In Mississauga, we were enrolled in a gifted program at a Catholic elementary school, because our mother is a Roman Catholic. They had a pretty nice library there, and because the school was Catholic, there were lots of books on Latin, Greek, Roman history, and Catholicism, and I became interested in those subjects.
I had actually been reading the Bible in English since my arrival in Canada. My grandparents were given a copy when they were sworn in as citizens. Since they couldn’t read it, they said I could have it, and I used to read it every day. In grade five, the Gideons came to our public school — in fact, into our classroom with the teacher’s permission — and gave each of the students a pocket edition of the New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs, with a red leathery cover. I used to carry it everywhere and read it whenever I had the chance. Nowadays that sort of blatant proselytism of immigrants and children would probably not be allowed inside a public institution. But I don’t think that I was ever harmed by it — in fact, quite the opposite. By studying the Bibles, I not only learned about Protestantism and other sects of Christianity, but also vastly improved my vocabulary, became familiar with archaic and other literary forms of English, and began to think about problems of translation between languages. So I don’t think the Bible should be kept out of public classrooms, as some people do — it is one of the most important documents in Western civilisation, regardless of one’s beliefs about it, and one can learn a lot from it… » [Expand post] [Permalink]