 Sunday morning, time to talk about hell, where you're all going. Despite the ruling in Kitzmiller versus the Dover area school district, many public schools have continued to attempt to sneak in creationist teaching. Perhaps the most notable example is the Louisiana Science Education Act, which allows teachers to provide supplemental materials in order to critique controversial scientific theories including the theory of evolution. In addition, Louisiana's voucher system currently being reviewed by the State Supreme Court allows state funds to be diverted from public schools to private religious schools. Outside the public education system, many students who are homeschooled or educated privately in religious schools are relentlessly exposed to false information. Skeptics rightly express concern about the quality of science education in such teaching environments. However, the way the humanities are taught is just as disturbing. For instance, students may be exposed to history textbooks that claim that slavery wasn't really that bad, even for the slaves, or that the Ku Klux Klan were social reformers. In literature classes, students are exposed to a very limited range of inoffensive texts. They're vigorously guided towards specific Bible-based interpretations of literary works and they're warned against indiscriminate reading. In such learning environments, both creative and critical thinking are stifled. While there are many possible approaches to the study of literature, one overriding principle of literary analysis is that there is no single fixed interpretation of any text. However, not all readings are equal and interpretation must be supported by evidence. This evidence may be drawn in part from the historical, cultural, and linguistic context of a work, but it must first and foremost come from the text itself. While there may not be a single correct interpretation of any work, there can be wrong interpretations that are contradicted by the textual or contextual evidence or simply not supported by it. Literary analysis, then, is more subjective than the sciences, but it is based on critical thinking and the presentation of evidence, or it should be. Many interpretations have validity, even if they contradict each other, and these interpretations contribute to our appreciation of the nuances and complexities of a work, in general, works that are not capable of multiple interpretations that have a simple, obvious solution don't really hold readers' interests for very long. This evidence-based approach to literary studies does not apply to textbooks intended for fundamentalist Christian schools, and imagine you're surprised by that. Texts are chosen not on the basis of literary merit, but on the basis of scriptural and moral worth. These standards leave out many writers and even entire genres, such as erotic Carpe Diem poems and the naughty restoration comedies of manners. In addition, students are firmly guided to very specific interpretations of the text that do pass muster. All interpretations must follow biblical guidelines. I looked into depth at two textbooks published by Bob Jones University Press, which are popular with religious homeschoolers and fundamentalist schools, including some of those receiving public funds from Louisiana's voucher program. Elements of Literature for Christian Schools by Ronald A. Horton, Donalyn Hess, and Stephen N. Skaggs is intended for freshman and sophomore-level high school students. Horton's British literature is geared toward high school seniors. The teacher section of Elements of Literature makes it clear that the study of literature isn't actually about literature, which may seem strange. It's actually about the Bible. The primary purpose of the literary selections is to shine light on the Bible. Improved Bible study will be an inevitable benefit of developing reading comprehension. Students will be sensitive and responsive to meanings in the scripture that were bought beyond them before. Students will be aware of the beauty and power of biblical expression and understand how artistry clarifies and reinforces meaning. For sheer variety and magnificent of artistic effects and structural finesse, the Bible is incomparable. It supernaturally excels in artistry of form as well as in truth of content. It is an artistry, however, subservient to and disciplined by its message. Every section begins with a selection from the Bible, which exemplifies whatever literary device is being discussed. Only then are other selections introduced. In this way, the authors say, the students are learning that they may take the Bible as their standard in every area of their experience, that it should in fact be the center of their entire mental and emotional world. Of course, in juxtaposing the Bible with other works of literature, there is a danger that students might come to see the Bible as simply literature. A collection of stories using metaphor, allegory, symbolism, and other literary devices, little different from the works of Shakespeare or Edgar Allan Poe. No fear. The authors repeatedly hammer home the differences between the Bible and mere literature. This book is careful to maintain the distinction between the Bible and other literature. The Christian teacher of literature cannot afford to leave any doubt about his belief in the uniqueness of the divinely inspired writings of the Scripture. The study of biblical metaphors, allegory, irony, illusions, and themes can otherwise be construed to imply that the Bible is only a work of man and differs from other human writings only in degree. Secular courses in the Bible as literature raise doubt about the supernatural nature of Scripture simply by ignoring it. For this reason, this book continually points out the supportiveness of biblical artistry to the biblical message and to its intentions concerning the reader or hearer. It also makes frequent references to the supernatural origin and character of the Scriptures. The teacher's edition includes suggestions for classic activities and warnings of potential problems. Sometimes these warnings concern ideas or terms the students may be unfamiliar with or confused by, but often they're warnings