Educator ripped for her book calling for Christianity in school and politics

Educator ripped for her book calling for Christianity in school and politics

A member of the State Board of Education is drawing fire from a watchdog group because of her critical views on public education in a new book she has written that advocates more Christianity in the public square.

Sometimes, it's hard to avoid that feeling where you want to bang your head into the wall because of how stupid people are. Or bang their head into a wall. Depends on how stupid they are, I guess. In this case, despite being an educator, she's pretty stupid.

She calls public education a "subtly deceptive tool of perversion." The establishment of public schools is unconstitutional and even "tyrannical," she writes in the book, because it threatens the authority of families, granted by God through Scripture, to direct the instruction of their children.

It's fine if you want to have a debate over whether public school are constitutional, I think that's really a valid question. It's NOT valid to argue that the reason they are unconstitutional is because of magic and superstition. Ooops, I meant "god" and "scripture".

Dunbar endorses a belief system requiring "any person desiring to govern have a sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God in order to rightly govern."

Now, this is where the constitution really does come in, and it's very clear. Article VI, Section 3 states that

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

It's not even one of those ambiguous things. It's pretty clear, the constitution is right, and she's wrong.

"I don't think most people in the churches are aware of the venom against Christian America," she said. "So, it's more of a wake-up call to be informed, to be involved. They are fine with the body of Christ as long as we stay hidden in our four walls of the church, sitting quietly in our pews.

"But if we become civically involved or active in public policy issues, then we're going to be shot down," Dunbar said.

That's right, it's a little hang-up we have called the First Amendment. Separation of church and state: it works for everyone if you let it be. You're absolutely right, Ms. Dunbar, we are fine with you as long as you keep your religion within the walls of your church. No problems at all, we won't try to come and take it from you. But when you try to bring it to politics, we will fight you with everything we have.

Murder vs. faith-healing (or doing nothing)

The FFRF has a new press release with their perspective of the death of Madeline Kara Neumann from diabetic ketoacidosis while her parents did nothing while praying for her. I fully agree with their strongly-worded press release, and the authors seem to be putting up with the same sort of fractal wrongness that I talked about last week. These parents, their supporters, and frankly the Wisconsin Legislature, are wrong at such a fundamental level that they can't even understand why brights are so saddened and enraged by this.

What's even more appalling is the ambivalent reaction: "Ethicists say case unclear," reports the Wausau Daily Herald. The Herald quoted bioethicist Dr. Norman Fost of the University of Wisconsin Medical school warning that it's important not to be moralistic or pass judgment on parents who think they can heal a child through prayer: "They believe they're helping their child; they love their child, and they believe prayer has an effect."

However deluded the parents may be, the rest of us need not countenance or indulge that dangerous delusion.

Dean Zuleger, the administrator of the Village of Weston, was quoted by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel saying, "There is a general sense of grief and sadness. Because I know the family a bit, there is a great deal of concern for their well-being." The parents' well-being?

"Death draws out difficult issues" read a headline in the Journal Sentinel. While Madeline's drawn-out death, involving nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, weight loss and weakness, is very difficult to read about, there is nothing difficult at all about deciding where the blame lies. "The prayer of faith will heal the sick," according to James 5:15. The fault lies in society's laudatory attitude toward a "holy book" which teaches superstition and faith-healing, whose passages are latched onto by bible literalists, and whose obedience to such injunctions has been given a pass in the criminal statutes of many states.

Hattip to Friendly Atheist for the update

Certifying Parents - WSJ.com

Certifying Parents - WSJ.com

Apparently Nebraska isn't the only state grappling with what sorts of regulation is needed for homeschooling. The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece last week responding to a California judge's ruling that requires a teaching credential to teach children, even if they are your own and even if they are homeschooled.

This case is different from the Nebraska one in that Nebraska's issue was raised by the legislature, not the judiciary. Not that it makes a difference to the legions of homeschoolers who have been gnashing their teeth over this infringement of their rights. Or at least if you listen to all the hyperbole. For some reason, any attempt to regulate or quantify results of homeschooled kids is met with large-scale opposition.

