[Apologetics] "Socking it to Christianity" in high school tests?

[Dianne Dawson]

"Socking it to Christianity" in high school tests? 
 
Tuesday August 24, 2010 
 
That's the charge some teachers are leveling in New York. 

State testmakers played favorites when quizzing high-schoolers on world 
religions -- giving Islam and Buddhism the kid-gloves treatment while socking it 
to Christianity, critics say. 


Teachers complain that the reading selections from the Regents exam in global 
history and geography given last week featured glowing passages pertaining to 
Muslim society but much more critical essay excerpts on the subject of 
Christianity. 


"There should have been a little balance in there," said one Brooklyn teacher 
who administered the exam but did not want to be identified. 


"To me, this was offensive because it's just so inappropriate and the timing of 
it was piss-poor," he added, referring to the debate over the plan to build a 
mosque near Ground Zero. 

The most troubling passage came from Daniel Roselle's "A World History: A 
Cultural Approach," observers said. 


The passage reads: "Wherever they went, the Moslems [sic] brought with them 
their love of art, beauty and learning. From about the eighth to the eleventh 
century, their culture was superior in many ways to that of western 
Christendom." 


Meanwhile, an excerpt listing the common procedures used by Christian friars to 
introduce the religion in Latin America stated that "idols, temples and other 
material evidences of paganism [were] destroyed," and "Christian buildings 
[were] often constructed on sites of destroyed native temples" -- and built with 
free Indian labor, to boot. 


"I can see why some people might see these questions as skewed," said Mark 
MacWilliams, a religious-studies professor at St. Lawrence University in upstate 
Canton. "Why does the exam seem to have only documents that portray Islam as a 
religion of peace, civilization and refinement, while it includes documents 
about Christianity that show it was anything but peaceful in the Spanish 
conquest of the Americas?" 


At the same time, MacWilliams criticized the presentation of Hernando Cortes' 
conquest of Mexico -- which he said portrayed him as a "choirboy" rather than a 
"conquistador." 


"It's quite a whitewash," he said. 

Some other religious-studies experts contacted by The Post said they didn't see 
what the fuss was all about. 


"[The] selections seem about equal in terms of being historically/culturally 
focused, all relatively positive about the contributions made by each religion 
as it was introduced into various societies," wrote Barbara Sproul, an associate 
professor of religion at Hunter College in Manhattan. 


Yet Michael Dobkowski, chair of Religious Studies at Hobart and William Smith 
Colleges in upstate Geneva, asserted that it was only Christianity for which 
both positive and negative aspects were highlighted. 

Check out more, and examples, here.


Read more: 
http://blog.beliefnet.com/deaconsbench/2010/08/socking-it-to-christianity-in-high-school-tests.html#ixzz0xdOUuEHR



      
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