 Hello, this is another one of Dr. Sadler's Chalk and Talks in the series that I started in order to answer questions at greater length that have been posed to me in other forums, sometimes through emails, sometimes through VU or other electronic media. The question that I'm going to tackle today and we'll only get to, you know, so far into because we only have 10 to 15 minutes is a very contestant one. Should religion be taught in public schools? And one of my VU's or friends asked me that question. It prompted a lot of other questions about K-12 education and the church and state and all sorts of other related issues. So I wanted to talk about this. This is something that I have given a lot of thought to. I used to teach not only philosophy but also religious studies in a college setting and I would often be called upon to come into local high schools as I have down here in Fayetteville to give talks about world religions. Now you might ask how can that be done? Why should that be done? Doesn't that violate the separation of church and state? Those are very valid questions and those are things which want to be explored. I think that there's a lot of misinformation out there about this topic. And so one place to begin with, one of the issues to start with is the constitutionality of it. Is it allowable to teach anything pertaining to religion in a public school? It's very clear from Supreme Court cases that you can't hold religious observances. You cannot require prayer. You can't even offer an opportunity for a moment of silence because that may make other students feel uncomfortable as they're being discriminated against. So how can you actually teach about religion in a public school? Well, the Supreme Court actually considered cases like this. In the course of discussing cases where there had been some clear infringement of some of these constitutional rights under the First Amendment. And two of these cases that are particularly interesting, Angle vs. Vitaly and Angon vs. Shem, there were discussions, you know, these were sort of side notes, but they are a revelatory of an attitude that the Supreme Court has towards a certain type of teaching in respect to religion. In Angle vs. Vitaly, you find an assertion that the history of man is inseparable from the history of religion. So we'll come back to this in a moment. What that means is that if you're going to adequately teach the history of humankind, you have to have some room in there for teaching about religion. And if you're going to teach it well, you have to teach the parts that pertain to religion well. Or else you would be teaching an ideological perspective. If you were to try to strip religion away entirely, that would not be adequate teaching. In Angle vs. Shem, Justice Brennan in a concurring in-road, the holding of the court today, because they were holding that you could not require Bible teaching as such in public schools, he said the holding of the court today plainly does not foreclose teaching about the Holy Scriptures, or about the differences between religious sex in literature or history. Indeed, whether or not the Bible is involved, it would be impossible to teach meaningfully many subjects in the social sciences or the humanities without some mention of religion. Now, what does this mean? Well, you notice he's talking about several different classes. You can teach religious texts, and you can teach about religious movements, about religious ideas, about mindsets, about tenets of religion in a variety of different classes. You can teach about them in literature classes or, you know, in English classes. You can teach about them in humanities. You can teach them about them in history, and you can teach about them in social science. Those are all mentioned explicitly. Now, why would you want to do that? So here's one of the questions that I like people to think about. What would be lost, or what would be diminished in a child's education, K through 12, by not teaching about certain topics? Well, you know, you leave a hole in their education, and if it's just a matter of teaching certain facts, perhaps those holes could be filled in later on. But, consider what education is. Is education merely learning a bunch of different facts which then you put together in any way you like? No, it goes beyond that. What else is involved? Well, there's learning certain skills, certain dispositions, certain attitudes, certain modes of being, modes of behaving. You learn, for instance, how to do research, or at least I hope that you do. You learn certain technical things, how to use computers. You also learn about what we call the great ideas, the sort of facts, if you want to call them such, around which other things coalesce. So, for example, if you want to understand why the pilgrims came over here to the United States, you need to know something about religion, and not just religion in general, but about Christianity, and not just Christianity in general, but about what was going on in the Church of England and on the continent, the European continent, in terms of the Protestant Reformation. In order to understand the mindset, and really in order to fully understand the writings, and the illusions, and the arguments of some of the pilgrims and some of the Puritans, you need to know something about Catholicism, and you need to know something about the Church of England, and its developments. And in order to do that, you need to know something about the Roman Catholic Church, against which they were all reacting. And in order to do that, you need to know something about the differences between them, and where they split off from each other, and why. You notice you need to know a lot of things in order to make sense of that one phenomenon. And we can go on and on and on. If you want to understand the cultures of the world, you absolutely have to know something about certain major world religions. You need to know about Islam. You need to know about Hinduism. You need to know about Buddhism. You