Recently, Oklahoma’s highest-ranking elected education official spoke about his efforts to put the word of God in every school in the state. Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters has led various initiatives in recent months to incorporate Christianity in his state’s education system.
Walters recently allocated $3 million of his budget to ensuring that a Bible is in every school, where he will be asking for another $3 million in an upcoming meeting with the conservative majority senate. “There were several mechanisms that could have been used here,” he said. “Districts could have used the money already allocated for it. They could have used their textbook funds. But what we’re doing is we, as the state Department of Education, we’re saying we’re going to purchase the Bible for every classroom with $3 million,” he said.
Walters continued, “That is what will be a new announcement today: We are actually going to purchase them, deliver them to the schools. And then number two, we’re going to be asking for $3 million moving forward to continue to supply the schools with Bibles moving forward.”
When asked if there was any pushback against the initiative, Walters claimed parents are generally excited to see Christianity coming back into the schools. He noted that Oklahoma’s youth are “going to have an understanding of the role the Bible played in American history.”
The Christian Tribune previously reported on an initiative from Walters to place the Bible into teaching in grades 5 through 12 across Oklahoma. “The Bible is an indispensable historical and cultural touchstone,” Walters said in a statement. “Without basic knowledge of it, Oklahoma students are unable to properly contextualize the foundation of our nation which is why Oklahoma educational standards provide for its instruction.”
“We’re going to make an important announcement today regarding the Bible and the Ten Commandments. My staff has been looking at Oklahoma statute. We’ve been looking at Oklahoma Academic Standards, and as crystal clear to us at any Oklahoma Academic Standards under Title 70 multiple occasions, The Bible is a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of Western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system,” he said.
“And as frankly, we’re talking about the Bible, one of the most foundational documents used for the Constitution and the birth of our country. We also find major points in history that refer to the Bible, that reference the Bible. We see multiple figures when talking about the Federalist Papers, constitutional conventional arguments, and Martin Luther King, Jr, who use it as a tremendous impetus for the civil rights movement and tie many of those arguments back to the Bible. It is essential that our kids have an understanding of the Bible and its historical context. So we will be issuing a memo today that every school district will adhere to, which is that every teacher every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom, and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom to ensure that this historical understanding is there for every student in the state of Oklahoma, in accordance with our academic standards and state law,” he added.
Featured image credit: Joshua Keller, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gutenberg_Bible,_New_York_Public_Library,_USA._Pic_01.jpg
