Parents of seventh-grade students at Spring Hill Middle School in Spring Hill, Tennessee are furious after their children came home from school with a world-history assignment focusing on the Five Pillars of Islam while Christianity is not being taught.
The Daily Caller is reporting on a dustup at the school which began when Brandee Porterfield, who has a daughter in the seventh-grade at Spring Hill, came home with schoolwork about the core teachings of the Abrahamic religion. She was told that her teacher instructed the girl to write, “Allah is the only God” while learning about the shahada, which is the most important pillar of the Five Pillars of Islam.
Porterfield says her concern is not so much that the school is teaching about the Muslim faith, but that it does not give the same amount of time to teaching Christianity. In fact, it’s not taught at all!
“I have big problems with that,” Porterfield told The Daily Herald. “From a historical point of view, that’s a lot of history these kids are missing. Also, for them to spend three weeks on Islam after having skipped Christianity, it seems to be that they are making a choice about which religion to discuss. . . . From a religion point of view, if the schools are going to be teaching religion in history, they need to teach them all equally.”
As it turns out, the teacher wasn’t too happy about it either. Porterfield said she spoke with the teacher who said she was “not happy about” the focus on Islam with no instruction on Christianity but felt she had no choice but to teach the government-mandated standards.
Other parents were also upset about their children writing “Allah is the only God” as part of a taxpayer-funded school assignment.
“To me, a Christian child should not be made to write that,” said Joy Ellis, another seventh-grade mother, to the Herald. “I honestly don’t want my child learning about Islam at all, but if they’ve got to learn about it, I would like for them to learn about the historical aspects of it and definitely nothing about the religion.”
Ellis believes that if schools are going to teach other religions, they need to teach Christianity too, especially because the U.S. is a predominantly Christian nation.
In her own state of Tennessee, only about one percent of the residents are Muslim with 81 percent identifying as Christian.
The school district offered nothing more than platitudes when asked to explain why their kids weren’t being taught about Christianity while other religions were getting so much class time.
“Our teachers work together to make sure that our students are learning what is expected through the Tennessee academic standards,” said Maury County Public Schools director Chris Marczak in a statement. “For this last section on the Islamic World this past week, our educators had students complete an assignment that had an emphasis on Islamic Faith. The assignment covered some sensitive topics that are of importance to Islamic religion and caused some confusion around whether we are asking students to believe in or simply understand the religion. It is our job as a public school system to educate our students on world history in order to be ready to compete in a global society, not to endorse one religion over another or indoctrinate.”
Marczak went on to encourage “all Maury County parents to be their child’s first and main teacher.”
Jan Hanvey, the Maury County Public Schools middle school supervisor said students would eventually come across a reference to Christianity when history teachers teach the “Age of Exploration” in eighth grade.
The school is promising a “brief forum” for parents to voice their concerns at the September 17 Parent-Teacher conferences.
This is hardly enough to satisfy parents.
“Instead of being responsible and solving the concerns of the parents regarding Islam, the school board and the new director of schools is passing on their responsibility to principals,” said area resident Bob Crigger on the Spring Hill Home Page. “We are not going to put up with this political shell game. The government’s first priority is to protect its citizens. These are our children and we want them protected.”
© All Rights Reserved, Living His Life Abundantly®/Women of Grace® http://www.womenofgrace.com
