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Texas's new required school reading list includes stories from the Bible
Texas is the first state to establish such a list, as others generally give wide latitude to school districts and boards to select their own texts.
There are fourteen stories, listed in order of grade level: Jonah and the Whale (Jonah 1:1-5, 10-17, 2:10), David and Goliath (excerpt from The Children's Book of Heroes), Daniel and the Lion's Den (Children's Adapted Version), The Necessity of Humility (Luke 14:7-11), Moses (Exodus 3, 14), Do Not Be Anxious (Matthew 6:25-34), The Shepherd's Psalm (Psalms 23), Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12), To Everything There is a Season (Ecclesiastes 3), Lamentations 3, The Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), Job (Job 1-7, 11, 14, 19, 28, 38-42), Adam and Eve (Genesis 2-3), The Definition of Love (1 Corinthians 13).
They also select a variety of translations: the New International Reader's Version, which is for a third-grade reading level, the English Standard Version, the King James Version, and the Jewish Publication Society. The ESV/KJV have their own history as evangelical texts; this is why there are so many parochial Catholic schools, though it's doubtful whether modern Catholics (who make up ~22% of Texas's population) care as much.
Teaching Biblical stories as cultural or historical texts does not violate the 1st amendment. Certainly the Bible is the most influential book in Western thought and has relevance to any serious study of literature and history. That being said, certain passages err on the side of theology and perhaps should be avoided outside of a comparative religion course. And some atheists will be disappointed that the more controversial passages have been excluded.
Side notice: Goldilocks and the Three Bears and the Grashopper and the Ants seem both a bit heavy-handed for kindergarden.
Also, the Texans (or Americans) really seem to love their founding fathers and presidents. Though I will also notice that Texas had the good taste not to make a hagiography of The Greatest President of All Times required reading. And I do not even want to speculate what kind of dirt Bennett (whose Children's Book of Virtues provides texts no less than seven times) has on the state board of education.
I think that religious background knowledge is often important context and the school should probably try to teach kids the basics. Quite a few of the great writers did have an education heavy on both Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman mythology. If Melville's narrator introduces himself as Ishmael, he is implicitly assuming that the reader knows of the biblical namesake.
On the other hand, there is a thin line between education and indoctrination. Jonah (author credit: Jonah in the HC article, which is amazing, like crediting Odysseus with writing the Illiad) is basically a story about God railroading some unwilling guy (whom he gave free will for some reason) into delivering some ultimatum to some city, then chickening out when it came to follow up on his threats (remind you of anyone? Sadly, God does not always chicken out.), leaving Jonah pissed for a lack of fire and brimstone. Kindergardeners might not understand that the character of God is every bit as fictional as the character of the Grandmother Spider from How Grandmother Spider Brought Fire, because adults around them take one more serious than the other.
On the third hand, there is also merit to letting kids discover for themselves that the adults are full of shit. I got a bible in fifth grade (German schools have opt-in religious education), which is the book I credit with turning me atheist around ninth grade or so.
Also, it seems likely that blue states will retaliate by finding out what stories are most effective at turning kids away from Christianity and making them required reading. They can even co-opt Texas guise of providing Judeo-Christian context, the story of Lot should be enough to give most teens the Ick.
That would be the actual bibliography of the bible. Kids could get a real education on the jewish state, how they got their ass handed to them and how the bible was rewritten by no less than 16 different authors spaced in time so much that you could track who retconned what just by the way language mutated over time. Also there's like a whole book/scroll that was removed at one point. Lets not even mention the original polytheistic origins and the cast of various Elohim.
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With an interpretation like that, sounds like the inclusion of Bible stories is a good idea! and maybe you could attend the same class? 😁
For those of you what never heard the Mass readings, God sends Jonah as prophet with a warning message to Nineveh and they convert and He spares them. I don't know what is "chickening-out" there, Jonah is explicit that God is merciful and will spare the truly penitent:
In Markdown, you have to add two space characters at the end of a line in order to create a line break.
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Goldilocks and the Three Bears? Isn't that the kind of bedtime story parents will already be reading or telling to their kids? Depends on what version is in the curriculum, I suppose, but kindergarten is 4-5 years old, isn't it? Plenty old enough for a simple form of the story.
Aren't we already there? If the books aren't explicitly all LGBT+++ friendly, the new interpretations of them are, e.g. this 1970s series of Frog and Toad which I only knew of from seeing the characters presented as gay on Tumblr posts, and the author's daughter saying "yes, my gay dad meant them to be a gay couple".
