Beliefs
By PETER STEINFELS,
NYTimes on the web, September 6, 2006
Back to school. Back to
reading, writing, arithmetic and religion.
Religion?
If learning about evolution is essential for understanding contemporary science,
if learning about sex is essential for adolescent health, is learning about
religion any less essential for understanding a world of powerful and often
literally explosive religious allegiances?
After a quarter-century of complaints about the eclipse of religion in history
textbooks and others used in the public schools, a kind of consensus has
emerged. As Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center operated by the
Freedom Forum puts it, “Knowledge of the world’s religions is essential for
comprehending much of history, literature, art and contemporary events” — and
conveying that knowledge in public schools is constitutional.
That doesn’t mean it is easy. Parents, school boards, administrators and
teachers are justifiably nervous about bias, proselytizing and community
division. Reports of proposed Bible courses that are theologically loaded
do nothing to calm these fears. Alongside those who worry that teaching
about different religions will turn into preaching on behalf of one are those
equally worried that such teaching will convey the relativistic message that
religious differences are inconsequential.
So while the past scrubbing of religion from, say, history courses or social
studies has been modestly repaired, courses teaching directly about major
religions remain few and almost always elective.
One exception is Modesto, Calif. For the past five years, all ninth
graders have been required to spend nine weeks — half a semester — studying
major world religions. The course begins with a segment on the First
Amendment and religious liberty in the United States, then describes in
succession, though not comparatively, the beliefs and practices of Hinduism,
Buddhism, Confucianism, Sikhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The
semester’s other half covers world geography; apparently, students should know
about seven spiritual continents as well as the physical ones.
In a rare example of empirical research in this area, Modesto’s experience has
been studied by Emile Lester, a visiting professor of political science at the
University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., and Patrick S. Roberts, an
assistant professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. Their report,
“Learning About World Religions in Public Schools,” is available from the First
Amendment Center’s offices at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Surveying approximately 400 students with 75 written questions before and after
they took the world religions course in the fall of 2004, the researchers found
that after the course, students expressed modest increases in their already
strong support for religious liberty and their weaker support for other First
Amendment rights like freedom of speech and assembly. The course increased
students’ basic knowledge about world religions and stimulated student interest
in learning more about major faiths.
After the course, students were far more likely to view all major religions as
sharing “basic moral values.” But this increased appreciation of
similarities among faiths “did not contribute to religious relativism or
encourage students to change religious beliefs,” the researchers write.
Students did not conclude that “differences between religions are negligible or
that choices about religion are arbitrary whims.” In fact, later in-depth
interviews with a sample of students showed that students’ personal faith was
more likely to be invigorated than enervated.
Modesto was not a problem-free setting for such an undertaking, said Professors
Lester and Roberts, who also interviewed school administrators, teachers and
local religious leaders.
A city of 190,000 in what locals routinely and sometimes proudly call the
“California Bible Belt,” Modesto has a large and growing evangelical population,
well represented on the school board. The city also has an active group of
politically and culturally liberal citizens. And it has plenty of
religious diversity: mainline Protestants; Roman Catholics; Greek
Orthodox; Assyrian Christians; Jews; and, thanks to recent immigration,
significant numbers of Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus and Southeast Asian Buddhists and
animists.
The world religions course in Modesto actually emerged from a small culture war,
when controversy over a proposal to counteract harassment of gay and lesbian
students indicated the need to promote understanding of religious perspectives
and differences. Intended to be religiously neutral and run by a
broad-based council of religious leaders, the course was unanimously approved by
the school board.
The course has required 30 hours of training for teachers — college classes,
readings, use of videos and workshops. To guard against teacher bias,
school administrators developed strict teaching guidelines about avoiding
controversial subjects. More than 60 percent of the students said on their
surveys that each religion was treated fairly, and none in the interviews
complained of teacher bias. In the interviews, students of minority
religious backgrounds, including Hindus, Jews, Wiccans and atheists, were
particularly united in viewing the course positively.
Three-quarters of the students surveyed said they found the course interesting
or very interesting and would recommend its being taught in the future.
Among the small sample interviewed, a majority urged that it be longer than nine
weeks.
There remain, however, the 28 percent of students who disagreed, strongly or
moderately, that every faith was treated fairly. Professors Lester and
Roberts are aware of this and other problems. In particular, they discuss
what a local rabbi called the tendency of some teachers to promote, rather than
a bias toward any particular faith, a “warm and fuzzy” approach to all faiths,
obscuring real differences between them and, reinforced by the need to maintain
neutrality, avoiding the darker sides of their beliefs or histories.
“The success of Modesto’s course was not unqualified,” they write. But
with a track record of five years — broad support by a diverse set of school
board members and local religious leaders, and a measurable impact on students’
religious knowledge and respect for religious liberty — the experience, they
feel, deserves a look by communities elsewhere.
Posted Sept. 2, 2006
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