THE U.S. CONSTITUTION CAME TO MIND when I read David Dayen in The New York Times, October 22, 2024: “Back in June, Oklahoma’s superintendent for public instruction, Ryan Walters, ordered every classroom in the state to teach the Bible between fifth grade and high school.” What about the First Amendment Establishment Clause that prohibits the government from establishing a religion or favoring one religion over another?
But wait, there’s more.
Dayen continues, “Three months later, when he released the guidelines for companies bidding to supply the Bibles, they included some unusually specific terms. The Bibles had to contain not just the King James Version of the Old and New Testaments, but founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as well as the Pledge of Allegiance. And they had to be bound in leather, or some reasonable facsimile.”
What about a Pledge of Loyalty as well?
Dayen recounts, “The only Bibles that fit these parameters happen to be endorsed by Donald Trump or his son. The $59.99 ‘God Bless the USA’ Bibles (which are, incidentally, printed in China) cost 20 times more than a mass market paperback version of the King James Bible. It’s not clear how much Mr. Trump earns per sale—The Times has reported that he receives royalties for use of his name—but his cut is likely significant.”
Pause here to consider the hypocritical if not utterly unconstitutional aspects of this matter. See also AP News, March 24, 2024.
Image from AP News.
Dayen also notes, “Mr. Walters’s spokesman has confirmed that the $3 million in the state budget earmarked for Bibles came directly from ‘payroll savings’; that could pay salaries for 75 entry-level teachers in Oklahoma.… Maybe a rogue ideologue handing a chunk of Oklahoma’s education budget to the former president strikes you as egregious. It should also strike you as familiar.”
Image by Sheneman/Tribune Content Agency via CNN.
On the Other Hand. Here’s considerably more encouraging news on the educational front: Katharine Gammon writes in The Guardian, October 15, 2024, “A U.S. University Has a New Requirement to Graduate: Take a Climate Course.”
Let’s pause here for the expected reaction of climate-change deniers. Especially the hapless ones caught in recent warm-ocean-enhanced hurricanes.
More Details on UC San Diego’s Requirement. Gammon describes in The Guardian, “Courses must cover at least 30% climate-related content and address two of four areas, including scientific foundations, human impacts, mitigation strategies and project-based learning. About 7,000 students from the class of 2028 will be affected this year.”
Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego. Image by Ben Lundsford from Wikipedia. It has appeared here at SimanaitisSays before: “Holding Knowledge in One’s Hands.”
Preparing for the Future. Gammon cites Sarah Gille, a physical oceanographer at nearby Scripps Institution of Oceanography: “The most important thing is that UC San Diego wants to make sure we’re preparing students for the future that they really will encounter. We’re acutely aware as a society of how the climate is changing and how scary that can be, and that probably means that we need to implement some changes in how we do things.”
Gammon describes, “Gille says she can stand in front of a class and talk about what the world might look like in 50 or 100 years in terms of temperature increase or sea level rise—‘a pretty demoralizing lesson’—but when she ties it to strategic decisions students can make about their own lives, and how to pursue opportunities in the future, ‘it can become an empowering lesson too.’ ”
Integrated into Other Topics. “The requirement,” Gammon observes, “won’t add any time to a student’s graduation schedule—it’s designed to be integrated into existing classwork. Forty one-quarter courses meet the goal, including ‘The Astronomy of Climate Change,’ ‘Gender and Climate Justice,’ ‘Indigenous Approaches to Climate Change’ and ‘Environmentalism in Arts and Media.’ Many of the classes that fall under the climate requirement overlap with courses that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, the school says.”
Let’s pause again for the rants of those who feel DEI is some sort of Marxist plot to capture young minds. Or maybe to foster tolerance.
Society’s Larger View. “The move,” Gammon notes, “mirrors a larger sentiment in society. According to a Marist poll this year, 85% of gen Z is very or somewhat concerned about the climate crisis. They are more likely to believe the climate crisis is caused ‘mostly by human activity’ than any other generation. And states from California to Connecticut and New Jersey are now requiring that kids learn about the climate crisis in grade school classrooms.”
Gammon adds, “Arizona State University has also implemented a new sustainability requirement for graduation this year. Universities such as Columbia, Harvard and Stanford are taking the climate focus a step further and have created entire schools devoted to the issue.”
I suspect these activities are considerably more beneficial to society than fattening Trump pocketbook with faux pious pronouncements. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024