The only time I’ve ever been handed a Bible is right after I’ve said, “Hey, could you hand me that Bible?” And it’s not like I hide in the bushes every time the Bible-hander-outters come around; I’ve faced plenty of harassment from Bible-thumpers and had plenty of civil conversations with decent Christians.
As for giving kids books, I feel perfectly situated to give kids books that match their interests and reading level and do so on many occasions. There are a few exceptions:
-Politics
-Religion
-Stuff that might earn an R rating in a movie.
Even then, I’m okay with some of it. I’m reading my students The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, a rip-roaring adventure story (seriously, if you have kids under the age of 12, find a copy of this book!) set on a merchant ship sailing from 19th century England. It’s full of murder and religion and class politics, and while I read it, I don’t shy away from any of these topics.
But that’s very different from giving kids a book that’s the sacred text of a particular religion, and frankly anyone who doesn’t see the difference is probably lying.
That’s a super-slippery slope. First of all, Porno can be illegal, so sayth SCOTUS.
Next, the Bible is important historical literature, I took a upper level Univ class about quotes from the Bible. The KJV was a textbook for that class.
Bibles do have their place in a public elementary school. And that place is the school library. Where I hope you will also find Harry Potter and Huckleberry Finn
So the teacher should just say “I can’t make available in the classroom a Bible/Koran/Torah/etc., but you can go to the school library and check out one of the copies there.”
I see, makes perfect sense. Never let a good outrage be tempered by logic. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
That’s a super-slippery slope. First of all, Porno can be illegal, so sayth SCOTUS. **Some can be, but something like Playboy isn’t illegal. So if a teacher is handing out Playboy and is stopped, is that censorship?
so it’s only censorship if a teacher is stopped from handing out “literature”? The test for censorship then turns quickly into a subjective assessment of the book in question.
That’s quite different from the “censorship is censorship” position originally set forth.
I genuinely thought the thread title was missing a comma and was about some guy called Duncan who’s a good-but-not-great schoolteacher and was handing out Bibles.
Me, being an OK resident, I was just terrified what else might be revealed in the story. Thankfully, she was just dispersing bibles and not blowing the kids or something.
Here’s some sample text from a level Q book, the level we expect third graders to read and comprehend by the end of the year:
Here’s the story of Jonah from the New International Version:
That’s one of the easier sections of the Bible, and it contains words like calamity, perish, and terrified. It’s significantly more difficult.
Reading is about a lot more than text level, of course, but even if it were appropriate, I wouldn’t assign a whole class a story of this level for independent reading. High reading third graders, maybe.
Okay, so it would take a fairly bright third-grader. I’m not sure the concepts in the passage are hard to grasp, but I have no children and it’s been a long time since I was eight.
What’s a hard passage in the bible, in that the concepts are difficult to grasp? Hopefully one that isn’t so just for being nonsensical.
The King James Version or the Douay-Rheims Bible would be even worse! Those were the versions pictured in the video at the OP’s link, but I got the impression that that was because the editors of the video thought, “Hey, let’s see if we can find a picture of a Bible that we can splice in!” rather than that they were picturing the actual Bibles that had been distributed by the teacher in question.