October 29, 2015
Controvery has arisen in Katy, TX over an assignment given to a seventh-grade reading class.
Jordan Wooley went before the school board and related how she and her fellow students were lead through an exercise in which they were to classify various statements as either an “opinion,” “factual claim,” or a “commonplace assertion.”
The problem arose early with statement #2: “There is a God.”
Jordan, a Methodist, answered that the statement is both a fact and an opinion: “I said it was both a fact and an opinion because in my religion there is God for a fact, but it also depends on other people’s religion, so it could be an opinion at the same time.”
Speaking with 13 Eyewitness News, she continued: “And she told us that it was wrong, and that It was a myth of our imagination that is commonly believed to be true, but is completely wrong.”
A statement by the Katy school district reads:
The activity, which was intended to encourage critical thinking skills and dialogue by engaging students in an exercise wherein they identified statements as fact, opinion, or common assertion was not intended to question or challenge any student's religious beliefs as reported by some media outlets.
When Jordan protested, the teacher challenged the seventh-grader to “prove it.” When she referenced the Scriptures and stories of people dying and experiencing heaven before being resuscitated the teacher replied that both sources were just people looking for attention.
Other students were also visibly upset and attempted to debate with the teacher.
Jordan’s mother, Chantel Wooley was understandably shocked that the beliefs and values she has instilled in her child were rebuked in a seventh grade classroom.
Wooley could understand the assignment if it were given in college:
"Are we talking about impressionable 12- or 13-year-olds or are we talking about 24-year-olds in college who already have a firm grasp of the world around them?" she asked.
It was a common practice in the atheistic Soviet Union to forcefully teach children in school that there is no God.
However, the school board’s statement also notes that the teacher is herself a Christian and distraught by the whole episode, but then it is all the more strange that she so adamantly insisted to pre-teen children that God is but a myth and a figment of imagination.
“The majority of the kids believed in God,” Jordan’s mother told KRIV, “and they’re being told by their teacher that there’s no God.”
