Abstract
There were two important and related Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s that were pivotal in defining the role of religion in public education. In Engel v. Vitale (1962) it was decided that government should not sponsor prayers in public schools. In Abington v. Schempp (1963) the Supreme Court ruled that the government should not sponsor Bible reading and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools. The banned activities were symbols of the lingering Protestant Christian hegemony in public education and these decisions were thus met with both scorn and praise for what they represented. While many hailed these rulings as a strong endorsement of the separation of church and state and thus an affirmation of pluralism, others felt that they signaled the demise of a common moral foundation that served to unite all Americans amidst our diversity. These same tensions persist today and many trace the roots of the current culture wars to these rulings.2
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;1
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Notes
First Amendment Center, A Teacher’s Guide to Religion in the Public Schools (Nashville: First Amendment Center, 1999).
Another useful general guidebook is Charles Haynes and Oliver Thomas, Finding Common Ground: A Guide to Religious Liberty in Public Schools (Nashville, TN: The First Amendment Center, 2001).
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (NY: Routledge, 1991), 183–202.
Diane L. Moore, “Overcoming Religious Illiteracy: A Cultural Studies Approach,” World History Connected November 2006, http://worldhistoryconnected.press.uiuc.edu/4.1/moore.html accessed December 2, 2006.
James C. Carper, “History, Religion, and Schooling: A Context for Conversation,” in James T. Sears and James C. Carper, eds., Curriculum, Religion and Public Education: Conversations for an Enlarging Public Square (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998), 11. Carper cites political scientist James Skillen as the author of this particular framework.
David Tyack, “The Kingdom of God and the Common School,” Harvard Educational Review, 36 (Fall, 1966), 454, quoted in Fraser, Between Church and State, 34.
J.D. Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 37, cited in Carper, “History, Religion and Schooling,” 19.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has only recently begun to gather data on private schools and homeschooling in the United States. In a survey report published in October 2004, private schools were organized into three categories: Catholic, Other Religious, and Nonsectarian. The largest of the three was the category “Other Religious” which comprised 49.2 percent of all private schools. Of that group, Conservative Christian schools were the largest sub-category. They comprise 18.9 percent of all private schools in the United States. See S.P. Broughman and K.W. Pugh, Characteristics of Private Schools in the United States: Results From the 2001–2002 Private School Universe Survey, (NCES 2005–305), U.S. Department of Education (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics), 9. These figures represent an increase from a report published in 1999 on the same topic. In that report the “other religious” category comprised 48.2 percent of all private schools and conservative Christian schools still comprised the largest sub-category, representing 18.2 percent.
See S.P. Broughman and L.A. Colaciello, Private School Universe Survey, 1997–98 (NCES 1999–319), U.S. Department of Education, (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics), 2. In relationship to home schooling, the NCES published an Issue Brief in July 2004 entitled 1.1 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2003. The conclusion states the following: “From 1999 to 2003, the number of homeschooled students in the United States increased, as did the homeschooling rate. The increase in the homeschooling rate (from 1.7 percent to 2.2 percent) represents about 0.5 percent of the 2002–2003 school-age population and a 29 percent relative increase over the 4-year period … Nearly two-thirds of home-schooled students had parents who said that their primary reason for homeschooling was either concern about the environment of other schools or a desire to provide religious or moral instruction.”
See Institute of Educational Statistics, Issue Brief, 1.1 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2003 (NCES 2004–115), U.S. Department of Education, (Washington, DC, National Center for Education Statistics) 2004.
See, for example, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Chester Finn, Jr., and John T.E. Cribb. The Educated Child: A Parent’s Guide From Preschool Through Eighth Grade (New York: Free Press, 1999), and other texts by these prominent authors.
David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York, Oxford, 1992).
See Sven Linqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes (London: New Press, 1997)
and Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (New York: Mariner Books, 1997).
See, for example, Donald J. Dietrich, ed., Christian Responses to the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003);
John Gager, The Origins of Christian Anti-Semitism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983);
William Brustein, Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
and John Shelby Spong, “The Bible and Anti-Semitism,” in The Sins of Scripture (San Francisco: Harper, 2005), 183–212.
Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington are two prominent and popular contemporary scholars often associated with promoting “orientalist” views of Islam. See Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998)
and Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003) and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003).
For example, a school board member in Chattanooga, TN protested the administration’s decision to allow a Muslim student at East Ridge High School to wear her hijab in school. “I think this opens up a Pandora’s box for us. You may have Jewish students asking to wear yarmulkes and students from other religions making requests. I think we should stick to the dress code,” stated school board member Rhonda Thurman. The student had previously been told she could not wear her hijab but the administration reversed its decision following an intervention by a Muslim civil rights group based in Washington, DC. “Rhonda Thurman Says Allowing Islamic Head Scarf Was Wrong Decision,” January 18, 2005, The Chattanoogan.Com at http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_61195.asp accessed on October 27, 2005. In a similar story, in October 2003, Nashala Hearn was suspended from Benjamin Franklin Science Academy in Muskogee, Texas for refusing to remove her hijab at school. Nashala’s parents, with the support of the Rutherford Institute, brought a lawsuit against the Muskogee Public Schools in protest. A little over a year later in November 2004, the Muskogee Public Schools settled the suit by agreeing to revise their dress code. “Muslim Girl Back to Wearing Head Scarf to School With Pride,” Dallas Morning News, November 12, 2004.
Huston Smith, The World’s Religions (San Francisco: Harper, 1958, 1991).
Several independent school teachers who participate in conferences held before the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion report using the Smith text. Joseph Laycock, “Religious Studies in Secondary Schools” unpublished final paper for an independent reading and research course, Harvard Divinity School, Fall, 2004. The Smith text is also used by history and other religion teachers in California, Texas, and Massachusetts as reported in responses to a qualitative research project entitled the Harvard Study on Teaching About Religion in the Schools (H-STARS). For a description of the project and access to the online survey see http://www.hds.harvard.edu/prse/hstars/ accessed November 13, 2006.
See James A. Banks, Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997);
James A. Banks, ed., Multicultural Education: Transformative Knowledge and Action: Historical and Contemporary Essays (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996);
and James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks, eds., Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, 2nd edition (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).
In the authoritative Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education cited above, there are only a handful of references to religion in the index and most of these cite articles where religion is referenced in passing. A notable exception to this general trend of omission is an article by James K. Uphoff entitled “Religious Diversity and Education,” in James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks, eds., Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives 4th edition (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2001), 103–122.
Christine E. Sleeter and Carl A. Grant, Making Choices for Multicultural Education: Five Approaches to Race, Class, and Gender, 3rd edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill, 1999).
See Hirsch, Cultural Literacy; Diane Ravitch, “Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures,” The American Scholar, 59 (3), 1990, 337–354;
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton, 1991).
See Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream,” in James Washington, ed. Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper, 1990).
See Mohandas Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work and Ideas, Louis Fischer, ed., (New York: Vintage, 2002);
Joan Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg, “Cultural Studies: An Introduction,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5.
Henry Giroux also recognizes how pedagogy is a critical dimension of cultural studies and one that is often overlooked by theorists outside of education. See Henry Giroux, “Doing Cultural Studies: Youth and the Challenge of Pedagogy,” in Ruben A. Gaztambide-Fernandez, Heather A. Harding, and Tere Sorde-Marti, eds., Cultural Studies and Education: Perspectives on Theory, Methodology, and Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review, 2004), 233–260.
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© 2007 Diane L. Moore
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Moore, D.L. (2007). How to Teach About Religion in the Schools. In: Overcoming Religious Illiteracy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607002_3
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