Should the Bible be taught in public schools? If so, then how? If no, then why not?

The Tennessee Board of Education believes they have the answers, or at least the guidelines (here is the link to the Board of Education PDF):

(AP) The state Board of Education has approved guidelines on how to teach the Bible in public high schools despite concern the curriculum could be challenged in court.  Legislation approved in 2008 authorized a course for a “nonsectarian, nonreligious academic study of the Bible” in public schools.

The course will teach students about the content of the Bible and its historical context. It is an elective, meaning high schools can choose whether to offer it to students as a social studies credit, and students can decide whether to take it.

This is a complicated issue, but if my children were in these schools, I would keep them out of the class.

As even the postmodern philosopher Stanley Fish has argued:

The truth claims of a religion — at least of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam — are not incidental to its identity; they are its identity.

The metaphor that theologians use to make the point is the shell and the kernel: ceremonies, parables, traditions, holidays, pilgrimages — these are merely the outward signs of something that is believed to be informing them and giving them significance. That something is the religion’s truth claims. Take them away and all you have is an empty shell, an ancient video game starring a robed superhero who parts the waters of the Red Sea, followed by another who brings people back from the dead. I can see the promo now: more exciting than “Pirates of the Caribbean” or “The Matrix.” That will teach, but you won’t be teaching religion.

Read Al Mohler’s discussion of this topic, “What is Christianity without Truth?”.

After the Obama administration cut $170 million in funding for abstinence programs because they didn’t meet scientific standards of effectiveness, a new federally funded study is showing that abstinence can work to keep teens from having sex.

Only a third of students in the abstinence program began having sex within two years, while more than half of students in traditional sex education became sexually active in that same timeframe.

The abstinence program did not insist that students save themselves for marriage and didn’t disparage condom use, but rather encouraged them to delay having sex.

University of Pennsylvania professor John B. Jemmott III, who led the study, said,

“The take-home message is that we need a variety of interventions to address an epidemic like HIV, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy…There are populations that really want an abstinence intervention. They are against telling children about condoms,” he said. “This study suggests abstinence programs can be part of the mix of programs that we offer.”

A study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services seems to indicate that we’ve spent quite a lot of money on a program with very little impact. The study looks at Head Start, the early education program that began in 1965 as part of the War on Poverty. Researchers studied 5,000 3-year-old and 4-year-old children, randomly assigning them to either a Head Start group or a control group that had access to other early childhood programs. They found that Head Start makes a little difference at the beginning, but the impact fades:

Providing access to Head Start has a positive impact on children’s preschool experiences. … However, the advantages children gained during their Head Start and age 4 years yielded only a few statistically significant differences in outcomes at the end of 1st grade for the sample as a whole.

The Cato Institute argued last year that early childhood government programs are more costly than effective. Yet Cato notes that $5 billion of the stimulus package went to Early Head Start, Head Start and other early education programs.

Having just read Dr. Miriam Grossman’s new book, You’re Teaching My Child What? A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How They Harm Your Child, I am sobered (again) by the state of the world. Among many things, Dr. Grossman discusses the profound effect Dr. Alfred Kinsey had on modern sex education. Thanks to the work of Dr. Judith Reisman, Kinsey’s “research” on sex has been exposed as fraudulent, and Kinsey himself has been exposed as deeply disturbed. Nonetheless, his role in helping to bring about the sexual revolution and the role his work continues to play in the lives of schoolchildren is sadly undeniable. My children are growing up in a world turned upside down, where “exploring their sexuality” is often viewed as a more valued commodity than their health, both moral and physical. It brings to mind the words of Isaiah 5:20:

“Woe to those who call what is bad, good, and what is good bad, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness, who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”

So I pray “A Parent’s Prayer” from Saint Augustine’s Prayer Book:

O Heavenly Father, I commend the souls of my children to thee. Be thou their God and Father; and mercifully supply whatever is wanting in me through frailty or negligence. Strengthen them to overcome the corruptions of the world, to resist all solicitations to evil, whether from within or without; and deliver them from the secret snares of the enemy. Pour thy grace into their hearts, and confirm and multiply in them the gifts of thy Holy Spirit, that they may daily grow in grace and in knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ; and so faithfully serving thee here, may come to rejoice in thy presence hereafter. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

Once a liberal atheist, Mike Adams is now a Christian who believes “socialism and communism are for losers.” Adams, who has been a professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington since 1993, spoke to students of The King’s College in New York City on Sept. 11, 2009, as part of the college’s Distinguished Visitor Series.

