Popular science teacher John Freshwater has the support of many of his students and their parents but has been canned by the Mount Vernon, Ohio school board for “branding” students on the forearms with a cross. At least that is the story as reported by the on-line news service Breitbart.Com (Report: Ohio teacher burned cross on kids' arms).
In fact, the image on at least one student’s arm was produced by a science demonstration of a high-frequency generator similar to devices used in medical offices for a number of non-invasive therapies. During application it produces a slight tingling and warm sensation and causes the blood vessels in the skin to dilate producing a reddening of the surface that may last a day or so. The claim of one student is that the image lasted “3 or 4 weeks.” In fact, it was the complaint of that one student that brought the school board and its Superintendent, Stephen Short , down on Mr. Freshwater. But this occurred after years of efforts by the school district to get the popular and well-credentialed teacher to heel to demands that he cease any mention of God or Creation in his classroom. A particularly troubling problem for the Superintendent was Mr. Freshwater’s insubordinate habit of placing his personal Bible on his desk during class. What might students think? What evil might such overt displays provoke in the minds of the innocent and impressionable children?
According to several accounts Mr. Freshwater has been at loggerheads with the administration for some time over issues pertaining to the First Amendment and has prevailed because he knows his rights and asserts them appropriately. Furthermore, “Freshwater has drawn consistent praise for his strong rapport with students, broad knowledge of his subject matter and engaging teaching style.”
It seems that the complaint about the demonstration with the high-frequency generator was made to order for the administration that has sought Freshwater’s dismissal for some time. One student complained about “branding with a cross” out of how many? Slight reddening of the skin hardly amounts to “branding.” I’d be interested to know how many tattoos and/or piercings this poor child has endured. It lasted “3 or 4 weeks” you say? Well, if my child had been “branded” as they have alleged, I assure you I would be able to state, without any ambiguity, the precise duration of the injury down to hours and minutes.
I trust the Alliance Defense Fund will be called to Mr. Freshwater’s defense and I’ll be sending them another generous donation. No word, as yet, about the ACLU taking this opportunity to defend our Bill of Rights.
Related links:
Students support teacher by taking Bibles to school
Student Backs Teacher In Fight To Keep Bible On Desk
Ohio board votes to ax teacher accused of branding
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Saturday, June 21, 2008
Teacher Allegedly "Brands" Student With a Cross
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19 comments:
None of the articles I've read seem to indicate whether the students gave their permission for him to do this. If it was done against their will, he's lucky they're not pressing charges.
Either way, this is clearly not a guy who should be teaching *science*. I read somewhere else that he told students that carbon dating was "inaccurate" - who knows what else he's telling them (someone should quiz these kids on dinosaurs and see what they know).
Nobody is infringing on his right to free speech, or anything of the sort. He has a responsibility to follow the school's science curriculum, and it sounds like his religious beliefs are limiting his ability to do that.
Anonymous, did you know that C14 dating relies on a number of assumptions and "assumes" certain things to be true? Things that are flatly impossible to verify as true? Things like (1) the amount of C14 present in the organism at the time of death, (2) a constant rate of decay, (3) no external contamination, (4) no additional leeching, and several other assumptions?
Did you know that material from living organisms has been dated to be thousands of years old? And that's called "science?"
In other words, it's not nearly as accurate as it's portrayed to be.
Actually, C14 dating has never presumed to give an exact date, it always gives a range. But if this teacher told his students that it was completely inaccurate, that's a straight up lie - just ask any credible member of the scientific community.
There are many teachers across America who are Christians but don't bring their Bibles to class with them or make the shape of the cross on their student's arms (for whatever length of time) because they respect the right of their students to have their own personal beliefs and they believe in the separation of church and state. If you can't separate your personal beliefs from your teachings in a publicly funded school, you should find a job at a private one.
How accurate is a "range" of 0 t0 10,000 years?
In a 1958 experiment, wood was cut out of living trees...and stated to 10,000 years old.
In 1971 the Antarctic Journal reported the findings that freshly killed seals were dated at 1,300 years old, and some that were known to have been killed 30 years prior were dated at 4,600 years old.
There are many other examples of what you might call "accuracy" but most reasonable people would call "a wild guess." C14 dating is wildly inaccurate because of those assumptions I mentioned; have one or more of those assumptions fall through, and suddenly your "scientific reading" is meaningless.
Is it possible that the "cross" on the kid's arm was merely an X, or the intersection of two straight lines? Remember the hysteria over the bookshelf behind Mike Huckabee in one of his commercials that hyper-paranoid secularists thought was a "floating cross"? I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing wasn't going on here.
Again, you float the idea that our religious values and principles must be sanitized from public life. That would be utterly impossible, even if it were desirable. Would you enjoy being served by amoral cops, firemen, doctors, stock brokers, security guards, bankers and so on. You should really think about that before you say yes...
