Published in Courier-Express 2022
Dear Editor:
Comments by a citizen at a recent school board meeting took me back to my days at Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania law then required “at least ten verses from the Holy Bible read, without comment, at the opening of each public school on each school day.”
Then on June 18, 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court, voting 8 to 1, declared unconstitutional such religious practices in the public schools as readings from the Bible and recitation of the “Lord’s Prayer.”
The citizen said his comments are intended to bring Bible reading back to the schools. He may want to review Abingdon School District v Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963).
Four years of my career were spent abroad teaching Christian, Hindu, and Moslem students, not unlike many classrooms in today’s diverse United States. During my BASD years, I taught Jewish, Moslem, and Hindu students, and once, during a faculty room conversation when a fellow teacher claimed that “all our students are Christian,” I had to remind her of the religious diversity of our students.
Religion, of course, in an important cultural component. History courses would be incomplete without the development of Christianity, the dominance of Roman Catholicism prior to the Protestant Reformation, and the piety so important to the Puritans as they stepped on our shores.
Learning about religion should not be omitted from our curricula, but the obligatory reading of one particular religious book is not the way to go in our diverse world.
Carole A. Briggs
Brookville