Adams’ best-known book, Welcome to The Ivory Tower of Babel, is a scathing critique of higher education. He said the unconditional security of tenure has created campuses “crawling with lunatics” who are not held accountable for what they teach, leading to a higher education environment driven by ideology and politics. According to Adams, the professors and administrators on American college campuses are “the czars of tolerance,” promoting free-speech codes that “give people a constitutional right to not feel uncomfortable.” However, these “czars,” he points out, are not tolerant with Christian, conservative, or Jewish beliefs.

Thanks to a free-speech conflict with a student, Adams rose to national prominence shortly after 9/11. The media attention generated by that controversy eventually led to him writing a weekly column for Townhall.com. Adams said one of the ironies in his situation is that since his conversion to Christianity in 1999, he has been increasingly outspoken and conservative. The tenure system, he acknowledged, probably saved him from being fired when he was being attacked by liberal ideologues.

Despite the challenges Adams faces as a lone conservative on a liberal campus, he can “see the beginning of something that is very, very exciting” for America’s colleges, as Christian students defend conservatism.

Overall, Adams said he “thanks God” he was hired at UNCW while an atheist, as it has enabled him to bring to light the confusion on college campuses. His advice to students today: “Stand up and fight” the rise of liberalism and discrimination against Christianity and conservatism. He implored King’s students to be bold and speak out because “as Christians we always win. The truth is on our side.”

Kristin Rudolph is a student at The King’s College in New York City.

Editor’s Note: Be sure to read Marvin Olasky’s interview with Mike Adams in the current issue of WORLD and listen to podcasts of Marvin’s conversation with Mike at The King’s College in September.

At Nyack College in New York City, they were praying for a miracle. In an overflow room, students and other attendees watched on camera the proceedings from two floors below. They raised their hands and said, “Amen!” as professors came forward to read Psalms and lead the group in prayer for what they called the “Miracle in Manhattan”—namely, $70 million to $100 million for 160,000 square feet to call their own.

The college’s story highlights the challenges of a private, urban college—or any Christian organization with an urban calling. A.B. Simpson, a leader in the American missionary movement, formed Nyack’s precursor in 1882 in the city. In the words of college president Michael Scales, Simpson chose New York because “here the world came to him.” It met in the back of a Broadway stage and then bounced from place to place until it settled 20 miles out of town in Nyack, New York. But the college never lost its mission to go back to the city so it returned in the 1990s with a campus in Manhattan.

Nyack has about 1,300 students at its Manhattan campus and it hopes to double that number along with its square footage. Just to give some perspective to the challenges of a private urban college, contrast that with my little alma mater, Hillsdale College, a private liberal arts school in south-central Michigan. Hillsdale has about the same number of students but is close to completing a $608 million fundraising campaign that will include $17.3 million to build a 42,000-square-foot chapel and performance hall and $3.1 million to add about 10,800 square feet onto the library. That’s about $378 per square foot to build, whereas it will cost Nyack about $625 per square foot just to buy.

There are practical obstacles, along with cultural ones. At Hillsdale, the college swallows up the surrounding culture, sustaining the jobs and the rural town with its business. College students barely interact with the lower-income “townies” around them, unless it’s to chat with the housekeepers who clean the dorm or to go out into the community to do charity work. It’s easy to become cocooned in the big ivory clock tower that is Hillsdale’s focal point. But in an urban setting, it will be the other way around: The city can swallow up the college and the college will have to fight for its identity—and in a city of 8 million people, fight to be noticed at all. One set of challenges is not better than the other, but the urban college faces a whole new set of practical ones and others that shape its mission and purpose.

Meanwhile, Barbara Pierce, Nyack’s re-enrollment specialist, fired up the crowd in the room with a rousing call: “It will happen! It will happen! I’m looking for a miracle. I expect the impossible. It’s a battle cry for those of you who know what it’s like to be against a wall.” They responded with “Amen” and stood to their feet with her as she prayed: “Right now move around this room. . . . Remove all doubt. . . . Remove all uncertainty.”

Could improved educational opportunities help to “defang” the Taliban in Pakistan? Here is an interesting story that highlights the growing number of private schools in the country:

Pakistan is seeing a surge in private schools, a trend some find hopeful in a country where the government education system is decrepit and the other alternative is religious schools, known here as madrasas, which offer little education beyond memorizing the Quran and are seen as one source of Islamic militancy.

