Would anyone doubt that deliberately depriving children of education and condemning them to ignorance and poverty is a form of child abuse? Yet that is exactly the fate of many children attending our nation’s public schools. It is the fate of many, but not of all.
The glare from the international news through the summer obscured a good story of how the Good Book is enhancing the lives of children with otherwise gloomy prospects. It turns out that one hour a week of Christian religious instruction is transforming the lives of public school students in one of the most blighted urban neighborhoods in the country.
Back in 1914, a public school superintendent in Gary, Indiana created the Released Time Religious Education program which was approved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952. Itprovided for religious instruction during the school day to public school students off campus with parental permission.
The secular non-profit National Council on Crime and Delinquency just completed an independent evaluation of the Oakland Released Time Program that had been operating for about two years. Oakland schools have long ranked among the least effective and the most dangerous in the country. Just to give you an idea, during each of the past few years, Oakland schools typically reported about 500 assaults, over 50 of which involved guns or knives. In addition they report about 50 rapes or attempted rapes along with hundreds of cases of extortion and robbery.
We’re talking schools here, not penitentiaries and jails. Needless to say, not much in the way of mathematics, history, or even basic fluency is being learned.
Even in this atmosphere, children enrolled in the Time Release program, 77 percent of whom are racial minorities, dramatically outperformed their classmates in almost every academic category. They also improved their own academic rankings compared to before their enrollment in the Bible program.
Furthermore, these students demonstrated significant character development and diminished criminal and delinquent behavior compared to their classmates. None of this is new. Academically credible studies proving positive correlation between religious instruction and preventing crime and delinquency go back to the 1970’s.
Every impartial observer must surely now rethink American education’s attempt to teach facts without beliefs. Even trying to teach the facts of America’s history without teaching the beliefs that fueled the nation?s founding has failed. High school students are quick to fault America while most cannot identify the century in which our Civil War took place. Children attending religiously-based private schools as well as home schoolers who typically are
educated on a foundation of belief, routinely outperform their public school friends who are rigorously denied any form of belief.
Teaching facts without an underpinning of beliefs simply does not work. But aren’t beliefs strictly for primitives who lack the intelligence to base their lives only upon facts and reason?
Not so. We all base many of our most important decisions on beliefs rather than facts. We believe that the person we are marrying will be a wonderful life partner; but we do not know it as a fact. We believe that our investments are wise decisions but we do not know this to be a fact. We bring children into the world believing we will be able to give them good lives although we hardly know this as a fact.
As life tools, facts are overrated because they don’t govern our behavior as much as our beliefs do. Believing in marriage, for instance, contributes far more to marital stability than fact-finding, premarital sex can possibly do. Germany, for centuries a home of artistic, cultural and scientific enlightenment, clearly demonstrated during the reign of the Nazis that mere knowledge of facts is not proof against barbaric behavior.
Not that belief is any guarantee of goodness. But the evidence shows that it does improve people’s conduct, whereas there is zero correlation between secular education and virtue. For myself, I know that my belief has not made me a saint. However I know with equal certainty that it has made me just a little bit better than I would have been without it.
Desirable character traits like courage, persistence, loyalty, honesty and optimism spring from the human soul, the repository of our beliefs, not from any facts we may have stored in our brains. Soldiers who would follow a certain commanding officer to the very gates of hell follow that leader because of the beliefs he radiates, not because of the technical information and the facts in his brain. Notorious corporate criminals of recent days lacked no facts but were hideously short on beliefs.
As a car enthusiast, I think of it in these terms: Just as a car needs gasoline, we human beings need food, water, and oxygen. That, however, is not all a car needs. Without oil to lubricate its innards the car runs only briefly before it will seize up in permanent paralysis. Oil to a car parallels belief to humans. One can only deprive human beings of belief for a short period before their culture begins to show the dreadful consequences.
Religious faith is one vital example of belief, but our capabilities are sharpened whenever our souls sculpt even general convictions about durable principles that are not nailed to scientific coordinates. Don’t get me wrong; we need science and we need facts. First, though, we need belief in general and, I believe, religious belief in particular.
How strange that it should be controversial to proclaim that biblical belief does not hurt America and oppress its citizens, as popular culture has insisted for decades. Au contraire, biblical belief helps our society, particularly the neediest within it. I think King David was correct when he wrote at the end of Psalm 111, “The foundation to all wisdom is belief in G-d and good understanding will come to all who practice this.” The only mystery is why all schools in America are not practicing this just as they used to back when American education was the envy of the whole world.
There is now ample evidence that biblical training can help cure the disease of ignorance and end the abuse it inflicts on innocent children. For genuinely rational people, this evidence would surely warrant wider adoption of the program. Why do some Americans fear the cure more than they fear the disease? There would appear to be two lessons here for the Orthodox community. One is that we do better living among educated and virtuous people, and the second is that we ought to be offering similar programs for Jewish students in public schools.
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