After virtually disappearing for more than two decades, religion makes a comeback in the classroom.
Jesus, Moses, Buddha, and Muhammad are all headed back into America’s classrooms this fall. Ostracized since the early sixties, when the Supreme Court ruled out praying in public schools, religion is once again finding a place next to reading, writing, and ’rithmetic.
A new wave of textbooks and supplemental curricula that teach about religion is catching on nationwide. In addition, teachers are attending state-sanctioned seminars designed to debunk the 30-year-old myth that they can’t mention the “r” word in class.
Some, like Georgia high-school history instructor Ken Russell, a committed Southern Baptist, have always tried tactfully to include religion in their teaching. Most, however, simply have avoided the subject.
But faced with the steady increase in drug abuse and violence, and the erosion of basic values such as honesty and responsibility, liberal and conservative policy makers agree that American students are missing something in their education. “Folks have re-evaluated the situation, and have seen that the kids are not getting any moral absolutes,” Russell contends. And he is joined by a growing number of school officials who say an understanding of major religions might be a missing factor in the public schools.
The Big Chill
The Supreme Court’s 1962 decision on prayer sent a chill through public-school systems and textbook publishers, who chose to avoid controversy and legal battles by avoiding the subject of religion altogether. Eventually, even the mention of religion in the classroom came to be viewed as impermissible, though that was never the intent of the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“The message that people heard was, ‘If you talk at all about religion, you are going to get in trouble,’ ” says Charles Haynes, executive director of George Mason University’s First Liberty Institute (FLS), which was formed last year in response to the 1988 Williamsburg Charter, a statement signed by a broad range of national leaders urging a return to “the first principles” of the First Amendment’s religious liberty clauses (CT, Aug. 12, 1988, p. 50).
“Most Americans didn’t even read the [school prayer] decision,” Haynes says. If they had, they would have read this: “It might well be said that one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”
In spite of the latitude left by the Court, Haynes says, the option of teaching about religion, while avoiding indoctrination, was ignored in the years of debate that followed. Only recently has that option been revived.
The Big Thaw
The leading edge of the trend, says Judy Turpen of the Christian Educators Association, arrived several years ago in social-studies curriculum in California, “the most important work that has been done in education in the last 20 years.”
Turpen gives credit for the reformation, in part, to Charlotte Crabtree, professor of history at UCLA and director of the National Center for History in the Schools, who was at the helm of a special committee in 1986 when California began revising its social-studies curriculum. Crabtree herself says the U.S. is experiencing “a profound curriculum revolution.”
In fact, Houghton Mifflin Company has created a whole new set of textbooks based largely on input from educators in California, the nation’s largest schoolbook market.
This year students from kindergarten through the eighth grade in California, Arkansas, Oregon, Indiana, and West Virginia will use the new books, which attempt to give “thorough” attention to Christianity, as well as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Dozens of other school districts in states that do not adopt statewide curricula are buying the books, says Terry Heagney of Houghton Mifflin.
There are other signs of a thaw. For example, Georgia is the first of 13 designated states to pilot a new teacher-training program designed by FLS and committed to equipping teachers to teach about religion. The remaining states will launch their series as the $250,000 to $350,000 in private, local funds needed for each program is raised. Other states include Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Kentucky, Minnesota, Indiana, Georgia, Texas, Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii.
FLS also has its own supplemental religious-liberty curriculum, screened and approved by members of such diverse groups as the National Association of Evangelicals, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Federation of Teachers, and already fieldtested in six states.
Teaching Naturally
The idea of “natural inclusion” is central to the new approach to teaching. As defined by Haynes, natural inclusion means that “study about religion should take place within a historical and cultural context,” or, in other words, “whenever it naturally arises.” The emphasis on studying about religion, rather than being indoctrinated in religion, is also crucial.
Haynes and others assert it is possible to teach objectively about the major religions through disciplines like American history without pressing one religion’s superiority over another. With the United States becoming a mixed basket of religions, Haynes says, children need to respect faith backgrounds besides their own to make them better citizens. And there are basic values such as justice and freedom—common to major faiths and most Americans—that can be communicated in the classroom without indoctrination, he says.
