The proposed curriculum overhaul was released a week after the Texas GOP proposed requiring the Bible to be taught in public schools. School districts that opt to use them will get more funding.
Elementary school curriculum proposed this week would infuse new state reading and language arts lessons with teachings on the Bible, marking the latest push by Texas Republicans to put more Christianity in public schools.
The Texas Education Agency released the thousands of pages of educational materials this week. They have been made available for public viewing and feedback and, if approved by the State Board of Education in November, will be available for public schools to roll out in August of 2025. Districts will have the option of whether to use the materials, but will be incentivized to do so with up to $60 per student in additional funding.
Aight, so long as we’re including other religious texts and having the class be a deep dive into similarities and differences and what might make the “human condition” between all of them, I’m game.
Oh no? Just American Christianity? Sounds like something that goes against the Constitution there.
sips tea
That’s how religious classes went in the Catholic school I went to.
Had a legit Catholic priest as my teacher, he educated us in the history and beliefs of all major and quite a few minor religions (and some extinct ones) and not once told us any one of them was better than the other or we should chose Catholicism over anything else.
It was mostly just History class but rather than “what happened” as the context, “what did people believe”.
Weirdly Catholic schools in America are often the least conservative and pushy on doctrine. I went to a Catholic school in NC and had the same experience essentially. Never got any brimstone and the priest had a few academic lectures on parts of the Bible.
From my understanding, most Catholic schools are very good about core curriculums. They just fail abysmally at sex education.
The one I went to wasn’t HS but they did great at adolescent development, including sexual development. They also never spoke about contraception, masturbation or abortion in sermons, lectures or classes.
They prefer mandatory practical training in that regard …
Same, MA in the 80s and 90s; very solid science and social studies/civics too. There was a bit of bias perhaps in the lessons about Israel, but mostly about how Gaza and the West Bank were “contested” and how the Dome of the Rock was built on the former Temple of the Mount site. All of that was in the “Religion” class though, and was pretty middle of the road on taking sides, although from what I remember it really didn’t cover the Nakba or anything (but maybe I wasn’t paying attention for that part, it was middle school Religion class lol)
Jesuit school?
Nah, all schools in my home town are Ursuline schools with the one I went to named after Saint Amandina, who was an Ursuline nun, as she was from the part of town the founders of the school were from.
These nuns have a nack for education and healthcare (a crapton of hospitals here are Amandina founded) and if I recall correctly, even founded some liberal arts schools in the US at some point.
From what I understand from the nuns I’ve been in contact with through the years, they aren’t as bookish as Jesuits, but are 100% behind the idea that “if you teach people the whole picture, they will eventually find God” as the sheer wonder of the universe to them can only mean their deity exists.
Rather than the US Christian way of “indoctrinate to the level of making some people incapable of interacting with a modern society, so they have no choice but to believe whatever we believe”.
i went to high school in Texas in the 90s. One of the options for senior English was “the Bible as and in literature”, where they did what it says on the tin - studied the christian bible as a work of literature, and also ways the bible was used in literature.
it was an aggressively non-religious class that focused on the bible because of its cultural importance, and some of my friends that started out nominally christian stopped identifying as such after reading the bible for class (some of them for the first time ever).
That’s how you teach (just) the bible in school. Not whatever the hell they are doing now.
No, none of them, ever. Without that rule you’ll get preferential and biased teaching with a smidgen of others that are required. This method is how you get full blown religious schooling veiled in false equality.
The Constitution only matters if there are people that will enforce the Constitution. We’ve purged all those people from government.