Reading the Bible as a Pedagogical Text: Testing, Testament, and Some Postmodern Considerations About Religion/the Bible in Contemporary Education

Abstract

While it is true that following various Supreme Court decisions in the last century, religion is, in most cases, no longer explicitly taught in public school classrooms, we use this article to explore the ways in which implicit religious understandings regarding curriculum and pedagogy still remain prevalent in current public education. Building on previous work, we first aim to problematize the ways religion and particularly Judeo‐Christian assumptions remain at the core of secular public education in the United States. To do so, we work to engage the Bible as the foundational Western text and its understanding of testing and of teaching as testament to illustrate particular assumptions about assessment, questioning, and the possibility for interrogating authoritative text. In the process we outline a historical precedent that twins passive reading of the Bible as always‐already containing singular truths with a modern educational system underwritten by these same assumptions about knowledge and expertise lying in the teacher and the textbook. We suggest that the Bible is not only our “first” text—authoritative, literal, and fixed—but also our first postmodern text which explicitly allows for, indeed encourages, creative, even subversive, encounters with knowledge rather than being subject to passive submission in a system of transmissive education. Ultimately, and using existing work in hermeneutics, critical literacy, and constructivist education, we pursue a critical reengagement with the historical and ongoing role of the Bible and religion in modern public, secular schooling as a way of revisiting fundamental epistemologies and ways of reading text and particularly the curricular implications of revising how we read education‐as‐text.

Notes

Notes

1. We are referring to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1947 decision (Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1) that the separation of church and state established in the First Amendment applies to states and, therefore, to local school districts as well as the court’s various ensuing decisions banning religious instruction (McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203 []), school prayer (Engle v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 []), devotional Bible reading in public schools (Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 []), or religious invocations at public schools graduation ceremonies (Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 []).

2. While the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge has, since the Renaissance, been depicted as an apple, it was probably more likely to have been a tamarind (Enoch 32:4) or perhaps a fig tree, if we are to take their hasty choice of clothing against a newfound nakedness as a guide (Genesis 3:7).

3. For lack of a better word, we use the term Bible in its more colloquial usage as referring to the collection of primary religious texts of both Judaism and Christianity. Still, we recognize the problematics (and politics) in doing so as it is originally a Christian term referring to the collection of Christian sacred writing comprising both the Old and New Testaments (with the Hebrew Bible often referred to as the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament). In specific places we use the term Torah, which stands for the five books of Moses, the first of three components comprising the Tanach, or Hebrew Bible/scriptures.

4. http://newhopeforliving.com/old/guest03.htm

5. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp‐dyn/content/story/2008/06/23/ST2008062300818.html

6. U.S. Stands Alone in Its Embrace of Religion Among Wealthy Nations (Pew Research Center, December 19, 2002). http://www.pewglobal.org/2002/12/19/among‐wealthy‐nations/

7. By this we do not mean that we in fact are, demographically, a Judeo‐Christian society. Rather, we are referring to the foundational understandings that have guided the United States since, and before, its origins as a country. Indeed, one need only attend to current political debates and culture to get a full spectrum of the depth with which American society, as reflected in pandering and pomp, might well come to define itself Judeo‐but‐especially‐Christian.

8. For some other examples: “God has come to test you” (Exodus 20:20); “Please let me test just once more” (Judges 6:39); “Prove me, O LORD, and try me; test my heart and my mind” (Psalm 26:2); “I the LORD search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds” (Jeremiah 17:10).

9. Scholars adhering to the Documentary hypothesis now believe that the Old Testament was not written by a single author but is a compilation, by later editors, of four sources/texts: The Jahwist text (where God is referred to as Yawhwe), the Elohist text (which refers to God as Elohim), the Deuteronomist text (written during the Babylonian exile in the 6th century bce), and the Priestly text (refers mostly to priestly matters and written in the 5th century bce, when Judah was a province of the Persian empire).

10. There are, of course, broader political considerations that are perhaps corollary to our analysis here—indeed, that influence the very issues discussed in this article. In a broad sense, education—what we describe here and otherwise—is never removed from the broader societal discourses that structure education or the power relations underlying schooling. Nor can one extrapolate the relationship between the forms of subjectivity and reading positions addressed here from the broader notions of the desirable citizen society—and schools as its agents—have work so long to produce. And then there are the more immediate political considerations pertaining to sex education, censorship of school books, and bullying gay students, all of which have been situated within a religious discourse from the political Right. Recent concerns have also been raised about the funneling of state money to (exclusively) Christian religious schools through expanding state voucher programs in the United States. Revelations about nominal science curricula in state‐funded schools—most recently and prominently in Louisiana—that teach “young earth creationism,” evolution as a debunked theory, and the Loch Ness monster as proof that humans and dinosaurs coexisted have raised the hackles of any number of church/state separationist groups, scientific watchdogs, and just generally left‐leaning politically active citizens. The implication, when we telescope out, of such an uproar is rooted in the fear that because these assertions are made in schools, predominantly through texts, certain forms of truth are becoming fixed as, in effect, gospel for children. We are of course sympathetic to these concerns generally, but would point out that this problem of reading passively exists in schools everywhere, even though they often appear different in form.