This is what you get for trying to develop critical thinking skills in Texas: a seventh-grade student, her mother, her teacher, and the entire school board are all up in arms over a discussion on the existence of God. In 2015. This is true.
Although the existence of an omnipotent supernatural power will likely be the subject of debate for centuries to come, it doesn’t need to shut down the gears of education and potentially jeopardize a teacher’s career.
The assignment in question is a critical thinking questionnaire asking seventh-graders whether each phrase is a fact, commonplace assertion, or opinion. I think this is an excellent assignment, and I see nothing wrong with it. It is incredibly important, in this age of endless information accessed any time and any place, that kids and teens learn to differentiate between these three. Many kids (and adults) assume that because something is written somewhere, it is true. This is dangerous and terrifying.
Some of the phrases to categorize included:
The fastest land-dwelling creature is the cheetah.
America is the most free country on earth.
The ugliest sea creature is the manatee.
The answers I assume the teacher meant for the students to give were: fact, commonplace assertion, and opinion (although there is really not much difference between the last two; a commonplace assertion is really just an opinion held by the majority of any group, but I digress).
You can probably see where this is going. One of the phrases is: There is a God. I don’t know whether the teacher’s idea was for students to answer “commonplace assertion” or “opinion” (I would answer the former; I suspect the teacher wanted students to answer the latter), but the point is that students realize that, at this point, the existence of God is not a verifiable fact.
Admittedly, that is probably a bit heavy for an ungraded, skill-developing assignment. Probably the teacher should have stuck to cheetahs and manatees.
Then one of the students texted her mom that the teacher was going full-on Tarantino on Judeo-Christian belief systems, calling God “a myth” and forcing her to admit that there is no God under threat of failing the course. There probably was some discussion of the assignment in class, especially the God question, since probably most kids raised in fundamentalist Christian families called it a fact.
However, I am pretty sure that the teacher did not threaten to fail a student for refusing to claim that God isn’t real (although this is a common trope among Christian narratives involving education– the godless teacher forcing the students to deny God’s existence). Also, the school board has implied that the teacher believes in God and is a Christian, so
But now, the teacher likely fears for the future, the school board is tripping over itself to apologize to the student, and the student and her mother are being invited to the Texas Governor’s house. Unfortunately, the lesson we all learn is that Texas schools aren’t interested in critical thinking. At least not when it comes to God.
