Word: secularity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wagner and Schools Chancellor Nathan Quinones must deal with a minefield of conflicting views. The city's sex-education curriculum is described as "value neutral" but, like many other school systems' courses, is actually based on a generalized secular ethic of caring and respect for others. Parents dissatisfied with the version of the city curriculum served up in their district can pull their children out of particular classes by informing the principal. The program is sometimes popular, as it is at P.S. 42, but the effort to accommodate everyone is unacceptable to many. Last month the board of education mandated...
...BEEN said that the problem with the fundamentalists' argument was that it complained against un-Christian, as opposed to specifically anti-Christian education. However, the most startling argument put forth in the case is that the school system teaches its own religion, "secular humanism...
...first double-take, calling secular humanism a religion seems a contradiction in terms. Here the fundamentalists, of all people, have made "secular" and "religious" interchangeable ideas, rather than antonyms. By putting them on a par, the fundamentalists betray their real agenda: not just sheltering their religious beliefs, but building a shelter of intolerance against a whole range of other values and social practices...
What Mansfield dismisses as "feminist propaganda" is the study of theories that attempt to account for these statistics. I suppose then that other courses are also "vehicles for propaganda"--including Christian propaganda, Marxist propaganda or secular-humanist propaganda. I would guess that the Afro-American Studies courses are sympathetic to the plight of Blacks; does that make the field less legitimate? One would hope that the new concentration would indeed by objective and worthy of the term "scholarly pursuit." Pauline...
...claim," says Attorney William Bradford, who is defending the school board, "is that secular humanism is not a religion, and even if it were a religion, there is no evidence it is being espoused in these texts." The common legal definition of a religion specifies belief in a superior being, which would seem to be the very antithesis of secular humanism. Before the plaintiffs' attorneys rested their case last week, they called expert witnesses in an attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction. University of Virginia Sociologist James D. Hunter characterized secular humanism as the functional equivalent of a religion...