Bible Course Comes Under Fire
Class Taught In Hundreds Of Public Schools

POSTED: 10:56 pm EDT August 1, 2005
UPDATED: 10:57 pm EDT August 1, 2005

AUSTIN, Texas -- A religious watchdog group complained Monday that a Bible study course taught in hundreds of public schools across the country promotes a fundamentalist Christian view and violates religious freedom.

The Texas Freedom Network also said the course is full of errors and dubious research.

The course is offered by the Greensboro, N.C.-based National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools. They dismissed the critics as a "far left" organization trying to suppress study of a historical text.

The Greensboro council's Web site said its elective course is offered in high schools and junior high schools by more than 300 school districts in 37 states.

A Southern Methodist University biblical scholar asked to review the curriculum found that discussions of science in the course are based on the biblical account of creation and that archaeological findings are erroneously used to support claims of the Bible's historical accuracy.

He said the course also suggests the Bible, not the Constitution, be considered the nation's founding document.

http://www.wral.com/education/4797415/d ... resistible

Executive Summary

As a national debate rages over the proper place for religion in public education, more and more public schools are adding elective courses in Bible literacy. When taught with credible materials and from a nonsectarian perspective, such courses are an appropriate and even laudable way to help students learn about history and literature. This report, commissioned by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund, reveals that what may be the country’s most aggressively marketed and widely used Bible curriculum fails on both counts.

Dr. Mark Chancey, who teaches biblical studies at Southern Methodist University, has authored an in-depth analysis of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools’ The Bible in History and Literature (Ablu Publishing, 2005). Based in Greensboro, North Carolina, the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS) claims that 1,000 high schools in 36 states are using its course materials (although the organization will not identify those schools). Dr. Chancey’s report shows how the curriculum advocates a narrow sectarian perspective taught with materials plagued by shoddy research, blatant errors and discredited or poorly cited sources. A complete copy of Dr. Chancey’s report is available at http://www.tfn.org.

A Sectarian Perspective
Dr. Chancey’s report reveals a curriculum with a clear sectarian bias that begins with the NCBCPS’s founder and its advisers and finds repeated expression in the pages of the textbook.

* NCBCPS founder Elizabeth Ridenour is a member of the Council on National Policy, an organization comprising some of the nation’s most influential leaders from the religious right and other conservative causes.
* The group’s Board of Directors, Advisory Committee, and endorsers make up a virtual “who’s who” of the religious right, including the American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, Eagle Forum, Focus on the Family, WallBuilders and the Texas Justice Foundation. Many of these groups oppose the separation of church and state and assert the primacy of Christianity in this nation’s government and legal system.
* The NCBCPS curriculum goes beyond a study of the Bible as literature, a summary of traditional views of the Bible, or a description of the importance of the Bible for beliefs and practices of religious groups. It, in fact, improperly endorses the Bible as the “Word of God.” It also attempts to persuade teachers and students to adopt views of the Bible that are common in some conservative Protestant circles but rejected by most scholars.
* The curriculum almost exclusively reflects views held by certain conservative Protestant groups. The role of the Bible in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian thought receives little attention.
* The curriculum depicts the United States as a historically Christian nation. It even erroneously implies that historians generally believe that the Bible, even more than the Constitution, is the nation’s “Founding Document” [page 243].

A Flawed Curriculum
Dr. Chancey’s report finds that shoddy research, factual errors, and problems with sourcing material also make the curriculum inappropriate for use in any classroom.

Shoddy Research
The curriculum contains many passages in which the developers have distorted history and science, including:

* The curriculum cites a “respected scholar” who claims that archaeological evidence “always confirms the facts of the Biblical record” [page 170]. Yet that “respected scholar” claimed elsewhere to have seen Jesus’ school records in India, records from the lost continent of Atlantis and evidence that Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza was used to transmit radio messages to the Grand Canyon thousands of years ago.
* The curriculum uses a discredited urban legend that NASA has evidence that two days are missing in time, thus “confirming” a biblical passage about the sun standing still [pages 116-17].
* The curriculum identifies a creation scientist as an expert and recommends materials from his Creation Evidence Museum to explain the origins of life.

