On Dec. 18, 2005, Ben Stein made a speech on his CBS Sunday Morning Commentary, and lots of what he said I agree with. If you'd like the full text of what Ben said, let me know and I'll email it to you.
However, he made a couple of statements that I just had to comment on. What Ben said is next, in purple. My comments will be afterward in my traditional black.
"In light of recent events...terrorist attacks, school shootings, etc., I think it started when Madeleine Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body found recently) complained she didn't want prayer in our schools, and we said OK.
Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school, the Bible says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.
Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank our children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock's son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he's talking about. And we said OK.
Now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves."
And so I say:
You know, I lost a lot of respect for Ben Stein when he blamed the online game EverQuest for his son's addiction to it. So I take everything he has to say with a shaker of salt.
I agree with most of what he has to say here (again, remember what you're reading here is NOT the entire Stein post!) except for the part about keeping God in school. As a teacher, I had to look that one square in the face, teaching religion (except in a a detached educational sort of way) presents all kinds of problems. Whose religion? I had Christians, Muslims, Jews, pagans, athiests, agnostics. Which God do we talk to? Okay, so this is a predominantly Christian country, then what flavor of Christianity? Do we go with what is predominant in the area? Catholic? Mormon? Baptist? Or do we go with whatever beliefs the teacher has? But we can't because teachers can't impose their beliefs on the kids, we're there to teach things like English and math, and really there's not enough time to concentrate on those with all the other nonsense the administration has us doing.
I told my principal that if he required me to post the 10 Commandments in my classroom, he was going to have to allow me to put up all the other basic beliefs of every other religion or he'd be faced with a serious lawsuit, and not just from me either, but I wasn't Christian and wasn't for imposing beliefs I didn't hold on my students. He agreed, but it didn't come to that.
I did allow a group of kids, who knew I'm not Christian, to use my classroom to hold a prayer group during my lunch break. They used mine because most of them had my class immediately after lunch, and I really didn't mind. However they decided not to continue when I pointed out to them later that they were the meanest, rudest group of students I'd had in a long time, and they were. Oh my, they were vicious to other students who didn't meet with them in that prayer group! I'd never had a group more dedicated to deriding their classmates, and they really didn't see that they were doing anything wrong.
I expected situations like this to happen when Bradley brought her Sociology 2 class to merge with mine for her religion section. With my honors students, every week or two we had a graded discussion on any topic. No topic was forbidden, they chose it and the rules were that everyone had to participate, you could disagree but name-calling was forbidden, you had to present a logical argument, and you had to stay in your seat. We had some wonderful discussions, and I'd play devil's advocate on both sides, depending on who had the most people backing it. Bradley brought her class in to talk about religion, just to get more people involved, and she generally had one or two teachers or principals come in and participate too. It was always lively, the questions posed and answered were invariably intelligent, and very few people got their feelings hurt, which honestly happened more when we had discussions on vegetarianism.
I do think that if people want God in school, they should send kids to a private religious school or homeschool, but a school funded with public money needs to leave religion to the parents, not the teachers.
Well, and Ben Stein should stop blaming a game for his lack of parental observation.
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