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Bible studies approved

cj.23 said:
Except Britain, and I think most European states have taught Religion to a very high standard for the last fifty odd years as an academic objective subject???
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The Brits also don't have a long-term tradition of leaving the religious nutters to sort out their own education. A "national curriculum" designed by Whitehall mandarins would do wonders for American primary and secondary education. Unfortunately, it would probably also destroy American tertiary education....
 
cj.23 said:
Why's that?
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A primary advantage of American tertiary education is the ability to specialize and to attract well-heeled sponsors for the specialists, which in turn gives the high-end universities the ability to (over)pay their specialists and thus further specialize; establishment of a national curriculum would eliminate this.

There's a reason that more professors flee Oxbridge for the Ivy League than the other way around.
 
Jon_Stripe said:
O.k, you're gonna teach Bible studies in our public schools?

Then what about Wicken studies?
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Despite being invented by a british civil servant world impact is limited.

or

Islamic studies?
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Hopefuly

or

Buddhism studies?
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perhaps.

Better yet; how 'bout all the major ones.

I'm not being sarcastic.

There are lots more of these people around then you might think.

The world isn't made up of all Christians.........
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The problem is you are limiting yourself to current religions. Aten and Amun-Ra haven;t had followers for a few thousand years but they are kinda important to understand certian elements of history.
 
drkitten said:
A primary advantage of American tertiary education is the ability to specialize and to attract well-heeled sponsors for the specialists, which in turn gives the high-end universities the ability to (over)pay their specialists and thus further specialize; establishment of a national curriculum would eliminate this.

There's a reason that more professors flee Oxbridge for the Ivy League than the other way around.
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Ah! The reason I had never looked at lecturing in the USA despite a couple of tempting offers was I believed the opposite - I thought US undergrads had to study a wide range of subjects, specializing very late in their studies? Perhaps I am misunderstanding though... but I do like the idea of being overpaid!

cj x
 
They're doing this in my state, too.

The problem is, they don't have teachers in the high schools who are qualified to teach the Bible.

I wish I still had the link to the course materials supplier, but they're fundie. Maybe I can find it.

I'd be happy to teach a Bible class, but they'd bomb my damn house or something if I did.
 
cj.23 said:
Ah! The reason I had never looked at lecturing in the USA despite a couple of tempting offers was I believed the opposite - I thought US undergrads had to study a wide range of subjects, specializing very late in their studies?
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They do (typically the first year or two years are "core" courses and only then do undergraduates specialize), but undergraduates are (and always have been) a bit of background noise at a typical university, in part because they are in and out so fast. The intellectual heart of a university is of course, the faculty (who can be there for forty years and are usually active researchers, even at smaller and less-prestigious schools).

Absent a national curriculum, faculty are free to pursue and to teach their own research interests, even if it leaves moderate (or gaping) holes in the actual course content; I've seen biology degrees where invertebrates, for example, don't get a mention. So what you have is a school where students get a very good background of vertebrate zoology, and the students who are interested in bugs simply don't attend (or transfer out) --- which tends to be more valuable than a mediocre background in both, because the vertebrate zoologist was forced to teach a course in entymology 'because the standards say so.'

Of course, this is exactly why standards exist in the first place, to prevent departments from specializing away from important but unpopular areas. The difference is that there's no such thing as an "arithmetic" specialist; it's not really possible to take advantage of a teacher's superior knowledge at the primary school level since fundamentally we all know the same amount about arithmetic or the water cycle. It's at the undergraduate --- and the post-graduate --- levels where you start to see advantage.

Basically, you can get a better department with three vertebrate zoologists than you can with one vert., one invert., and one botanist -- if you're teaching courses at a level where the students can benefit from the interactions between the faculty.

And overpaid is certainly nice. I was checking the salary for an Oxbridge Endowed Professorship a while ago, and it's less than I make as the equivalent of a senior lecturer here at a rather mediocre school. (And that's also with the exchange rate in the loo as well.)
 
