The Texas Board of Education, the nation's second largest purchaser of public school textbooks, is revising its K-12 social studies curriculum and deciding how to characterize religion's influence on American history. Three consultants have recommended emphasizing the roles of the Bible, Christianity and the civic virtue of religion.
While installing some operating software, I found a version of the following letter accidentally embedded with the instructions. The importance to the topic of the Texas Board of Education decision is obvious, and since I had no way to contact the authors I decided to pass it on to you. Why a software company has access to infernal e-mail is a question that I will leave to their representatives at Wolfram and Hart. The e-mail follows:
From: Alcibiades
T Baalette
Subject: Texas Bible Decision
Sometimes the attitude of you junior devils fills me with worry about our future success. Your delight in the decision of the Texas Board of Education to teach the Bible for a year is understandable, but superficial. We can usually rely on politicians to muck things up, but this decision is a decidedly mixed bit of work for our general policy.
Of course, you hope that the same schools that have made that sickening saint Shakespeare stultifying or absent altogether in their curriculum will be able to do the same for the Bible. Your plans to get our "religious" friends to volunteer to teach the classes, especially those most likely to turn off high school students, is acceptable, but lacks imagination.
May I suggest that a better strategy is to get administrators to drop this new requirement on an already overburdened and underpaid teacher struggling with yet another demand from an out-of-touch legislature?
Such a policy can do two things at once. It will give us a bad class on the Bible (almost as good as no class!) and one less altruistic teacher.
Given our long-term strategy of making education as ineffectual as possible, placing the Bible in schools may do to religious comprehension what we have done to mathematical literacy.
However, you have grossly underestimated the danger of the class. First, it has students reading an important book that is part of their heritage. Surely, many of them whose minds are numbed by consumerist entertainment will be turned off, but it will present quite a few students with exposure to ideas.
How many hedonists have we lost by an unfortunate exposure to Jane Eyre? Our near total replacement of great texts with textbooks has been a great victory on this front. We might lose a student to reason if he meets Plato's Socrates, but what tempter has ever lost a soul to a textbook?
What will happen to our work in Texas if people start to understand their heritage? We have played up the bad parts, but what if will happen they come to see the religious side of someone like John Locke? What if they read the good bits of the Bible, the parts that formed their nation, as well as the parts that we have made difficult?
Don't forget that just this summer a group of such students in Houston were caught in an art gallery actually understanding and enjoying classical art. If this sort of thing spreads, demonic heads will roll. Make sure your head is not one of them.
If they must read the Bible, let me suggest three strategies.
Encourage the teachers, especially the Christian ones, to try to make the Bible relevant and cool. Talk should center on students' felt needs and not the text. Get your teachers to show many videos. Nothing has done us better service than to teach Americans to avoid pursuit of beauty for being cool. Endless meaningless consumption is the inevitable and (to them) frustrating result.
Don't forget that the up-to-date teacher is always hopelessly dated and will turn off more students than the eccentric (how I hate them!) who might show them something authentic and real. Don't forget the rich harvest gained when we turned Their youth pastors into hipsters.
