[Disclosure: I have worked with Florida and Oklahoma on their ELA and social studies standards.]
To many non-Jews and non-Christians, the actions of these states look like proselytizing, the equivalent of the establishment of a state religion. Some might say that if the Bible gets time in the school day, other religions should, too. If all religions can’t be represented, then no religions should be allowed.
The argument has the virtue of simplicity, and it certainly meets the diversity criterion, which still has great authority in education circles even though no empirical evidence of its learning benefits has surfaced. However, the choice of what to teach is not a matter of equality or secularity, but rather one of learning benefit. It is a matter of what young Americans need to learn in terms of fully understanding the events and leading figures’ words and actions in the history of their country.
From the perspective of learning early American history, if you had to choose one book from all of American history, the book that was read by the most people and the one that influenced the most powerful people, what book would you choose? The answer is obvious: the King James Bible. Back in the colonial era and the early republic, most households had one. Every American who went to a Protestant church or camp meeting, or who was caught up in the First or Second Great Awakening, or who sat for lessons in reading and writing while a child—all of them heard King James quoted again and again.
The metaphors and cadences of the Good Book echoed in the mind of Abraham Lincoln, the verse of Walt Whitman, and the oratory of hundreds of politicians on the campaign trail. Masters who led their slaves in Bible study used it. Theologians and pastors filled their tracts with its phrases. No book holds as prominent a place in American history. During the debates over the drafting of the Constitution, commentators inside and outside Philadelphia quoted Leviticus all the time. Even today one hears in secular discourse allusions to Noah’s Ark, Cain and Abel, the Good Samaritan, the road to Damascus, the patience of Job, and so on.
What this means is that a student who passes through middle school and high school without exposure to Bible stories and language is inadequately educated. If she goes to college and takes a freshman course that has her read speeches by Lincoln, Booker T. Washington, William Jennings Bryan, and Martin Luther King, Jr., she will be at a disadvantage. The student sitting next to her who got some King James in junior and senior year of high school will pick up Biblical references in those works, but she won’t. The banning of Bible materials from her schooling because of the “separation” principle will have given her a partial sense of her nation’s past, a misleading one.
Let’s applaud the governors, legislators, and education leaders for not letting a faulty dogma prevent them from building a better curriculum and equipping high school graduates with the cultural literacy they will need at the next level. Biblical knowledge will serve them well in college courses in history, civics, English, art history, ethics, religion, theater, and political philosophy. Banning the Bible from public schools is miseducation. It is to let an ideology determine the formation of the young, a process whose results are all too evident at the present time on college campuses, in the streets, and on social media.