Of course, Ernie and Bert are gay. What, you thought those two were straight? Pfft!
In Texas, kindergarten is five to six. Pre-k is four to five and officially optional(technically, so is kindergarten- but there isn't quite as strong a norm of going to Pre-k as there is kindergarten). After that grades count 1-12 in ascending order.
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Goldilocks was extremely popular with small boys of my generation as soon as they were old enough to read - you didn't need to set it as a course book for illustrated copies to fly off the library shelves. I don't think this was motivated by misogyny because Tailypo was equally popular with boys who came across it.
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Jonah is essentially about the mercy of God. Your claim that God 'chickens out' is embarrassingly backwards - the people of Ninevah clearly respond as required to Jonah's warning, which is why they are spared. What's interesting is that Jonah doesn't want them to be spared. That's why he initially tried to avoid God's call, not because he was lazy but because he hated the Ninevites and hoped they would be struck down. The ending of the story is the whole point - that God can destroy or give mercy to whomever he wants, and it's not for humans to complain because we have a limited perspective. Jonah tried to avoid God's call because he disagreed with God's plan, and it's only when he repents of that in the depths of metaphorical hell that he's saved. It's quite an interesting and layered story.
I get the vibe that you're some kind of angry atheist type? It's possible that if you'd been properly taught Jonah and other Bible stories as a kid you would have more respect and understanding for them, and maybe less hostility towards God.
To someone who grew up with western secular morality, properly explaining the lesson "God grants and denies mercy capriciously and we should not question his decisions" makes God less sympathetic, not more. The kiddie moral of "Johan was punished for his disobedience but forgiven in the end" is much more palatable to even Victorian sensibilities, let alone today's.
God doesn't need to be sympathetic. The purpose of the Bible isn't to make you think God is a chill dude, it's to describe his actual nature.
Also, the mercy in this story isn't capricious, in fact it's the opposite. God gives Ninevah the opportunity to repent, and they take it.
Anyway, the point of this story isn't God's treatment of Ninevah, it's Jonah's response to it. The person reading should see themselves in the person of Jonah, who seeks to avoid God's will for his life. Even a child can understand this basic theme. Jonah gets in trouble because he tries to flee from God's will, and is saved when he returns to that will. This concept is deepened by the context of Jonah's reasons for fleeing (his hatred for the Ninevites). There's no contradiction, this theme of Jonah's anger is an expansion of the simpler concept.
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Except it's not "capricious" in the slightest. The people of Nineveh repent their wickedness and are spared. Jonah rebels and is punished. And all the while God tries to reason with Jonah and bring him on side rather than just leaving him to suffer.
It's a story about free-will and the difference between punishing sins and punishing sinners.
Jonah (like many people who subscribe to a "secular morality" these days) has become high on his own sense of righteousness and as such has become more concerned with sticking it to his outgroup than addressing real problems. This prompts God to test him and ultimately call him out on his bullshit. If God calling someone out on their self-righteous bullshit violates your precious sensibilities perhaps you are the one who needs the message most.
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But it's not just about Jonah's punishment, it's about Nineveh being spared not capriciously, but after repenting. Caprice would be God telling Jonah after he arrived and proclaimed the message, but the people of Nineveh didn't believe and didn't change, "You know what? Changed my mind, you can go home".
The lesson for us is "don't be vindictive and punitive for the sake of it, don't try and tell God what to do based on our own desires and hatreds". If the wicked truly repent, they can be forgiven. The whores and tax-collectors enter the Kingdom of God before you, the self-righteous who look down on others.
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It's not exactly capricious, the Ninevites explicitly go overboard in their repentance. Even the cows repent of their wickedness!
There are lots of layered takes to get out of the story, that's why it's so good! Jonah was punished for his disobedience but forgiven in the end. Also, God didn't just kill Jonah but brought him back - He could have just picked a new prophet but Jonah was given a second chance. Nineveh better at repenting than Israel/Judah. Israel has prophet after prophet spitting reams of flowery poetry sent to convert it and no one changes. Nineveh gets a half-assed "God's going to come down hard on you!" and they all immediately undergo a ridiculous level of fasting and repentance.
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Another layer is that Jonah himself is not destroyed. Even after doing as God commanded, he still wishes to see Nineveh destroyed, and is angry when it is not. The story ends with God attempting to reason with him, rather than simply smiting him for his rebellious attitude.
I think this is the part that trips up a lot of secular readers, they see God as "chickening out" because, like Jonah, they aren't really worried about fighting sin as much as the are hating the outgroup.