Actually, radiometric dating methods, including radiocarbon (C-14) dating, are quite accurate when used properly. You'll find details about these methods here:
http://www.asa3.org/aSA/resources/Wiens.html
I haven't seen any 1958 study, but if you could provide additional details, I'd be interested in reading about them.
Bob, does it really matter whether it was a cross or an X though looking at the photos, there is little doubt? He burned it into an 8th grader's arm!
And Bob, putting the accuracy of carbon dating aside as it has nothing to do with the real argument, if your child was being taught in a public school and one of his teachers was teaching from the Koran or telling your kids that Jesus was a myth, would you be as understanding? I somehow doubt that you would.
It's funny how the only radiocarbon dating results I've seen that are "reliable" and "accurate" are the ones that are supposedly so old as to be impossible to verify by any other means.
In other words, if we know the date of something because we've seen it (such as the formation of the lava dome at Mount St. Helens which formed about 30 years ago, but was dated at 2.8 million years old) or because it can be tied to something else with a firm date (say a shoe in a Roman ruin with coins dated in a certain range), somehow those radiometric dates are very error-prone, while ones that are supposedly millions of years old are mysteriously deemed "accurate."
That 1958 article was from Science, called "Groningen Radiocarbon Dates III" by H. deVries and H.T. Waterbolk
Bob, there is some doubt as to whether this was a mere discoloration that God-hating people have hyped up into a "weeks-old" injury. Did you never horse around in chemistry or physics class with other students and teachers with things that might look to an outsider to be more horrendous than they actually are?
I don't know the truth of the matter; all I'm saying is that they've had a witch hunt after this guy for so long that their credibility is a little suspect. I'd look very closely at this case before making any solid conclusions.
And they already tell kids in public schools that Jesus is a myth, or at the very least he's irrelevant to "real life." That's why my kids don't go to public school. They can no longer be trusted to even generally uphold the value system held by 82% of Americans, much less teach anything seriously sound on a Biblical level.
Did you know that during colonial times even for decades after the Revolution, most children in American schools were taught with books that contained so many Biblical references, they might well have been a Biblical commentary?
Did you know that as late as 1893, when some were considering removing Christian instruction from the school system, the National Education Association said "If the study of the Bible is to be excluded from all state schools, if the inculcation of the principles of Christianity is to have no place in the daily program; if the worship of God is to form no part of the general exercises of these public elementary schools; then the good of the state would be better served by restoring all schools to church control."
All the out-of-context "church and state" malarky aside, someone's value system has to win out in a culture. Why not the value system which created the most free and successful nation on earth? You don't need to try and force people to go to a particular church or give money to a particular church or even believe a particular religion. But you have to have to instill a set of values in children, good or bad. Why not the values that American children learned in school for most of our history? We had less teen pregnancy, drug use, guns in school, and teen crime then. Is the chaos and crime of our current education system really preferable to teaching children the Ten Commandments?
The alternative is to teach them what we've taught them the last few decades: there is no truth, you descended from animals, there is no transcendent morality, and you have no eternal accountability or destiny. And kids are acting in accordance with what we're teaching them...sadly.
Either way, we're teaching them a set of values; the old ones were Biblical, the new ones are "make it up as you go, and see if you can get away with it."
I'm sorry Bob, the principles of ones faith should be taught at home or in church and not the classroom. Our country, while founded by the faithful, was founded by those that didn't want someone else's faith force upon them.
Let children learn their ABC's and Periodic Table's in school and their Psalms in church.
So, Bob, the founders who founded our country had no idea how it was supposed to work? The men who wrote our Constitution had no idea what it accomplished or what it allowed?
Wow. I'm glad you "moderate" liberals came along 50 years ago and straightened everything out.
Funny how academic performance was so much better, and child (and adult) behavior was so much better under that screwed-up mess the founders believed in. And all that time, Muslims still managed to remain true to their religion, Jews managed to worship according to Judaism, along with all the other religions here in America. What a miracle! Oops, sorry for that religious reference--I realize we're not in church.
I read over the December 19, 1958 Nature article by de Vries and Waterbolk, but I couldn't find any mention by them of their cutting material from a living tree and dating it to 10,000 years ago. Any idea what page they mentioned that on?
I'm sorry, Drew, I gave you the wrong reference.
The one regarding the trees was from "Recording Gaseous Exchange Under Field Conditions" by B. Huber in Physiology of Forest Trees.
I apologize for the mistake.
