A new book by religion professor Stephen Prothero has been getting enough major coverage in media ( (USA Today / Newsweek /other ) to make it to the double-digits bestseller even though it hasn’t been released yet. His main points according to the articles are that Americans are extremely ignorant about world religions and even Christianity (duh!) in a time when that’s downright dangerous, and that religion should be a standard part of education.
I’ve started several Pit Threads about the ignorance on religion by people who base their lives on it, particularly those in the South who I encounter daily. I’m very thankful that I went to a religious school for several years where religion was a part of the standard curriculum and I got a very good background in Bible (though not so much in Bible history), though if I had kids I’m not at all sure I’d send them to religious school (where I went its absolute truth was taken for granted). I completely agree that now more than ever American youth needs to know a lot more about religion- differences in Christian v. Jew/Sunni v. Shia/ Catholic v. Protestant, etc., and not just the superficial stuff (e.g. “Jews don’t accept Jesus as their savior” IS a major difference in Chr. and Jud., but that’s FAR from the only difference, or that the Sunni/Shia difference is a bit more complicated than just current geography and Muhammad’s son-in-law 1500 years ago).
However, I can’t imagine it being taught in high schools. All teachers have personal views on religion and it’s a very very hard subject to be objective on; I’m not pointing fingers as I seriously doubt I could keep my skepticism out of lectures to teenagers, particularly when questions and ideally debate arose.
Do you think it could be done objectively? Has anybody had a high school level objective course on the subject? Any other relevant posts welcome.
My daughter had an excellent unit on religion in her history class in 10th grade, I believe. It lasted a few weeks, and the text covered all the major world religions factually, giving their history and beliefs, and not getting into rights and wrongs. As an atheist I was not the least bit put off, and I agree with you that this is an essential part of an education these days.
It might have helped that we live in the Bay Area, and the number of Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists, and believers in Shinto are greater than that of Christians.
Right now, public high schools have trouble producing graduates that can read, write, or locate their home state on a map. Religion belongs in the homes and churches. It does not belong in the public schools.
I would like to think it could happen, but I doubt it very much. It probably would have worked better 20 years ago, even. I think that a good understanding of religion and its place in history and current events is essential; but given the current climate, I don’t think it’s going to happen in the schools.
(This is one of the major reasons that I homeschool. I agree with this premise entirely, and decided to educate my children accordingly, in a way that the public schools cannot. Perhaps I can’t be totally objective, but I can give it my best shot, and that’s better than nothing.)
I went to German public schools (surprise!) and in accordance with our constitution religion was a regular subject. It was paid for by the state but teachers and materials were approved by the relevant denomination. In Germany the religious landscape is dominated by two denominations of approximately equal size: The Catholic church and the Evangelical Church of Germany, an association of evangelical/lutheran/reformed former state churches. The distant third is Sunni Islam but so far it is not represented by any coherent organization. For this reason Islam classes are limited to a few projects and usually muslim students together with all other faiths and atheists are taught in neutral “Ethics” classes.
I’m Catholic. Our classes were certainly taught from a Catholic perspective in some ways. However it is perfectly possible to teach the subject in a reasonable way that can have a place in an otherwise secular school - at least in a society where it has a sufficient tradition. For those who don’t agree with any of the denomination-specific classes there are the Ethics classes.
One can certainly argue that one class for everyone (as it is taught in some states) is enough. Nonetheless the consensus here seems to be that a basic knowledge of religion(s) is part of a complete education, no matter what your personal beliefs are.
Topics included:
[ul]
[li]Bible content[/li][li]History of Christianity[/li][li]Religious holidays[/li][li]Liturgy[/li][li]Church organisation[/li][li]Saints, including the local ones[/li][li]Various other Religions[/li][li]Visits to a synagogue and a mosque[/li][li]Ethics[/li][li]Whatever the “Don’t (take drugs|join cults|commit suicide), m’kay.” segment of education is called in English[/li][/ul]
As well, I doubt most Americans would accept an objective class about religion; not only does religion have lots of embarrassing history and dogma, but many parents would freak out at the thought of their kids being taught about any religion but their own.
Also, I think it’s outright impossible in much of the US to teach religion even remotely objectively; the local fundies will just use such a class as an excuse to teach creationism, the inferiority of women, the evils of gays and that the Jews killed Jesus.
