The Texas Board of Education has added biblical texts to the compulsory school reading list

The Texas Board of Education has added biblical texts to the compulsory school reading list. Pupils from the earliest grades through to the 12th will read the stories of Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, and extracts from the New Testament.

I consider it a splendid neighbourhood for Dickens's Great Expectations, in the largest state of one of the biggest Christian countries in the world.

Texas has some five million schoolchildren, and last year a federal court already heard a case on the mandatory display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom. The state won.

The United States is now experiencing a whole wave of return to Christian values. In 2024 Louisiana ordered the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every classroom, while Oklahoma included the Bible in the curriculum for grades 5 to 12 and decreed that every teaching room should hold a copy of it. Such initiatives are constantly brought before the courts, and if Oklahoma managed to defend its right to have the commandments in school, a similar law in Arkansas failed to pass through the judicial filter.

It would be interesting to see how matters stand with the Word of God in British schools, where on the one hand people are arrested for reading the Bible in the street, and on the other religious education is compulsory by law. In Germany "Religion" is a regular school subject, with ethics as the alternative. In Greece Orthodox religious instruction is compulsory in school, and in Italy there is a state-funded hour of Catholic religion.

Christ is Risen