{"id":2947,"date":"2010-12-29T06:20:05","date_gmt":"2010-12-29T10:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=2947"},"modified":"2010-12-28T21:47:09","modified_gmt":"2010-12-29T01:47:09","slug":"teaching-about-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=2947","title":{"rendered":"Teaching about religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andy Rotherham uses the overblown rhetoric about "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays"* to point out that public K-12 schools generally do a lousy job of teaching about<\/em> religion<\/a>. He attributes this substantially to the skittishness many public schools have about the church-state boundary. Never mind the 1995 consensus statement that included (among others) ACLU and Baptist signatories that recognized the (then- and mostly current) status quo in court doctrine: individuals have religious-expression rights, schools can neither interfere in non-disruptive religious speech nor endorse religion, and schools can teach about religion. So, for example, public schools can teach about religious influences on history, art, and so forth. <\/p>\n

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Rotherham's argument is plausible–there is plenty of defensive education going around in schools (a la defensive medicine). There are a few flaws in the argument. One small weakness is inconsistency in treating the defensive-education phenomenon: Rotherham takes the defensive-education argument for granted with regard to the teaching about religion, but he's resisted that argument when it comes to public schools' engaging in test-prep and neglecting parts of the curriculum that aren't tested. If public-school officials can be defensive with regard to one type of threat to them (lawsuits), you'd think they'd be even more vulnerable to threats that are political and financial (in the case of accountability). <\/p>\n

The other flaws in the argument are also matters of inconsistency: first, in some cases, schools generally do a good job of teaching about religion. AP European history courses focus a great deal of attention on the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, Inquisition, Thirty Years' War, etc. In general, my impression is that coverage is much better the further back one goes in time–open, straightforward coverage of religion in the discussion of the 16th and 17th centuries, but not as much when one gets to the 20th century and issues such as the Catholic priesthood's involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Part of the reason is the nature of the material (politics and religion being obviously intertwined before the more secularized 20th century Europe), but part may be skittishness as you get to the present. Since that skittishness is also true in U.S. history courses (I bet you can find plenty in most AP U.S. history texts on Puritanism and the first Great Awakening and very little about post-WW2 evangelical Protestantism), I think there's other stuff at work, neither the nature of the material nor the defensive-education argument that Rotherham uses. <\/p>\n

The last weakness is the widespread nature of poor teaching about religion. If defensive education were the main driver, you'd expect that in those parts of the country where public school officials may not care about legal liability (and there are plenty of such officials from the Florida Panhandle to Dover, Pennsylvania), you'd find some good teaching about religion. But I have never heard of such, maybe because the news incidents are generated by poorly-behaving school officials or maybe because people who don't care about legal obligations at all are going to have poor judgment in other areas… but at least in the second case, superintendents are not going to be directly supervising the teachers who would theoretically feel less pressure to create sterile classrooms. <\/p>\n

My strong suspicion is that teaching about religion has generally been weak, and that such weaknesses are no more prevalent now than before the early 1960s (when the U.S. Supreme Court started prohibiting official public-school sponsorship of religious expression). Some of that may be encouraged by defensive-education pressures or the skittishness of analyzing contemporary events in schools. I also suspect that the teaching-religion\/teaching-about-religion distinction is inherently tough to address with a diverse group of students, many of whom have very strongly-held views about religion (including both their beliefs and others'). If a teacher handles it perfectly well well, a student can misunderstand something the teacher said, repeat it to a parent, and you get a game of telephone (serial miscommunication). That can blow up in the face of the teacher just for handling the material. Good teachers with solid administrative support can do that. But where a teacher is feeling skittish either because of her or his skill level or administrative waffling, you're going to see avoidance of religion as a topic of instruction. <\/p>\n

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Andy Rotherham uses the overblown rhetoric about "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays"* to point out that public K-12 schools generally do a lousy job of teaching about religion. He attributes this substantially to the skittishness many public schools have about the church-state boundary. Never mind the 1995 consensus statement that included (among others) ACLU and Baptist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-Lx","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2947"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2962,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2947\/revisions\/2962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}