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Unread 25-12-2003, 16:26
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Kristina Kristina is offline
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Re: Christmas and Schools

So once again I must come out of my posting slumber because I can't resist political discourse (even on Christmas). My ideal path would be to be a Constitutional lawyer but remember I'm not one yet so this just my brief analysis from what I've learned thus far in political science and at a law forum in DC I went to, where our main case was actually sepearation of church and state in high school.

So first you look at the first amendment and the establishment clause in particular and it's pretty vague. No help there so you go to current court cases and presently the legal standard for seperation of church and state is the Lemon Test (from Lemon v. Kurtzman). Basically it outlines this criteria:

(i) a statute [or public policy] must have a secular legislative purpose

(ii) the principal effect of of the statute [or policy] must neither advance nor inhibit religion

(iii) the statute [or policy] must not foster "excessive [government] entanglement with religion"

So basically for a public school's actions to be deemed consitutional, they have two options: All or nothing. They can't just celebrate one holiday (with decorations, songs, parties) even if the majority of the students are of one religion because that would be advancing one religion. The school must either decide whether they not do any single holiday festivities or promote learning about various ones. Learning them all would therefore make it have a secular purpose because you're learning about the world and it's religions, basically like a History class.

That's the legal standpoint and for my personal view I would go with the "all" option. Teach and celebrate Christmas but also cover Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and other religious holidays that may be celebrated by students at a school. That's the point of school right? Sure you learn the basics out of a book but why not teach students skills to do with the outside world, like FIRST does with technology. Think about it; what's the source of so many problems in today's world, the source of hate? It's ignorance. If you can start exposing kids to different beliefs and fostering acceptance of different people's cultures from a young age (c'mon, in elementary school you have time to teach this stuff since there are no AP tests or finals) then I think we'll be setting kids on the right path. Ignoring differences by keeping them out of school won't help anything.
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Last edited by Kristina : 25-12-2003 at 16:29.
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