The New York Times reports that Cody Young, an evangelical Christian who attends a religious high school in Southern California, has filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against the University of California, charging that they practice “viewpoint discrimination” and that their admissions standards violate the free speech and religious rights of evangelical Christians because they refuse to certify some of the Christian school’s courses on literature, history, social studies and science.
The university system’s reasons for refusing to certify those particular courses is that the textbooks used in the courses and the curriculums themselves have a specifically Christian viewpoint. Here’s a sample:
In the last year, the board has rejected courses like Christianity’s Influence in American History, Special Provenance: Christianity and the American Republic, Christianity and Morality in American Literature and a biology course using textbooks from the Bob Jones University Press and A Beka Book, conservative Christian publishers.
The officials rejected the science courses because the curriculum differed from “empirical historical knowledge generally accepted in the collegiate community,” the suit said. Calvary was told to submit a secular curriculum instead. Courses in other subjects were rejected because they were called too narrow or biased.
What interests me most about the suit is an argument made by Robert Tyler, a lawyer for Calvary Chapel Christian School in Murrieta, CA, where Cody Young is a senior: “What really lights the fire here is when you look at courses the U.C. has approved from other schools. In the titles alone, you can see the discrimination against us.” And he pointed out that the university has approved courses on Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and gender and counterculture’s effects on literature.
I’m in favor of teaching courses on all those things, and on Christianity as well, at all levels. But I think that courses in religion must be taught in the same spirit of rationality and open inquiry as are courses in other subjects, like history, sociology, and science. Here’s an illuminating quote from John Dewey, probably the most profound thinker about education that this country has produced:
It is pertinent to point out that, as long as religion is conceived as it is now by the great majority of professed religionists, there is something self-contradictory in speaking of education in religion in the same sense in which we speak of education in topics where the method of free inquiry has made its way. The “religious” would be the last to be willing that either the history or the content of religion should be taught in this spirit; while those to whom the scientific standpoint is not merely a technical device, but is the embodiment of the integrity of mind, must protest against its being taught in any other spirit.
So let’s accept a course on Islam, as long as that course permits teacher and student to introduce viewpoints questioning the Prophet’s sanity or his womanizing; let the course on Christianity use materials from the Jesus Seminar, and require the students to read passages from Bertrand Russell (and from Dewey himself) that question the rationality, morality, and historical truth of Christian beliefs. Let the universities certifying those courses for their admissions policy focus, not on the subject matter, but on the pedagogy, and accept only those courses that exemplify what Dewey calls the “method of free inquiry” that must characterize all honest search for truth.
I think this is pretty well said. It’s a secular school, so I am confused why a Christian would push for such classes.
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Thanks, Alex. Are you an Alex Blumberg? My son is an Alex Blumberg.
Which reminds me of a story (what doesn’t these days)…
Years ago, when my son was still in high school, he was working one summer as a carpenter with a construction crew. I had pulled into a gas station, and the car in front of me had a bumper sticker, “My Boss is a Jewish Carpenter”. As I was filling my tank, the woman who was driving that car came out of the station, and I told her that I couldn’t help but notice her bumper sticker; she smiled. And I said, “It’s really a coincidence. My son is a Jewish carpenter.” She looked at me like I was really, really dangerous, jumped into her car, and sped off.
Richard
As far as the Christian H.S. courses go, there can be little doubt that they are biased. So what? As long as the kids who take them get good enough SAT scores and meet the other, “normal,” criteria for admission to CA colleges, I say let ‘em in. If they flunk Biology because they insist on standing up in mid-lecture and screaming about
holes in Darwin’s theory, too bad for them. They belong in a seminary somewhere anyway. Adapt or perish, knowhutta mean, Vern? Let’s all be brave and take our chances here. CA’s approach impresses as parallel to that much-maligned preemptive war strategy we all are being told is nasty, evil, Republican(pardon my French), etc.
This refusal by CA to give them the same chance for an education as
anyone else does indeed smack of prejudice from my angle. They go out of their way to admit other “disadvantaged” students, so why not treat these poor brainwashed evangelicals the same way? Sounds political to me, not pedagogical…
P.S. Having some Yahweh nut scream about holes in Darwin’s theory
would not necessarily be a bad thing if it led to earnest discussion of topics like what constitutes proof of a theory, the difference between theory and fact, and where Evolution stands on the theoretical continuum between the two poles. Evolution is generally
presented as a Given(like Euclid’s postulates in Geometry) in science classes across the educational spectrum. I propose to you that this is not a good thing. Serious believers in Evolution, I among them, entertain detailed debates on the very same questions that the unbelievers point to as holes in Darwinism. It is a fact that many, many holes exist in the fossil record, due either to chance or a very busy Devil who put all those rocks in that order just to fool us all. These holes need to be explained, not ignored. The rocks will still be there. The fossils will still appear in the same order. Our ancestors will still be apes–why do you think they called it the Monkey Trial in 1925 anyway?–and nothing about any god or set of gods influencing its course will be settled. It does not matter. All the babbling of all the hominids at all the typewriters in all of history cannot change whatever actually happened. Trying to figure it out…aye, there’s the rub.
Let the kids scream if they want. It will be educational.
If you are interested in Evolution,do a search of “punctuated equilibrium,” just for starters. Fascinating stuff. And get a great book, “Bully for Brontosaurus.” You may soon find yourself hooked.
Dave’s suggestion that UC relax its two-accredited-science-class requirement for the Calvary Chapel students overlooks the reality of university enrollment in California.
The UC system is supposed to be able to enroll the top 12.5% of California’s graduating high school seniors. Thanks to dwindling state funding and a growing population, only about 10% of the state’s high school students can be accommodated. If I understand the latest incarnation of the admissions policy correctly, the system tries to get diversity by grouping high schools by geographic area and student socioeconomic status, then taking the top 10% of each group.
Unfortunately for Calvary Chapel, it is located in suburban Los Angeles. That means its students are being grouped with the other middle- and upper middle class kids from the six or seven closest public high schools. While some inner city and rural public schools in California offer a poor education, many suburban school districts are easily the equal of a very good private prep school, and they usually offer more advanced and specialized elective classes than the smaller private schools (excluding classes in religious doctrine, of course, which are not considered in UC admissions decisions).
As a practical matter, some 50% of the middle class high school seniors in suburban Los Angeles have probably met the minimal qualifications to attend a UC campus, and have applied. Since the UC system can only accept 10%, the admissions office must reject a staggering 80% of the FULLY QUALIFIED applicants from the area. They’re not looking for students who have two years of science, one of them in a course that flunked its accreditation review. They’re looking for a way to eliminate kids who took three or four years of rigorous science classes and got straight A’s in them.
So where does that leave the kids from Calvary Chapel? Their parents were wealthy enough to shell out about $6000 per year for tuition and fees. For their trouble, they got a kid who will have to take a year of remedial courses at the local community college just to complete the basics they could have gotten for free at their local public high school. Parents who can afford Calvary Chapel’s tuition can probably afford that without too much difficulty, but it’s got to be a rude awakening.
The big loser is Calvary Chapel’s high school. Almost all parochial schools have a significant percentage of students who do not belong to the sponsoring denomination, but whose parents feel that a private school will provide a better education. If those parents discover that Calvary Chapel’s students aren’t getting into UC, but the local public school kids are, they’re going to start asking some hard questions about what’s being taught in those expensive classrooms. The school might even find itself being sued for fraud.
Of course, my sympathy for the parents is limited. If they had opened their kid’s textbooks half as often as they opened their checkbooks, they would have had ample warning that the education their kid was receiving was worthless.