The problem with teaching religion as a cultural study is that it would be difficult to regulate the bias of the teacher. I live in the rural midwest and I'm absolutely positive that teachers would teach christianity as fact and other religions as myth.
I taught school for a long time and at one point I was a special education teacher who assisted high functioning students with learning disabilities in the mainstream classroom. One of the classes I worked in was a biology class and when it came time to teach evolution the teacher flatly refused. She was required by law to teach the information so she simply printed and copied information from the internet, passed it out to the students and sat at her desk while they were given time to read it- which they didn't and which she didn't care. When passing out the copies she told the class there would be no test and called Darwin's (apparently the only scientist who has ever studied evolution) methodology into question without elaborating on these questions or presenting any opposition to them. The principal, superintendent and school board fully supported this method of circumventing the law.
A cultural studies class, introduced in our current environment would play out in much the same way, I'm afraid.
As it currently stands god is rampant in schools unless someone explicitly objects (usually at great personal risk both physically and socially). God is assumed to be fact. And it's different than when I was in school. Fundies weren't so loud then and I was actually teaching school before I learned that there are people who actually don't believe in evolution, despite the fact that I grew up in a Southern Baptist church. That is not the case now- we all know these people exist because they've made sure of it. And they've also made sure that people who formerly wouldn't have given evolution a second thought do now and that these people now feel it is their duty to fight against these "lies". Perhaps someday cultural studies will have their place in our school system but not in the current climate.
I taught school for a long time and at one point I was a special education teacher who assisted high functioning students with learning disabilities in the mainstream classroom. One of the classes I worked in was a biology class and when it came time to teach evolution the teacher flatly refused. She was required by law to teach the information so she simply printed and copied information from the internet, passed it out to the students and sat at her desk while they were given time to read it- which they didn't and which she didn't care. When passing out the copies she told the class there would be no test and called Darwin's (apparently the only scientist who has ever studied evolution) methodology into question without elaborating on these questions or presenting any opposition to them. The principal, superintendent and school board fully supported this method of circumventing the law.
A cultural studies class, introduced in our current environment would play out in much the same way, I'm afraid.
As it currently stands god is rampant in schools unless someone explicitly objects (usually at great personal risk both physically and socially). God is assumed to be fact. And it's different than when I was in school. Fundies weren't so loud then and I was actually teaching school before I learned that there are people who actually don't believe in evolution, despite the fact that I grew up in a Southern Baptist church. That is not the case now- we all know these people exist because they've made sure of it. And they've also made sure that people who formerly wouldn't have given evolution a second thought do now and that these people now feel it is their duty to fight against these "lies". Perhaps someday cultural studies will have their place in our school system but not in the current climate.
