This weekend, my mother brought a local controversy to my attention. It’s actually been going on for weeks, but since I don’t get the paper, I hadn’t noticed. It turns out that one of my old high school history teachers, Mr. Escamilla, has been suspended with pay while the school investigates just how inappropriate he was in inviting an anti-Islam Christian evangelist to be a speaker in his class.
Like the students and former students interviewed in this article, I wasn’t very surprised. Escamilla made no secret about his evangelical views, and was widely known to truly believe the world was going to end (complete with the Rapture) quite soon. (A quick firsthand Escamilla story: When I was in his AP European history class, his wife had recently had another baby. One of the other students, knowing of his belief in the imminent end of the world, asked why he and his wife had had another kid, if they didn’t think it’d get to grow up. He replied candidly that the most recent baby hadn’t been planned.) Although he didn’t do it in my class, many of my friends who had him for other classes told me about watching the “Left Behind” videos and other evangelical propaganda on days when no actual learning was scheduled. I was never particularly impressed with his classes, in any case, because all we ever did was read the textbook and then teach the chapters to each other in assigned turn. He very rarely actually seemed to teach us anything. I think I saw him being more teacherly in driver’s ed than in my history class.
So anyway, I wasn’t surprised to hear he’d finally done something so flagrant it had gotten him suspended, and I’m very happy that the students who were scared and offended by the speaker actually took the issue to the administration. Beyond that, the whole thing got me thinking about the place of religion in public schools in the US.
When I was at Enloe (1994-1998), the student body was quite diverse, and it should have been quite clear to the teachers that not nearly all of the students in their classes were of a Christian background. And yet, time and again, teachers would assume a background of Biblical knowledge, especially in English classes, where they would throw questions at us about allusions we obviously should have picked up on right away. Like other non-Christian students in the class, I’d just hope some Methodist or Baptist would answer the question, or that the allusion came from some really famous bit that I must have picked up by exposure. There wasn’t any pushing of Christianity, there was just widespread assumption of it, all evidence, such as the names on the roll, to the contrary. We all just learned to fake it, and life went on.
But should we have ignored it? Can we afford to anymore? What should the role of religion be in the public schools? What should be the teacher’s role in discussing religion? Where should the school administration set the boundaries for what teachers should, and should not, be allowed to do?
Posted by Dana
