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Of all the possible reactions to the Texas Board of Education’s mandate to teach certain biblical stories in public schools, from its stringently secular critics to its classical-education-minded apostles, the ends of the spectrum tend toward opposite pitfalls.
Advocates of the board’s decision appear uncharacteristically optimistic about a change in curricula’s potential to rear a generation of liberally studied citizens in the Ciceronian mold. Uncharacteristic, in comparison to more typical right-wing attitudes toward public schools, which have been quite skeptical. Perhaps rightly so. In the United States, student outcomes are lagging behind those of other developed countries.
Setting aside the religious question, it is difficult to contend against the quality of the other proposed readings or the valuable experience gained in mere exposure to them, which include works by Homer, Shelley and Tocqueville — all of whom were unhappily absent from my Hoosier high school experience.
But it is equally difficult to imagine that content is the deepest-rooted problem in our education system. When U.S. literacy has dipped so low compared to other countries, it is worth asking what must first be done so that students can read these works.
It is quite fashionable to bemoan American literacy rates, however.
Complaining of compatriots’ reading skills is also quite perennial and, perhaps, as often overblown. What is less chic is lamenting that, even if students can read, they frequently do not enjoy anything assigned to them and, more or less openly, resent it. This problem, too, is perennial. In “Confessions,” penned in the late fourth century, St. Augustine admits to a lifelong grudge against “The Odyssey,” which he developed as a schoolboy.
Enough of my peers felt similarly about the little Shakespeare that was required of them that conservative supporters of such measures as Texas’s — many of whom are evangelicals and hope, quite reasonably, that their fellow Americans come to the faith — must consider not only the effects of compulsory reading of the Bible, even as a historical text, on students, but on Holy Writ itself.
On r/atheism, some commenters wondered, with acute perception into the adolescent psyche, how quickly school-issued Bibles would be graffitied by young scholars of baser humor.
Students’ personal responses are a problem, lacking a sure answer, which plagues lessons regardless of their subject. Though, how deeply it is felt depends on one’s opinion of the educators who present the material.
As we said, conservatives’ sentiments toward public school teachers have been increasingly suspicious in recent years. And if the conservative is Catholic, such suspicion is historically justifiable. The universal presence of the Bible — in the Protestant King James translation — and private biblical interpretation in public schools when Irish, German and French immigrants arrived in the U.S. gave rise to the modern Catholic school.
Catholics’ battle to remove the Bible from public schools in the 19th century, which they won in several states that banned private education, resembles contemporary progressives’ fight to keep the Bible out. But circumstances somewhat differ. Measures to restore the Bible’s place in public education, such as Texas’s mandate and the one proposed in Indiana, nominally at least, focus on the text’s historical significance in American civics — which it does have — rather than its potential to engender faith or the moral virtues. Accordingly, critics risk insensitivity toward religion’s integral part in civic culture, a part the Christian religion, historically, largely fulfilled in the U.S.
To paraphrase the French prelate Jean Cardinal Daniélou, we cannot cleanly partition the exterior and interior life. There must be an alliance between prayer and politics, in whatever form we find them at a specific time and place. The thrust of Daniélou’s argument, in his 1967 book “Prayer as a Political Problem,” was that religious expression responds to a vital yearning in the human being and that it is the government’s role, not to affirm the truth of specific creeds, but to steer away from policies that would render spirituality the privilege of a few leisurely citizens.
George Washington emphasized religion’s public significance in his Farewell Address, writing that, among the instruments that assist in procuring political prosperity, “religion and morality are indispensable.” A survey of prominent American political figures illustrates the creative force of religion in politics and culture. For many, it was the Bible that inspired, for good (see Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or President Gerald Ford's bicentennial speech) or ill. With a changing religious environment, other scriptures increasingly contribute to our civic life as well (see New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani).
No doubt in an ideal world, students would graduate literate in religion’s political and cultural impact on the U.S., as much as in Shakespeare’s mark on our language. I would be delighted to see students be given the opportunity to encounter more meaning-laden topics in K–12 classes. But our world may be bound to become a post-literate one. The effort to address that, as all other academic efforts ultimately must, including the one Texas hopes to achieve, must begin in the first schoolhouse, the home.
Eric Cannon (he/him) is a junior studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government. He wanted to include a pun using the quotes “Never the twain shall meet” and “Let not man put asunder.” Alas, it did not fit.
