Sneaking Religion Into the Three Rs

Once or twice a week, a book shows up unsolicited in my mailbox, and there is no gift like a book to give pleasure--or pause.

Friends and family tend to give books they know I’ll like. But the strangers who send me books tend to have other reasons. They have something to say, some idea they want me to embrace, some point of view to put across. The book is both bait and hook. The free book is rarely free.

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Since fourth grade, Veronica Van Ry’s daughter, Rita, attended Belridge School in McKittrick, a Kern County town so deep in oil that its original name was Asphalto.

Last spring, parents were invited to look at the textbooks for Belridge’s new curriculum. The books, said Principal Steven J. Wentland, had been donated. Their publisher, A Beka Book, styles itself “the largest Christian textbook publisher in the world.”

Beyond dates and places, here is what Van Ry read.

HISTORY: Do you want to have an important part in the history of America? Then pray for your country and the men who lead it.

God allowed America to remain hidden from Europe until Columbus discovered it . . . in God’s plan, the right time had come for the discovery of the “New World.”

The Renaissance . . . emphasized the abilities of mankind and largely ignored God.

The early American Indians . . . had forsaken the things that their ancestors knew about God.

Through the Negro spiritual, the slaves developed the patience to wait on the Lord and discovered that the truest freedom is freedom from the bondage of sin.

Some Americans were led astray by cults, counterfeit church groups that go under the guise of Christianity . . . Mormonism (1830), the Jehovah’s Witnesses (1863), and Christian Science (1877).

MATHEMATICS is . . . part of the truth and order that God has built into reality.

LANGUAGE IS . . . learning how to use words effectively to express God’s love to others.

GRAMMAR: Combine simple sentences into compound sentences:

Most Arabs are devout Moslems. This religion will not save them from sin.

Recognizing compound-complex sentences:

Though they attained a degree of civilization, the American Indians had no knowledge of the true God, and without this knowledge all other attainments are worthless.

Distinguishing dependent clauses:

The theory that man evolved from an ape is an ungodly one.

Neatly circle every word that should be capitalized:

my family and i worship god in church every sunday.

Then Van Ry found on the Belridge Web site a mission statement: “Education is effective and has purpose when we believe that God has given us the task to educate our children through love.”

And so this churchgoing Catholic and taxpayer, who “cannot in good conscience send my daughter Rita to the public school of our choice, on account of the efforts of the Belridge School District to teach religion,” according to her declaration, reluctantly and even fearfully made a federal case out of it.

Van Ry, with the ACLU’s help, is suing. The books were withdrawn, but the principal recently declared that he reserves the right to use edited versions later. To that, retired Methodist minister Milton Andrews of Bakersfield, who joined the suit, says, “If you marked out all the problem sections, there wouldn’t be much of a book left.”

The God reference has been snipped from the Web site, which still pledges to teach values that are wholesome, and “without prejudice or bias.”

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I too went to a little school, in a little town so homogeneous that its most exotic faith was Catholicism. I still endorse learning spelling and the multiplication tables. I think memorizing a few poems is good brain exercise, and learning grammatical components is like learning the combination to a safe called “language.” And I hold no brief for curricula so PC that they tiptoe around reality.

But this is a curriculum that has parted company with learning. It reminds me of a bill on Gov. Davis’ desk to regulate the practice of companies paying public schools big money to use and boost their products exclusively. Last week Davis signed a bill keeping product names out of textbooks (“If Nikes cost $108 a pair . . . “)

The difference between that and the Belridge texts is essentially one of product, not practice. My shoes, not yours. My God, not yours. It is not wrong--where would free enterprise be without it?--but it is not education. Education should teach judgment, not impose judgments.

Corporate checks or donated books, it’s the same old lesson again: the true price of “free.”

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com