bad discipline in public schools as one of their top reasons for opening their own school, right up there with “secular humanism,” “evolution teaching,” and the fact that “kids weren’t learning.”  In a fundamentalist school that opened in September 1974 with a grand total of eleven students, one teacher informed the Stanford researcher that most parents assumed that the fundamentalist school was “solving discipline problems the public schools could not.”

Another study, this one from Temple University in Philadelphia,[2] found that parents listed poor discipline as one of their top reasons for abandoning public schools in favor of private Christian ones.  Nearly 65% of switching parents listed “discipline” as a leading reason for changing schools.  By way of comparison, just over 68% of parents listed “secular humanism” as a primary reason for their switch.

It may come as no surprise that some conservative parents choose Christian schools out of fear of disorderly public schools.  Leading conservative religious writers throughout the 1980s insisted that public schools had utterly abandoned all attempt at imposing discipline.  Jerry Combee, for example, warned readers in a 1979 book,

Without Biblical discipline the public schools have grown into jungles where, of no surprise to Christian educators, the old Satanic nature ‘as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour’ (I Peter 5:8).  Students do well to stay alive, much less learn.

Similarly, in his 1983 book The Battle for The Public Schools, blockbuster fundamentalist author Tim LaHaye insisted that one of the vital reforms that could save education was a return of traditional discipline.  As LaHaye put it, “We must return discipline, authority, and respect to public schools”

In 1986, conservative Texas school watchdogs Mel and Norma Gabler asked readers, “Why has discipline become so bad that policemen must patrol the halls of many schools?”  The Gablers’ answer was simple:

We were taught that if you plant potatoes, you get potatoes.  If you plant rebellion and immorality in children’s minds by teaching them that only they can decide what is right and wrong, that parents are old-fashioned, and that the Judeo-Christian Bible is a book of fairy tales, then what can you expect?  Garbage in—garbage out!

These conservative critiques of the sorry nature of school discipline were not limited to conservatives of a primarily religious background.  After his turn as Education Secretary under Ronald Reagan, William J. Bennett lamented the sorry state of school discipline.  In his 1994 book Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, Bennett cited a fraudulent but evocative historical comparison:

In 1940, teachers identified talking out of turn; chewing gum; making noise; running in the halls; cutting in line; dress code infractions; and littering [as “top problems”].  When asked the same question in 1990, teachers identified drug abuse; alcohol abuse; pregnancy; suicide; rape; robbery; and assault.

Due at least in part to this widespread sense that American public schools had reached a nadir of weak discipline, many states and school districts imposed variants of “zero-tolerance” policies.  According to these policies, student infractions would be met with an escalating series of ever-harsher punishments, including out-of-school suspensions and reports to police.  Politicians could claim that they were taking action to ensure a no-nonsense disciplinary attitude in America’s schools.

Yesterday’s announcement by Arne Duncan and Eric Holder represents the Obama administration’s repudiation of that zero-tolerance approach.  Though “zero-tolerance” may sound good, Duncan told an assembled crowd at Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, “Too many schools resort too quickly to exclusionary discipline, even for minor misbehavior.”  According to the Baltimore Sun, Duncan described a new federal approach that would de-emphasize suspensions and put more emphasis on creating nurturing in-school environments.  Attorney General Holder agreed.  Principals, not police, should be responsible for school discipline, Holder insisted.

Will conservatives care about this shift in school disciplinary policies?  If history is any guide, I’m guessing that conservatives will paint this new policy as yet another soft-headed, over-complicated liberal approach to a simple problem.  Folks such as Eric Holder and Arne Duncan may worry that zero-tolerance policies unfairly target racial minorities, but I’ll be surprised if conservative educational activists don’t complain that such social-science talk only obscures a far more obvious point.

If students misbehave in school, conservatives will likely insist, they should not be allowed to be in school.

[1] Peter Stephen Lewis, “Private Education and the Subcultures of Dissent: Alternative/Free Schools (1965-1975) and ChristianFundamentalistSchools (1965-1990),” PhD dissertation, StanfordUniversity, 1991.

[2] Martha E. MacCullough, “Factors Which Led Christian School Parents to LeavePublic   School,” Ed.D. dissertation, TempleUniversity, 1984.

