[spindritf]

Are you being sarcastic? To me it's obvious that middle schoolers should in fact at least skim parts of the Bible. If not the most important, it's in the top ten most important texts of the western culture.

BTW Those other nine (Iliad, The Song of Roland, Heart of Darkness, 1984...) are also full of violence so if schools really do apply that criterion consistently, teachers may as well stop bothering students with any reading.

[numeromancer]

http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html

Of course they should read it. It is a book of life; it contains everything from utter foolishness to profound wisdom; from vile pettiness to unrestrained love; from brutal punishment to loving clemency.

It is the right book, which would be presented to them for all the wrong reasons.

[TheAmazingIdiot]

In my middle school (Indiana, public schools), we read chapters from the bible, mostly from the Old Testament.

We did this because the next few books we were to read used a large amount of biblical symbolism.

Later on, I took an elective in high school over Jewish history, and was assigned a bible for required reading. We also did comparative analysis between other copies of the bible, as well as readings from the Torah. I think nearly everybody found questionable differences between different translations. However, we did grasp the history of the Jewish people.

[hef19898]

Risking to be down voted outright, that's exactly what those people want. reading is dangerous, it encourages thinking. Guess why Guttenberg was such a threat to the church when he invented moving letter printing. He basically destroyed their monopoly on information by providing the full bible to everyone. even back then they where quite carefull about the passages they read to the public.