Vitale that it is unconstitutional for public school teachers to lead students in prayer or otherwise encourage students to pray. Schempp that it is unconstitutional for public school teachers to assign their students to read verses from the Bible from a devotional perspective. Schempp , which later went on to become a landmark Supreme Court decision.
What you can teach students about religion in schools. There is a popular belief that it is illegal to teach the Bible in public schools, but this is actually a misconception.
Believe it or not, it is actually completely legal for a public school in the United States to have an entire class solely devoted to the Bible—but only if that class teaches the Bible from a secular academic standpoint. There are two main ways of teaching about the Bible. This is the way that most people are taught about the Bible in Sunday school.
There is another approach, however: the academic approach, which sees the Bible not as the inerrant word of God, but rather as a collection of ancient texts, which are not necessarily completely historically reliable. Sunday school classes teach the Bible from a devotional perspective, not from an academic perspective.
In other words, you can teach the Bible in a public school, but only if you teach it from an academic perspective.
Instead, you would have to teach them about the historical contexts in which the individual books that make up the Bible were written, about the different and often conflicting messages that various Biblical authors present, about how these books are interpreted by different groups of Jews and Christians around the world, and about how the Bible has impacted cultures around the world not necessarily always in positive ways.
Adam and Eve are mythical figures, not real people. The necessity of teaching at least some things about religion in public schools. It is perfectly legal for public schools to teach students about religion, as long as they do it from a secular academic standpoint. In fact, at least in some cases, it is necessary for public schools to teach students about religion. Most notably, it is necessary to teach students about religions in history class. History and religion are inextricably intertwined and it is impossible to understand history without knowing about religion.
All of these religions are interrelated in all sorts of complicated ways and they have all fundamentally shaped not only western history, but the culture of the United States as we know it. Similarly, it is impossible to understand Indian history without having at least some basic knowledge of Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and Sikhism, since all these religions have had huge impacts on Indian history. Indeed, challenges have come from Christian groups arguing that school policies discriminate against Christianity by promoting cultural pluralism.
In one example, the 2nd U. Circuit Court of Appeals considered a New York City Department of Education policy regulating the types of symbols displayed during the holiday seasons of various religions. The department allows the display of a menorah as a symbol for Hanukkah and a star and crescent to evoke Ramadan but permits the display of only secular symbols of Christmas, such as a Christmas tree; it explicitly forbids the display of a Christmas nativity scene in public schools.
Klein that city officials intended to promote cultural pluralism in the highly diverse setting of the New York City public schools. The judicial panel ruled that the policy, therefore, did not promote Judaism or Islam and did not denigrate Christianity. In another high-profile case, Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum v. Ordinarily, opponents of homosexuality could not confidently cite the Establishment Clause as the basis for a complaint, because the curriculum typically would not advance a particular religious perspective.
However, the Montgomery County curriculum included materials in teacher guides that disparaged some religious teachings on homosexuality as theologically flawed and contrasted those teachings with what the guide portrayed as the more acceptable and tolerant views of some other faiths. The district court concluded that the curriculum had both the purpose and effect of advancing certain faiths while denigrating the beliefs of others. The county rewrote these materials to exclude any reference to the views of particular faiths, making them more difficult to challenge successfully in court because the lessons did not condemn or praise any faith tradition.
At the time of its school prayer decisions in the early s, the Supreme Court had never ruled on whether students have the right of free speech inside public schools. By the end of that decade, however, the court began to consider the question. And the results have made the rules for religious expression far more complex. The leading Supreme Court decision on freedom of student speech is Tinker v. Des Moines School District , , which upheld the right of students to wear armbands protesting the Vietnam War.
The court ruled that school authorities may not suppress expression by students unless the expression significantly disrupts school discipline or invades the rights of others. Some school officials responded to the mix of student liberties and restraints by forbidding certain forms of student-initiated religious expression such as the saying of grace before lunch in the school cafeteria, student-sponsored gatherings for prayer at designated spots on school property, or student proselytizing aimed at other students.