1 Comment
by Adam Laats on January 9, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Child Parent State, In the News, Schools in Black and White, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 9, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/01/09/learning-by-discipline/

Outlaw Colleges

Why do so many otherwise right-thinking Americans embrace leftist ideas?  For generations, conservative intellectuals have blamed the skewed perspective of American colleges and universities.

This morning in the pages of National Review Online, Victor Davis Hanson offers a ten-point condemnation of the American higher educational system.

For those unfamiliar with the real history, it might be tempting to assume that conservatives turned against the higher-education system during the campus tumults of the 1960s and 1970s.  Free speech movements, hippies, sit-ins, campus radicals occupying dean’s offices…there was certainly enough reason for conservatives to look askance at campus culture in those years.  But conservative intellectuals and activists had worried about the state of higher education long before that.

In the 1920s, for example, religious conservatives worried that mainstream campuses converted faith-filled young people into atheists and skeptics.  As I describe in my 1920s book, the first generation of fundamentalists realized that college determined culture.  William Jennings Bryan, for example, often trumpeted the findings of James H. Leuba.  Leuba had studied the beliefs of college students, and in his 1916 book The Belief in God and Immortality, Leuba concluded that the number of self-identified religious believers declined during college years.  In speech after speech in the 1920s, Bryan used Leuba’s numbers as proof that college wrecked faith.

Bryan wasn’t the only one.  Throughout the 1920s, evangelist Bob Jones Sr. warned of the dangerous effects of typical college curricula on young people.  One of the reasons Jones founded his own uniquely religious school, he explained in sermons, was because too many young people became college “shipwrecks.”  He told the story of one hapless family who had scrimped and saved to send their beloved daughter to

a certain college.  At the end of nine months she came home with her faith shattered.  She laughed at God and the old time religion.  She broke the hearts of her father and mother.  They wept over her.  They prayed over her.  It availed nothing.  At last they chided her.  She rushed upstairs, stood in front of a mirror, took a gun and blew out her brains.

In the 1930s, too, conservatives fretted that college corrupted culture.  Beyond the ranks of religious conservatives, activists in patriotic organizations such as the American Legion warned that colleges had been subverted by anti-American socialist moles.  As I argue in my upcoming book, worries about the subversive state of higher education became a central tenet of their conservative ideology.  For instance, in 1935 New York Congressman, red-hunter, and American Legion co-founder Hamilton Fish attacked the state of higher ed.  He named names, including Columbia, New York University, City College of New York, the University of Chicago, Wisconsin, Penn, and North Carolina.  These elite schools, Fish warned, and many others, had become “honeycombed with Socialists, near Communists, and Communists.”  A less prominent American Legion writer echoed this sentiment.  “Colleges all over the land” Legionnaire Phil Conley warned in a 1935 article, had begun teaching “the overthrow of our government . . . through subterfuge and through destroying faith and confidence in our democratic institutions.”

Long before “The Sixties,” then, conservatives concluded that colleges and universities threatened to shatter the cultural cohesion that had made America great.  These days, too, conservative intellectuals often condemn the state of higher education.  Of course, just as with earlier generations of conservatives, today’s conservatives may find many different reasons to worry about what goes on in America’s campuses.  Publications such as Minding the Campus and from the National Association of Scholars offer conservatives forums for sharing their complaints about the state of higher ed.

In the pages of National Review Online, we read one summary of conservative complaints about college today.  Victor Davis Hanson calls the state of higher education criminal.  He damns “virtual outlaw institutions” that take students’ money mainly to line their own pockets and fuel the narcissistic lifestyles of fat-and-happy professors and administrators.  “If the best sinecure in America,” Hanson concludes,

is a tenured full professorship, the worst fate may be that of a recent graduate in anthropology with a $100,000 loan. That the two are co-dependent is a national scandal.

In short, the university has abjectly defaulted on its side of the social contract by no longer providing an affordable and valuable degree. Accordingly, society can no longer grant it an exemption from scrutiny.