Factual Errors
The curriculum is full of errors (such as the dates of historical events, the identities of key individuals, and the details of biblical stories), faulty logic, unsubstantiated claims and unclear wording, including:

* The curriculum misstates the length of the ancient Jewish calendar [page 14] and the years of the rule of Herod as king of the Jews [pages 193 and 196].
* The answer key to a quiz [page 87] identifies a pharaoh as “Hyksos.” Hyksos was the name of an Asiatic-Semitic people who once ruled Egypt.
* One passage [page 138] asks students to consider how the use of “simple monosyllabic words” in a passage of Old Testament poetry was typical of the Hebrews. Yet while the words in these passages may be monosyllabic in English translations, they are quite different in Hebrew and Greek. How English syllabification provides insight into the ancient Hebrew mindset is not explained.

Inadequate Citation
The curriculum is shockingly lax when it comes to properly crediting sources – inexcusable in any scholarly writing at either the high school or college level. For example, the wording of the sections titled “Pilate” and “Herod,” which constitute pages 195-196 in their entirety, is identical to that of passages from the articles “Pilate, Pontius,” and “Herod the Great” in Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2001. No source is cited. In fact, a considerable amount of the curriculum’s content – Dr. Chancey estimates one-third or more of its pages – is reproduced word for word from its sources (both cited and uncited), often for pages at a time, though the curriculum does not note this or indicate that permission has been granted to reproduce these passages.

Conclusion
The problems detailed by this report – a blatant sectarian bias, distortions of history and science, numerous factual errors, poor sourcing – reveal a curriculum that is clearly inappropriate for the 1,000 public schools the NCBCPS claims use its materials. Indeed, such schools would do far better by considering other Bible literacy curricula for what could be an enriching part of their students’ learning experience.

I think it's very interesting. The bible is a fantastic and historically rich text. Being able to study it is great.

Kind of like Creationism.

Agreed. More churches should offer Bible examination courses. That would be a good place for something like that.



* Intelligent Design.

Even Jesus himself is tired of these threads.

What if the Quran and Torah were also examined?

What if the Quran and Torah were also examined?

Like a religous texts class. So many sayings and practices come from biblical text. I think it can easily be examined without teaching faith.

Ignoring that they exist is kind of silly

I can't imagine the classroom fights and teacher discussions among the fundamentalist crowd from various religions.

I think that would be interesting, yeah. But I would think that would need to be limited to upper high school levels...a large percentage of students are unable to seperate faith and study like that.



But public schools ignore the existence of all sorts of stuff, simply because it doesn't fit the curriculum or because it would take 8,000,000 years to cover all the information out there. The issue isn't whether or not religious texts could be taught in public school...it's a reality that with funding set the way it is and with the number of classes a student can experience limited, you have to REPLACE something with that class. So what do you want to take out? Life Skills type classes where students fill out job applications and balance checkbooks? Health class? Maybe an AP course...



These days, you can see those fights played out in some 8th grade Science classes. We don't need Bible class in order to have fundamentalist vs. the world fights. Fundamentalism is on the rise just about everywhere in the world right now, and the struggle for how that plays out in the classroom is only going to get more volatile.

Do you mean with a sectarian perspective, a flawed curriculum, shoddy research, factual errors, and inadequate citations? I'd imagine there'd be right wing Christians lined up to protest even without those issues.

studying the bible as literature and history and moral lessons = good

studying the bible as pure fact = ridiculous

fitting religious text sudy into current curriculum = impossible, but certainly worth looking into

I'm not upset that this class is offered. It is an elective after all. I am upset by some of the things found in the book, but apparently it's a big book, and must largely be pretty good if that's all the study could find wrong with it. I'd like to have this book. I think it'd be an interesting read myself.

What exactly is a religious fundamentalist? What is an extremist?

I must have missed this during my public school years in Texas.

Well, their materials do only date back to 2003.

Then I'm to old. But back in the day, there was no Jesus in Texas, and we walked 3000 miles through the dirt and sun and we liked it.