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Jonah is a wonderful piece of satire, and it's a shame it will just be used as "kids, look at this time a whale vored a dude". Basically every other prophet suffers rejection, humiliation, and violence from their own people. Meanwhile, Jonah is sent to Israel's mortal enemies, tries to get out of doing his job, walks through the city giving the most half assed proclamation ("Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!")... and it works perfectly. Even the cows cover themselves in sackclothes and sit in ashes. Absolutely brilliant.
That said, it's unclear if teachers will present the narrative excerpts as clearly work of fiction, like Aesop's fables. Is that too close to establishment of religion? Schools are obviously allowed to teach evolution even though it offends young earth creationists.
The beautiful part of Jonah is the prayer, which is unfortunately not part of the reading. It acts as a sort of maximum externalization of salvation from a rock bottom psychological state, with Jonah poetically describing himself as being barred into the bedrock of the ocean (literal rock bottom). Many of the metaphors we use today to describe being in psychological disaster — can’t get above water; trying to stay afloat; drowning; out of our depths; swallowed whole; confined; in hell; fainting / dying; flooded with work; suffocating — these are all found or implied in the small little poem-prayer. In my view this is the real utility of the work, with the tale of empathy placed around it for added tropology. When the ancient Israelite found himself in disaster, he would remember Jonah, and in remembering Jonah he would remember what Jonah did. Jonah’s salvation comes from three behaviors:
His cessation of avoidance (no more fleeing from the Great Ought)
His expressing out of his troubles in words, imagery, and emotion (extremely useful psychologically, functioning as catharsis and rubber duck debugging in one)
His orientation toward hope and eventual deliverance from his troubles (“(though) I have been banished from Your sight, yet once more I will look toward Your holy temple”)
These are great behaviors. If you were to teach these behaviors in a class, it would be an advantage to those students who would otherwise avoid, ignore, and despair over their troubles.
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What even is the moral of Goldilocks, other than that burglary is bad?
Bears can and should eat bratty little girls, and if the little girls get away that's a disappointing ending.
Seems there were three versions, the first with a nasty old woman instead of a cute little girl:
Digging into it is fascinating, the history seems to be that it was originally an oral folk tale and when it was first written down seems to be difficult to pin down; this one attributes it to Eleanor Mure in 1831 written down as a version of a story told inside the family but not published, and the bears are more violent to the intruder. First published version seems to be Robert Southey published in 1837 and that kicked off mass-market popularity and new versions.
Over time, the story got tidied up (the dirty old woman becomes a beautiful young woman and then a little girl, the three bears change from three bachelor bears to three friends sharing a home and then become a family of father, mother and baby) and softened (the bears don't do anything to the intruder, she jumps out an open window and gets away scot-free so far as the ending goes) so that it became suitable for children.
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Moderation is best. Be neither too hot nor lukewarm; walk the middle path.
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I actually have a book that's the sequel where the bear family shows up at Goldilocks' suburban house while the parents are out. They trash the whole place while she's frantically running around trying to fix all the messes. Then the parents come home from grocery shopping and there's her long explanation of what happened, starting with 'I know I'm not supposed to let strangers in but technically I knew them I've been to their house...'
Fun variation, maybe something to do with [large, furry] brown home invaders. They're not like us, tell you what.
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I actually have it in a collection of preschool books. Small kids love hearing the three voices ("Papa Bear said in his great BIG voice...") It teaches concepts of hot, cold, lukewarm. Big, small, medium. If there is a moral it might just be: looks can be deceiving. A nice cottage may look inviting, but maybe a family of bears lives there! Remember kids, don't take candy from strangers.
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"Don't wander around in the forest" and "don't take other people's shit" seem sufficiently didactic for a old children's story. (The first in particular is a very popular theme)
Yeah. Goldilocks is a brat, the bears leave their house open because they don't expect any intruders and she doesn't seem to have even the plea of necessity about needing shelter and food, she tries all the porridge and sleeps in all the beds and doesn't explain herself when discovered, she just runs away without making good for the damage she did.
"Don't take stuff just because it's lying there" is a very good lesson for small kids. They need to learn about "this belongs to someone else, ask first" at that age.
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Sometimes things aren't the right fit for everyone?
More pointedly, I think the image of "trying Papa's things and Mama's things and then realizing that the Little One's things are just right" is supposed to lead children away from messing around with their parents' things when they're home alone. Which is less of a moral lesson and more of a practical, avoiding-accidents-in-the-home sort of lesson. The story doesn't actually illustrate that lesson, so much as wrap the image in a fun little story that'll stick in kids' minds.
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