Hanson offers a ten-point brief.  College can be saved, he argues, if these senseless traditions are subjected to radical reform.  First, abolish tenure.  Second, rationalize hiring.  Third, take ideological garbage out of the curriculum.  Fourth, add transparency to the admissions process.  Fifth, cut the fat out of administration.  Sixth, remove the useless teaching credential.  Seventh, add national competency tests for faculty.  Eighth, publish school budgets.  Ninth, eliminate expensive and unnecessary university presses.  Finally, open campuses to real free speech.

Taken together, Hanson suggests, these radical reforms promise to renew the promise of American higher education.  Without them, American students and their families will continue to be held at intellectual and financial knife-point by the highway robbers known as professors and administrators.

How bout it?  Have you experienced college strife?  For those readers who come from conservative religious backgrounds, did your college experience shatter your faith?  Or did college turn you from a patriotic youth into a skeptical adult?  And what about Hanson’s broader challenge?  Do colleges take students’ money and offer only a skewed ideological indoctrination in return?

 

2 Comments
by Adam Laats on January 7, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Higher (Power) Education
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 7, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/01/07/outlaw-colleges/

When Is a Conservative Not a Conservative?

Some of the most intriguing personal stories of American conservatism tell of standout leaders who have switched from left to right over the years.  Of liberals, leftists, and radicals who had been “mugged by reality.”  It has been all too easy to make jokes about this tradition.

Q: What do you call a liberal with a daughter?  A: A Social Conservative.

Or, Q: What do you call a liberal with a mortgage? A: A Financial Conservative.

As Winston Churchill supposedly put it, “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart.  Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.”

In the pages of National Affairs historian Jonathan Bronitsky has offered a new vision of the long process of ideological conversion among some of the twentieth century’s most prominent side-switchers.

Of course, America has a long history of leaders changing from youthful leftism to mature conservatism.  Back in the nineteenth century, for instance, Tom Watson of Georgia started his career as an advocate of bi-racial populism and ended it as a bitter rabble-rousing racist.  William Jennings Bryan got famous as the voice of the little man and ended his career as the voice of the Bible.

In the twentieth century, too, casual students of conservatism have grown accustomed to the story that a group of New York Lefties switched over to conservatism due to the excesses of “The Sixties.”  Intellectual leaders such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, the story goes, emerged from the intellectual contradictions of Trotskyism to create and embrace an energetic and engaging “neo-conservatism.”

In the cases of Irving Kristol and his historian spouse Gertrude Himmelfarb, Bronitsky argues that the love affair with Edmund Burke’s thoughtful conservatism went back much further.  As Bronitsky puts it,

Scholars routinely break down the intellectual conservatism that emerged in post-war America into three groups. First, there were “traditional” conservatives like Russell Kirk, John Crowe Ransom, and T. S. Eliot. They invoked Edmund Burke and his anti-radical appeal to tradition. Second, there were “New Conservatives” — as they were called in the post-war years — like William F. Buckley, Jr., Richard Weaver, and Peter Viereck. They looked to Burke as well as to Adam Smith with his moral justification for market economics. And third, there were libertarians like Robert Nozick, Albert Jay Nock, and Murray Rothbard. They admired Smith in addition to Friedrich Hayek with his contention that communism and fascism were merely opposite sides of the same totalitarian coin. Though the first generation of neoconservatives interacted with these three groups, they operated at a distance — or at least most intellectual historians have repeatedly insisted they did — preferring change over custom, reason over revelation, dogma over philosophy, and, thus, celebrating thinkers far removed from classical liberals like Smith, Hayek, and, particularly, Burke.

Bronitsky argues that this standard story does not work for Himmelfarb and Kristol the elder.  In their cases, the love affair with Burke and the tenets of conservatism went back decades, to the 1940s.

For those of us who struggle to make sense of the complicated kaleidoscope of American conservatism, this intellectual creation story matters.  What did it mean for Kristol and Himmelfarb to dance with the conservative devil as far back as the 1940s?  More intriguing, what did “conservatism” promise intellectually that “liberalism” had failed to produce?  How did “conservatism” solve the intellectual problems that Trotskyism could not?

