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Come ON!!! This never needed to happen. Anyone who is aware of world religions and their practices would have known right away what was happening and the whole embarrassing episode and inconvenience to the passengers wouldn't have happened.
This is my point: American education does nothing to require students growing up in our multicultural society to understand the religions around them and how the varied belief systems interact with our society. When 9-11 took place, everyone was scrambling to understand what kind of belief system would drive humans to commit such atrocities against innocent people who had every reason to think of themselves as being safely at work. Those with an understanding of world religions had some clues.
Do you know why sikhs wear a turban and carry a little dagger? Do you know why many Muslim women wear a head covering, and that Muslims don't eat pork or drink alcohol? Do you know what Confucius and Lao-Tze taught and how their ideologies drive Chinese thought? Do you know that Baha'i believers consider October 1844 to be significant, and why? Do you know who the most powerful Hindu gods are, and why they're considered powerful? Do you know the main beliefs of Buddhism, and whether it's a theistic religion or a philosophy? Do you know in what ways Native Americans experience the Great Spirit and what beliefs are common among the tribes? Or start looking at the divisions within Christianity: Can you describe the differences between Methodists and Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Catholics, Baptists and Pentecostals?
Yet every day in our country American citizens practice these religions, let them guide their lives and decide their actions. Every day in the United States we do business and make agreements with people and governments all over the world whose worldviews are more often than not guided by different beliefs and practices than ours. So how on earth can we ignore the great hole in our educational system? How is it that we settle for poorly equipping our next generation to operate capably in such a diverse society?
I think we've scared so many people away from mentioning God at all in public schools, that we have created a void that operates under pretense that knowledge of religions is unnecessary. It's not appropriate to teach religion in public education, but we've gotten so hung up on that, that we don't teach about religion, either. And in neglecting religious education under such a definition, we have done the United States and her people a great disservice.
If that air crew had been required to take a course on religions in high school, perhaps they would not have wigged out when a 17-year old American lad who had boarded the plane early in the morning simply wanted to catch up on his prayers. Puh-leeze.
Even more sad is that my own Christian students, who went to Christian High Schools, don't know the Bible, some basic Bible stories, basic Bible texts, or basic Hebrew and Christian practices. If these students have not a clue, what then can we expect of the wider society!
ReplyDeleteEven though I didn't know about the tefillin before, I am glad that I do now. I feel privileged having grown up in KL where different religions were allowed to exist side by side most of the time, where our teachers were not just history books but also our school friends and neighbors, who were from different racial and religious backgrounds. I moved from being a child following my parents in bowing to Chinese gods in temples and worshipping ancestors and not having much understanding of the merging of Confucianism and Taoism to repeating the Lord's prayer at school assembly at the Convent for 13 years, to confronting Adventism 30 years ago and finally face-to-face with Jesus.
ReplyDeleteWhile I am glad that my kids grew up in an SDA environment, I hope that our schools have prepared our youth well to handle differences and avoid religious ignorance and fear.
I think it's partly because we think we can turn every kid into a mathematician or scientist, so humanities get left behind.
ReplyDeleteGreat considerations. I admit, I do not know the answer to some of the questions you pose. It is true, however, that much ignorance and fear will cause such incidents to become more prevalent, until the onset of open discrimination.
ReplyDeleteThe tricky part is getting an unbiased education about religion. I signed up for a world religions class at a community college but didn't return after the first night. In the teacher's first lecture he pretty much singled out the Christians in class and said that Christianity was narrow-minded and wrong and that we had all just been misled because there was so much more out there. Not exactly the education you want young students to get either.
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