Europe is on the ball...
The European court has acted in a decision to ban displaying the Christian Cross in Italian public schools. That's good for them and good for all of us, too. Europe is certainly on the ball. And the United States could do itself well by taking a few lessons from Europeans.
It was decided by the European court that the aim of schools is to teach critical thinking skills to children and that displaying religious symbols was not in keeping with that ideal. European judges were not about to allow children to be "forced" by mere habit of familiarity into believe the unfounded notions of gods without preparing them first with a start-up of maturity and healthier state of mind for dealing with adult philosophy.
Here in the US, religious symbols are banned from public school classrooms... but not all schools are public schools, are they? And, not all public money for education is harbored exclusively for public school classrooms - some goes for subsidizing parochial schools, dosen't it?. And there's something wrong with the system which allows that practice to continue.
Historically, legal efforts to deny subsidized payments of public tax money to religious schools have been raised time and again, and arguments have been given at both the state and federal Supreme court level to end such practices. Mostly, they've failed, and the reasoning behind the failures is difficult to tolerate, at best. It amounts to hair little better than splitting where the thinking goes something like, 'Paying for secular books and computers used for parochial education isn't a subsidy of parochial education.' Bunk...! That's nothing but bologna no matter what else it might be called.
And, of course, we still have to deal with the legacy of Dub-ya, George Walker Bush's Office of Faith Based Initiative.
Eeek! Wake up America. Religious schools divide up our kids into opposing camps of belief. This is not how things ought to be in a united country.
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It was decided by the European court that the aim of schools is to teach critical thinking skills to children and that displaying religious symbols was not in keeping with that ideal. European judges were not about to allow children to be "forced" by mere habit of familiarity into believe the unfounded notions of gods without preparing them first with a start-up of maturity and healthier state of mind for dealing with adult philosophy.
Here in the US, religious symbols are banned from public school classrooms... but not all schools are public schools, are they? And, not all public money for education is harbored exclusively for public school classrooms - some goes for subsidizing parochial schools, dosen't it?. And there's something wrong with the system which allows that practice to continue.
Historically, legal efforts to deny subsidized payments of public tax money to religious schools have been raised time and again, and arguments have been given at both the state and federal Supreme court level to end such practices. Mostly, they've failed, and the reasoning behind the failures is difficult to tolerate, at best. It amounts to hair little better than splitting where the thinking goes something like, 'Paying for secular books and computers used for parochial education isn't a subsidy of parochial education.' Bunk...! That's nothing but bologna no matter what else it might be called.
And, of course, we still have to deal with the legacy of Dub-ya, George Walker Bush's Office of Faith Based Initiative.
Eeek! Wake up America. Religious schools divide up our kids into opposing camps of belief. This is not how things ought to be in a united country.
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