Back in the days when schools taught something more than self-pity, indignation and jumping to conclusions, many teachers required that students read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1863 poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride.” For generations of Americans, its opening line, “Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,” was, perhaps, the single best-known line of poetry. Reading the entire poem, even in the cynicism of the early twenty-first century, evokes much of the tension of April 18, 1775, as Paul waited in the Charlestown cemetery to notify “every Middlesex village and farm” of the coming peril.
By the time I reached elementary school in the early sixties, both poetry and patriotism were fast fading from America’s classrooms. Paul Revere’s Ride was more likely to be ridiculed than revered by the time I reached high school, and I—regrettably—never taught the poem in my thirty-four-year teaching career. Given those facts, I doubt Brooke Schultz’s teachers read the poem to her, either.
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Despite alluding to the President and the often conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the great villain of the piece is the State of Texas. Specifically, Miss Schultz lays four sins against secularism at the door of the Lone Star State. They allow “religiously associated chaplains” to advise students, they approved a curriculum that includes Biblical passages, they may pass a bill allowing schools to “carve out” prayer time from the busy academic day and they are considering a requirement that schools post the Ten Commandments.
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In typically leftist fashion, neither Miss Schultz nor her Education Week colleagues have the self-perception or modesty to ask why several states are taking such steps. Nonetheless, the current state of secular education indicates that such an examination is warranted.