College too late, too little for secular studies in America

[rug]

This week’s “On Faith” question about the appropriateness of secular studies programs in universities is only tangentially related in the United States to the more fundamental and important civic issue of why Americans are so ignorant of the secular side of their own nation’s history. I am less concerned about whether the American public is unacquainted with secular philosophy than I am about its vast ignorance of the founders’ determination not to establish a Christian government. College courses cannot fill the empty space left by public elementary and secondary schooling in which secularism is considered a dirty word instead of an honorable part of American history.

If Americans were not in dire need of remedial education on this subject, Texas Gov. Rick Perry would be automatically disqualified as a presidential candidate because of his unabashed contempt for the constitutional prohibitions against any government favoritism toward religion.

Secular studies in college, including philosophy as well as the history of science and nations, are fine for those who want to study the subjects in depth but such programs can do little to alleviate the damage from sins of omission committed against young schoolchildren in many areas of the country. One of the great victories of the religious right since 1980 has been its ability to convince a significant proportion of Americans that public education is dominated by secular values and a secular interpretation of history, when the truth is that many local school officials and teachers are terrified of saying or teaching anything that contradicts conventional wisdom about religion as the foundation and essence of the American nation.

That’s why schoolchildren learn that the first settlers in America were seeking religious freedom but are taught nothing about the persecution that the Puritans, as soon as they were established in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, directed toward Quakers and other Protestants who disagreed with them. That’s why college freshmen are always surprised when I mention, in speeches on campuses, that the Constitution deliberately avoided any mention of God. That’s why high school students never learn that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and many of the other founders were Enlightenment deists, not orthodox Christians. That’s why Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason is never mentioned in high school history classes and why there is no memorial to Paine, the preeminent publicist of the American Revolution, in Washington.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/spirited-atheist/post/college-too-late-too-little-for-secular-studies-in-america/2011/08/31/gIQAxgPBsJ_blog.html

[nosmokes]

1. K&R