of moral dangers. For instance, in a discussion of a passage from Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, the authors say, You may wish to caution your students about indiscriminate reading of Mark Twain's works. Several of Twain's works would be considered inappropriate for recreational reading. The idea that discouraging indiscriminate reading or attempting to limit out-of-class recreational reading is antithetical to everything I hold dear as an English teacher. Even the Da Vinci Code and the Twilight novels are better than nothing. Don't quote me on that. The literary selections are accompanied by capsule biographies of the authors. These biographies touch on the authors' literary merits, but they always end with a moral assessment of the author. Many of the authors suffer from serious moral failings, it turns out. I find it helpful to mentally add the words, and that's why the author is going to hell at the end of each of these biographies. The condom, it just saves time. You could do it as a drinking game, but you'd die. The condemnation of Twain is too lengthy to quote in full, but it concludes, Twain's outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless, denying that he was created in the image of God. Twain was able to rid himself of feeling any responsibility to his creator. At the same time, however, he defiantly cut himself off from God's love. Twain's skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth, but the deliberate defiance of a confess rebel, and that's why he's going to hell. Emily Dickinson viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty, although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration. She never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life, and that's why she's going to hell. John Ruskin's writings show that he espoused empiricism, a philosophy which teaches knowledge stems directly from man's experience. According to this dangerous doctrine, we can only trust what is felt or seen. Bradbury tends to deify the imagination rejecting the God who gave him his imaginative faculties, although Bradbury's powers of imagination are exceptional and admirable, they are ultimately fruitless if not used in the service of a God who bestowed them, and that's why he's going to hell. Right. As with elements of literature, Horton's British literature attempts to guide students to a particular interpretation of literature, but in this textbook, he also attempts to impose an unusual and deeply offensive view of history. In his introduction, he declares, England was entrusted with an even more valuable gift, and with a mission to share this gift with the rest of the world. Wherever English trade flourished, the Gospel of Christ became known. The blessing of God rested richly on England, though she proved far from worthy and eventually let it slip from her grasp. As England turned from God, she lost the spiritual leadership of the world. Whole damn country, sorry, Brits. God prevented the Catholic Mary I from producing an heir with her husband, Philip II of Spain, which was nice of him, and allowed Protestant England to defeat Catholic Spain's armada. Colonialism and the British Empire were on the whole good things. Behind England's colonial expansion had been a generous concern for the improvement of subject peoples. Colonial territories such as India prospered under a benevolent conscientious British overlordship. Missionaries streamed from England to every corner of the empire, and Britain undertook to evangelize as well as civilize the pagan nations of the world. In his presentation of literary history, Horton makes statements that are factually wrong or based on tragically outdated scholarship. He states opinionist fact without any supporting evidence, and he quotes scholars without naming, much less citing, his sources. These flaws are not acceptable in a textbook, but as they are not necessarily agenda-driven, I will not dwell on them here. As in elements, he tries to limit interpretation of literary works to assess those works and their authors biblically. He does it at more length here. I will focus specifically on his treatment of William Blake, a visionary poet, artist, and printer. Blake was profoundly but idiosyncratically religious. Horton calls his philosophy, obviously, a satanic counterfeit of Christian redemption. Blake wrote, printed, and illustrated two collections of poetry that remained extremely popular, songs of innocence and songs of experience. The songs of innocence are all spoken by children. They seem simple, naive, and optimistic, although there is more complexity. The songs of experience are much darker, but Blake considered both states to be incomplete. The best-known poems from these collections are The Lamb and the Tiger. Both revolve around a central question, who made thee, as it stated in The Lamb? In The Lamb, this question is answered. He is called by thy name, for he calls himself a lamb. He is meek, and he is mild. He became a little child. I, a child, am thou a lamb. We are called by his name, little lamb, God bless thee, little lamb, God bless thee. Clear implication is that God created the lamb, which represents Jesus as lamb of God, while the child represents the Christ child. In The Tiger, the same basic question is asked. What a mortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry? In this case, however, the question is never answered. It's further expanded upon and explored. Did he smile in his work to see? Did he who make the lamb make thee? In his study questions, Horton asks, in what ways does the tiger differ from the speaker in the lamb? What does the tiger represent? How do the physical attributes of the tiger, which the poet describes, make the symbolism more apparent? These are perfectly good questions to spur discussion. The symbolic significance of the tiger is central to any interpretation of the poem. The problem here is that Horton's actually already answered the question in his introduction to William Blake. In The Lamb and The Tiger, Blake represents in Christ and Satan an internal dualism of good and evil, each power necessary to complete the other. He thus degrades the biblical