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drkitten said:
A primary advantage of American tertiary education is the ability to specialize and to attract well-heeled sponsors for the specialists, which in turn gives the high-end universities the ability to (over)pay their specialists and thus further specialize; establishment of a national curriculum would eliminate this.

There's a reason that more professors flee Oxbridge for the Ivy League than the other way around.
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UK does not have a national curriculum at university level. There is a significant amount of specialisation at collage level and some at GCSE level.
 
geni said:
The problem is you are limiting yourself to current religions. Aten and Amun-Ra haven;t had followers for a few thousand years but they are kinda important to understand certian elements of history.
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Yes, but "world impact" is still limited. The number of people -- including professional historians -- who could even distinguish Aten and Amun-Ra is quite limited. I can't imagine why a Europeanist, or an Asianist, or even a scholar of the modern Mideast would need to know about long-dead religious beliefs.

A key aspect to designing high school curricula is not to ask the question "would it be useful to know this?" Instead, you have to ask yourself "would it be crippling to NOT know this." Time, classroom space, and faculty salaries are extremely tight -- and if you are removing a course in Modern European History or the Renaissance to put in Aten and Amun-Ra, I would be forced to object.
 
geni said:
UK does not have a national curriculum at university level. There is a significant amount of specialisation at collage level and some at GCSE level.
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Not as such, no. But the grading practices (such as external readers for much of the exam grading) --- and the various evaluations to make sure that all the schools are keeping standards up -- have much the same effect; UK universities are much more homogenous than their equivalents in the USA.

But more to the point -- we're talking about the establishment of a major new bureaucracy in the USA with the mandate to establish a national curriculum for primary and secondary education. Do you really think that this bureaucracy would confine itself strictly to its written mandate and not attempt to establish standards and practices for post-secondary education as well? We've seen such attempts by ambitious Secretaries of Education anyway even without a formal remit.
 
drkitten said:
They do (typically the first year or two years are "core" courses and only then do undergraduates specialize), but undergraduates are (and always have been) a bit of background noise at a typical university, in part because they are in and out so fast. The intellectual heart of a university is of course, the faculty (who can be there for forty years and are usually active researchers, even at smaller and less-prestigious schools).

Absent a national curriculum, faculty are free to pursue and to teach their own research interests, even if it leaves moderate (or gaping) holes in the actual course content; I've seen biology degrees where invertebrates, for example, don't get a mention. So what you have is a school where students get a very good background of vertebrate zoology, and the students who are interested in bugs simply don't attend (or transfer out) --- which tends to be more valuable than a mediocre background in both, because the vertebrate zoologist was forced to teach a course in entymology 'because the standards say so.'
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Not at university level they don't. Mind you with the fairly low levels of tenure in the UK it is fairly trivial for them to bring in someone who covers whatever their existing staff don't. But once you move beyond the core of a subject you are rapaidly going to end up focusing on whatever the lectures are interested in rather than some kind of balanced course.
 
drkitten said:
Yes, but "world impact" is still limited. The number of people -- including professional historians -- who could even distinguish Aten and Amun-Ra is quite limited. I can't imagine why a Europeanist, or an Asianist, or even a scholar of the modern Mideast would need to know about long-dead religious beliefs.

A key aspect to designing high school curricula is not to ask the question "would it be useful to know this?" Instead, you have to ask yourself "would it be crippling to NOT know this." Time, classroom space, and faculty salaries are extremely tight -- and if you are removing a course in Modern European History or the Renaissance to put in Aten and Amun-Ra, I would be forced to object.
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Well people do seem to like to cover Tutankhamun and the whole Aten thing is pretty much it in terms of events with long term significance while he was alive.
 
I would imagine that Atenism's possible latent significance to monotheism in general would make it a rather touchy subject for a teacher wanting to stay employed in Texas.
 
Believe it or not, my brother was hired as a consultant to show high skool teachers in texas how to teach a bible as lit class. We are a bit different in our world views.