Department of Education sent to every public school superintendent in The department revised the guidelines in , placing somewhat greater emphasis on the rights of students to speak or associate for religious purposes. The guidelines highlight these four general principles:.
A case decided by the 9th U. Circuit Court of Appeals underscores the difficulties that school officials still can face when students exercise their right to religious expression on school property. In this case, gay and lesbian students in a California high school organized a Day of Silence, in which students promoting tolerance of differences in sexual orientation refrained from speaking in school.
The Court of Appeals, in Harper v. He concluded that the T-shirt could be seen as violating school policies against harassment based on sexual orientation. By permitting the Gay and Lesbian Alliance to conduct the Day of Silence, Kozinski said, the district was choosing sides on a controversial social issue and stifling religiously motivated speech on one side of the issue.
Harper petitioned the Supreme Court to review the appeals court decision. But Harper graduated from high school, and the case took a different turn.
The Supreme Court, in early , ordered the lower court to vacate its ruling and dismiss the case on the grounds that it had become moot. Harper highlighted a tension — one that may yet recur — between the rights of students to engage in religious expression and the rights of other students to be educated in a non-hostile environment. For now, cases like Harper illustrate the difficulties for school officials in regulating student expression. Parents sometimes complain that secular practices at school inhibit their right to direct the religious upbringing of their children.
When they object to certain school practices, the parents often seek permission for their children to skip the offending lesson or class — to opt out — rather than try to end the practice schoolwide. Society of Sisters , which guarantees to parents the right to enroll their children in private rather than public schools, whether the private schools are religious or secular. The students said the flag represented a graven image and that their religion forbade them from recognizing it.
Of all the Supreme Court rulings supporting religious opt-outs, perhaps the most significant came in Wisconsin v. Yoder , which upheld the right of members of the Old Order Amish to withdraw their children from formal education at the age of The Amish community had a well-established record as hardworking and law-abiding, the court noted, and Amish teens would receive home-based training.
The worldly influences present in the school experience of teenagers, the court said, would undercut the continuity of agrarian life in the Amish community.
In later decisions, lower courts recognized religious opt-outs in other relatively narrow circumstances. Parents successfully cited religious grounds to win the right to remove their children from otherwise compulsory military training Spence v. Cronin, In Menora v. Illinois High School Association , the 7th U. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Illinois High School Association was constitutionally obliged to accommodate Orthodox Jewish basketball players who wanted to wear a head covering, despite an association rule forbidding headgear.
The Menora case involves a narrow exception from the dress code, rather than a broader right to opt out of a curriculum requirement. Under these opt-out programs, parents do not have to explain their objection, religious or otherwise, to participation by their children. On other occasions, however, parental claims that the Constitution entitles them to remove their children from part or all of a public school curriculum have fared rather poorly.
The issue of home schooling is a good example. Before state legislatures passed laws allowing home schooling, parents seeking to educate their children at home were often unsuccessful in the courts. Many judges distinguished these home schooling cases from Yoder on the grounds that Yoder involved teenagers rather than young children.
The judges also noted that Yoder was concerned with the survival of an entire religious community — the Old Order Amish — rather than the impact of education on a single family. The most famous of the cases is Mozert v. The school board originally allowed children to choose alternative reading materials but then eliminated that option. The 6th U. Furthermore, the court said, the school board had a strong interest in exposing children to a variety of ideas and images and in using a uniform series of books for all children.
Because the books did not explicitly adopt or denigrate particular religious beliefs, the court concluded, the parents could insist neither on the removal of the books from the schools nor on their children opting out. The 1st U. Circuit Court of Appeals reached a similar conclusion in a case involving a public high school in Massachusetts that held a mandatory assembly devoted to AIDS and sex education. In that case, Brown v. Hot, Sexy, and Safer Productions , the court rejected a complaint brought by parents who alleged that exposure to sexually explicit material infringed on their rights to religious freedom and control of the upbringing of their children.