As I've mentioned before, I don't believe that there's a "bright-line" between who's right and wrong on these issues. Of course parents should have the right to raise their children as they see fit, barring any sort of abuse. I'm just not sure what ought to count as abuse. Is it young-earth creationism? In any case, this issue is a useful one to tease out whatever particular biases your news source has. For example, the Wall Street Journal opines:

That so many families turn to home schooling is a market solution to a market failure -- namely the dismal performance of the local education monopoly. According to the Home School Legal Defense Association, the majority of states have low to moderate levels of regulation for home schools, an environment that has allowed the option to flourish, especially in the South and Western U.S. Between 1999 and 2003, the rate of home-schooling increased by 29%.

For some parents, the motive for home schooling is religious; others want to protect their kids from gangs and drugs. But the most-cited reason is to ensure a good education. Home-schooled students are routinely high performers on standardized academic tests, beating their public school peers on average by as much as 30 percentile points, regardless of subject. They perform well on tests like the SAT -- and colleges actively recruit them both for their high scores and the diversity they bring to campus.

In 1994, a federal attempt to require certification of parent-teachers went down in flames as hundreds of thousands of calls lit up phone banks on Capitol Hill. The movement has since only grown larger and better organized, now conservatively estimated at well over a million nationwide. But what they can't accomplish legislatively, unions are now trying to achieve by diktat from the courts.

So, to them, homeschooling is both an issue of free markets and inappropriate judicial activism. The homepage for the "Homeschool Legal Defense Association" showcases this perspective:

So clearly to them, it's both a religious and a constitutional issue. Although in the rhetoric about various homeschooling issues, the HSLDA invariable asserts that homeschooling is a "fundamental" right, apparently their website argues that it is a right that requires constitutional protection. I'm terrified what constitutional changes they are seeking, especially if Dr. Dobson is on board. Here's the text of the proposed constitutional amendment:

DRAFT PARENTAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT
FOR THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION

SECTION 1
The liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children is a fundamental right.

SECTION 2
Neither the United States nor any state shall infringe upon this right without demonstrating that its governmental interest as applied to the person is of the highest order and not otherwise served.

SECTION 3
No treaty nor any source of international law may be employed to supersede, modify, interpret, or apply to the rights guaranteed by this article.

What do you think? It appears to be ambiguous, over-reaching, and completely unneccessary to me.

Biblically Correct Tours of Science Museums

Thanks to Dangerous Intersection for the tip on this ABC News Report about a group that offers tours of Denver area places like the zoo or the museum, but do so from a "biblical perspective". Which, of course, means "wrong and utterly mistaken perspective". As far as I can tell, this does little more than poison the well for these student's future education. This is the problem with homeschooling... at some point I believe it becomes child-abuse. I don't know quite where that point is, as I mentioned here, but it's certainly doing them a disservice. Here's a lesson:

"If you want to map out life through time, the fossil record is really great for doing that," he continued. "There's a really nice record of what happened on this planet from the first real life forms we know of about 3.4 billion years ago until today."

Out on the museum floor, Jack and Carter stopped the group in front of a window display that contains samples of sandstone that have ripples created by water and fossils of ancient life. Bill Jack asked his group, "How do they date the fossil? By the layer in which they find it. They date the layer by the fossil and the fossil by the layer," he said. "That's circular reasoning."

In the next moment he stepped past and turned his back to a display on radiometric dating, the method by which scientists determine the age of rocks through the rate of decay of their natural radioactivity.

When later asked why he skipped the display, Jack said simply, "We can't cover everything."

Inside the museum's expansive bone and fossil storage room, Johnson said, "They have no clue about how accurate it is … Now it's plus or minus a tenth of a percent."

How does +/- .1% equate to "no idea how accurate it is"? I guess they haven't covered statistics in their homeschooling yet. Ha, you've got to love the chief curator's response. "Regardless of what the tour guide is saying, some of those kids are going to start thinking for themselves," says Kirk Johnson, chief curator.

