re: #211 SixDegrees

Oh no no no. I never meant to give the impression that religion could be ignored like that. I can’t think of a better example than creationism to illustrate what I think has no place in a classroom unless you’re context is historical rather than scientific.

Depends what you mean, exactly. For example, I don’t have a problem teaching a comparative religions class in high schools; in fact, I think it’s a shame we don’t, since it’s all but impossible to understand the world we live in - the world of the Enlightened West - without some foundational knowledge of the role religions played in shaping that world.

On a less controversial note, I also strongly support teaching art history, and again, when we’re talking about the West, enormous swaths of art history are, in fact, enormous swaths of religious history, as the Church and various monarchies strongly tied to the Church sponsored most of the art for millennia, and as a result religious themes abound. The absence of representational art from Jewish and Islamic cultures is also a result of religious influence.

So you can’t really keep this sort of knowledge out of the public schools, and overwrought attempts to do so result in a severely distorted and inadequate education. And there are probably atheists who wouldn’t care to see such topics brought up.

My solution is a bit simpler and more draconian: keep religion out of topics where it has no place. Like science. And let the choices be guided by organizations with expertise in the fields in question - in this case, organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and many others. We don’t go to the athletic department when designing the English curriculum; we leave it to the experts in the particular field in question.