All education of the young must include moral / civic teachings.
All moral/civic teachings have their foundation in a religious system somewhere. No exceptions.
Therefore, education of the young must take place in a setting where there is something resembling agreement in religious teachings.
If you don’t believe me, just look at the education mess that takes place when the community doesn’t seem to have any morals or religious beliefs.
Greater is HE within thee than he that is in the world.
Get saved, honey.
You have to read this to believe it ping.
I think this woman needed to be the adult in the situation. If her beliefs are so rigid that she can’t allow a child to read a children’s book aloud, then I think she’s in the wrong position or needs to find a Christian-based school where such conflicts won’t arise.
Actually, having certain things read that might have objectionable content leads to a chance to discuss and analyze the content and develop critical thinking, something in short supply in much of education which could serve the children well later in life.
Instead, she chose to teach children the wrong lesson.
A seven year old was reading a book bigger than her head. Sorry, but I find that something to cheer over.
Then again, I’ll probably be standing in line at eleven o’clock with my daughter waiting to buy the last book in the series with a lot of other parents, all of us marvelling over what we are doing.
Betty Bowers placemarker
Oh, how silly! She didn’t have to listen to a 7-year-old “read a Harry Potter book.” The dang things are hundreds of pages long; please don’t drop one on my foot!
At worst, she’d have had to listen to a paragraph. Big FReepin’ deal.
(And for the record, I’m a fundamentalist Christian, okay?)
Harry Potter is fantasy folks. Get a freakin’ life. Or did you all become cannibals from reading Hansel and Gretel?
To me she sounds like a sour tight a$$ who doesn’t understand or much like children and their need to explore their imaginations.
I would guess that she would also ban “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe”, “The Hobbit” and any works by Shakespeare.
She reminds me of my first grade teacher Miss Hookway who we not so fondly called “Captain Hook” (behind her back of course). She really resembled Emira Gulch from the Wizzard of Oz (another work of literature this woman would probably ban from her classroom.)
True story, Miss “Captain Hook”, gave us an assignment where we had pictures and words and had to color the pictures and indicate whether the vowels were “hard” or “soft”.
The vowel was the letter “A”. One of the pictures was a glass and the word was “water”.
I completed the assignment and got all the answers right and colored all the pictures except the glass of water.
When I turned it in she told me it wasn’t finished because I didn’t color the water blue. I very politely explained that water isn’t blue, it’s clear.
My reward for being smarter than the teacher was to be kept in from recess. Bi-otch!
When I got home from school, I told my father. He said a very wise thing that has stuck with me these 46 years – “Just because someone is in a position of authority, doesn’t mean that person is always right”.
More to the point: How would religious cons react to a Muslim teacher refusing to let a child read from The Three Little Pigs because it was "against her religion"?
I doubt there'd be much sympathy for the religous nutjob in that instance.
This posting and the thread are one more item for the file on “Why to consider home schooling.”
The best item in the file, however, is still:
Underground History of American Education
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
For the “picture version”, see:
American Education History Tour
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/historytour/history1.htm
If the Harry Potter novels are so demonically depraved, could someone please explain to me why the children at Hogwarts observe Christian-inspired holidays like Christmas, Easter and Valentine's Day? I've read all six books multiple times and there's not a single mention of any pagan observations other than Halloween.
Yup. No Dancing naked in the moonlight and sex orgies at Beltaine. No driving cattle through smoke from sacred fires at Lammas. Nothing.
Her last act...if teachers in England have the kind of power that teachers here in the US enjoy, I have to wonder what her first fifty obstructive acts were!
Fundamentalism is anti-intellectual, and exalts our "obedience" (in reality, our legalism, since so many rules are designed to "protect" us from things not even overtly unbiblical) and downgrades the sovereign protective work of God, as though He were powerless to keep our minds from running off into apostacy if we read "wicked" works.
The ugly effects of this approach are evident to me lately in working with a number of Latino evangelicals. As some know, Guatemala is now over 65% protestant, and El Salvador is over 70%. But when you get with these people (many of whom are VERY sweet and loving and godly persons), you see the same legalistic and unbiblical "rules" approach that characterized American fundamentalism in the 50s and 60s (no wonder! Our missionaries left our bible colleges and seminaries and taught them!). It is the same old stuff. No movies, no make up, no haircuts for women, NO drinking, NO dancing, and varied other prohibitons. It is like stepping back in time. What is really interesting is that there is a kind of a consensus that "Doing these things (or not doing them) is a sign that we are different and not "worldly." This makes us attractive to the unregenerate world." In fact, this obsession with rules keeping is repellent to the unbelieving world around them. When questioned, the unbelievers will often say "I would like to be a Christian. They are really good people. But I don't think I could live that way." Either that, or they are just thought strange.