The perils of indoctrination

Can I clarify something here?

Learning about something is not the same as learning to believe in it.

As an example, in an introductory political science class, I would undoubtedly study communism.  I might even read Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.  This does not mean that I now have no choice but to become a raving communist, ready to leave behind capitalism and go to North Korea to join in the worship of Dear Leader.  In fact, it could well have the opposite effect; my reading of those books might leave me thinking, "This is all bullshit."

Or I might decide that it sounds right.  It could go either way.  The point is, having been exposed to the communist school of thought means I have the choice of making up my own mind -- provided I have been given enough tools of rational evaluation to decide what makes the best sense.

This is a point that has evidently escaped Fox News commentator Todd Starnes and evangelical pastor Greg Locke, both of whom have gone public in the last couple of days with statements that any inclusion of material about Islam in public school curricula amounts to "indoctrination."  Locke went even further, saying that Christian parents need to see to it that their children completely refuse to participate.

"You need to tell your kids, ‘Take an F for the class,’ Locke said.  "Because I’d rather fail in man’s class and get an A+ in God’s class.  And we need to have some kids that have some character, that stand up.  Because we do not serve the god of the nation is Islam [sic].  We do not serve Allah."

Starnes said parents are up in arms, too. 

"'I am not pleased that my 12-year-old was taught the Islamic conversion prayer,' parent Brandee Porterfield told me," Starnes wrote in an op-ed piece.  "Joy Ellis was a bit fired up, too.  She discovered the Islamic lessons after examining her daughter’s class work.  'I was very angry that my child, my Christian child, was made to profess that Allah was the only God,' she told me."

"Could you imagine the outcry from liberal activists if the students had been forced to write 'Jesus is Lord'?" Starnes went on to say.

Starnes gives the impression that the state standards include Islam only, and ignore Christianity completely, a claim that is outright false -- the curriculum guidelines in Tennessee (the state in question) list nearly equal numbers of concepts from Christianity and Islam, and in fact, the sixth grade standards include zero references to Islam, but the following about Christianity:

[Students will be able to ] describe the origins and central features of Christianity... 

• monotheism 

• the belief in Jesus as the Messiah and God’s Son 

• the concept of resurrection 

• the concept of salvation 

• belief in the Old and New Testaments 

• the lives, teachings and contributions of Jesus and Paul 

• the relationship of early Christians to officials of the Roman Empire 

I wonder what credence these people would give to an Islamic family who complained about the sixth-grade curriculum and claimed it was "Christian indoctrination?"

Locke then followed Starnes into the Unintentional Irony Zone with the following statement:

[Teaching about Islam] is nothing more than absolute brainwashing of religion.  And so, I’m telling our folks, don’t take the test.  Keep your kids home from school...  [T]hey have to learn about Islam and Mohammed and how it all came about and about the Holy Koran and the Five Pillars of Islam and how they pray and when they pray and where they pray and why they pray and about pilgrimages and all of this!  That’s a bunch of bunk, we do not serve the same God.

So not only are Starnes and Locke lying about the facts, what they're saying is untrue on a deeper level.  Learning what the Islamic conversion prayer says is not the same as declaring that it represents the truth.  In a good social studies curriculum, children are taught about a great many political, social, and religious systems, and they grow to see how those institutions have shaped human history.  The point isn't conversion, the point is broadening of the mind.

And really, how likely is it that one unit of a forty minute social studies class in elementary school is going to profoundly alter a child's religious beliefs?  Consider how many students have been exposed to Greek mythology -- Zeus, Hera, Athena, and the rest of the lot -- during their school careers.

How many of these students then went on to spend the rest of their lives sacrificing goats to Apollo in their back yards?

Once again, you have to wonder what they're so afraid of.  Are their children so weak in their beliefs that even learning about Islam is sufficient to make the whole house of cards come crashing down in ruin?  Or do they fear that Islam is, at its heart, more attractive than Christianity?  Or that any opening of the mind provides a gap through which Satan might leap?

Whichever it is, their demands that schoolchildren not be exposed to other cultures and other belief systems comes at a cost.  Deprived of any knowledge of beliefs outside of their own will result in another generation of narrow-minded, paranoid bigots, living in a little circle of their own fearful certainty, not even wanting to admit that any ideas different from their own might be worth knowing.

