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Of all the fronts opened up in today's culture wars, the most volatile may be the public schools. The Religious Right, at its inception in the 1970s, mobilized grass-roots support largely over opposition to two court cases—Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963)—which together outlawed public prayer and devotional Bible reading from public schools. Since that time, many conservative Christians have come to believe that the public schools are fomenting what Stephen Carter referred to as "the culture of disbelief." Some have even argued that secular humanism has become the established religion of American public education.
Religion in Schools: Controversies around the World
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Much has been written about the history of American education in general and the relationship between religion and education in particular. The decade following the appearance of Warren A. Nord's landmark study, Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma (1995), saw the publication of a variety of useful books along similar lines, including Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America (1999) by history professor James W. Fraser, The Fourth R: Conflicts over Religion in America's Public Schools (2004) by English professor Joan DelFattore, and Does God Belong in Public Schools? (2005) by law professor Kent Greenawalt.
Lost on these important studies, however, was the fact that, while the American situation is unique in its particulars, it is not unparalleled. Although Europe is a hotbed of the culture of disbelief (or "Eurosecularity," as sociologist Peter Berger calls it), the study of religion is far more advanced in secondary education on that continent than it is in the United States. So Americans can learn much from European examples about how to educate our children concerning the ways and means of religion. Elsewhere in the world, believers and nonbelievers alike are engaged in cultural skirmishes of their own about just how closely religion should dance with education. American debates about the propriety of high school courses on the Bible or on the world's religions look very different when viewed in the light of similar dilemmas ongoing not only in Europe but also in Asia, Australia, and the Middle East.
Such dilemmas are the subject of a new book by R. Murray Thomas, Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Religion in Schools: Controversies around the World consists of 12 case studies of religion-in-the-schools controversies in twelve different countries, namely France, Japan, England, India, Spain, China, Italy, Pakistan, Thailand, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. To take just a few examples, the French case concerns Muslim girls who were told that they could not wear headscarves in public schools. The British case concerns the introduction of atheism and agnosticism as "belief systems" to be taught alongside Christianity and Judaism in England's required courses in religious education. And the Italian case concerns whether a headmaster should have been ordered to remove a crucifix from a wall of his primary school after a Muslim student's father objected to its presence.
What is clear from the case studies Thomas presents is that the "national dilemma" of religion and education takes very different forms in different nations, and that those forms shift quite rapidly with the political winds. In India, for example, Thomas discusses efforts to seize on the 2004 electoral defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in order to do away with pro-Hindu biases inserted earlier by the BJP into required schoolbooks. In Spain, he discusses efforts by the Socialists, who came to power after the 2004 election, to reverse a decree passed by the pro-Catholic People's Party requiring students to take either a course on Roman Catholic theology or an alternative course (heavily biased toward Catholicism, according to many) on the world's religions.
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