Ron’s Blog

God at school: The legend continues

We go to yesterday morning’s assembly at Oz’s school, and there’s a new patriotic song for the month (this being the first of the new month). This will be the first new one since we’d clearly expressed our concerns about the God-heavy Veterans Day assembly to the Principal, and had gotten a good response from her (see the earlier post Truth, justice, and the American way). So, the new patriotic song for the month? “Say a prayer for our boys”.

So, we have a chat with the Principal, and she again responds in all the right ways: She proactively expresses discomfort with the religious tones of the song. (Apparently, assembly content details are delegated to individual teachers.) She says the issue of respecting religious diversity was raised at the faculty meeting after our last discussion on this, and now she’ll be putting out a memo to the school faculty (and will bcc us). She also suggests that if necessary, she’ll exercise veto in the future. As before, she says all the right things, and seems like she is not only going to do the right thing, but because she sees it as right (as opposed to doing it out of fear that we’re bringing in the ACLU next time — something we’ve in no way implied or threatened, of course).

But it’s interestingly disconcerting how deep somebody’s impulse (not the Principal’s, but some teacher or teachers’) to inject religious content into the school assembly goes here. And it’s hard not to think that teachers who do so in spite of information that actual parents of actual students are asking that they be more attentive to the diversity of their student population aren’t doing so from some sense of grinding a political axe.

My expectation is that some fraction of the school’s faculty will come to resent us for getting in the way of their attempts to use their little corner of the public square to politically “educate” the kids to seeing an intrinsic bond between God and country. (Not that our identity has been or would be disclosed by the Principal; but I expect it’ll get out.)

I think that’s unfortunate; I’d much rather they stop pushing the God-stuff because their conscience tells tham that their real duty to the kids here lies in making the school inclusive. But I expect that for at least some group, that’s too much to hope for. Still, I will be delighted if I turn out to be wrong about this.

Undoubtedly, more to come.