It's getting hard to know what to do if you are a fundamentalist these days. Should you try to change the school system? Or should you pull out of it in order to seal yourself off in a sectarian community of homogeneous beliefs?
One strategy is to bring prayer into schools "to demonstrate the importance of religion".
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) – A state lawmaker wants voters to amend the state constitution to allow prayer in schools, a proposal that critics say is unnecessary.
Democratic Sen. Tom Ivester of Elk City has introduced Senate Joint Resolution 8, which would send his proposal to voters in the state. The first-term lawmaker says the measure is needed to demonstrate the importance of religion.
If that was the actual motivation of the proposal, is it not more rational and constitutional to have a religious studies course? Besides, religion has been an important aspect of many public school curricula in social studies and history courses. Demonstrating the importance of religion and practicing religion are two distinct things. Someone should send Sen. Ivester the memo about this simple fact.
Since that won't work, why not wage war against the school systems since they will not openly endorse Bible based Christianity? That's the strategy someone else is proposing.
Exodus Mandate Project founder and director retired U.S. Army Chaplain Lt. Col. E. Ray Moore explains here:
"The Call to Dunkirk is a special emergency effort to try to get other ministries, churches, pastors, and the major Christian right and pro-family movement to join with us and the other K-12 home-school ministries in rescuing the children from the public schools during the year 2009," he says.
"The real target of the liberals and the left has always been the children. And we can see in California where the conservatives won Proposition 8 — the vote [was] 52 to 48 [percent] — but…when Proposition 22 was voted on [in March 2000], they had a 61-percent margin of victory. So the culture is turning against Christianity and against the pro-family movement primarily because we've allowed our children to be educated in their schools," he adds. "They're converting our children; we're not converting them."
Perhaps it is the penchant of conservative Christianity to eschew critical thinking and education in general that is the problem. The oddity here is that, as with the cohort of home-schooled students at Patrick Henry College, the goal is to indoctrinate kids with immutable propositions in order then to send them into an alien world for which they lack the ability to navigate or understand. Yet the goal is for this naive and ignorant group of kids to change said world.
But Moore and Ivester may be right about one thing, the church is doing a poor job of educating kids. Indoctrinating will only create a facade of stability in the foundations of knowledge without developing the skills to critically engage a powerful set of structures that are counter-factual to what they are taught. The goal should be to develop an equally powerful set of critical tools to train kids in the discipline of discernment. However, this means a critical engagement of what they are being taught.
Teaching and indoctrination cannot truly co-exist. That is the problem, not what the schools may or may not be teaching kids.
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