That approach, however, is not without critics. Richard Baer, a Cornell University professor who holds a doctorate in history and philosophy of religion from Harvard, asks what it means to teach religion objectively. “Should we consider it objective to teach the Bible as literature, but not objective to teach it in order to bring students to faith in Jesus Christ?” Baer asks.
Baer also says that teaching children to respect all religions “has a nice democratic ring to it, but taken at face value it leads to intolerable consequences for those persons who take seriously the truth claims of the Christian gospel.”
Teaching children mutual respect for all religions, Baer says, would make it “illegitimate for [teachers] to criticize religion at all. Witchcraft, Satanism, the worst forms of Christian legalism, fanatical apocalypticism, snake handling, Islamic fundamentalism: all would have to be dealt with ‘objectively’—presumably uncritically and dispassionately.”
Baer says there are other ways of dealing with the role of religion in pluralistic America, such as “released-time” programs, in which public schools set aside time for students to receive religious instruction outside the school. A voucher system, allowing parents to apply tax money to private and parochial school tuition, also could help provide religious education.
Haynes counters such arguments by insisting that public school teachers can be objective, though it may get tricky at times. When a teacher is handling hard issues, like salvation and humanity’s ultimate destiny, he says, simple attribution—“Christ said” or “Muhammad said”—solves a lot of problems.
Furthermore, says FLS assistant director Michael Cassity, only those religions that truly have had an impact on a society or the portion of its history being studied should make it into classroom discussions and texts.
“We have to be good historians,” says Cassity, a high-school English teacher and California’s 1988 Teacher of the Year. “We have to be careful not to overreact to the very minor religious movements in history. The Wiccan movements are very minor, over the long haul. They don’t have the right to demand equal time.” Adds Cassity, “I trust teachers to use good judgment.”
Tough Questions
Teachers in Georgia are warmly welcoming the new push, says Gwen Hutchensen, social-studies coordinator for the Georgia Department of Education. In years past, notes Hutchensen, teachers did indeed feel uneasy teaching about religion.
But recently, about 60 teachers, school administrators, and board members enthusiastically attended one of six training programs FLS will present across the state.
In one sense, teachers may welcome the new freedom as a chance to express once-supressed ideas. But teachers undoubtedly also will feel a new weight of responsibility, notes Georgia schoolteacher Russell.
In the end, it is teachers who potentially will be facing questions about heaven or hell, or biblical baptism—not to mention a growing number of students like those in Russell’s classroom wanting to talk about subjects such as reincarnation and meditation. As religion returns to the classroom, Russell and his fellow teachers will be left to juggle a lot of ideas, and to answer to the parents in the community for how they handle them. For him, the option of doing that is preferable to being able to do nothing at all. Says Russell, “I’ve walked that line before.”
By Joe Maxwell.
Choice on the Chopping Block
When President Bush announced his “America 2000” education proposal this spring, conservative profamily and religious groups were pleased, particularly because the plan called for federal aid to disadvantaged families that want to send their children to private schools, including religious schools (CT, May 27, 1991, p. 45).
As America 2000 makes its way through Congress, however, much of the conservatives’ initial pleasure is turning to concern as liberal politicians threaten to water down the “parental choice” provisions and add new initiatives.
According to the Family Research Council (FRC), one of the first red flags appeared when Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Labor and Human Resources Committee, introduced the America 2000 bill. He later offered an alternative education bill that omits provisions for parental choice and adds measures to fund school-based clinics that provide contraceptive and abortion-referral services.
“The question is to what extent [Kennedy’s] package will be combined with the President’s proposals in the negotiations,” said Robert Morrison, an FRC education analyst.
Earlier this summer, Education Secretary Lamar Alexander met with profamily representatives and assured them his department would “do what it could” to keep parental choice in the bill and would “not initiate any proposals on school-based clinics.” However, according to Morrison, what remains unclear is how committed the administration is to including religious private schools in parental choice and whether it would support school-based clinic proposals.
The FRC, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), and other groups are urging the Bush administration to hold fast to its original proposal, with a veto threat if necessary. “The White House should not give up,” said NAE policy analyst Richard Cizik.
Meanwhile, groups that advocate a strong separation between church and state continue to raise concerns about even the most modest parental-choice provisions if they include religious schools. “It makes churches become dependent on the government dole,” said Robert Maddox, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.
