Let me get this straight -- Fundamentalist Dominionists feel a sense of entitlement and thus engage in a frivolous lawsuit to try and impose their way of revolutionary, outside-the-norm thinking on an entire state (California in this case) after becoming upset because a secular collegiate system declared their quasi-education standards lacking due to a religious-based rewriting of historical and factual information so as to actually remove factual info to the point of rendering the Dominionists' education meaningless.
It's fine if you want to educate students from a religious point of view, but this lawsuit by Dominionists against the University of California school system is beyond ridiculous. Basically, the UC has decided that any religious-based or secular-based high schools need to meet certain minimum standards in teaching information to their students. They've rejected curricula from both religious-based and secular-based schools due to their curricula being under those standards.
But when an entire group of schools base their curricula -- from US History to Literature to Science (namely Biology) -- on texts that have so much context and reality removed from them that they border on misinformation ... don't get uppity by complaining that the secular school system has minimum standards.
The beginning of today’s Tribune article on this lawsuit refers to a high school sophomore at one of the religious-based schools... but that student misses the point:
Sarah Potter-Smith, a sophomore at Calvary Chapel Christian School, can’t understand why anyone would think that learning any subject from a Christian perspective is inferior to a secular education.
Ms. Potter-Smith doesn’t realize that the UC isn’t saying her school’s education is inferior because it is taught from a Christian perspective. They are saying it is inferior because it doesn’t teach rafts of material that is commonly held by society at large to be important material in the education of high school students.
You can teach the Christian perspective of our Founding Fathers and the Christian heritage of some of our basic laws -- as long as you also teach that America is a secular nation founded also on a heritage of Greek democracy, Roman republicanism, and English property-owners' rights. Plus, many of our Founding Fathers were naturalists or universalists much moreso than what has come to mean "Christian" to Dominionists today... not to mention anything about the Enlightenment (which is generally anathema to Dominionists who wish to impose their faith-based perspective on all others).
You can teach the Christian perspective of creationism -- as long as you also actually teach evolutionary theory and the scientific evidence supporting said theory (not just discredit that theory by removing context from other scientific studies).
You can teach the Christian perspective of literature -- as long as you also explain that a lot of that perspective comes from faith-based scholars analyzing authors' works after the fact rather than the authors themselves and, as the University of California apparently requests, your students actually read the entire books, rather than simply portions or anthalogies of those works. (In the article, one of the suing schools' English teachers references "allusions to the creation story" in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- and indeed, Dr. Frankenstein's "creation" reads John Milton's Paradise Lost and the story of Adam. But, there are also direct allusions to the Greek story of Prometheus ... just read the subtitle to the book. The stories of Prometheus and Frankenstein's monster are, in some sense, parallel to the Biblical story of the Tree of Knowledge and the expulsion from Eden.)
The issue with the University of California's standards is not some sort of discrimination against religious-based education -- meaning the Trib's headline "Religious-based education on trial" is completely off-base. (In fact, the Trib article notes that the UC also rejects curricula from secular and other non-religious high schools.)
The issue is seen in the reverse of the lawsuit. While schools of all manner (even home-schooling) are allowed to teach students from whatever perspective they see fit, there are certain minimum standards imposed by various universities. If a given high school hopes to find its students on a given university's track, the onus is on the high school to teach to those standards -- not on the university to accept the myriad of differing high school curricula. (And, keep in mind, there are other means for students of even "rejected" schools to earn acceptance into the University of California system: different combinations of minimum SAT scores is one alternate method.)
If the coalition of high schools suing the University of California hopes to be university-quality prep schools then it needs to meet the standards of those universities, not the other way around (dumbing down the universities to those high schools' variances). The Trib's sidebar gives a good indication of the information lacking from such reject curricula:
Classes dismissed
Examples of courses at Christian schools rejected by the University of California:
Course: Special Providence: Christianity and the American Republic
Text: "American Government for Christian Schools" (Bob Jones University Press)
Reason rejected: Content was not consistent with the "empirical historical knowledge generally accepted in the collegiate community."
Course: Christianity and Morality in American Literature
Text: "American Literature: Classics for Christians Vol. 5" (A Beka Book)
Reason Rejected: Used only an anthology instead of complete works; selected works inconsistent with university "expectations regarding critical thinking and broad exposure to writers' key works."
Course: Biology
Text: "Biology for Christian Schools 2nd Edition" (Bob Jones University Press)
Reason rejected: Text "is not consistent with the knowledge generally accepted in the scientific community" and operates from the premise that "science is invalid to the extent it conflicts with Christian belief."
It is not the University of California's fault that a given high school seeks to teach its students from text books that are lacking ("is not consistent with the knowledge generally accepted in the scientific community"). Perhaps Bob Jones University Press and the other publishers ought to seek to improve the level of information they provide in their school texts by actually including a well-rounded curricula. Again, a school can teach from any perspective it wishes to, but this is akin to a bunch of Christian students attending a Jewish school and complaining they're being discriminated against because the curriculum doesn't include New Testament teachings.
FYI, I come from a background of having attended a Christian school for the first half of my education, K-8. My senior pastor asked, well after I'd graduated, how I thought the school had prepared me. I told him they did a great job preparing me as a student and I believe it to this day.
What a difference my pastor's attitude of wanting to prepare students for later life is when compared to the attitude of these Dominionists who seek to impose their view of "preparation" on everyone else (their view of preparation being defined by deliberate ignorance and discounting of provable information and data when it doesn't fit their narrowed view of "religious-based perspective" -- "science is invalid to the extent it conflicts with Christian belief"). Then again, these are same set of folks who want to impose their radical reinterpretation of our Constitution and laws... their radical reinterpretation of foreign policy based on bringing about Armageddon... their radical reinterpretation of society based on Dominionist principles of ostracizing those who are different... and on and on.
This is little more than another in a long line of examples of the self-realizing martyrdom these Dominionists set up for themselves by ignoring the reality of the multi-cultural, multi-faceted, multi-perspective, fact-based world around them. It's not society's fault that they choose to think differently than everyone else and believe in a faked-up history and pseudo-science that is different from everyone else accepts as knowledge.
...And when they're called out on it they have the audacity to complain that they're "victims" of some sort of discrimination or persecution on the part of society-at-large? Please.
(c/p Illinois Reason)