The Case for Texas’s New Curriculum — Why Bible Stories Matter for Literacy

The Texas Board of Education’s recent public hearing on the state’s proposed new curriculum sparked intense debate. Critics expressed concerns that it crosses a line into proselytizing for Christianity, or fails to give equal time to other religions. But these well-intended criticisms overlook a crucial point: The state’s curriculum, dubbed Bluebonnet Learning, isn’t the only thing that’s “ Bible-infused ”; so is English. Our language is redolent with concepts, phrases and allusions drawn directly from the Bible and other touchstones of Western thought and culture that speakers and writers assume their audiences know and understand. Knowing these things is critical to reading comprehension.

This was the enduring insight of E.D. Hirsch Jr., whose 1987 best-seller Cultural Literacy argued that there is a common body of knowledge, including names, phrases, historical events and cultural references, that “every American needs to know” in order to effectively communicate, navigate the world and be fully literate.

Like the Texas curriculum, Hirsch’s book met with fierce opposition and was deeply misunderstood. Critics accused Hirsch of seeking to impose a dead white male canon on schools. But these criticisms missed his central and unassailable point: Words, phrases and ideas from history, literature, mythology and, yes, the Bible form the bedrock of much of English speakers’ linguistic heritage. Without complete command of these references, students — particularly poor, minority and immigrant students — will struggle to fully comprehend what they read, no matter how well they can decode the words on the page.

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This distinction between decoding and reading comprehension is critical. The long-running debate over how to teach children to read is often oversimplified to a battle between phonics and whole language. However, when children score poorly on reading tests, it’s often not because they can’t decode the words on the page; it’s because they have difficulty making sense of what they’re reading. Most people probably think of reading as a skill, like riding a bike: Once you learn, you can ride any bike. But it’s not so. Any given text is the tip of an iceberg. Beneath the surface is a vast body of vocabulary, background knowledge and context that enable the reader to make meaning. Well-educated people perceive reading comprehension as a skill because it feels like one. But like the proverbial fish that doesn’t know it’s in water, literate people are unconsciously awash in knowledge and vocabulary that they employ reflexively and on which language comprehension depends.

I often compare a reading passage to the child’s game Jenga, where every block is a vocabulary word or a bit of background knowledge. You can pull out a few blocks and the tower still stands; pull out one too many, and it collapses. The same thing can happen when readers and listeners lack the rich array of mental furniture that writers and speakers draw from. Language comprehension suffers or can break down entirely.

This is where biblical allusions come into play. Everyday language is peppered with references to biblical stories and phrases, many of which are used by English speakers of all faiths — or none at all: Good Samaritan, prodigal son, forbidden fruit, pearls before swine and countless others. Scrubbing biblical references from school curriculum may seem like a step toward inclusivity, but given how deeply such phrases and allusion are embedded in the language, such an effort would more likely impose a form of illiteracy on students, leaving them unprepared to engage with the world around them and at risk of a lifetime of verbal disadvantage.

It’s equally important to recognize that no curriculum is handed down to teachers on tablets of stone and delivered robotically. “Most teachers do not use a single curriculum as it is written,” reported the RAND Corporation in its annual American Instructional Resources Survey . “Instead, they reported using multiple curricula, making substantial modifications, or creating their own

curriculum materials.” According to RAND, 99% of elementary school teachers and 96% of secondary school teachers rely on material they create or select to teach English language arts. Frankly, this poses an even bigger challenge for classrooms in Texas and across the country. Teachers, often pressed for time and resources, tend to select materials that underestimate what their students are capable of learning. The language and knowledge-rich Texas curriculum is a significant improvement over what’s available on the most commonly used lesson-planning websites, such as Share My Lesson and Teachers Pay Teachers, which one study described as “mediocre” or “probably not worth using.”

Given the way classroom materials are actually deployed, it makes little sense to reject an entire curriculum over objections to a small number of individual lessons. That said, the Texas Education Agency shared with me a 22-page letter it sent to the board detailing modifications already made to the curriculum in response to criticisms made over the summer during the public comment period, many of which were repeated at the hearing.

Some speakers there also voiced concerns about a perceived over-reliance on reading aloud in the proposed curriculum. But this, too, misses the mark. Listening comprehension outpaces reading comprehension well into a child’s middle school years. In other words, children can understand complex texts when they are read aloud long before they can read them just as well on their own. Read-alouds are a crucial tool for building vocabulary and background knowledge until reading comprehension catches up with listening comprehension.

In short, the concerns over the new curriculum’s inclusion of Bible stories, while understandable, are largely misplaced. What’s at stake is not the promotion of Christianity but the cultivation of cultural literacy, an essential component of reading comprehension and academic success. If parents, policymakers and other education stakeholders want students to be fully literate, able to understand the world of ideas they will encounter in literature, conversation and the wider world, they must be furnished with the common knowledge that educated people take for granted. Removing these references from the curriculum and public education at large does a disservice to students, leaving them at a disadvantage not just in school, but in life.