 

 

2 Comments
by Adam Laats on January 4, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Freedom & the Free Market
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 4, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/01/04/when-is-a-conservative-not-a-conservative/

To Debate or Not to Debate

Bill Nye and Ken Ham will be going a few rhetorical rounds next month.

The mega-popular science educator will broach the creationist lion’s den of the Creation Museum on February 4th.  The topic: “Is creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern scientific era?”

Image Source: Answers In Genesis

Image Source: Answers In Genesis

Are these debates worthwhile?  In the past they had decisive impact on the formation of American creationism and fundamentalism.  But these days such debates are a different animal.

Science pundits don’t like it.  Jerry Coyne warned that Bill Nye will only be putting money and legitimacy in Ham’s deep pockets.  PZ Myers wisely concludes that each side will likely only speak past the other.

I agree.  The audience at this debate will likely not be moved by either man’s arguments.  No matter how scientifically accurate or biblically flawless, logical arguments tend not to be the deciding factor in determining one’s beliefs about human origins.

As David Long’s ethnography demonstrated so powerfully, creationists can thrive in mainstream scientific environments without abandoning their religious ideas.  Many creationists have simply been taught to regard mainstream scientists as deeply flawed and bumbling fools.  It is easy to dismiss plausible-sounding talk from someone we have already deemed unreliable.

It’s hard to imagine Ham’s Cincinnati audience won’t be prepared to dismiss Nye’s mainstream science talk out of hand.  I assume Nye is hoping that he may still plant a few seeds of science doubt in the minds of those who hear him.  Not much reason to offer Ham such a plum chance to look like a reputable scientific authority.

At the start of America’s public evolution/creation battles, this legacy of public debating functioned much more powerfully, since creationists had not yet set up alternative institutions.  As I describe in my 1920s book, some of the most influential creationists of the 1920s received humiliating public trouncings in popular debates.

At a talk on the campus of the University of Minnesota, for example, fundamentalist leader William Bell Riley found himself surprised by a student prank.  Someone lowered a monkey onto the stage as Riley tried to convince his audience that creationism was reputable science.  “Every time I hear the argument that this is a controversy between experts on the one hand, and, as someone has said, ‘organized ignorance,’ on the other, I smile,” Riley told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1927.  “This is not a debate between the educated and the uneducated.”

Similarly, in London, creationist godfather George McCready Price found himself hooted off the stage in the days following the 1925 Scopes Trial.  He had tried to tell the merciless audience that the theory of evolution was doomed as mainstream science.  Such flawed science, Price insisted, may have worked fine

for the times of comparative ignorance of the real facts of heredity and variation and of the facts of geology which prevailed during the latter part of the nineteenth century; but that this theory is now entirely out of date, and hopelessly inadequate for us. . . .  We are making scientific history very fast these days; and the specialist in some corner of science who keeps on humming a little tune to himself, quietly ignoring all this modern evidence against Evolution, is simply living in a fools’ paradise.  He will soon be so far behind that he will wake up some fine morning and find that he needs an introduction to the modern scientific world.

The audience didn’t buy it.  Price found himself heckled so mercilessly that he could not complete his presentation.  That London debacle was Price’s last public debate.  After that experience he focused his considerable energy on founding alternative scientific institutions to prevent future creationists from needing to convert mainstream scientists.

Back in those days, creationists and fundamentalist scientists still attempted to tell audiences that they represented the true mainstream of scientific discovery.  Such early creationists eagerly debated in a variety of settings in hope of convincing middle-of-the-road audiences that evolutionary science was not real science.

In that context, public debates held promise for both sides.  Creationists hoped to prove that they had better science.  Evolutionary scientists hoped to demonstrate the scientific vapidity of creationism.

These days, both sides have hardened.  Creationists these days are not unaware of the fact that their science does not represent the scientific mainstream.  Evolutionary scientists are not hoping to relieve creationists of their naïve ignorance.

Rather, both sides in these debates enter and exit with the same set ideas.  Each side knows who to trust on that stage and who to ignore.  No matter how persuasive Ken Ham can be, he doesn’t really hope to change Bill Nye’s mind.  Rather, this exercise merely serves to give each charismatic speaker the chance to gain a sliver of legitimacy and respectability in the opposite camp.

