In what way was Thomas Aquinas an important influence on the founding of the United States and in what way would that be appropriate to teach elementary school kids?
It’s not appropriate for an elementary school kids. Per the article, this applies to grades 5 through 12. So what, 1 year of elementary with the primary focus of impact on junior high and high school?
But if you are getting into questions of “what was more important to our founding fathers, rome or christianity?” I’d say that’s pretty difficult to separate because of thinkers like Thomas Aquinas that married Greek Philosophy with Christianity. When you begin with a point that God is the source of reason, and build off of that, I think you can’t easily separate that out.
No, I asked in what way Thomas Aquinas contributed to the founding of the U.S. It seems like your reasoning is pretty damn indirect and it’s even more indirectly related to the Bible, so this law does not apply.
And it either isn’t appropriate for elementary school or it should be taught in the fifth grade (also, sixth grade is still elementary school in many districts). Which is it?
You said this:
Really, you need to look no further than our legal system though to see how little influence the Bible and Christianity actually have. I don’t just mean the First Amendment, I mean the fact that our whole system is basically a gradual evolution from the laws of Ancient Rome.
this statement says nothing about what should be taught in schools, it’s a statement of history. my statement is simply stating it is very difficult to separate out the roman influence from the christian influence because of thomas aquinas linking christian tradition to greek thought. I would say that from a intellectual POV, founding fathers were probably equally or more influenced by greeks than romans, but at the end of the day we can just call it all classical thought. that’s pretty apparent in our architecture of state houses. This is a tangential discussion where we are not discussing what should be taught in schools, but just historical thought in the USA. Please re-read your own to catch up on the conversation topic.