Can literature be taught objectively in public schools? Not really. It’s still worth doing, though, and teaching the Bible as literature is a worthwhile approach.
I went to public schools in the 70s in Northern Virginia and was a bit put off by the emphasis on religion in my History class, but figured out eventually that she wasn’t proselytizing Protestantism. Religion is too intertwined with world, European and American history not to give it some emphasis.
Religion, as a subject, can easily and effectively be taught in the public schools without it being a catechism for any religion. As a subject, it’s simply a sociological examination. Religion is obviously part of human life and thus not something to be ignored.
I agree with the OP about the astounding display of ignorance of even their own religion from those who supposedly base their lives on a particular religion. How many times have I mentioned on this board that I know more than a few fundamentalist type Christians who lack even basic knowledge of what the Bible says, let alone what it means!
IIRC, when I was stationed in Germany, the “relevant denomination” was one of two (or perhaps one of three): Roman Catholic, Protestant (actually meaning Lutheran), and perhaps Judaism.
That was the content of the Bible class I took as an elective in the English department of my high school in Virginia way back in the 1970s. We examined the Bible as literature, kind of like a few of us are doing with the Qur’an in a thread over in Cafe Society.
I went to a public high school in New York State about six years ago, and we had a lesson on the Bible in our advanced literature class. We studied it as a work of literature, without getting into right/wrong true/false or any questions of religion. We studied the stories in it, the cultural implications, the history of the Bible as a written work that began in oral history and was taken down and translated multiple times. We also studied the mythology and religious literature from other religions and cultures. We were in a pretty conservative area of New York State (although conservative for New York might mean something else in other places) and no one was insulted or tried to proselytize or judge the validity of any religious beliefs. The teacher and all the students kept it about literature. Lots of different religions in the class, immigrants, atheists who were into atheism in the way that only a teenager can be, and it all went really smoothly with no preaching.
To be perhaps a little too characteristically pointed about it, if you were going to be genuinely objective and informative about all the major religions then we’d be obliged to point out that Christiantiy is a religion that boasts about how kind and loving its God is on the one hand while also explaining that the same diety routinely consigns the majority of people He created to the eternal fires of you-know-where over a difference of opinion—i.e. not accepting Christ—which is bad for folks named Ghandi.
If we’re not going to point out the weaknesses and assorted outrages to be found in the wonderful world of religion (snark, snark) then our children will be only half educated.
This thread raises the question: What is objectivity, really? Is being incompletely informative about certain real, uncomfortable facts to ensure that no major imbroglios occur truly objective? It seems to me that a truly comprehensive religious education isn’t going to happen because most people simply wouldn’t stand for it.
The 9th grade English class I taught several decades ago had a section on “oral literature,” including the Bible and several (other) myths. It had been a standard part of the curriculum for years and years, and nobody had a problem with it. I expanded upon it a bit, but always stressed that we were reading and talking *about * various religions, and the literature that accompanied them, but that we were in no way teaching what anyone present was supposed to believe. It should be perfectly o.k. IMHO to teach that Jews believe A, Christians believe B, Muslims believe C, the ancient Greeks believed D, and that Scandianvians in the old days believed E. I encouraged the kids to share their various beliefs and thoughts, but absolutely no one was indoctrinated. Nor should they have been.
As far as teaching religion itself, as opposed to *about * it, I would be violently opposed to that in the public schools. As I told my students at the time, they all had families and community resources to teach them about such things.
Even if many other denominations have the same legal status and could in theory get the same kind of religious education, in most cases there are simply far too few students. 32.5% of Germans are unaffiliated, 31.47% are Catholic and 30.84% belong to the dominant Protestant denomination.
Number three would be 4% Muslims, although unfortunately there is no single organization that comes even close to representing Muslims as a whole. Currently there are efforts to found such an organization. Muslims are also clustered in the bigger cities so that they achieve a sufficient density in many districts. We’ll certainly see more Islam classes in the future.
In the forth place are the Greek Orthodox with only 0.55% and it goes down quickly after that. The smaller denominations will hardly ever achieve the minimum numbers for their own classes (e.g. in my state 5 students in one grade.)
Thing is, though, you cannot possibly teach history without teaching something about religion as well. When I studed World History in 10th grade, we went over ALL of the major world religions-Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism-you name it. It’s a major part of the world, plays a huge part in history, and to avoid religion entirely would be a huge mistake.