The logic that says "things are so much better now than the were back then" is astounding. It seems like common knowledge that the illiteracy rate in America was much higher in 18th and 19th centuries. While there may not have been school shootings (which would have been much harder to carry out in a one-room school house with some sort of bulky musket or rifle there were events in that era - like the massacres committed by the U.S. army against the Native Americans, lynchings and slavery in the South - that happened on a regular basis, regardless of how much people read the Bible in school. In fact, many people have used (and still use) the Bible to condone America expansionism and racism. The point is, people often interpret the Bible and other holy texts to mean what they want them to mean. There's no "standard" interpretation of the entire Bible and every verse it contains.
Furthermore, in America we have citizens of many different creeds and religions: Christians, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Wiccans, Agnostics, Atheists, etc. It is discriminatory to practice one belief over all the others in a public classroom, because it's a sign that the government favors one religion over others, and that's just not democratic (or constitutional). It's un-American because it doesn't reflect who we are as a people. So if you want prayers in school, you would have to show no favoring of one religion's prayers over the other: they'll have to recite prayers from the Koran, Torah, etc. right along with the Biblically-based prayers. However, something tells me you wouldn't be to keen on that.
"Again, you float the idea that our religious values and principles must be sanitized from public life. That would be utterly impossible, even if it were desirable. Would you enjoy being served by amoral cops, firemen, doctors, stock brokers, security guards, bankers and so on. You should really think about that before you say yes..."
Mr. Ellis,
Are you implying that people who are not religious have no morals?
Numerous sources, including the testimony of John Adams, indicate the literacy rate of colonial America was extremely high (some figures say 95% or higher). Children were usually taught right out of the Bible (not an easy text), or with textbooks such as the New England Primer, which was so filled with theology it would stump most average adults today.
Who we are as a people is predominately Christian. At least 82% of Americans still identify with Christianity, despite decades of assault by secularists, with many more of the Jewish faith, which shares a value system almost identical to Christianity.
What's more, our system of government was designed by Christians on Christian principles, and was designed to function for and with Christian people. It simply will not function well for any other worldview.
People have the freedom to believe as they want and worship as they want, as they have since colonial days. That has never changed and hopefully never will change. But to take our society off the standard of the Christian worldview and put it on the standard secular humanist (which is where we pretty much are) will reap bigger and bigger crops of what we're already seeing: drug use, suicide, teen pregnancy, disorder in the classroom, and academic mediocrity.
Anonymous, many people who are not religious do lack morals. They certainly lack an objective moral standard.
If someone is not guided by an objective moral standard, they are usually guided by an internal moral standard...which usually ends up comprised of a standard which says holds that what is good for that individual is the standard of what is right.
I don't want someone like that protecting my neighborhood as a cop, or managing my money as a banker or broker, or anything else for that matter. There is nothing to stop him from deciding that what is good for him is what I will have to live with.
That's incredibly naive, Bob. From personal experience, some of the most moral people I've ever met do not associate with any religion, while the ugliest, most hateful, and most unloving words I've received have come from Christians. Not just Christians, mind you, but Christians who honestly and truly believe, just as you do, that they are following God's word to the letter.
Besides, when it comes to religion and morals, you can do far better than Christianity. Buddhism, while not a religion per se, has far more integrity. You won't find a single word of hate, anger, or aggression. If I had to choose between a Christian banker and a Buddhist one, I'd pick the Buddhist any day of the week.
I am not saying John Freshwater was right or wrong in what he did but I would like to mention that having a bible on your desk is not the "say all" in following God. Do we try to follow those instructions and obey God? Do we take God's name in vain, do we commit idolatry, do we keep the seventh day holy since God sanctified the 7th day and not the first day of the week, do we commit adultery, do we follow His other commands? If not, then do we acknowledge our sin and change? I think I would have found a way to do the right that I needed to do in the classroom, without losing any of my influence that I could have brought to the students for good, allowing them their freedom to believe what they want to believe and to love them instead of losing any influence I could have had, my income for my family, etc. I don't think God would be displeased if I followed that course since I would not be denying Him. People can usually tell what a person believes. John Freshwater chose his course and I am not faulting him, but I am stating another course of action, be it right or wrong in the view of others.
Christians don't always act according to the principles of the Bible, since they too are fallen creatures with a sin nature, but those are the principles which drive the genuine ones; you'll also find that there are a lot of people who call themselves Christians, but a few questions would quickly reveal that they aren't one.
At least Christianity provides a set of standards and principles to follow, even if disciples don't do it perfectly. The religion of secular humanism, however, says that man's wisdom is the highest moral standard, and in the modern world it's come to embrace a relativism which says each person determines what is right and wrong for them. That's a recipe for chaos and disaster.
As Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the least religious of America's founders, said, "If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it?"
In our modern culture of soaring crime, disrespect, rebellion and corruption, we're starting to see the answer to Dr. Franklin's rhetorical question.
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