also need to know about some of the religions that are peculiar to a particular ethnic group, like Chinese folk religion. That helps to understand a lot of things. Confucianism, originally starting out in China, but deeply influencing Japanese culture, and Korean culture. So to deprive a child of learning about those things is really to stymie and to set back their education. It's to generate somebody who is whether they like it or not. In some ways, an ignorance. You deprive them of some of the major things that they need in order to peg, in order to constantly ideas, conceptions, historical movements. I'm not saying that you have to supply them with something like a comprehensive education in world religions, but you do have to provide them with something. Otherwise, you are, in fact, in some way doing those children harm by not fully educating them. There's a distinction that we can make that gets made in these Supreme Court cases that's very important to keep in mind. This is why a lot of people are very uncomfortable with the notion of talking about religion in schools, because they don't make a distinction between teaching religion, on the one hand, which would mean taking a particular stand that a one religious group, or one subdivision of that group has got things fundamentally right, and teaching those texts as if they are revealing absolute truth, and teaching, here's the key word, about religion. There is absolutely no problem in teaching about religion. As a matter of fact, in these Supreme Court cases, they are affirming that you ought to be teaching about religion, and if you are not doing so, and you're not doing so in a competent manner, you are actually depriving students of a full education. What does it mean then to teach about religion? This is what we call the religious studies model. We don't commit ourselves to truth claims. We can make truth claims along the lines of, Buddhists believe that the Four Noble Truths are true, and we can say, here's what the Four Noble Truths are, all life is suffering, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We can actually require students to engage in both memorization of them, but we're not doing catechism. We're not saying you must memorize these because these are true. We're saying you must memorize these because this will help you understand the mindset, the culture, the arguments, the claims made by this entire group of people, and that's something valuable. You're not committing yourself to the truth of Buddhism or the truth of Christianity, or whether the Roman Catholics have got it right about, say, the authority of the Pope, or whether the Protestants have got it right. You're not actually making truth claims about that. What you are making claims about is that it is true that such and such a group believes this, practices this, that this is an important value for them. I like to stress this in terms of the difference between understanding and agreement. I used to teach religious studies in a maximum security prism, and I found that the students were very interested in talking about religion, and they would always want to get into doctrinal disputes about who's actually right, and I would say, well, we can't decide that here. That's not what we're going to do. It's enough just to try to understand. And really, if you study any of the world's religions, what you do find out, they are so complex. There's so many things going on in them. They have so many texts, so many interpretations, so many rituals, such a wide universe of meaning, and such long histories full of people debating about these very things that just to try to acquire understanding, that takes a lot. Just to acquire understanding of why you news might say that God manifests himself throughout time under different guises. That's something worth exploring. That's more than a class session. That can be an entire week just going into that and going into the intricacies of the notion of the avatar. You don't require anybody to agree with you. You don't require anybody to say, I believe this and that is what we were going to do in class and I'm comfortable with it because it's reinforcing or pushing onto others or proselytizing about my beliefs. Now, people may feel threatened by talking about other religions, but so long as you're not actually requiring them to change their beliefs, to change their views, that's fine, no problems. Well, do we have teachers who are capable of doing this? I think in large part the answer is no, high school teachers, middle school teachers, they have to study a lot of other things. Some of them may have acquired the sort of education that we find in religious studies, but many of them have not and they would feel rightly uncomfortable in trying to introduce this sort of thing. What do I think is the solution? Bring in experts, bring in people for guest lectures. Provided they can say that they are not going to stress truth claims or that they are going to focus on understanding instead of agreement and they're not going to proselytize. Bring in the people who have degrees in religious studies and philosophy and religion, even those in theology because if somebody is good at theology and they're not just a pedant, they want to be able to explore and explain other perspectives. I can talk more about that, perhaps I will let another one. Here's one of the questions I want to leave off with. Intolerance. What should we do about intolerance when we're teaching about intolerance? Obviously we don't have to make truth claims that they are right in being intolerant or that they are wrong in being intolerant. But how do we teach about it? That's a question worth exploring. How do we teach about it without being intolerant to ourselves towards those who have discrimination of different sorts? Who say some people are right and some people are wrong. That's a bigger issue and that's one that has to be explored further. I believe there are some very good solutions to it but I'm going to leave off here.