The earth is flat: my textbook says so.

Education is a battleground these days. Public schools are widely and for the most part rightly seen, at least in some large urban areas, as disasters. The blame falls on the wider culture, the teachers' unions, the demands placed on public schools as the courts of last resort when all other social institutions have collapsed, and all of this complaining has some basis in fact.

Today's lesson has to do with the texts. Teachers work with what they are given, and often have little choice about the texts they must use to teach children about everything ranging from the American civil rights movement to world history. It is one thing to have to deal with the culture of the inner city, the effect of failed families, etc.--but when the text itself is simply false, what do you do? I encountered an interesting example of a truly terrible text recently. It has to do with my religion and a child in our parish. I know that parents have complained for years about the fact that some texts will not, for example, mention the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Christian minister, that religion is slighted in the texts our children must read and pass tests on. What do you do when information is not merely missing, which is bad enough, but downright wrong?

Years ago, the Peanuts comic strip had a wonderful series in which Lucy held forth with great authority about subjects upon which she was absolutely incompetent. At one point she made a smug point of informing the otherwise ignorant, "The palm tree is so named because the palm of the ordinary human hand can fit snugly around the trunk of the tree"--this said with absolute assurance. I had a teacher like that once, a religious brother who said things like, "the British pound, which is currently worth about twenty dollars...." It was amusing then. At least it wasn't in any text we had to deal with, and we knew he was nuts.

A girl in our parish was presented with a text that misrepresented her Eastern Orthodox belief. She mentioned the errors to her teacher, who didn't take the problem seriously, so she showed it to me. Here is what it said:

"At the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451, Pope Leo I decreed that Jesus, although one person, had two natures. This doctrine did not satisfy the religious leaders of the Eastern Orthodox church. Not only did they disagree with the doctrine, they also did not like the fact that the Roman pope had decided for them.

"The second religious disagreement had to do with the question of whether or not images, or pictures and statues, were to be allowed in church. The Eastern church opposed the use of images. The Western church believed that images were essential in helping people to imagine the divine. The controversy raged through the papacy of Leo III. Like the Monophysite controversy, it was never fully resolved, and it contributed to the permanent separation of the Eastern and Western churches in 1054.

"This division, or schism, between the churches was political as well as religious .... The patriarchs, or religious leaders of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, were unwilling to recognize the decision of Leo I in the controversy over the nature of Jesus. They were also unwilling to recognize the decision of Leo Ill on the nature of the use of images in church..." (The Pageant of World History, by Gerald Leinward, published by Prentice Hall).

Just about everything is wrong here--not oversimplified, or even distorted, but plain wrong. It is such knuckleheaded stuff that if it showed up on a high school or college history test as an answer, you'd fail the student.

The use of images was not particularly controversial in the West; in the East, the Orthodox were, of course, entirely on the side of the use of images in worship (where do all those icons come from, if we are so dead set against them?) and celebrate the victory of Orthodoxy over the iconoclasts every year, on the Sunday of Orthodoxy. Papal decisions weren't really part of this controversy. With regard to Leo and Chalcedon, the Orthodox not only accepted Leo's dogmatic formulation--not because he was a pope who had decided for them, but because it reflected their own faith--but even said, "Peter has spoken through the mouth of Leo." There seems to be a confusion here of Orthodoxy with Monophysitism. In any case, it misrepresents Orthodoxy as drastically as Protestantism would be misrepresented if Protestants were said to have based their protest on the grounds that Rome took the Bible too seriously, or Catholicism would be misrepresented if Catholics were said to be people who worship the pope instead of Jesus.

But something is encouraging here. The good news is that most important aspects of education don't happen in school. The girl in my parish was able to recognize the text as false because, at home and in church, she had learned something about her faith. Her kind of literacy matters more than what schools teach. I have always thought home schooling was beginning to make more sense than sending kids to public schools; in some sense home schooling happens, even when the kids go to public schools, and my parishioner has learned a valuable lesson: don't always, or even usually, believe what your teachers tell you.