God to a position parallel to the devil, subordinating both to whatever intelligence is finally responsible for the shape of things. He has already told students what the tiger represents, Satan, and what its relationship is to the lamb. In addition, he has told them that Blake's philosophy is wrong and evil. The study questions seem intended to provoke independent, critical, and creative thought, but they aren't. They're designed only to allow students to regurgitate Horton's interpretation in their own words. Any other interpretation is not only wrong as a literary interpretation, it's wrong morally and biblically. Horton also warns against reading texts too closely. Apparently, Shakespeare's works are actually pretty easy to understand in, you know, a quick read through. Most problems are only apparent, resulting from attempts to reconcile Shakespeare to modern beliefs and attitudes. When we approach the plays from a historical, i.e., Christian, and Renaissance humanistic perspective, these problems tend to disappear. Other problems derive from failure to recognize that the plays were written as popular dramatic entertainment, not as texts to be scrutinized by scholars. What we read is Macbeth is an actress script, not narrative intended for close reading. Interpretation therefore should not stress details that would escape a general audience witnessing a performance. Oversubtle, fanciful interpretations ignore the fact that Shakespeare was supporting himself by writing plays with a general appeal and an evident meaning. Students should not read the text too closely. Perhaps they shouldn't read it all. And scholars should keep their filthy modernist hands off. He even derides close reading, which is central to literary studies. If we look too closely at work, we're in danger of finding the wrong meaning, meaning that might place England's most famous writer in opposition to the correct view of the Bible. These textbooks are overtly intended to inculcate the Shakespeare face palm was created by Ocknotten from the J.Ref forums. So Farrow made that. These textbooks are overtly intended to inculcate a narrow religious view of the world. This approach is antithetical to what a good literature course should do. Students should be encouraged to think for themselves, to provide an interpretation supported by evidence from the text. They should be encouraged to read great literature indiscriminately, not merely those bits that are deemed biblically inoffensive to a very narrow definition. And do we have any questions for Dr. Seedon? Please come up to the front. First of all, I think we can say we all pity the kids. What is your opinion as to why critical thinking, healthy skepticism, and the scientific method are generally not found in public school curriculums? That's a lot. I don't really know. I don't teach in the public, while I teach at a public university, but not in public schools. I think they should be. I'm not really expert on what's taught in public schools. Perhaps we could narrow it a bit. In your experience of teaching English literature, is there any emphasis on critical thinking, or where would it be in those courses? Well, I mean, as I said, there's an emphasis on making an argument based on evidence, whether that evidence comes from the text, or research on the work, research on the time period, et cetera. Asking questions about the work, asking questions about your own interpretation, your own biases that may look at the way you're interpreting the work. Hi there. I'd like to engage you in a spirited debate about whether the DaVinci Code is better than nothing, but that will have to be in the middle of the talk. I know. In my teenage years in England, I would never have dreamt of reading Lady Chattel as lover, except that there was a court case that tried to prevent me from reading, which made me want to do it. Don't you think that suggesting that certain of Mark Twain's books should not be read is really making a rod for their own back? I don't know. Possibly, to some extent, and certainly probably for some students. On the other hand, these particularly homeschool children have been, I don't want to say brainwashed. I kind of want to say brainwashed, but exposed to this very narrow view of the world in every aspect of their lives, and everything is so controlled. In some cases, I'm sure it does, but in other cases, I'm sure they just go, I should probably shouldn't read that. Do you ever get kids in your own classes who have come through this type of education, and if so, how do they behave, and how do you handle it? I have. Well, I'm not sure I've gotten homeschoolers. I taught for a long time at a Jesuit university, so I'm more likely to get Catholic students who had sort of an unexplored Catholicism. They've just, you know, they've hurt these things, and they hadn't really looked at them. But not too much this extreme view. I have had students who have said things more in comp classes about, well, like God says, it's... And, you know, how you deal with that is a complicated situation, and like, well, you know, Bible's nice. It's not the only evidence in the world. Consider your audience. Hi, my name's Keith, and I'm totally new to all of this. So my question is, in which I... But I appreciate all this information. It's wonderful and low in my mind. And also, Friday I was in California and saw Dr. Ramoto, who has water crystals. So I was like, let me just go figure out all this stuff. So I was in California on Friday and here today to learn all these things, and I think it's great. So my question is, as I say, I don't know much, but willing to make a jackass out of myself. So I think that's good. But was there any belief that the Bible existed, that there was any kind of guide, or what kind of is it from a skeptic standpoint, from a critical point of view, what is that? What's the context? I think it's a little bit broad for this particular talk, but you know what, there's a whole row of tables out there that gladly engage you for hours on this. Yeah. I'd like to apologize too. No need for apology. We're here to enlighten, but we're short on time right now, so thank you. So Dr. Siebert, thank you very much.