A public school in Alabama invited a preacher to speak to students about Jesus and lead them in prayer. One reason we know that is because the preacher bragged about how he got away with itonline.
It happened at Stanhope Elmore High School, part of the Elmore County Schools District, on April 12. John Eklund was the speaker at a mandatoryassembly that students were told would address “mental health.”
As a licensed clinical social worker, Eklund could have told students about how to deal with mental health struggles in a way that was universal. Instead, he used the opportunity to proselytize before leading students in a group prayer.
Was he going rogue? Did he do this despite promises that he would keep things secular?
Nope. It seems the school was well aware of what he planned to do.
This is relatively common. A good many of the abstinence-only sex-ed career-lecturers present not only a cruel value system (if you’re a girl, your verifiable virginity is your only value. If you’re a guy, don’t date until you’re ready to put a ring on her worth two months salary) but also go pretty deep into modern post-Fifield conservative Christian dogma. And these lectures are mandatory attendance by the whole class in the auditorium.
So it’s not surprising to me that school administrators and district administrators might be looking at other ways to give their flock extra doses of indoctrination.
I can’t speak for how it affects typical students, but I can’t forget that my school willfully lied to me, and hence was antagonistic towards its students (at very least my class) at the behest of the state, and this factors into my relationship with the states of California and the United States. Hence I try to let kids know that they really are in a Young Adult Dystopian Novel, and their story is how they break free from the state’s efforts to turn them into yet another cheap laborer / soldier for billionaire vanity projects.