The Koran as a Classroom Lesson? At the Right Time, Yes

I get many things from my mother, but usually not news tips. Yet there she was on the phone a couple of weeks ago, asking if I’d heard about the school in California where students were being taught from the Koran. She wondered if it were possible.

Not likely, I said. For one thing, they wouldn’t be able to teach religion in a public school. More to the point, I told her, I was sure I’d have read something about it had it been true. We then moved on to the more serious subject of how I liked my new mini-blinds.

Subject forgotten, until last week when I saw a story from a Garden Grove-based Christian wire service known as ASSIST News Service. And there it was.

A school district in Contra Costa County in Northern California had taken some heat over a lesson in which 7th-graders at Byron Intermediate School had to wear Muslim garb, learn how Muslims pray, memorize Islam’s Five Pillars of Faith, and discuss and act out other Islamic practices and beliefs.

It was a role-playing exercise for a reputable teaching program known as History Alive.

I doubt many people would give any of this a second thought, except that the exercise apparently was taught not long after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack by Islamic extremists. If nothing else, that put the timing of the class exercise in question.

To my surprise, however, Karen Hershenson, a Contra Costa Times columnist who defended the classroom program, said the detractors seemed more upset by the “teaching” of Islam than they did with the lesson’s proximity to the Sept. 11 attack.

“My sense was that [the local protests] were all about teaching prayer in schools,” Hershenson says. In so many words, if schools are teaching Islam, why not Christianity?

I’ll let readers figure out for themselves whether a couple of days discussing in class the tenets of one of the world’s major religions--albeit one many Americans don’t know much about--constitutes prayer in schools. The real question you want answered is whether the lesson was taught in Orange County schools.

Two county Department of Education officials say they aren’t sure. Both say the same lesson plan is available to Orange County teachers, but don’t know whether any teachers used it. However, no directives were issued that teachers were not to use the lesson.

All right, then, let’s take on that question: Should it have been used, when events of Sept. 11 are so fresh in our minds?

“There were a couple schools of thought after Sept. 11,” says Deborah Granger, the coordinator of history and social sciences programs for the county’s public schools. “One was, you stay way far away from Islam and pretend like it’s not there. It’s too hot a button to press. Others said, ‘We want our students to understand who these people are, where they come from, so they [students] are not frightened about what’s going on, and it will help them with a better sense of understanding.’”

Asst. Supt. Linda MacDonnell says the question of using such material is best left to the teacher: “It’s a judgment call. If you know your kids, and have a really good relationship with the kids and they trust you, you can teach anything.”

Why not teach such a lesson? “The only thing I can think of is the emotional environment, if the kids are fearful ... [if] they saw the planes go into the towers, saw the destruction,” MacDonnell says. “If this raises more anxiety, that isn’t something we want. But we can’t turn our backs on it. I’m glad you brought this up.”

I asked both administrators-- who are former teachers--what they would have done. “That’s a tough question,” Granger says. “I don’t know if there is a right answer to that.”

The parent in her, she says, would want her teenagers to learn about Islam. The educator in her tells her that teaching a lesson so potentially controversial, so close to the Sept. 11 trauma, should be preceded at minimum by a teacher informing the parents of students who might take part.

My instinct--just a gut feeling, nothing more--would have been not to use a lesson that dramatic last September. It’s hard to see how that would have been the optimal time to get the historical points across.

But I give straight F’s to those who said such instruction had no place in the classroom. Especially, as was the case in Contra Costa County, when the students were already studying the Middle East and Islam when the Sept. 11 attacks occurred, according to Hershenson.

The Christian news service says lawsuits may be filed against the district over the issue. I couldn’t confirm that, but let ‘em sue. Maybe they’ll believe a judge when he tells them how silly their argument is.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.