The Textbook Battle in Tennessee

...Although the plaintiffs have sought to portray educators as uncompromising, it is fundamentalism itself that is based on complete intolerance...

...Nevertheless, the "floodgates" objection to the ruling makes civil libertarians uncomfortable...

...Indeed, from their campaign against pornography, some feminists have found that fundamentalists can make energetic, if awkward, comrades...

...But, she continued, "When the destruction of the world comes, it will not be from some old nuclear war...

...Hull is known as a pragmatist, and he limited his ruling to the fourteen children and the Holt, Rinehart and Winston reading series directly involved...

...Toward the end of our conversation, Pastor James Fields of the Cedarview Church promised to defend to the death my right to practice any religious or political views...

...Still, I was anxious to discover a long-brewing local feud that had suddenly broken open...

...But there is a basic difference between opting out and busing, which reaches to the heart of what both public education and the fundamentalists' case against it are all about...

...All other accounts I could obtain about that incident, as a result of which the court, in a separate trial, awarded Frost damages, suggested an entirely bungled, not orchestrated, affair...

...For she also asserts that her kids must be taught from a Christian perspective...

...ALTHOUGH SOUTHERN PREACHERS are famous for their rhetorical eloquence, many of their listeners are unlettered, particularly in areas more isolated than Hawkins County, which is located near the "Tri-Cities" of Bristol, Kingsport, and Johnson City...

...by a call from Jennie Wilson...

...Some observers were surprised that Hull, who originally threw the case out of court until a higher court remanded it for trial, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs...

...Once again those hill folk at the foot of the old coal mountains were charting an independent course, as they had done during the Civil War, when they refused to secede from the Union...

...After Nissan, General Motors, and American Airlines had initiated major new projects in Tennessee, here came another Scopes trial...

...And educators can be forced to judge texts by religious criteria without the kind of drama as in Florida—where the offending book was finally removed from the curriculum...

...Some of the details were funny: she'd heard that the United Nations was built on a piece of land that used to be called Babel...

...Each story seems designed to assure a different sort of child—whether of a minority race or religion, or one who's a little clumsy, or who feels uncomfortable with a gender stereotype— that she or he is still OK...

...An 156 alleged impracticality should never stand in the way of remedying social injustice, as the experience of busing shows...

...Since those reported overstatements, however, the plaintiffs have carefully restricted the terms of their argument to avoid addressing the broader implications of the trial...

...She echoed the preacher, who had just said from the pulpit that there are signs the Kingdom is approaching...

...Or was this mess a calculated test case, plotted by Beverly LaHaye's Concerned Women of America to take place in a town called Church Hill but designed to affect all the nation's schools...

...Wilson sees evidence everywhere of a humanist conspiracy to wipe out Christianity, but knows it will ultimately fail...

...Frost argues that her children were denied a public education and that that amounts to "taxation without representation...

...Much animosity in town seems to be spent arguing over who was the first to contact a national organization...

...The remedy in Mozert v. Hawkins County Public Schools—that is, opting out—suggests that the case was about fourteen children and one particular course...

...And some were indisputable, though a Dissent reader would view them from opposite political ground: American democracy is very imperfect...

...It is fitting, then, that the fundamentalist church is so entirely a textual one...

...When Marvin, a black child, asks his mother what a manhole cover is, she says it's merely a plate to allow workers to get to the pipes under the street, though Marvin suspects it lets into a frightening world filled with monsters...

...Jennie told me that phone records from different public offices revealed a flurry of conversations around that time among the mayor, the police chief, and members of the school board...

...A dispute in Panama City, Florida, became violent when fundamentalists threatened the lives of three teachers and tried to set fire to the apartment of a local journalist...

...The fundamentalists insist they are not trying to get religion into the schools...

...The more important question is whether the case was in fact the quintessential test of American civil rights that supporters of the plaintiffs have claimed...

...Public schools must be able to set their own basic curriculum, and the tolerant, broad-ranging one Hawkins County selected, regardless of imperfections, is the only one a pluralistic society can accept...

...What I found was a very homogeneous community, with almost everyone on both sides of the case a political conservative and a religious fundamentalist...

...No one is denying her that right...

...During Pastor Fields's sermon he spoke convincingly about man's need to avoid self-righteousness, and then launched into a harsh criticism of "liberals" who read the Beatitudes as a tract about social justice...

...A few days later, he finds the cover off and a ladder protruding...

...But the constitutional guarantee of the right to practice any religion freely does not promise the right to carry out that practice within the public schools...

...ALTHOUGH THE CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT to influence the public-school curriculum has local origins, the national inspiration and financing it receives assures that opt-out challenges will be common, especially in the South, if this ruling is allowed to stand...

...By accepting the plaintiffs' premise that their children are entitled to other school benefits even though they have been instructed to reject its central project, Judge Hall implies that the public schools are just another outlet for public money, like Medicare or Social Security...

