Fact, Faith and Education

The Middle East:  Schools in ISIS controlled cities are being forced to change their curriculums.   Art, music, history and literature are "permanently annulled." Philosophy and chemistry have been eliminated.  Pictures deemed un-Islamic have been torn from textbooks. 

In the name of "eliminating ignorance," ISIS has made it clear that the teaching of modern biology and evolution is banned.   They are to be replaced with "religious sciences."

     

Our Conservative States:  Money taken from education budgets has resulted in art and music being eliminated in many schools.  In literature classes, recent months have seen conservative states move to ban classics like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath, The Call of the Wild, Of Mice and Men and The Color Purple from high school classrooms. 

In states like Texas, conservative leaning school boards, with the support of Republican legislators are attempting to re-write history texts to reflect their own brand of patriotism--a brand that discourages dissent, emphasizes Republican leaders, skims over historical moments in the civil rights era, largely ignores Hispanic contributions and calls the U.S. a "Constitutional Republic" rather than a "Democratic society." It also calls for more focus on the Biblical and Christian traditions of the first Europeans to settle in America.

School boards, especially in the Bible belt, are testing the constitutional limits of prayer in school. They have argued for the teaching of creationism while presenting evolution--the basis of all modern biological sciences, including geology, genetics, paleontology--as an unproven hypothesis. 

what eye thynk:  I can't help but see the similarities in ISIS' and American conservatives' education goals.  History is fact.  You can't ignore it like ISIS, or change it like Texas.  Eliminating literature that does not fit your narrow vision of acceptable will only result in students with no whole-world experience, a populace of followers in a world in need of leaders who can think and relate to those beyond their personal clique.  

But it is the coerced emphasis on religion over science that demonstrates how close our conservative Christians are to the core ideology of conservative Islamists.  One culture is  attempting to legislate faith by eliminating access to secular knowledge.  The other is attempting to emphasize faith by discrediting the entire chronicle of science on which the modern world is based. 

Fact and faith can and must co-exist; denying the reality of either is senseless. The world continues to advance, no matter the restrictions placed on education by religious radicals; and only those who tame the extremists--believer and non-believer alike--are going to move forward with it.