Reply #85: In Norway, which has a state church, [View All]

[KitSileya]

all non-vocational students have to take a course in religion and ethics in their senior year in high school. There they learn about different denominations of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, either Hinduism or Buddhism, and paganism. That accounts for 4/6th of the curriculum, the other 2/6th being devoted to philosophy and ethics.

I teach this course, and when pupils ask me why they have to learn these things, I compare it with language learning. You have not learnt any language unless you've learned at least two different languages, because without knowledge of other languages you cannot know about languages - meta-language escapes you. The same with ethics and culture - if you do not know what they believe in other countries, how can you make informed decisions about faith, philosophy and ethics? If you do not know that things can be done differently, you are like someone in a sensory deprivation chamber - a fish who's spent their entire life in water and does not realize there's some places without water, where they breathe air. In addition, how are you to understand other parts of the world if you do not have even a rudimentary knowledge of the underpinnings of their culture? How can you understand your own culture if you do not know it was built on Christianity - that the Lutheran-evangelical church was part and parcel of the attempt to subjugate Norway into a vassal state by the Danes, for example? How can you understand American culture if you are not familiar with the two 'prongs' of primary European settlement - the capitalists of Jamestown and the puritans of Plymouth Rock?

Harvard should be allowed to teach what they want, but I think they should not change the graduating requirements for current classes.