By Allie Martin
A civil liberties organization is launching a campaign to educate students, teachers, and administrators about the U.S. Constitution.
The Virginia-based Rutherford Institute has sent legal memos to each of the more than 15,000 public school superintendents across the nation to warn them against censoring student religious expression. The Institute's president, John Whitehead, says a national initiative to educate students, parents, and teachers about the Constitution has also been introduced.
“The ABC's of the U.S. Constitution in the Classroom” is a campaign to teach people how to uphold the Constitution in America's public schools. Whitehead, who is also a constitutional attorney and author, says with the start of each new school year, there is always a slate of cases in which the constitutional rights of Christian students have been violated.
“In a lot of the cases we see, we believe it's because of ignorance. They don't know the law — the school teachers, the superintendents — and the school board lawyers usually are not experts in constitutional law. So this [campaign] is something we're hoping will defuse problems,” he says.
The Rutherford Institute wants Christian students and parents as well as educators in America to know about the freedoms their Constitution affords. Toward that end, Whitehead says the organization is developing some far-reaching initiatives.
“What we're hoping to do in the future is set up a curriculum that schools can use to start teaching these things right, so when our kids graduate from high school they can actually know what the law is, and [eventually] teach their own children,” he adds.
Once the effort is under way, Whitehead says he hopes it will help equip believers to begin turning some of the nation's problems “around in the right direction.”
(This article courtesy of Agape Press).
