Q: should public schools celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 2, 1996 | by Eric Buehrer, | Edd Doerr

But Thanksgiving never was established to be a history lesson about the "invasion" of the Pilgrims, and nowhere was it established to be a multicultural lesson about the plight of American Indians. Yet, the trend is to distort Thanksgiving to be just that.

When it comes to the way Christmas is treated in many public schools, the hostility toward anything religious is even more blatant. For celebrating Christmas, the "Anti-Bias" handbook suggests three options: (1) "Integrate December holidays from several cultural groups" into one nonreligious lesson; (2) "Do December holidays other than Christmas"; and (3) "Don't do December holidays at all in the classroom." These teachers don't seem to see the hypocrisy of suggesting an obvious bias against Christmas and Christians in their "Anti-Bias" handbook.

In a Raleigh, N.C., school three years ago administrators were so fearful of offending anyone with Christmas they put out the word that if teachers even used the colors red and green during the month of December they would have to make sure all other religions were celebrated. This bizarre bestowal of religious significance on colors made parents afraid to bring cookies with red and green icing. Since then the school has relaxed its regulations on the "offensive" colors and has adopted a "multicultural" policy But, in what is all too typical around the country, while the policy talks about teaching religious holidays, students never hear about the birth of Christ at Christmas. The reason? Educators consider the use of red and green, the display of a Christmas tree and the mention of Santa Claus as "religious" enough to pass for a good education about the meaning of the holiday. An innovative music teacher got "Go Tell It on the Mountain" included in the "winter" concert only after labeling it multicultural and attaching it to Kwanzaa.

It is frustrating to see educators bend over backwards to avoid the appearance of promoting Christianity when the courts have made it clear that they need not go to such lengths.

In the 1963 case of Abington School District vs. Schempp, which struck down the practice of state-directed and required Bible reading, Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote in his concurrence" [U]ntutored devotion to the concept of neutrality can lead to invocation or approval of results which partake not simply of that noninterference and noninvolvement with the religious which the Constitution commands, but of a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but, it seems to be are prohibited by it."

Some school officials try to draw a distinction between educating about the holiday and celebrating it. However, Justice Tom Clark. who authored the Schempp decision, later commented, "Most commentators suggested that the court had outlawed religious observances in the public schools when, in fact, the court did nothing of the kind." A common dictionary definition of "observe" is "to keep or celebrate"; likewise, "celebrate" means "to observe with ceremonies of respect" - something many schools refuse to do.