More recently, parents and students have, on religious liberty and other grounds, sued school districts that accommodate transgender students by allowing them to use bathroom and locker facilities that match their current gender identity rather than their sex at birth. Some parents and students argue that the new arrangements violate their religious liberty rights because the school policy forces them to accommodate a set of moral and religious beliefs they disagree with.
So far, however, federal courts have sided with school districts that have accommodated transgender students. For instance, in Parents for Privacy v. Dallas School District No. And in , the Supreme Court declined to review Doe v. Boyertown Area School District, letting stand a 3rd U. Without question, public school employees retain their rights to free exercise of religion.
When off duty, school employees are free to engage in worship, proselytizing or any other lawful faith-based activity. When they are acting as representatives of a public school system, however, courts have said their rights are constrained by the Establishment Clause. This limitation on religious expression raises difficult questions.
The first is what limits school systems may impose on the ordinary and incidental expression of religious identity by teachers in the classroom. Most school systems permit teachers to wear religious clothing or jewelry. At times, however, teachers act in an uninvited and overtly religious manner toward students and are asked by school administrators to refrain.
In Bishop v. Aronov , for example, the 11th U. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a set of restrictions imposed by the University of Alabama on a professor of exercise physiology. In Roberts v. The court emphasized that school principals need such authority to prevent potential violations of the Establishment Clause and to protect students against a religiously coercive atmosphere. That much is clear. That was the key question in Wigg v. Sioux Falls School District 8th U.
Circuit Court of Appeals, , in which a teacher sued the South Dakota school district for refusing to allow her to serve as an instructor in the Good News Club an evangelical Christian group that met after school hours at various public elementary schools in the district. A federal district court ruled that the teacher, Barbara Wigg, should be free to participate in the club but said the school district could insist that the teacher not participate at the school where she was employed.
The court reasoned that once the school day ended, Wigg became a private citizen, leaving her free to be a Good News Club instructor at any school, including the one where she worked.
In general, then, the courts have ruled that public schools have substantial discretion to regulate the religious expression of teachers during instructional hours, especially when students are required to be present.
Over the past 20 years, evangelical Christians and others have advanced the rights of religious organizations to have equal access to meeting space and other forms of recognition provided by public schools to students.
These organizations have consistently succeeded in securing the same privileges provided by public schools to secular groups. Their victories have not been based on a claim that religious groups have a right to official recognition simply because they want to practice or preach their religion; instead, these cases have been won on free-speech grounds.
Whenever public schools recognize student extracurricular activities for example, a student Republican club or an animal rights group , the schools are deemed to have created a forum for student expression. In a now-lengthy line of decisions, the Supreme Court has ruled consistently that religious groups represent a particular viewpoint on the subjects they address and that officials may not exclude that viewpoint from a government-created forum for expression or association.
The first major decision in this area was Widmar v. The court rejected this defense, ruling that the university had allowed other student groups to use university property and that the complaining group could not be excluded on the basis of its religious viewpoint.
Deckman, M. School board battles: The Christian right in local politics. Erekson, K. Politics and the history curriculum: The struggle over standards in Texas and the nation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hinsdale, B. Horace Mann and the common school revival in the United States. Fiske, J. The beginnings of New England: Or, the Puritan theocracy in its relations to civil and religious liberty. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Fox, J. Separation of religion and state and secularism in theory and in practice. Religion, State and Society , 39 4 , Fraser, J.
The school in the United Staes: A documentary history 1st ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Gaither, M. Homeschool: An American history 1st ed. Goodman, B. New York Times. Greene, S. The bible, the school, and the Constitution: The clash that shaped modern church-state doctrine 1st ed.