I think teaching a basic overview of the worlds major religions, their history, basic beliefs, and their literature, would be great for either Jr High or High school. As our world becomes more culturally diverse it seems like a good thing to give people some accurate information as a foundation for understanding.
If a teacher can avoid teaching that Arabs, the French, or whatever are evil un Americans, she can probably teach religion in a dispassionate way. I’m assuming a unit here, not a whole class - there are more important things to spend a required period on.
Don’t underestimate the benefits of exposing kids to knowledge. My high school also had a unit on the Bible as literature. I first learned the theories of the actual authorship of the Bible reading the introduction in the English book room. How many kids will ever get exposed to this kind of thing except in a public school? I sure hadn’t been, and my parents were not exactly devout.
The Bible as literature started me on the road to atheism, so I can’t knock it.
Well, being a member of a minority faith did give rise to one entertaining incident (again, this was back in 1981 or so). I attended the English-speaking LDS ward and there was a civilian family there with a young daughter (maybe 6 years old?). The mom dropped the kid off at the German school she was to attend and hied off to work. At the end of the day, the school’s principal was on the curb waiting with my friend’s daughter. The principal said she just had to find out something from them. The school, as all the other schools did, had a period set aside for religious instruction. The girl’s teacher asked her if she were Catholic or Protestant. The girl said she didn’t know what that meant. So the teacher asked the principal what to do. The principal had a good idea–she asked the girl (by showing her what she meant) if her family prayed with their hands clasped together (meaning Protestant) or just the palms and extended fingers together (meaning Catholic). The girl brightened up and said, “Oh! We pray like this.” Then she closed her eyes, bowed her head, and folded her arms over her chest. The principal told her parents she just had to know what religion prayed like that.
But, back to the topic: In most places, with rational people, there would be no problem with teaching the Bible, or any other religious tome, as a literary work. Sadly, though, in today’s USA, religion is a much more charged topic than it used to be not even twenty years ago. The fanatical reaction to even the most innocuous thing is ruining the idea of ideas, if you will.
Teachers also have varying differences in how they interpret history as well, does that mean we shouldn’t teach history? Does being anything less than 100% objective render a religion course worthless? Of course not, so why should we hold a class on religion to such a strict standard? If it’s such a sensitive subject as to warrant such sensitivity then maybe it doesn’t belong in public school.
In theory, I don’t see anything wrong with such a course. There’s nothing wrong with learning about what other people believe. I’m a little curious as to what we’d accomplish by making a class on religion a requirement.
#1. What do we do with the students whose parents opt them out of the class? No, you can’t just tell them to suck it and make the kids take the class anyway.
#2. Do we have the budget for another class? We’re going to need textbooks, qualified instructors, and let’s not forget the time to actually teach the class.
#3. Is this suppose to make people more tolerant? I gotta be honest with you, the more I’ve learned about Islam the less I like. Though, at the end of the day, it’s better to have knowledge instead of ignorance.
#4. Is the class going to be offensive to anyone? I wouldn’t want to hear about a teacher getting his head cut off because he said something less than nice about Muhammad. (Relax, son, it’s a joke. Mostly.) Maybe this goes in with point #1.
Or, to be factually accurate about it, instead of hiding one’s own biases under a claim of making a “pointed” statement, one could point out the apparent inconsistency among various passages of scripture and present the ways in which different Christian groups have attempted to reconcile those discrepancies rather than just pretending that all Christians believe some sort of stereotypical view held by a limited number of Fundamentalists and small number of atheists who assert that only biblical literalism is valid.
When I was in Catholic high school (a few years ago now), I took a World Religions course taught by a nun. It was excellent, did not preach that Catholicism was superior to all other religions or anything of the sort, and motivated me to do further study in world religions, which proved to me that they are more similar than unalike, and in a good way.
I completely agree that it should be part of a high school curriculum and taught, as others have pointed out, as an unbiased sociology-type course. In fact my other favourite course of my entire high school career was a sociology course of sorts called ‘Man in Society’.
I also think people should take a course in ethics, for that matter, before they are launched on an unsuspecting public
Thing is, all those basic skills you talk about is a problem with the levels of school below high school. Once you get into high school, and the level of education you expect, is it that far a stretch to say that study of religions (not religious study, note) is important to understanding various topics of history and current events?