Anyway, there was a news story about it with him in it, I'll see if I can dig it up!
 
drkitten said:
Yes, but "world impact" is still limited. The number of people -- including professional historians -- who could even distinguish Aten and Amun-Ra is quite limited. I can't imagine why a Europeanist, or an Asianist, or even a scholar of the modern Mideast would need to know about long-dead religious beliefs.
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I have lectured in both Religion and History at a UK university, and am considered pretty good i think on religions of the A.N.E, and the only thing I can think of without Google is that the priests of Amun/Hammon (Amane in Nubia?) were displaced by the Aten worship of Akhenaten, then murder said Pharaoh and that worship of Amun has declined by the Hellenistic period of Egypt, indeed almost ended as far as I know. Considering my ignorance, I'm going to guess that outside of Egyptologists and New Ages with a thing for Akhenaten (and I do know quite a bit aout his reliligious reforms i guess) most historians would know almost precisely nothing about it- as much as I do about say land price fluctations in 19th century Schleswig-Holstein!

cj x
 
If there is a shortage of qualified religion teachers in the US, why not simply hire British RE teachers? They can teach based on my ex-girlfriends course and my experience in training RE teachers Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism and also generally have a knowledge of Chinese and African traditional religions, plus can do stuff like "do science and religion conflict?" and sicuss bioethics etc, etc to contextualize it.

My A level course taught me Biblical Crit & The Quest for the Historical Jesus, Feurbach, Nietzche, Kierkegarde, Hegel, Freud, Marx, Christianity & other religions (Hick mainly), the Victorian Church and lost of other fun stuff. If bias is an issue we have plenty of atheist, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu RE Teachers here - and a good few Wiccans which never ceases to amaze me. I think the majority of RE teachers i have met have been atheist or agnostic though, with Christians representing the second largest group. Still they are definitely extremely well trained, and higher wages in the uSA would attract them?

cj x
 
cj.23 said:
If there is a shortage of qualified religion teachers in the US, why not simply hire British RE teachers? They can teach based on my ex-girlfriends course and my experience in training RE teachers Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism and also generally have a knowledge of Chinese and African traditional religions, plus can do stuff like "do science and religion conflict?" and sicuss bioethics etc, etc to contextualize it.

My A level course taught me Biblical Crit & The Quest for the Historical Jesus, Feurbach, Nietzche, Kierkegarde, Hegel, Freud, Marx, Christianity & other religions (Hick mainly), the Victorian Church and lost of other fun stuff. If bias is an issue we have plenty of atheist, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu RE Teachers here - and a good few Wiccans which never ceases to amaze me. I think the majority of RE teachers i have met have been atheist or agnostic though, with Christians representing the second largest group. Still they are definitely extremely well trained, and higher wages in the uSA would attract them?

cj x
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Now that sounds like an interesting course. That, of course, is not the point of those who want bible studies here. The last thing they want is a critical evaluation of their beliefs. They wish reinforcement and indoctrination: a Southern Baptist perspective.
 
cj.23 said:
If there is a shortage of qualified religion teachers in the US, why not simply hire British RE teachers?
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Well, assuming they were being honest in their class offerings --- they couldn't afford to.

The "shortage" isn't caused by a lack of people with teaching credentials; the "shortage" is caused by a lack of people with teaching credentials who are willing to move to South Bumbleburgh, Texas to teach for $13,000 a year under the supervision of the South Bumbleburgh Area School District.

Still they are definitely extremely well trained, and higher wages in the uSA would attract them?
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The higher wages in the States only really applies at the post-secondary level; primary and secondary school teachers in the USA are notoriously underpaid.

But beyond that, teaching conditions in public schools tend to be so bad --- in part because of the way that schools are the battleground for local politics --- that even when wages are raised, teachers tend to stay away in droves. And Texas is one of the worst offenders in this regard.

But, of course, the other problem is that the sponsors of this program don't really want "qualified religion teachers" any more than your local crystal healer wants to hire RNs for patient care. What the sponsors are really looking for is not qualified religious instruction, but Sunday-school-during-the-week, and I suspect your ex- would get really annoyed with being presented with material that starts out with the assumption that Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament.
 
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