New York: Oxford University Press. Gutman, A. Democratic education. Civic education and social diversity. Ethics , 3 , — Hayes, W. Hedges, C. New York: Free Press. Hess, D. Discussing controversial public issues in secondary social studies classrooms: Learning from skilled teachers. Controversies about controversial issues in democratic education. PS: Political Science and Politics , 37 2 , Hodgson, C. Coercion in the classroom: The inherent tension between the free exercise and establishment clauses in the context of evolution.
Next, A Journal of Opinion 9 , Jackson, L. Images of Islam in U. Educational Studies , 46 1 , Islam and Muslims in U. Religious Education , 2 , Kaveny, M. The remnants of theocracy: The Puritans, the Jeremiad and the contemporary culture wars. Law, Culture and the Humanities , 9 1 , 59— Kliebard, H.
The struggle for the American curriculum, — 3d ed. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Kunzman, R. Religion, politics and civil education. Journal of Philosophy of Education , 39 1 , — Imaginative engagement with religious diversity in public school classrooms. Religious Education , 4 , Kymlicka, W. Politics in the vernacular: Nationalism, multiculturalism and citizenship. Multiculturalism and minority rights: West and east. Labadee, D. Politics, markets, and the compromised curriculum.
Harvard Educational Review , 57 4 , — Larson, E. New York: Basic Books. Lester, E. Long, E. Church-state debate: Religion, education and the establishment clause in post war America. Bloomsbury, U. Macedo, St. Liberal civic education and its limits. Canadian Journal of Education , 20 3 , — Macedo, S. Diversity and distrust: Civic education in a multicultural democracy.
Mann, H. Horace Mann on the crisis in education. The republic and the school: Horace Mann on the education of free men. Massaro, T. Oregon Law Review , 84 4 , McGuffey, W. McGuffey reader: Eclectic second reader. Cincinatti, OH: Truman and Smith.
Moore, D. Overcoming religious illiteracy: A cultural studies approach to the study of religion in secondary education 1st ed. Moore, R. Bible reading and nonsectarian schooling: The failure of religious instruction in nineteenth-century public education. The Journal of American History , 86 4 , — Neuhaus, R.
Strict church-state separationists of a fanatical bent routinely claim that exempting religion from government regulation constitutes a violation of the no-establishment provision of the religion clause of the first amendment. New England Primer. Noddings, N. Educating for intelligent belief or unbelief. Chapter Spirituality and religion in public schooling. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education , 1 , — Nord, W.
Does God make a difference? Taking religion seriously across the curriculum. Nashville: ASCD. Okin, S. Feminism and multiculturalism: Some tensions. Ethics , 4 , — Mistresses of their own destiny: Group rights, gender, and realistic rights of exit.
Ethics , 2 , Prothero, S. San Francisco: Harper. Rawls, J. Political liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Reich, R. Bridging liberalilsm and multiculturalism in American education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robertson, G. Virginia county closes schools as Islam assignment prompts backlash. Rogers, T. Parental rights: Curriculum opt-outs in public schools Doctoral dissertation, University of North Texas.
Rosenblith, S. Beyond coexistence: Toward a more reflective religious pluralism. Theory and Research in Education , 6 1 , Religious education in a liberal, pluralist, democratic state. Religious Education , 5 , Educating for autonomy and respect or educating for Christianity? The case of the Georgia Bible bills. Journal of Thought , 45 1—2 , Between mere tolerance and robust respect: Mutuality as a basis for civic education in pluralist democracies.
Educational Theory , 64 6 , , , Rudolph, F. Essays on education in the early republic. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Sears, J. Curiculum, religion, and public education: Conversations for an enlarging public square. Shreve, G. Religion, science and the secular state: Creationism in American public schools.
The American Journal of Comparative Law , 58 , 51— Temperman, J. State-religion relationships and human rights law: Towards a right to religiously neutral governments 1st ed. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff. Webb, P. Teacher power: The exercise of professional autonomy in an era of strict accountability. Teacher Development , 6 1 , 47— Westerhoff, J.
McGuffey and his readers: Piety, morality, and education in nineteenth century America. Nashville: Abingdon.
0コメント