The U.S., for one, says it plans to invest in private schools as part of a multibillion-dollar aid package designed to erode extremism in the nuclear-armed country battered by Taliban attacks.

With President Obama’s 2010 budget set to cut all funds for abstinence-only sex-ed programs, Newsweek reports on the varied approaches these programs will take as financial support vanishes.

The Future of Abstinence” chronicles the history of the abstinence movement since 1996, showing that some programs were entirely “abstinence-only” while others changed into a hybrid of abstinence and comprehensive sex education (explanation of contraception).

On one side of the debate you have what seems to be some objective data showing that abstinence-only programs do not actually change the sexual behavior of teens:

By 1999, one study estimated a third of American students were receiving an abstinence-only education. But as funding grew, so did a body of research showing that abstinence didn’t change the sexual behaviors of students; pregnancy and STD rates did not go down, the age of initial sexual activity did not go up. “Each evaluation came along … and each showed it didn’t work,” says Santelli. The articles appeared in peer-reviewed journals, many in the Journal of Adolescent Health, and in government-commissioned reviews. In 2007, a federally funded study of four abstinence programs found its students no more likely to abstain than those in a comprehensive program.

On the other hand, a Christian understands sexuality as being more than just the physical act. Therefore, the “if you are going to do it, use a condom” teaching seems like setting up teens for failure from the start:

But many of the abstinence advocates NEWSWEEK talked to thought such compromises were untenable, that they could not teach students to remain abstinent until marriage while demonstrating how to use condoms. “If the funding is for a different worldview, one that says you should give condoms to kids, that’s not my belief system,” says Unruh. “I think it’s very harmful.” She and others say it’s a question of morals and values, which is not an area for compromise. “Our program indicates that sex is more than physical. It’s emotional. There’s a lot of different aspects,” says Scott Phelps, who directs A&M Partnership, an Illinois-based provider of abstinence-only curriculums. The group has a federal grant that expires in 2013. “If I’m teaching all of that, and then I’m teaching contraception, what is contraception going to do for all those consequences? It would be sort of nonsensical.”

There is a lot to think about here: public policy & federal funding, sexual ethics, adolescence. What is a biblical Christian response? How does a gospel-centered understanding of sexuality work alongside the realities of public policy?

A new report–noteworthy because it meets the “gold standard” of educational study–finds some success for New York City charter schools.

Some 94 percent of New York City’s charter school students are chosen by lottery, so it creates a good randomized study: researchers can take a group of students whose parents entered them in the lottery and compare the achievement of the students who got into the charter school and the students who stayed in the public school.

The report (read it in its entirety here) looks at data from 2000 to 2008. It found that on average, a student who attended a charter school K-8 would close about 86 percent of “Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap” in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English. (The “Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap” refers to the finding that students in Scarsdale, New York — an affluent New York suburb–score on average about 35 to 40 points higher than students in inner city Harlem.)

Dr. Miriam Grossman is the author of Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student, a book I highly recommend to the parent of any teenager considering college. Grossman originally wrote that book anonymously, but has since become an outspoken opponent of the culture of sexual permissiveness and the adults who promote it.

Dr. Grossman recently wrote a piece for Townhall.com about an organization called SIECUS, which stands for Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. Why should you care about SIECUS? Because there’s a good chance your public schools are using its materials in “health” class.

While SIECUS makes polite references to supporting parents, the information it provides and promotes does anything but.

On the SIECUS website, adolescents are directed to a downloadable mini-book called Talk About Sex. Here’s a small sampling of what teens are told:

“Every human being has basic rights. Still, adults may say and do things that make young people feel like they don’t have rights. It’s important for you to know your rights so that you can stand up for yourself when necessary. . . . At every point in your life, you can choose if and how to express your sexuality. . . . These may include decisions about . . . what sexual behaviors you want to do/when/and with whom. . . . It is up to you to determine how much risk you are willing to take. . . .”

SIECUS, as Grossman writes, is “a powerful organization that has set the standard for sex education in this country for nearly fifty years.” Its materials are used in schools throughout the country. And its influence may have reached closer than you think.

For example, in the town next door to mine, a former president of SIECUS taught at the local high school and gave a presentation to middle school parents called “Raising Sexually Healthy Young People.”

So beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing, or anything with the name SIECUS on it.