BJU Math Text Offends Democrats
Sunday, February 20th, 2005Here’s something interesting: Some guy named “broomfield_jay” at democrats.com has his shorts in a wad over the fact that BJU Press puts Christian doctrine in its textbooks. Specifically, this article refers to a pre-calculus text, describing it as “sick” and as a “KKK handbook.”
Here’s one of the examples he cites:
“Carl Friedrich Gauss first proved the fundamental theorem of algebra. There are many fundamental theorems: of arithmetic, calculus, and so on. These are so ‘fundamental’ that many other theorems are derived from them. In the Bible, there are also fundamentals, without which Christianity would not exist—the deity of Christ, His substitutionary atonement, and the inspiration of the Bible, to name a few.”
And here’s his take on the book as a whole:
An objective review of this “text” would warn that it not only wastes students time, but will also leave them behind studenst [SIC] using more competent texts. Modern texts are concise and have real-world math applications involving economics, biology, and physics. Leave the Bible to the department that teaches sociology or better yet, mythology.
Will a text that drops Christian doctrine in at every opportunity leave its students behind the students of secular textbooks? I somehow doubt it.
Of course, my Christian high school used the secular Saxon math curriculum, if that’s any indicator of text quality.
In any case, broomfield_jay is over-reacting. As long as the book teaches the fundamentals of pre-calculus to its students, there’s no problem with it dropping in Christian doctrine, especially when you consider that the book is written specifically for Christian schools. And unless the story problems involve getting the dimensions of a burning cross, the KKK comment was out of line.
