When a Public School English Teacher Uses Only the Bible for Classwork: What Parents Should Know
My daughter came home with a sticky note stuck to her backpack that said, “Bring a highlighter tomorrow. We’re doing close reading on the Book of Job.”
She’s in ninth grade at our local public high school. She didn’t seem alarmed. She’s not particularly religious, but she also wasn’t confused. “It’s just what we read in English,” she said when I asked. “We’ve been doing the Bible all month. Last week was Genesis. This week it’s Job.”
I knew her English teacher, Mr. Hargrove, was a laid-back, well-liked guy. He wore patterned cardigans and made puns about grammar. I couldn’t picture him passing out flannelgraph or asking kids to memorize verses. But I could picture him thinking the Bible was good literature and deciding to teach it like one long epic poem. That was exactly the problem. He hadn’t really decided anything. The school district had a curriculum, but Mr. Hargrove had quietly replaced it. Not with a book he loved, not even with three or four books he loved. Just one.
That night, I texted two other parents from the freshman English carpool. One said, “Oh yeah, my kid told me about that. I figured it was a unit or something.” Another said, “Hasn’t he always done this? My son has him two years ago and they read Corinthians for five weeks.” So it wasn’t a new thing. It was just something people had sort of noticed and then got busy with other things.
That’s the part that didn’t sit right with me. Not the Bible. I’m not a religious family, but I’m also not someone who jumps at a Bible in a public school classroom. A Bible can be a powerful piece of literature — it has narrative structure, recurring themes, layered characters, and language that has shaped writers for centuries. Any decent English teacher should be able to use excerpts responsibly. But “the Bible” as a whole, as the only assigned text, felt less like literature and more like a confession. It felt like Mr. Hargrove had decided, quietly and without anyone checking, that the only writing worth close reading had to come from one book.
My concern wasn’t that my daughter was being proselytized. She wasn’t. He wasn’t leading them in prayer or asking them to affirm belief. The assignments were standard English class tasks: annotate the text, identify symbolism, write a character analysis. But here’s the thing — when you do those tasks on the same book all semester, the underlying message is that this book is special. Not because it’s good, but because it’s the only one you’re allowed to study. Kids notice that, even if they don’t say anything.
I decided to stop by the school instead of writing an email. Emails feel like complaints. Emails feel like you’re already angry. A visit is different. You’re just a parent who showed up, which is rare enough that people tend to pay attention.
I caught Mr. Hargrove during his prep period. He was eating a bag of pretzels and organizing a stack of papers. I told him I was curious about the upcoming reading list. He smiled and said, “Well, we’re doing Leviticus next week, and then we’ll hit Ecclesiastes. It’s got some really beautiful passages about time.”
I said, “So it’s a full year of Bible? No novels? No short stories? No poetry outside of Psalms?”
He said, “The Bible has all of that in it.”
That was the moment I realized he wasn’t going to argue with me. He’d already made this into something like a one-man mission. He thought he was giving his students an education in foundational texts. Kind of like teaching Greek mythology, but in his case, he’d only ever deeply read one mythology, and he’d decided to make it the entire curriculum.
I didn’t want to get him fired. I didn’t even want to make him dig in his heels. I just wanted my daughter to read more than one thing. And I knew from years of working with teachers that a parent can’t dismantle a syllabus with a meeting and a firm tone. You need to ask questions that force a teacher to explain the educational logic, not the personal reason.
So I asked a couple of practical questions.
“What are the learning objectives for the year?” I said.
He paused. “Reading comprehension, textual analysis, writing.”
“And they all can be met with the Bible?”
“Yeah,” he said. “They can.”
“But wouldn’t they also be met with, I don’t know, The Odyssey? Or Of Mice and Men? Or some actual modern poetry?”
He shrugged. “Sure, but why do I need to add texts when I can go deeper with one?”
I didn’t have a perfect answer in the moment. But I said something that mattered: “Because when you only teach one text, you’re not teaching literature. You’re teaching preference. And if that preference is a religious text, it feels like the school has a religion.”
He went quiet. Then he said, “I don’t bring religion into it.”
“I know you don’t,” I said. “But the book itself is religion. And when it’s the only book, the religion is the point, whether you mean it to be or not.”
We didn’t solve anything that day. I left with a stack of photo-copied handouts he gave me “so you can see what we’re doing.” I looked at them. All of it was Bible. Verses with blank lines for paraphrasing. A chart for the plot of Job. A prompt asking students to explain how the story relates to “their own life.”
That last one really got me. To be fair, teachers ask that all the time. “How does this relate to your life?” is a standard English class question. But for a ninth grader whose family doesn’t go to church, a prompt like that can feel like a test. She has to decide whether to be honest and say, “It doesn’t,” or try to pretend it does so she doesn’t look like she’s missing something.
My daughter handled it better than I expected. She wrote, “I don’t believe Job’s suffering was a test from God. I think his friends were mean.” It was a fine answer. But she told me she felt weird about writing it because the other kids in her class seemed so comfortable talking about God. She said, “I feel like I’m not allowed to disagree because the teacher likes it so much.”
That was the clearest picture of the problem. It’s not about the text. It’s about the message a student receives when the classroom has one overwhelmingly favored point of view. Kids are flexible. They can handle difficult books. They can even handle religious books. But they can’t handle having no other door to walk through.
What helped, in the end, was not my meeting with Mr. Hargrove. It was the school’s English department chair. I sent a short email to her, not to complain but to ask a simple question: “Can you tell me which texts are required for freshman English?” She wrote back within a day. The district has a list of core novels. The Bible is not on it.
I didn’t take that list to the principal. I took it to Mr. Hargrove. I said, “You’re supposed to teach The Outsiders and A Raisin in the Sun. I really want my daughter to read those.” He looked at the list and said, “Those are just recommendations.” I said, “Maybe they are. But they’re the books every other English teacher in the district uses. Can you at least teach one alongside the Bible?” He said he’d think about it.
He didn’t end up teaching A Raisin in the Sun. But by December, he added a memoir excerpt and a couple of short stories to the syllabus. Not a revolution. Not even a full course correction. But the Bible was no longer the only reading. My daughter still had her own reaction, though. She said it felt weird that a teacher was allowed to pick a religious book for so long just because nobody pushed back.
That’s the part I’m still chewing on. Not the legal side — the district has made it clear that the Bible can show up in English class as long as it’s taught as literature and not religion. The harder part is how quickly a classroom can become a one-book echo chamber without anyone noticing. Not because the teacher is a zealot. Just because he liked the book, believed it mattered, and didn’t see a problem with giving it all the space.
We’re still in that class. My daughter still gets Bible homework. But she also read poems by William Stafford and a short story by Amy Tan, and when asked how a text relates to her life, she had choices. That’s what I want for every kid, whether the book is ancient or brand new, sacred or ordinary. There should always be more than one book on the desk.
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