...the power structure is dominated by the wealthy...

...This argument did not sway Judge Thomas Hull, as the plaintiffs were able to present witnesses claiming that such havoc would not occur...

...She explains the function of a gutter, but the story ends with Marvin thinking, "I knew that wasn't right...

...Though I expect there will be a big bang, don't you...

...One explanation of why this case received such extensive national attention is that it seemed to contradict the forward-looking image then Governor Lamar Alexander had long been cultivating for his state...

...Taken together, the details suggest a worldview both deeply frightened and supremely, or divinely, confident...

...How could you have one story say there isn't a God and the next story say there is...

...Frost earned an amount of notoriety for her statement "Our childrens' imagination has to be bounded"—though she contends that there is ample imaginative freedom for her kids within a religious framework...

...And in Hancock County, which is contiguous to Hawkins, 71 percent of the adults have not completed high school...

...Besides suggesting that the accused in Massachusetts were witches, Frost said that reading such a passage would be a sin for her children...

...and the mass media are ideologically conformist...

...Strange political alliances are not uncommon where First Amendment issues are at stake, and perhaps leftists should have defended the fundamentalists, as many did Samuel Loring Morrison, who was convicted in 1985 for selling public though nominally classified military documents to the British journal Jane's Defence Weekly...

...Thus a story about the trial in Salem could be included as long as no "incantations" were printed...

...It may be only in this environment, where the idea of interpretation as a personal act is so foreign, that a serious belief in a "literal" reading of God's word could flourish...

...he screams...

...To this question both Frost and Mozert responded that they are not educational experts and have no advice...

...And although Hull unofficially certified the plaintiffs' abilities, some parents might not be competent or conscientious enough to teach...

...The fundamentalists I spoke to made no secret of their disdain for every aspect of public schooling except that it is "free...

...And the white Christian child is meant to learn to be equally accepting of those differences...

...Yet she did not agree when I asked whether nuclear weapons are the means by which God is going to wreak his devastation...

...Here, where the unemployment rate in some counties reaches 25 percent, the next opt-out challenge might be accompanied by the argument that Hull's plan—whereby the school tests the children's reading skills but the parents pay for the alternative books and teach their youngsters at home—discriminates against single or impoverished parents who cannot afford the extra time or money...

...We will not be able to brag throughout history: 'Look what we did.' When it happens, God will do it...

...Mozert argued that it exceeds its charter by teaching more than just reading skills—it indoctrinates...

...JENNIE AND HER HUSBAND, Marion, also gave me a rundown on the local political machine, which they said had forced them to turn to the courts to resolve the school dispute...

...Wouldn't I do the same...

...This fine tale, by Winifred Rosen, finds a way to show children that parents know a lot but it's good to let your imagination run anyway...

...Given a basic disagreement with the premise of a "neutral" secularism that the public schools are based on, the plaintiffs are bound to interpret passages as contrary to their beliefs, even if the reasoning sometimes seems forced...

...But if the ruling is ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court, it will be legally applicable to any district in the country...

...But in a sense he threw the case out a second time, relegating to a short footnote in his opinion the essential issue of the trial...

...A celebrated trial in Alabama, on which the ruling was pending as this article went to press, seeks to determine whether secular humanism is a religion and thus ought to be excluded from public schools...

...This convinced the Wilsons that there had been a plot to arrest Frost in order to intimidate the concerned 155 parents...

...When I suggested that a businessperson's use of a secretary does not imply that she or he cannot write, Marion explained that the textual offense here hinged on the word "needed...

...They make a practical religious argument, not a theoretical educational one, and thus crowd under the First Amendment banner...

...Frost assured me that she does not object to her kids learning the history of other religions, but she draws the line when books such as the Holt series force students actually to practice objectionable faiths...

...And Robert Mozert, who lent his name to the case, has allegedly demanded a dress code in the schools, a mandatory Pledge of Allegiance, and a curtailment of sex education—though he denies this, explaining Jennie Wilson forged his signature on a letter to the editor of the local paper...

...No, she said, because she had no desire to influence the curriculum for any children but her own...

...There is no question that the reading texts teach more than just how to read," he wrote at the bottom of page twelve, implying that public schools have no right to do that...

...As it happened, Frost herself had notified the police of her intention to pull her child from class in defiance of the school board ruling...

...This background helps explain the fundamentalists' complaints about the Holt series...

...On my last day in Hawkins County I was wakened just before 7:00 A.M...

...One of the primary reasons, according to the counsel for the school board, is that a "cafeteria" educational system will disrupt classrooms and bureaucratize teachers' jobs, as they try to keep track of who's sitting out where because of what...

...It is also beside the point...

...In fact, Frost said, she did not really even care what might happen elsewhere, though she stated at one point: "This decision is a real victory for parents—for me as a parent, for freedom in the schools...

