Many schools try to keep students moving on conveyor belts to good careers. Sure, kids fight in the corridors at some places, terrorizing teachers and each other, but most affluent suburban schools function without regular incidents of this sort. They generally give students the tools to get ahead, and fill their heads with all kinds of information and propaganda.

And yet, much of what happens in school could be summarized in the title of a book by the late Neal Postman about education and other aspects of popular culture: Amusing Ourselves to Death. Many “good” schools typically get kids thinking about everything except what is truly important: our relationship to God. They try to turn kids into happy chimpanzees, capable and desirous of following the rules, grinning and gobbling down the bananas offered as rewards.

Christian schools that are up against top-flight public schools are likely to lose, because they typically don’t have as many bananas to offer. Christian schools rarely have expensive but well-oiled bureaucracies. They often don’t have the clubs and activities that keep kids busy after school. But they can compete because, apart from learning about God in the context of learning about His creation, all of the bells and whistles are worthless. They may seem pleasant rather than destructive physically, but in the end they are destructive morally and theologically.

Christian schools should teach children to resist superficial happiness, the kind that comes too easily. They should want their graduates to be restless selves rather than diverted selves – to be, as Walker Percy says, dislocated humans rather than happy chimps. They should recognize that a lack of self-esteem can hurt, but unearned self-esteem can hurt even more. They should help students to locate themselves spiritually.

One other thing: Christian schools should teach children that it is good to give and fine to receive. The left wants a world where no one serves anyone else, where people are not dependent on others because they have entitlements from government. But that deprives us of part of our humanity. We begin our lives completely dependent on people. We maintain them with partial dependence. We are always completely dependent on God. Charity and service to others makes us less brutish, more giving. They help us to locate ourselves throughout our lives.

There’s trouble in River City.

Okay, it’s Mission Viejo, really, — a town about 45 minutes north of San Diego. There, the Farnans, a Christian family are suing James Corbett, a history teacher in the Capistrano Unified School District, the Los Angeles Times reports. The Farnans say Corbett’s hostile classroom remarks about religion made their son, Chad, 16, uncomfortable and unable to learn. But it’s not Chad’s word against the teacher’s: Chad has Corbett’s remarks on tape. Among them:

“When you put on your Jesus glasses, you can’t see the truth.”

The South has more draconian views of criminal punishment, but murder, rape — and church attendance — all are higher in the South.

And conservatives, Corbett said, “don’t want women to avoid pregnancies. That’s interfering with God’s work. . . . All over the world, doesn’t matter where you go, the conservatives want control over women’s reproductive capacity . . .”

Two questions: Do such remarks have a place in a public school history class? What do you think would happen if Corbett had substituted “Allah” for Jesus and God, and “synagogue” or “mosque” for church?

Should America’s public schools ignore or rely on race when setting school admission policies?

Some complain that the federal courts are sending contradictory messages. The Supreme Court recently ruled against “voluntary diversity” programs in Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky, saying the programs were too heavily race-based. But the courts are directing other schools (still pegged as displaying racial inequalities) to integrate schools by creating race-based admissions policies.

For instance, a federal court has ordered schools in Shelby County, Tenn., to bus minority students to schools an hour away and replace hundreds of white teachers with black teachers. In Huntsville, Ala., the court has forbidden students to transfer away from a school where they’re in the racial minority. In Tucson, Ariz., transferring students have to take into account the “ethnic balance” of both schools.

Bobby Webb, superintendent of Shelby County schools, asks, “So which ruling do I violate? … The judge’s ruling now, or the earlier rulings that we can’t discriminate against people on the basis of the color of their skin?” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg admits that the situation is “very odd.”

Edward Blum, visiting fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, told WoW the problem is that the federal courts are making individual schools reflect the racial makeup of the entire school district, even when the schools accurately reflect the racial makeup of their actual, local neighborhood. He said busing students away from local schools puts “the concept of neighborhood school unity” into peril: “If there is a neighborhood that is multi-racial or multi-ethnic, those students should attend a local school.”

Blum agrees that integration is a worthy goal but suggests that the courts let it happen naturally: “As … Hispanics and blacks move to more suburban, multi-racial neighborhoods, schools then naturally will become more integrated. … It’s a naturally slow but naturally occurring process.”

In a “surprisingly uncontroversial decision,” Alabama became the first state in the union to approve a Bible-based textbook for use in its public schools. During a hearing Oct. 11, the state Board of Education voted 8-0 to include The Bible and Its Influence on the state’s list of accepted textbooks.

The textbook is a product of the Bible Literacy Project, founded and run by Chuck Stetson, a conservative Christian New York-based equity fund executive. Assessing scripture and its subsequent influence on literature, art, philosophy and political culture, it was specifically designed to avoid the Constitution’s church-state barriers. Although the text, which has been on the market for two years, is now taught in 163 schools in 35 states, no state had previously endorsed it.

Do you think Alabama’s example will pave the way for other states?

Education reformers have been trying to make a chink in the hegemonistic monopoly of public education for a long time.  The most extreme examples are school choice, the voucher debate and the privatization of the public education system: all too extreme for the Powers to accept.  But the idea of incentives and rewards, a much less extreme kind of reform, is making inroads in the very Death Star of public education: NYC schools.

New York attracted the national spotlight when the city and the union agreed on a groundbreaking plan to reward teachers who improve student achievement in the neediest schools […] The federal proposals reward individual teachers who improve their credentials and meet other guidelines. The New York program takes a schoolwide approach. Under it, needy schools that hit specified performance targets would receive $3,000 per union staff member. The school-based committee that distributes the money could do so equally or give disproportionate shares to teachers deemed to have made a greater contribution to schoolwide achievement.

This is a big step in the right direction because it uses the concept of incentive in a healthy way.  But public schools ought to be careful: they may grow to like the idea of competition, and if that happens, it’s all over.  For them.

Starting this year, Alabama public-schooled students will study the Bible with the State Board of Educations’ unanimous approval. Alabama is the first state to approve the Bible Literacy Project’s textbook, The Bible and its Influence, as part of its state curriculum.

Sheila Weber, Vice President of Communications for BLP, told WoW the BLP created the textbook “to give school boards a greater level of confidence, so they could see exactly how the subject matter was being presented.” The Bible and its Influence takes a non-devotional, academic approach to studying the Bible. It walks students through the Old and New Testaments, with side explorations of topics like “Milton and the Bible,” “Exodus and Emancipation,” and “Freedom and Faith in America.”

Any Bible textbook must walk a shaky wall between church and state. Forty scholars — Catholic, Jewish, Evangelical, mainline Protestant, and Orthodox – reviewed the textbook before publication. The book has won endorsements from evangelicals like Chuck Colson, Vonnie Bright from Campus Crusade for Christ and Jamie Crouse from Concerned Women for America. TIME Magazine has also praised it, and Charles Haynes, senior scholar with the First Amendment Center, reviewed and endorsed it.

According to San Diego Union Tribune, Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church called the textbook one-sided: “To teach religion objectively, you really have to teach the good, the bad and the ugly and this book only teaches the good.” The book’s introduction tells students, “You will not be pressed into accepting religion. You will study about religion as presented in the Bible, but you will not be engaged in the practice of religion.” Earlier critics pointed to factual errors in the textbook, but a second printing has addressed concerns.

Only 8 percent of public schools offer an elective course on the Bible. Now that 160 schools have implemented The Bible and its Influence and 2,000 educators are reviewing it, that statistic may change.