A Harlem School.
I remember my days as a graduate assistant, spending hours toiling over my students’ weekly papers, jotting grammatical instructions and probing questions in the margins. It was a New Testament class, and each week the students would respond to a writing prompt covering the assigned portion of the textbook and Bible.
And invariably during my grading time, my husband would hear me cry out, “How the hell did you get that from this passage?!”
Now I’m not talking theological differences here; no, I’m talking about a very serious inability to read a text well.
I remember one student who wrote about Luke 17:6, describing Jesus as a “mulberry bush hater” who wanted Christians to have enough faith to rid the world of mulberry bushes. Or another time when a student described Jesus’ birth in Matthew 1, writing how the “angel Isaiah” came and told Mary “she would bear a virgin son.”
All one has to do is visit the popular “Bible Students Say…” Twitter account to see countless more examples where it often appears the student just didn’t really understand how to read the English text, let alone derive the cultural and/or literary meaning.
Now perhaps I’m overly critical because of my years pursuing an Education degree, working in high school history classes where students could barely read the textbook, let alone write me a brief paragraph of reflection. But college illiteracy is stunning educators everywhere, and I think it is time for religious and religion educators to address the situation.
We must seriously ask, “How do we approach biblical and/or other religious textual education in an ever growing world where practical illiteracy is on the rise?” Can I truly expect students to appreciate a text’s literary elements, cultural context, and narrative purpose? What are we to do when students with poor reading skills read the text and derive obviously incorrect interpretations? Or for pastors, when it is a person in your own church community? As I encountered on more than one occasion in my graduate assistant office, some students will protest, “it is just my way of reading the Bible!”
In an era where “misreading the Bible” scares run rampant like the witch hunts of old, is it fair to say some people shouldn’t read the Bible at all because they can’t read well? I’d love to hear your thoughts as I figure out for myself the proper place for Bible reading in the Church and layperson’s lives.
