SHARON WORKS IN A PUBLIC elementary school in Minnesota. Each year, the halls of her school are decorated with voodoo masks or images of Aztec gods that the students make in art class. In January, Chinese New Year symbols are posted on the walls of the cafeteria and the children are encouraged to figure out which symbol their birthday is attached to.

“Yet,” she laments, “at Christmas, nobody can talk about Christmas or have any Christmas decorations up – especially a tree.”The children aren’t allowed to sing Christmas carols. And on the last day of school before Christmas break, instead of acknowledging the holiday, the school celebrates “Back to the Fifties” with decorations and clothing and “Fifties” music blaring in the cafeteria.

Sharon asks, “Whatever happened to our American culture and national holidays?”

What happened is that fear, intimidation, and outright misinformation about what is permitted in schools have created a public education system that too often fails to teach students about the American culture of which they are a part.

As president of Gateways to Better Education—a ministry helping Christians at every level in the public schools to appropriately articulate a Christian worldview without fear or embarrassment —I’ve seen countless examples of bias against Christianity; some are blatant, most are more subtle. For years, a secular mindset among educators and school officials has pushed legitimate education about Christianity off to an ever-shrinking portion of a public school student’s life. Think about how many children go through twelve years of education and never learn anything of significance about Christianity.

The bias can be so blatant as to actually reinvent history and culture for students. For instance, a district in Wisconsin published a memo on the holidays that stated: “Thanksgiving is a national custom. Please try to avoid religious connotations.”

Yet, Thanksgiving,by definition and Presidential proclamation, is inherently religious. Liberal and conservative Presidents alike proclaim Thanksgiving a national holiday and ask Americans to thank God for His blessings. Yet, this Wisconsin school district, in essence, was asking its teachers to mislead their students about the nature of the holiday.

This fear of even touching on a subject that references God or Christianity has led some elementary music educators to avoid teaching students patriotic songs that refer to God. An elementary music teacher in Florida, who is also a Christian, recently told me that her eleven colleagues who teach elementary music in the district will not teach students songs such as “America the Beautiful” because of the phrase “God shed his grace on thee.”

This illustrates the more common form of bias: teachers or students aren’t actually prohibited from referencing Christianity; they merely ignore it. Students don’t even know what they are missing.

The bias against appropriately teaching about the contributions of Christianity to society comes largely from educators who either think it is not legally allowed or that,even if allowed,it is not proper or culturally sensitive to do so.

There are millions of Christians within the public school system. Christian parents, students, teachers, school board members, and administrators abound in our nation’s schools. It is vitally important that they help those within their sphere of influence realize that helping students understand and appreciate the value and contributions of Christianity to our society, the world,and even their academic subject, is culturally relevant, academically legitimate, legally permitted, and morally imperative.

Parents, educators, school officials, and students can calm their fears about the presence of Christianity in classrooms just by remembering the acronym C.A.L.M. because it is Culturally relevant, Academically legitimate, Legally permitted, and Morally imperative.