 

15 Comments
by Adam Laats on January 3, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Evolution/Creation, In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 3, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/01/03/to-debate-or-not-to-debate/

Guns and Bibles

School needs more of both.  At least according to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott.

In their continuing series of year-end quotations from conservatives, the Texas Freedom Network Insider publicized this gem from Abbott’s Facebook page:

Source: Greg Abbott

Source: Greg Abbott

For those of us who are trying to understand the intellectual world of educational conservatism, Abbott’s plea is a good place to start.  The give-and-take of comments that accompanied this eye-catching poster sums up lots of the perennial debate in school culture wars.

As one back-and-forth had it,

Person 1: Satan is having a POW-WOW in our country right now….the Anti-Christ is alive and well! WAKE UP AMERICA!!!

Person 2: Good they should not be taught in school. Bible is mythology and learn to shoot at a gun range.

Abbott’s call for more Bibles and more guns in schools may seem shocking to progressives like me, but it seems many conservatives want both.  Especially after each school shooting, we hear calls for more armed guards to protect the innocent.  And of course there is never any lack of tumult for increasing the use of Bibles with America’s public school students.

Here’s a question for all you readers out there: For those agree with Abbott’s call for more Bibles and guns in schools, which should come first?  That is, if you had to pick, which would improve schools more, guns or Bibles?

And for those who are shocked with Abbott’s post, here’s a very different question: what are you more scared of, more Bibles or more guns in public schools?

 

3 Comments
by Adam Laats on January 3, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible and Prayer in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 3, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/01/03/guns-and-bibles/

Nazis and Sex Crimes

What history should we teach to children? In the United States, conservatives tend to insist that history should be heroic, or at least not vicious and mean-spirited.  But for the losers of World War II, these questions have played out in different ways.

A couple of intriguing recent stories in the New York Times describe the culture-wars over history in Germany and Japan.  In each case, the ways schools and textbooks portray war history have raised hackles.

In Japan, one village refused to use the new triumphalist textbooks distributed by the central education ministry.  The new books, village leaders protested, presented a distorted story of the post-war Constitution.  New books whitewashed Japan’s violent and aggressive record, downplaying the number of people murdered in the rape of Nanking and disputing Japan’s policy of kidnapping women for use as military sex slaves.

In Germany, in contrast, young people have learned a great deal about the Holocaust and Germany’s collective culpability for its epochal crimes.  Camp survivors such as Laszlo Schwartz have become a central part of high-school education.

What about in the US of A?  History has been distorted by both right and left.  Politically motivated histories by conservatives such as David Barton or by the late lefty Howard Zinn have presented distorted visions of the nature of American history.

These debates have gone on for a long time.  As I argue in my upcoming book, conservatives have long offered alternative school histories.  In the 1920s, for example, the American Legion commissioned a patriotic textbook that promised to teach children a prouder story.

How are these American history disputes different from those in Germany or Japan?  In each case, it seems that national history itself has dictated the ways history has been taught.  In Germany, for example, de-Nazification proceeded fairly thoroughly and rapidly after the war.  No such purge took place in Japan, politically or culturally.  As a wartime winner, the United States never had any reckoning.  The closest parallel has been the long fight over Civil-War history, with southern partisans insisting on a heroic Confederacy.

Also different is the structure of schooling.  Japan and Germany both have central education ministries.  Issues of history in Japan, for example, are part and parcel of national politics.  One of the leading reasons for the new distorted history textbooks in that country, according to the New York Times, has been the ambitions of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.  As one researcher told the Times, “Classrooms are one place where [Abe] can appease ultraconservatives by taking a more firmly nationalist stance.”

In the USA, in contrast, there has not been a central educational decision-making body.  As a result, perhaps, history fights have taken place at all sorts of political levels.  In the 1990s, the US Senate flexed its culture-war muscles by decisively rejecting a set of national history standards.  Conservatives in that battle protested that left-wing academic historians neglected traditional knowledge and morals in favor of fashionable but vapid trends.  More often, local or state textbook commissions air out the bitter battles over the nature of America’s past.

What did you learn in your school textbooks?  Do America’s children learn a distorted past?

