Shocking Christian school textbooks [View all]

[ashling]

http://www.salon.com/2012/06/19/shocking_christian_school_textbooks/singleton/

This 2012-2013 school year, thanks to a bill pushed through by governor Bobby Jindal, thousands of students in Louisiana will receive state voucher money, transferred from public school funding, to attend private religious schools, some of which teach from a Christian curriculum that suggests the Loch Ness Monster disproves evolution and states that the alleged creature, which has never been demonstrated to even exist, has been tracked by submarine and is probably a plesiosaur. The curriculum also claims that a Japanese fishing boat caught a dinosaur. AlterNet

On the list of schools approved to receive funding through the new voucher funding, that critics warn could eventually cut public school funding in half, are schools that teach from the Christian fundamentalist A Beka Book, Bob Jones University Press, and Accelerated Christian Education curriculum.

***

One of the schools cleared to receive substantial new funding through LA governor Bobby Jindal’s voucher program is Eternity Christian Academy, in Westlake, LA, which according to Independent Weekly writer Walter Pierce,

…has been approved to accept 135 new students. That’s a considerable uptick in enrollment, which at the end of this school year stood at 38 — a more than 300 percent increase. Talk about buttressing the budget; $1 million in tax dollars will be diverted from the public school system to Eternity Christian, a school that, according to its mission statement, offers “a quality faith-based curriculum that is soley [sic] based on principles from the Bible …

***

Like the ACE curriculum, A Beka and Bob Jones textbooks promote Young-Earth creationism, are heavily laden with political bias, and at times verge on racism. As shown in the following video, among the dubious, factually incorrect, politically tendentious, and racially and culturally insensitive claims in A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press textbooks are the following:

Only ten percent of Africans can read or write, because Christian mission schools have been shut down by communists.

“the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross… In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”

“God used the ‘Trail of Tears’ to bring many Indians to Christ.”

It “cannot be shown scientifically that that man-made pollutants will one day drastically reduce the depth of the atmosphere’s ozone layer.”

“God has provided certain ‘checks and balances’ in creation to prevent many of the global upsets that have been predicted by environmentalists.”

the Great Depression was exaggerated by propagandists, including John Steinbeck, to advance a socialist agenda.

“Unions have always been plagued by socialists and anarchists who use laborers to destroy the free-enterprise system that hardworking Americans have created.”

Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential win was due to an imaginary economic crisis created by the media.

“The greatest struggle of all time, the Battle of Armageddon, will occur in the Middle East when Christ returns to set up his kingdom on earth.”