And that, honestly, might be what Starnes and Locke are really trying to accomplish.

Fiddling while the education system burns

It's late February, and if you're a teacher, you know what that means:

Time to start worrying if you'll have a job next year.

In my own school district, we're just starting to see the proposed cuts being announced.  And while out of respect to my friends and colleagues whose jobs are on the line I won't give any details about what's come out thus far, I will say: it ain't gonna be pretty.

The problem is, it hasn't been pretty for years.  This is the seventh year in a row that my little upstate New York school district has had major staffing cuts.  We've seen classes dropped, curriculum lost.  Veteran teachers are being reduced to half-time, are teaching in two different buildings, are teaching four and five different subjects, are teaching classrooms in which every available seat is occupied.  Other, less fortunate individuals have simply been axed.  And every year we're told that the administration is really, really sorry about all of this, that they and the School Board and the Board of Regents and the State Department of Education have the students' interest in mind and are doing their level best to Keep Excellence in Education.

When are we, as a nation, going to wake up and point this out as the falsehood it is?

Oh, it's not that any of them are setting out to harm children; but if that's the ultimate outcome, does that really matter?  Shouldn't someone who is responsible for the oversight of education recognize this, and have the balls to point it out?  And, perhaps, do something about it?  But no; we're stuck with the same antiquated system of school funding, that places a stranglehold on poor and rural schools, that puts local school boards in the Hobson's choice of either raising property taxes or else cutting school staffing to the bone.

And school boards are elected positions, and the votes come from residents, who pay property taxes.  Guess how the decision almost always plays out?

The problem is that this kind of thinking -- today's dollar, today's tax increase, today's elementary school student -- ignores the fact that schools represent an investment in the future.  We don't know yet which third-grader is going to be the next Krishna Shenoy, finding a way to give quadriplegics the ability to walk again.  Which will be a Jocelyn Brown, who developed a device to help infants with compromised respiratory systems to breathe.  Who could be a Paige Cramer, who discovered that an old cancer drug could be used to ameliorate the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's.

And we're going to need the Shenoys, the Browns, the Cramers.  As a society -- and, perhaps, as a species -- we will face in the next couple of decades some of the most significant challenges we have ever seen.  Type-2 diabetes is rising so fast worldwide that doctors are calling it an "epidemic."  The effects of anthropogenic climate change are being felt across the globe.  (And sorry, deniers; it is happening, and it is anthropogenic.  The US National Academy of Sciences and the UK Royal Society issued a joint paper just yesterday that was unequivocal.  Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, said, "We have enough evidence to warrant action being taken on climate change; it is now time for the public debate to move forward to discuss what we can do to limit the impact on our lives and those of future generations.")  Supplies of fresh water and clean air are imperiled; we are using fossil fuels and other resources at a rate that is unsustainable.

And what are our politicians focusing on?  Here in the US, state legislators are monkeying around with bills in twelve states that are versions of the "Turn Away the Gays" bill that was just vetoed in Arizona.  Think about it; our elected officials think that reenacting the Jim Crow laws is a higher priority than assuring that our children receive a solid education. 

This is worse than fiddling while Rome burns.  This is having a Ku Klux Klan meeting while Rome burns.

The problem is, much of the benefit from education is (1) unquantifiable, and (2) realized only in the future.  So, to our legislators, and (unfortunately) to many voters, it doesn't exist.  If you can't show that the damage being done here and now by funding cuts to schools is causing a drop in the Almighty Standardized Test Scores, then we must be doing just fine.  Never mind the larger class sizes; never mind the loss of electives, music, and the arts.  Never mind the demoralized teachers who are right now reconsidering their choice of a career.  Never mind the students who, if you don't afford them the opportunity for learning and expanding their horizons, will never accomplish what they could have accomplished, for their own good and for the good of humanity.