 

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by Adam Laats on January 2, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 2, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/01/02/nazis-and-sex-crimes/

Year-End Poll: America and Evolution

Do Americans think humans evolved?  Sorta.

Thanks to the watchful folks at the National Center for Science Education, we see a new year-end poll from the Pew Research Center.

The Pew folks talked to about 2,000 respondents over the phone.  All told, about sixty percent of them seem to accept evolution, while a third rejected it.

As always, the wording of these questions matters.  In this poll, respondents were asked if they thought humans or animals had “existed in their present form since the beginning of time,” or if they had “evolved over time.”

When interviewers put it that way, a significant majority of Americans seems to agree that humans or animals had evolved over time.  In contrast, when the Gallup pollsters ask people to pick between three options, a larger percentage–nearly half of respondents–tend to agree that “God created humans beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last ten thousand years or so.”

It seems Americans have an easier time agreeing that humans had evolved over time than they do agreeing that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”  Indeed, many of the respondents who agreed that humans or animals had evolved over time also believed that God had directed this process.

Breaking it down by demographic groups, we see some predictable results.  White evangelical Protestants tended to reject evolution in the largest numbers (64%).  Republicans tended to reject evolution more often than Democrats.

One surprise: no one seemed to care much if they were talking about human or non-human evolution.  In the past, as historians such as Ron Numbers have demonstrated, the sticking point of much resistance to evolution has been specifically human evolution.  In this poll, however, the answers did not change much when the questions were about human or animal evolution.

 

 

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by Adam Laats on December 31, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Evolution/Creation
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Posted by Adam Laats on December 31, 2013

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2013/12/31/year-end-poll-america-and-evolution/

Fundamentalist Ducks

Okay, okay, I admit it.  I’ve been itching to write something about the recent Duck Dynasty culture-war imbroglio.  But until now there didn’t seem to be much worth saying.  One sentence said it all: Famous redneck shows ugly blind spot in racial issues and homosexual identities.  Didn’t seem like much more needed talking about.

For those of you who live in caves, bearded patriarch Phil Robertson ruffled feathers with recent ignorant and hateful comments about homosexuals and racial history.  In all his Louisiana life, he told a GQ reporter, he never saw an African American who seemed upset about lacking basic civil rights.  And homosexuals, he opined, should learn to prefer vaginas to men’s anuses.  After all, as Robertson concluded with invincible logic, “I mean, come on, dudes!  You know what I’m saying?”

Until today, everything I’d read about the scandal either defended Robertson’s right to his theology or attacked him for his hate.  But this morning I came across the comments of the brainy conservative Rod Dreher in the pages of Time.com.  For those not familiar with Dreher’s story, he moved back to his small-town Louisiana roots from a go-go New York media career after a family tragedy.

Dreher hit the nail on the head.  While Dreher doesn’t agree with Robertson’s positions, he remarked on the ridiculously excessive shock expressed by many media mavens.  Too many of those “culture-makers,” Dreher lamented,

are often every bit as parochial as those they condemn, but flatter themselves that they are the tolerant, cosmopolitan ones. I have lived in Manhattan, and I live once again in my tiny south Louisiana hometown. To paraphrase Solzhenitsyn, the border between narrow-minded and tolerant runs not between city and country, North and South, degreed and uneducated, but down the middle of every human community and every human heart.

. . .

The Duck Dynasty mess revealed that not all fundamentalists live in the Bible Belt, and that some of the biggest hicks live in Hollywood. The Duckman’s win is a score for authentic diversity and pluralism in the public square, and a victory for the right to be wrong without being ruined.

Hear hear.

When I began my current job as a university professor, I gave a talk about my dissertation research.  That work—which became my first book—concerned the first generation of American fundamentalists.  I soon realized that my tolerant, cosmopolitan university audience contained more than its share of Dreher’s hip hicks.  Not the entire audience, by any means, but certainly an influential group.  These culture-makers did not hope to understand fundamentalists; they did not seem interested in puzzling out the intellectual world I had tried to portray.  Instead, they only rushed to demonstrate their shock and horror at the ideas of people very different from themselves.