...Jean Price, principal of the middle school, told me the experience of the case had not changed any of her political or religious beliefs, but, she said, "Finding yourself in the same camp as these people really makes you think...

...Their real objection is with the "context" of the reading series, outside of which no one story is necessarily impermissible...

...And because these fundamentalists had, in effect, put intellectual freedom on the stand, much of the media may have become blinded to how shrewd they actually are...

...East Tennesseans were disappointed that the trial served to reinforce the hillbilly stereotype, even though most saw the case as isolated and insignificant...

...You cannot do that...

...The plaintiffs in Hawkins County find it a subversive antiauthoritarian message...

...It is a short step from a course-by-course opt-out plan to other conservative educational proposals such as tuition tax credits, or a voucher system in which parents would have access to public educational funds in order to spend them at private institutions...

...HAWKINS COUNTY itting in a pew at the Cedarview Methodist Church in Kingsport, I was chatting with Jennie Wilson, grandmother of two of the children in the Hawkins County school system who, through a trial this past July, won the right to opt out of reading classes that cover material their parents consider religiously offensive...

...MOZERT GAVE ME ONE MORE EXAMPLE of anti-Christian material, the story "Marvin's Manhole," from a second-grade reader People Need People, which, 157 he contends, teaches children that parents lie...

...The school there offered to allow three students to read alternative selections, but their parents complained that doing so would stigmatize those children...

...158...

...MOTHER...

...The parents in Hawkins County will not allow a philosophy of mutual acceptance to be taught to their children...

...Since children through the eighth grade are too vulnerable to "confusion" when exposed to conflicting religious and political views, he proposed that students through that level read "Dick and Jane" stories, as if those or any books could be "pure" readers without their own messages...

...And what conservatives will have won is the right, for religious reasons, to place restrictions on the schools' ability to set the curriculum...

...But if this case was about basic American freedoms, as she emotionally claims, what's the long-term solution...

...Mozert said Marvin should have been punished for his deviating thoughts...

...This is particularly interesting, since the plaintiffs claim that the textbooks, far from being simply unbalanced, are hostile to their faith...

...It is central to their objection to the "forced" teaching of "secular humanism," which they believe led the Hawkins County schools to suspend fourteen students...

...Tax money, in fact, may be what this trial was finally about...

...The preachers endlessly quote "chapter and verse" to congregations in which many of the members may have read no other book since their teenage years but the Bible...

...The court transcript is filled with examples of many other offensive stories, and case by case is an easy way to ridicule the fundamentalists...

...Anxious to head off book battles, they act quickly to scratch potentially offensive books from reading lists...

...But his disclaimer, stating that the ruling should not apply to future cases, is legally dubious as well as unrealistic...

...Although the scope of textbook material has been pared down to avoid contention, the Holt series does appear to teach tolerance, both of others and of oneself...

...As an example they described the arrest for trespassing of Vicki Frost, the plaintiffs' main witness in the textbook trial, after she had gone to the school one day to take her children out of class...

...Though I didn't get exactly why she phoned, I was able to scribble down these three sentences: "When [conflicting books] are side by side, you see that you cannot include their point of view...

...Was it Norman Lear's People for the American Way—yes, I was told that they are communist—that started it all, issuing orders from Washington to help the school defeat the educational freedom fighters...

...Jennie Wilson told me that the sentence from one reader, "Jesus needed his scribes," teaches children that Christ was illiterate...

...Of course in Tennessee the sight of children marching out of the room every day could also stigmatize the books for those who remain to discuss them...

...Representative Jim Cooper has calculated that his congressional district, which borders that of Hawkins County, ranks 427th out of 435 in terms of the educational level of its residents...

...Wilson was telling me about the growing "globalist" conspiracy, which aims at establishing an atheistic one-world government...

...The worker he has disturbed explains that indeed there's nothing underground but pipes...

...The more neutral "used" might be acceptable...

...This claim reveals the confusion of politics and religion behind the case...

...I asked Frost whether she had first attempted to resolve her complaints about the Holt books through more conventional channels before pulling her kids from the classroom...

...This new globalism represents for her and many fundamentalists the final stage of history before God brings about the Apocalypse...

...A cage is a cage...

...Marvin has learned his lesson, but the next day he asks his mother about the funny-looking cage in the street...

...Far from being short term, the organizational difficulties would presumably persist for the duration of a student's career, since the plaintiffs were objecting to the entire basic reading course...

...The trial in Hawkins County, then, comes down to a debate over the basic mission of public education...

...Unable to resist, Marvin climbs down and is terrified when he bumps into something alive...

...What conceivable reason could there be for refusing to allow a dozen or so kids to sit out a few classes that offend their parents' religious beliefs...

...It will add one more censorial strategy to a campaign that stretches throughout the country...