From Jonah to Job, the Bible belongs in public schools

You can't really get Moby Dick (or Pinocchio) if you've never heard of Jonah and the Whale, writes Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic. You won't understand why Harriet Tubman was called "Moses," if you're not familiar with the Exodus story. Bible stories belong in public school classrooms, he argues. Americans who don't know about David and Goliath, Job, the parting of the Red Sea, the Sermon on the Mount and the Good Samaritan will not be prepared to understand America's history or literature.

The new required-reading list in Texas has angered many liberals, who see it as "an attack on civil liberties and cultural diversity," Kirsch writes. The state school board has framed the Bible stories as part of a "common literary canon," not as religious instruction, but many are unpersuaded. A Dallas Morning News editorial called for including the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita, he writes.

"Saying that Americans have special reasons to study the Bible doesn’t imply that it’s more sacred than the scriptures of other faiths," writes Kirsch. American students don't study English because it's better than other languages. It's our language. And Western culture is our culture.

With its Bible-infused reading list and "patriotic" social studies standards, Texas is "aligning literacy, curriculum, culture, and civics around a common theory of education, writes Robert Pondiscio in the Washington Post. After decades in which schools tried to teach skills without paying much attention to content, Texas is all about knowledge building.

In the early grades, "children learn stories, people, places, events, and traditions," the standards say. Beginning in third grade, students move "from ancient civilizations through Greece and Rome, the medieval world, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, European colonization, the American Revolution, and the Constitution."

"A student who understands Greece and Rome, Hebrew Scriptures, medieval institutions, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment is better prepared to understand the American founding," he writes. "The fifth-grade standards make those connections explicit."

Affluent and highly educated families will always find ways to transmit sophisticated language, cultural knowledge, institutional know-how, and civic confidence to their children. Children who depend chiefly upon school for access to those things have the greatest need for an explicit, cumulative, coherent curriculum.

It's controversial, Pondiscio concedes. "Background knowledge is not culturally neutral and does not always yield to preferred notions of inclusivity."

He argues that "a curriculum is not principally a mirror in which every child must see a flattering reflection of himself. Its more important function is to give children access to a world they did not make but must learn to navigate — including the taken-for-granted cultural knowledge their more privileged peers are likely to encounter outside school."

The social standards are ambitious, writes Pondiscio. Will they be taught? Texas plans to align its reading comprehension tests with the required reading list and with social studies and science content on the theory that "what gets tested gets taught." 

Liberals should create an equally rich blue-state reading list, writes James Traub in a New York Times commentary. "Show the world that academic rigor is not just for conservatives."

He spent 2023-24 visiting schools for a book on civic education. "Most students even in the well-regarded high schools I visited knew precious little about American history and government and had only a hazy sense of chronology," Traub writes. "Teachers in English classes complained that students would not read whole novels — and so they didn’t assign them."

"Children need to be exposed from an early age to great works of literature and to history taught chronologically," he writes. "They should memorize poems and speeches," and "they should learn grammar."