[image from a ca. 1899 postcard, courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

For some, that's not an immediate enough problem to warrant doing anything about it.  Easier to keep doing what we've always done, figuring that we'll find our way forward somehow.  But remember; like canoes, societies have tipping points.  They don't often flip as spectacularly as canoes do, which means that we can pass the point of no return without being aware of it.  The signs of an incipient crash are already here; failing inner-city schools, poor rural school districts that are merging in order to survive or else going bankrupt, overcrowded classrooms with nothing to offer but the bare-bones graduation requirements.  We have to ask, as a society, if we are willing to accept this -- seeing a whole generation growing up without the skills, knowledge, enrichment, creativity, and critical thinking ability that will be needed to lead us forward.

If the answer is no, and yet we fail to act, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Battleground Texas, and the war over public schools

"We just want teachers to teach the controversy."

"Teachers should not be indoctrinating students with either viewpoint; they should teach students how to think, not what to think."

"Present both sides of the question, and let students decide."

These are the rallying cries of the ongoing push by young-earth creationists to insinuate their views into science classrooms nationwide.  And on the surface, it all sounds Fair And Balanced, doesn't it?  It paints the scientists as the narrow-minded ones, the ones who would love nothing better than to pull the wool over students' eyes, the ones who give only their own skewed viewpoint and pretend that it is the truth.

A report was just issued yesterday by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund that shows this claim to be the bullshit it is -- that once allowed a foothold in the public schools, evangelical Christians subvert, indoctrinate, and ignore any kind of standards for critical thinking.  If you have ever been tempted by the evenhanded-appearing "teach the controversy" rhetoric, consider this.

In 2007, lawmakers in Texas passed a bill that encouraged public school teachers to include in their curricula courses about the "influence of the bible in history and literature."  Once again, this sounds like it's fair enough, doesn't it?  After all, the bible has had an immense effect on history (most of it bad, in my opinion), and ignoring the role of religion in shaping culture is absurd.  But this gave the zealots just the foothold they needed.  According to the report from TFNEF, which was authored by a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, the 57 public school districts and three charter schools that introduced bible-based courses into state-funded curricula accomplished the following:

• Using instructional materials that teach that racial diversity can be traced back to Noah's sons
• Implementing courses that describe the Rapture as a likely future event, and discuss whether it will occur before or after the return of Jesus and his thousand-year reign on Earth
• Using materials that portray Judaism as a "flawed belief system" that is completed and transcended by Christianity
• Using materials that explicitly state that the bible is the inerrant word of god, and compare conventional historical timelines with those in the bible -- concluding, of course, that the bible is more accurate
• Using "textbooks" that explicitly evangelize -- one of them states, in its preface, "May this study be of value to you. May you fully come to believe that 'Jesus is the Christ, the son of God.'  And may you have ‘life in His name.'"
• Teaching that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and that evolution is a "discredited theory"
• Implementing courses that require the extensive memorization of bible verses
• Using such highly-rigorous support materials as Hanna-Barbera cartoons on biblical stories and a "documentary" claiming that UFO/alien sightings are angels

Outraged?  I sincerely hope so.  I also hope that this will show what I've claimed all along -- that the motives of these religious extremists have nothing whatsoever to do with balance, whatever they claim to the contrary.  They see this issue as a holy war, being fought on the battlefield of the public school system, with the minds, hearts, and souls of innocent children at stake.  We rationalists, atheists, secularists, and evolutionists are the enemy, motivated by Satan, and we are to be fought at every turn, by whatever means are necessary.

So, I will reiterate what I've said so many times; this is not about rational argument.  These people are not interested in argument except insofar as it can introduce into people's minds the incorrect impression that there is doubt about evolution and the antiquity of the Earth.  In fact, these zealots cannot be argued with at all -- not by any reasonable definition of the word "argument" -- because they do not accept evidential grounds as the means to support a proposition.  And they will never, ever give up, because to them, giving up is letting Satan win.

We do agree about one thing, though.  This is war.  And it's one that that the rationalists damn well better commit themselves to winning.  There are countries in the world that are run on the precepts of religion, where questioning the paradigm is considered evil, where antiquated ideas from a human-written book are considered to be infallible.  To name a few: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Mali, Algeria.

Oh, wait, that's not fair, you may be saying... that's because those governments base their laws in the precepts from the Qu'ran.  The bible is different, right?

Read the book of Leviticus, and write down how many of the statutes listed therein you'd be willing to live under as legal mandates.  Then come back and we'll talk.