COMMENTARY

Newman: Just whose will is being done on the State Board of Education?

David Newman, SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR

Power has attracted some strange and disturbing minds to the State Board of Education. Its chairman, Don McElroy, believes the Earth we all share is younger than the light we see coming from the nearest galaxy. God is, I guess, playing tricks, suggesting that the humility with which science views the heavens can't hold a candle to the obeisance we should show to archaic strips of parchment.

Now the board's Cynthia Dunbar has suggested that President-elect Barack Obama is a terrorist sympathizer. Dunbar thinks that within six months of his election, there will be "a planned effort by those with whom Obama truly sympathizes to take down the America that is threat to tyranny." I wonder, sometimes, what it is in American history that most inclines us towards tyranny. Is it tiny groups of "infiltrators," or arrogant majorities for whom "difference" equals "danger"?

Ironically, the Bible curriculum Dunbar endorses for all Texas public schoolchildren might provide the most compelling answer.

The State Board of Education has mandated that public schools teach a Bible course. According to a recent Associated Press report, four board members actively endorse a particular course, a product of the National Council for Bible Curriculum in Public Schools. As those members see it, the council's curriculum "has been implemented successfully in numerous school districts within the state of Texas."

This claim is a product of ignorance or deceitfulness. In 2006, the Texas Freedom Network conducted a comprehensive survey of public schools in the state, invoking the Open Records Act. The response stands in stark contrast to claims made by the council that more than 50 districts use its product.

In fact, fewer than five districts acknowledge using the council's materials. But that discrepancy should not surprise anyone who has had experience with the council and its backers, a cluster of evangelical and fundamentalist organizations and lawyers associated with Regent University, which was founded by Pat Robertson. The council has a political and religious agenda, and every educator and parent in Texas should know exactly what that agenda is.

I know, because I joined a suit against the council in the Ector County seat in Odessa. We had one "fundamental" goal: to block the teaching of this curriculum. We succeeded; the terms of our settlement were for the Ector County school district to stop teaching the course, and never to teach it in the future.

We were repulsed by the brazen advocacy imbedded in every part of the council's curriculum, advertisements and interactions with our local school board. Teaching the Bible is constitutional, if it is done fairly and objectively.

However, the council wants to create for students a distinctly sectarian narrative about the King James version of the Bible and its relation to history and literature. Normally, that would mean beginning with an assumption that students should examine how historical events and literary works shaped and were shaped by the Bible. Such an approach is academically rigorous, objective and designed to engender critical thought.

Not in the council's narrative, which assumes that influence only flows one way. The course shows kids how the Bible shaped other works of literature and all the history that matters. The Bible is presented, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, as an infallible artifact produced by scribes of the one true God.

Students are taught that there is really no such thing as "separation of church and state." They watch David Barton's video "Foundations of American Government." Here's what Barton has said about those foundations: "On the 4th of July, we celebrate what Jesus Christ did for America, since it was founded as a Christian nation -- The Declaration of Independence formed all of the principles of Christianity into our form of government -- It was nonsense that (the Founders) wanted a secular nation."

The council promotes itself as "returning the Bible to its rightful place in America's schools and affirming its unparalleled impact upon our history and culture."

Students begin and end their time in a classroom governed by a mindset dismissive of non-Christian beliefs, by deference to the rightness and exclusivity of Christianity entirely appropriate for Sunday school, and just as inappropriate for taxpayer-funded, multi-faith public schools where each student's freedom of conscience, and freedom from proselytizing, should be held sacred.

Newman is an associate professor of English at Odessa College.