The Texas Board of Education is currently debating how to talk about religious influence on American history. This is an interesting predicament. How does a teacher talk about American history without bringing religion into the picture? The Mayflower story just isn't the same without mentioning that they were ultra conservative Christians trying to protect God's sacred language, English, and their extreme views of the Bible.

One could easily argue that since we fail to talk about white slavery as a part of early setters traditions, focusing instead on the African slaves that replaced them, that we could just skip over the Christian settlement of the Americas as well. There have been arguments as to the true religious beliefs of our forefathers. Ben Franklin had many illegitimate children and if alive today would no doubt be seen as a junky. George Washington refused to take communion, he would leave services early, annoying religious leaders.

This seems to be a never ending problem. We see creationism verses evolution, an interesting problem seeing that there are Christians that believe that God simply had a hand in evolution. If evolution becomes a Christian staple, will school be forbidden to teach it as well?

The underlining problem here that we should be seeing is the utter failure of our educational system. We teach on language -- English -- in a country with no official language that invites the world to join us. New citizens are not required to learn the language. In the new global society, the United States - a world so-called super power - is the ranked low in Math and Science when it comes to education.

To fix America's educational issues the focus of K-12 would need to insure that by the time a child graduates high school they speak and read five different languages, and they understand calculus. With greater math, greater science can be achieved. If this were to be our educational legacy, then philosophy could be taught as well. At that time, creationism could be examined along with the religions reasons for the pilgrimage to and creation of America. But perhaps these should be taught after or at least along side of the non-Christian reasons. After all, greed did and continues to play a rather large role in U.S. history.

As long as Religion is the argument of education, learning never will be. If learning were the focus, perhaps more parents would realize their role in the eduction of our children religious and otherwise.

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