Survey Finds Teenagers Ignorant on Basic History and Literature Questions - New York Times

Survey Finds Teenagers Ignorant on Basic History and Literature Questions - New York Times

Along the same lines as my post last week on the willful ignorance of the American population, comes this story from the New York Times, which indicates that

Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked basic history and literature questions in a phone survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one in four said Columbus sailed to the New World some time after 1750, not in 1492.

The survey results, released on Tuesday, demonstrate that a significant proportion of teenagers live in “stunning ignorance” of history and literature, said the group that commissioned it, Common Core.

Then, Friendly Atheist ran this story about the frustration an assistant English professor faces as the essay assignment he hands out inevitably is returned by students who read Jesus into everything (but specifically literature of the Romantic Period).

Three papers in a row this evening found references to poets' beliefs that were both counter to all evidence in their biographies, to what was discussed in class, and which are completely ahistorical: the kind of personal teddy-bear god that has inf(l)ected a lot of popular American religious discourse--especially for teens. I learned that when Wordsworth speaks about nature in Tintern Abbey, he really means "Jesus," that the Tyger solves the problem of evil because it shows us that all of creation is part of God's Work, God's Plan and God's Love. The third paper references the author's desire to find "the presence of God in Blake's writing," but then finally acknowledges that this isn't an appropriate strategy. I'm not entirely sure why the author felt the need to signpost a rejected interpretive strategy, but I wish more students understood this.

I understand that many students with an evangelical upbringing will naturally transpose the ineffable and infinite of the sublime into the vocabulary of "my god is an awesome god," and I tend to understand this issue a bit more, often with a simple comment like "take care not to transpose your 21st century beliefs onto 200-year-old texts." But the papers where students spend the whole essay arguing that a poem about nature is really about Jesus? They unnerve me.

Are they witnessing to me? Do they believe that they are taking a stand? Are they so deeply immersed in a kind of totalizing theology that they can imagine no other way through which to view experience?

Are you seeing the trend yet?? As to the last question posed by Horace (the Assistant Professor of English) I would tend to argue that the students expressing this kind of nonsense are not so much "immersed" in this type of theology as they are bound by it. Like Chinese foot-binding, this restriction of intellectual free thought has weakened and atrophied the students' critical abilities and reasoning. This anti-intellectualism naturally comes from religion, especially the more religion resists empirical evidence. That is, the more they rely upon "God did it" or "Because the Bible says so" as explanations for the voids in their knowledge base, the more those seem like acceptable answers to any question, regardless of whether the answer is "known" by the rest of the world (e.g. evolution).

*sigh*

In a possibly related matter, parents that home-school their children in Nebraska are bitterly opposed to a new state legislative bill that would require their children to pass a test above the 50% percentile. If they fail to pass the exam, the child would be required to attend an accredited school. How very draconian.

I have been thinking quite some time about where the proper limit is between security and liberty. The debate over intelligence gathering by the administrative branch, religion and schools, abortion, taxes, etc... are all, at their root, questions over the proper role of government and the ways in which it is permissible or advisable to interact with the individual. Accountant by Day has a couple of good posts on the issue, here and here. Homeschooling is one of those issues that are tricky to me. On the one hand, they are your children and you ought to be able to raise them with the values you deem appropriate. On the other hand, if those values or teachings are handicapping the child for life in twenty-first century Earth, do you still have the same unfettered right to teach them any damn way you please? Where do you draw the line?

The homeschooling experiment really gained traction with the evangelical Christian community. They thought the schools were too godless, and figured they better take their kids education into their own hands. Fair enough, I'd rather you take your kids out than try to change public schools (back?) into Christian indoctrination camps. But I wonder why they are opposed to having their children meet some kind of minimum standard? I just don't get it. Sorry, off on a tangent there, the amusing thing really is that now there are atheist homeschoolers that are worried about the amount of religion that their kids are still getting in school, or even facing persecution over their atheism. But do you see the contradiction? Christian parents think the schools aren't Christian enough, atheist parents think the schools are too Christian. Could they both be right?