Pacific Academy in British Colombia, describes itself as “unabashedly Christian to the core” and gives enrolment priority to students whose families regularly attend a Pentecostal church or have experienced glossolalia, also known as speaking in tongues.
Parents who want to enrol their children at Pacific Academy must sign a family statement agreeing with Scripture teachings that marriage is between a man and a woman, (same sex couples are excluded from applying), and a faith statement that “invites God’s Holy Spirit to be active in the daily life of the school.” There is no expectation that students will speak in tongues, headmaster Paul Horban said, but they should be aware before enrolling that the school accepts glossolalia as a gift from the Holy Spirit.
What is expected from all students, however, is service, and that’s emphasized with a biblical phrase inscribed on a wall at the school’s main entrance: “Whoever would be greatest must be least — and the servant of all.”
The non-profit society that operates the school — the Pacific Pentecostal Education and Communication Society — received $5.8 million in government funding last year, which is 50 per cent of the operating grant provided to public schools. (The Week, May 23, 2013)
What this information does not include is any clue about how science, for instance, is taught, if it is taught at all. Are the students taught creationism? Is evolution taught, and if so, how? What do kids learn about global warming, other religions, history, the age of the planet etc? Is the taxpayer contributing to the production of human beings who are ignorant and unsuited to normal employment?
Epicurus would probably have said that the study of religion (all religion) is a valid part of the curriculum, but the indoctrination of kids in one specific religion is against the spirit of modern education. All too many people have at best a fuzzy idea of the meaning of the word “education”. The idea of thinking critically is not associated with religious schooling.
David Edwin Harrell’s historical study of Pentecostalism found that the racial and social views of Pentecostals were conditioned by class values rather than theological presuppositions. Robert Mapes Anderson also rooted the movement in its class status. In Vision of the Disinherited, Anderson studied the social class origins of Pentecostalism and discovered that extreme social strain among the nation’s poor and dispossessed was the source of Pentecostalism. Following Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, Anderson located social tension (such as class conflict and class stratification) in industrialization. The shift from an agrarian to an industrial society fed estrangement and those most at odds with this change suffered “status anxiety” and turned to Pentecostalism. To explain how Pentecostals coped with status anxiety, Anderson looks at two major features of the movement: millennialism and speaking in tongues. Pentecostals’ belief in the imminent, apocalyptic return of Jesus, he contends, brought order to their chaotic lives and alleviated social strain. Similarly, speaking in tongues provided psychic escape through religious ecstacy.
Anderson concludes that Pentecostalism represented a dysfunctional and maladjusted reaction to social pressures. Because of the Pentecostals’ negative appraisal of society and their pessimistic outlook for the future, they were an apolitical, “conservative bulwark of the status quo.” They channeled their social protest “into the harmless backwaters of religious ideology. For Anderson, the radical social impulse inherent in the vision of the disinherited was squandered away in escapism and conservative conformity. (Source: The Week)