At the end of the talk, one member of my academic audience raised her hand and asked in a frustrated tone, “What is WRONG with these people?”  Heads nodded throughout the room.  The person who asked the question was not dumb, was not ignorant.  She was a prolific researcher and dedicated teacher.  In fact, she had worked throughout her career to make schools more inclusive for all sorts of students.  Yet she saw no contradiction in dismissing the thinking of a large percentage of Americans as “these people” out of hand.

Like Dreher, I don’t think Robertson’s comments are worth talking about, much less defending.  But the reaction to his comments can tell us a good deal about the current state of America’s intellectual myopia.   It serves as a sobering reminder of the widespread and unacknowledged ignorance among many Americans about what America is really like.

 

1 Comment
by Adam Laats on December 29, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in In the News, Schools in Black and White, Teaching Sex and Sexuality
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Posted by Adam Laats on December 29, 2013

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2013/12/29/fundamentalist-ducks/

Does Wal-Mart Want More Jesus in Public Schools?

The Walton Family loves school vouchers.

For years, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune have pumped money into plans to privatize schooling in the US of A.  Most recently, we read that the Walton Family Foundation has donated six million bucks to the Alliance for School Choice.  Why?

The ASC has a track record of supporting vouchers.  Its enemies accuse it of being nothing but a front organization for “fundamentalist” schemes to re-religiousize public education.

Do the mega-rich Waltons hope to get more Jesus into America’s schools?

Readers of Bethany Moreton’s relatively recent book To Serve God and WalMart won’t be surprised to hear of the connection between conservative evangelical Protestantism and big-box retailing.  But even the most scathing critics of the Waltons’ educational policies have sometimes left out the religious angle.  Diane Ravitch, for example, blasted the Waltons for copying in education what Wal-Mart had achieved in retailing.  As she put it,

The foundation supports charters and vouchers, though it prefers vouchers. It seeks to create schools that are non-union and that are able to skim off students from the local public schools. In time, the local public schools will die, just as the Main Street stores died.

Other critics of the Waltons’ beneficence have focused more closely on the religious angle.  Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, for example, has long targeted both the Waltons and the Alliance for School Choice as leaders in the drive to sneak religion back into public schools through the back door of vouchers.  Rob Boston of Americans United, for instance, called ASC leader Betsy DeVos the “Four-Star General” leading a “Deceptive Behind-the-Scenes War on Public Schools and Church-State Separation.”

According to Boston, Devos is a “fundamentalist Christian and far-right political activist” with a sneaky goal: “nothing short of a radical re-creation of education in the United States, with tax-supported religious and other private schools replacing the traditional public school system.”

Here at ILYBYGTH, we have to ask the tricky question: what’s the relationship between free-marketism and Jesus?  Groups such as the ASC and the Walton Family Foundation seem committed to both.  In the realm of schooling, that means vouchers.  For many conservatives, vouchers seem to contain a triple promise.  They can weaken the grip of teachers’ unions by diverting tax money away from union-dominated public school systems.  They can bring more ol’-time religion into schooling by funding religious schools.  And they can give parents and families the magic wand of consumer choice.

It doesn’t seem as if there’s a logical or theological connection between these policy ideas.  That is, from my scanty understanding of Christianity, free-market principles don’t seem to be a central part of traditional evangelical theology.  Yet in school policy as in other areas, it seems Americans have historically connected capitalism with Christian virtue.

And there’s one other puzzle we need to suss out.  If these privatization campaigns are about both Jesus and capitalism, why don’t promoters mention either?  When the Alliance for School Choice tells us about itself, it does not mention religion or the panacea of the marketplace.  Why not?

For critics, this is all part of the ASC’s “sneak attack” on secular public schools.  The ASC wants more Jesus and more Milton Friedman, this line of argument goes, but wraps those goals in anodyne calls for more school choice for low-income families.  But why would conservatives try to hide their love for public religion or for capitalism?  Most conservatives make no secret of their goals.  Why would they hide their love for public religiosity or market-ism in this case?

 

3 Comments
by Adam Laats on December 27, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible and Prayer in the Classroom, Freedom & the Free Market
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Posted by Adam Laats on December 27, 2013

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2013/12/27/does-wal-mart-want-more-jesus-in-public-schools/

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