Church and school

A Christian high school in San Bernardino has sued the University of California, which refused to accept several of its courses as meeting UC standards. What standards would you set for high school courses to be acceptable at the University of California and similar schools?

How fascinating that parents who believe human life appeared several thousand years ago, that Darwin was second only to the Antichrist in Satan’s arsenal, and that all truth is divinely revealed and scripturally based would want to send their children to breeding grounds of politically correct secular humanism and would welcome their children being exposed to a professorial population that is overwhelmingly leftist, indifferent or hostile to religion, and “pro” just about everything that fundamentalists are “anti.”

John Dewey, who knew a thing or two about education, wrote, “There is something self-contradictory in speaking of education in religion in the same sense of education in topics where the method of free inquiry has made its way. The ‘religious’ would be the last to be willing that either the history or the content of religion should be taught in this spirit; while those to whom the scientific standpoint is not merely a technical device, but is the embodiment of the integrity of mind, must protest against its being taught in any other spirit.”

Fundamentalism and free inquiry are incompatible. When life is explained in terms of Biblical inerrancy, when evolution is debunked by higher religious claims, when history is taught from a sectarian perspective, when literature is examined through a Christian lens, when social studies are approached theologically, universities have every right to protest that such teachings do not meet core academic requirements.

While the cry of Christian victimization is raised, this contretemps is not an assault on Christendom. Christian students, many of whom emerge out of Christian schools, are still accepted at UC campuses. This is not discrimination against religion, only a bias in favor of reason, and it is one more phony battle waged by the benighted against the enlightened.

What nonsense that UC should approve for credit science courses that attack the credibility of science. Some other courses that UC could consider as admissible: Introduction to the Earth is Flat, Perspectives on the Fake Moon Landing, Astrological Science, Alternatives to Believing in Universal Gravity, and the Wisdom of Scientology.

The UC system is not obligated to dilute its standards. The classes under review may prepare a student to pass a doctrinal test in Christian apologetics, but fall short in equipping him to pass courses in phylogenetic systematics, or recombinant DNA, or microbial genetics and physiology, let alone biology 101.

There is an even larger issue: Having taught many hundreds of students at UC Irvine over 22 years, I often wished that criteria for admission had been stricter in the following competencies: grammar, composition and critical thinking, not to mention geography, current events and knowing that the 20th century refers to the 1900s.

College students should not only be familiar with “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” but also know how to spell it!

RABBI MARK S. MILLER

Temple Bat Yahm

Newport Beach

How I wish I had expertise with which to begin answering this question!

Interdepartmental committees at colleges, academic senates at universities and the board of regents, in the case of the University of California, regularly devote tremendous resources of ability and expertise, time and talent, responding to this question.

As a student at Cal during the free-speech movement of the 1960s, I know that episode alone produced answers voluminous enough to fill library shelves. I was among undergraduates attempting to secure tenure for Professor Ernest Becker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Denial of Death,” and other books including “Birth and Death of Meaning,” “Beyond Alienation,” and “Escape From Evil.”

Becker was one of the greatest teachers I’ve experienced, but because his academic approach was truly interdisciplinary, no department (sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, history, rhetoric) would take him.

He left Berkeley for San Francisco State and, then, Simon Fraser University in Canada.

Years later, as Episcopal campus minister at Cal, I worked to help establish a religious studies major at UC Berkeley; this interdisciplinary, interdepart- mental venture was successful. I know how very, very seriously this week’s question is taken by university personnel!

Counselors in public and private high schools bear great responsibility to guide students in adequately preparing for universities and colleges to which they are considering applying; this includes letting students know that various institutions of higher education accept transferable academic credits differently.

I was clearly advised by counselors at the Roman Catholic high school I attended that credits from their required religion courses would not be accepted by any of the three universities to which I applied: Cal, Harvard and Colorado at Boulder.

I think that both sides of this question are correct: Religious and secular institutions are free to teach all material they wish from whatever perspectives they choose. Secular and religious colleges and universities are free to set their own standards as to what courses they will grant transfer credits.

(THE VERY REV’D CANON) PETER D. HAYNES