Education Shouldn’t Care What You Care

     If you’re like me, you had a history class that covered World War II. As part of that class, you likely spent some time analyzing the specific political philosophies behind the Nazi party. Now, this is an unfortunately controversial statement, but I’m strongly anti-Nazi and have been for as long as I can remember. My belief that the Nazi movement was a detriment to the world didn’t change what I was required to learn in class because the facts of history (or any other discipline) aren’t dependent on your acceptance of them.

     Or so I thought.

     There is a bill that has passed the Ohio House of Representatives and is being sent to the State Senate that ostensibly seeks to protect a student’s right to express their faith on school grounds. The part of this bill that is drawing significant questions is the clause that says a school can’t “penalize or reward a student based on religious content of a student’s work.” Basically, if a student’s work in some way expresses a religious belief, the grade should not be impacted by that expression.

     Opponents of the bill are asking how an educator should respond to an answer that is religiously accurate, but not historically, or scientifically. Example: If a student claims the Earth is 6,000 years old, would an educator be forced to accept that as correct since they are not allowed to penalize for expression of religious belief? Does this bill allow belief to trump objective fact in an educational setting?

The bill was sponsored by Rep. Timothy Ginter who is an ordained minister and has a history of attempting to legislate his religious beliefs. Rep. Ginter specifically says the above example of the age of the Earth would not be acceptable because school is still about understanding the material presented in class. Rep. Ginter offered the counter example of a student wanting to do a book report on the Book of Job. That kind of situation is what the bill attempts to allow and protect.

Some legal scholars assessing the case question the need for the bill since these expression rights of students are already protected by the 1st Amendment of the Ohio Constitution. When news agencies pressed Rep. Ginter for an example of how his bill would create greater religious freedom than the 1st Amendment, he offered no response. If the bill is redundant, what is the reason behind it?

It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to long-time readers that I think this is an absolutely garbage bill. Outside of the redundancy of the bill, it sets up a false antagonism between education and belief. Education and belief are not enemies, they are two different ways of gathering information. If you think Education is the enemy of belief, something needs to be reassessed.

Despite Rep. Ginter’s claims, lawyers have said the bill potentially leaves open the possibility for a wrong answer to be marked correct for religious reasoning. The bill’s language is open to interpretation. Any paradigm that would allow a wrong answer to be correct undermines the point of education. A wrong answer is wrong whether you get it from your brain, an angel named Erika, or the flying spaghetti monster.

If when studying World War II, I told my teacher that the beliefs of the Nazis made me uncomfortable and were contradictory to my own, I hope she would’ve said, “good”. If I had then told her that belief exempted me from the test, I hope she would have laughed in my face. Facts are true, whether you believe them or not.