Steven Williams Case - more factual information

[Steven Jamar]

Is it a sociology class?  I think it depends a lot on purpose and 
presentation.

I also think that we as lawyers, having been trained in a certain kind 
of compartmentalization and detachment and objectivity (please don't 
ignore the "certain kind" and blast me for an assertion I am not 
making), underestimate the difficulty of making the distinctions that 
we take for granted.  And the whole experience of a believer is 
different from that of an outsider and some believers believe that it 
would be untrue to their beliefs even to investigate other things or to 
present information they don't agree with as anything but falsehood.  
And some of these people are teachers.

My boys experienced a variety of incidents in schools where 
fundamentalists or evangeilcals and in one instance even young earther 
Christian teachers made explicit statements about religion and religous 
truth and/or taught, and in one case tested, certain things that 
excluded as religions anything other than Islam, Christianity, and 
Judaism.  These were mostly social science and English teachers.

As much as they or anyone else guards against injecting beliefs into 
the classroom, it happens -- the time together is just so extensive and 
intensive.  So we need to cut a bit of slack for those sorts of things.

But there comes a time when the teachers go over the line in 
assignments or comments or whatever.  And this seems to be one of them. 
  But I would really need to know all about it to make that decision.

There are those on this list who have in the past opined that it is not 
possible to teach about religion without demeaning believers in the 
process -- it is, to them, inherent it teaching about instead of 
teaching the truth of it.  That level of paranoia or thin-skinnedness 
or world view or whatever motivates those sorts of comments cannot be 
responded to effectively.  There is no way around that world view.  But 
that does not make that world view the right one or grant it a unit 
veto over the rest of us who want to understand each other.

Steve

-- 
Prof. Steven D. Jamar                               vox:  202-806-8017
Howard University School of Law                     fax:  202-806-8567
2900 Van Ness Street NW                   mailto:sjamar at law.howard.edu
Washington, DC  20008   http://www.law.howard.edu/faculty/pages/jamar/

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to 
pause and reflect."

Mark Twain
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