Wait, where and/or when did you go to school that you were doing stuff about the Bible and stuff? I went to Catholic school for K-8 but after that I was in a public school and unless something pertained to what we were already learning about, studying the Bible just for itself would have been a big no-no.
(Like, in history if we were studying the Reformation, or the Crusades. But it was like, “Okay, these are Religions XYZ and this is what they believe.” Or if we were reading something like “Inherit the Wind” in English)
‘When’ is the key word, I expect. Hari’s a bit older than me, IIRC, and the Supreme Court decisions that outlawed state-sponsored prayers in the schools were in the early 1960s; before then, in much of the country, it was quite normal to include a dose of religion as part of the public school education. I’m old enough to remember that: in second grade in 1960-61, our teacher led us in the Lord’s Prayer every day. But that didn’t happen after that.
I grew up in the hills of East Tennessee, and I experienced Bible reading through 1974. In fifth grade the teacher just told us to pray silently, and our sixth grade teacher (who was in his first year) informed us that Bible reading and organized prayer were against the law when he was asked why we weren’t doing it. We were also subjected to sermons (which we could opt out of) every month or so through 5th grade. Years later, there was a big controversy in nearby Bristol, VA about “Bible ladies” coming into city schools. The pastor of the big Baptist church in town opposed this, and was (from what I was told by a church member) basically run out of town. This was in the early eighties.
Yeah, the religion-in-schools stuff went on longer in some places than others. Mostly it depended on whether someone was going to sue (possibly with ACLU help) to have the law enforced.
I spent five years in Bristol in the mid-1990s, teaching at a college there. I remember one school district on the Tennessee side instituted something called ‘release time’ in the middle of the day where a local church could send a bus to the school, pick up the kids that wanted to go, and give them an hour of religion over lunch before busing them back. Basically a way of doing religion in the schools while preserving deniability.
That worked great (for the fundies) for one year. Then the second year, some very non-traditional religion (can’t remember whether it was some New Age group or what) decided they wanted to send their bus to one of the schools doing ‘release time’. So the school district shut down the ‘release time’ program rather than allow a non-Christian group to participate.
