argumentative essay about should religion be taught in school

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Should Religion Be Taught in Schools? Argumentative Essay

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Argumentative Essay Samples on Religion in Public Schools: To Teach or Not to Teach?

In this article, the basic requirements for this type of writing are presented so that you could write a good argumentative essay on religion in public schools. Moreover, some examples of essays are given on whether students should study religion in public schools or not. Pay attention to every detail and create your own essay on the same topic “Religion in Public Schools: To Teach or Not to Teach?”

Table of Contents

3 Basic Rules for Argumentative Essay Writing

It is obvious that an argumentative essay has the same structure as a paper of any other type. So, there is a necessity to write:

An introduction in which a student should point out the main topic of a paper based on the thesis statement. Look at how to write argumentative thesis statements .
The body (three paragraphs as a must, then consider what can be added more) where it is necessary to prove your thesis with strong arguments and explain them in details. Get to know how to evaluate the validity and strength of arguments .
A conclusion is aimed at summarizing all the above mentioned briefly to convince the reader of the significance of reading this essay to the end. Study the guide on writing conclusions to argumentative essays .

10 Main Arguments to Write an Essay on Religion

As your argumentative essay is to be built on a set of reasons that show that you’re right, it is better to think about them in advance. You can brainstorm on your own if it is worth to teach religion in public schools or not. Alternatively, you can take into account the following ideas:

Top 5 Pros of Teaching Religion in Public Schools

Children learning religious practices and beliefs and aware of their deferences are more tolerant towards people around;
Schoolchildren learning religion apply more critical thinking in matters of morality. They learn to comprehend their actions not only from the perspective of their own advantages but also from the point of view of moral norms.
Modern society has an urgent need to cultivate moral values, tolerance, mutual understanding, and respect for each other in the younger generation.
The classes in Religion cover most topics that are ignored in many families.
Studying more subjects broadens the schoolchildren’s outlook.

Top 5 Cons of Teaching Religion in Public Schools

Teaching religion at school is an attempt to impose a religious outlook on the child, but not on critical scientific thinking.
In a civilized state, there is no imposition of dogmas of any religion. Most modern people have a habit of believing inwardly, individually.
Teachers may not be able to teach the basics of a particular religion; they may have other faiths. In this case, it is necessary to preserve the secular nature of the subject and to separate their own faith from theoretical information.
Textbooks can be compiled in the preaching and anti-scientific style and absolutely do not meet the goals.
Fierce disputes arising during the classes in Religion can provoke hatred and animosity among students that can be manifested in aggression.

2 Argumentative Essay Samples on Religion – Should Students Study It or Not?

As we have already said, the main aim of argumentative essay writing is to confirm a certain point of view. Since this opinion is by definition controversial, we decided to show you how to state that that religion should be taught in schools in the first essay sample, and refute this opinion in the second example. To ensure you succeed in this academic endeavor, consider using professional help and ask experts to do my project for me . This approach not only provides you with a strong foundation but also enhances the credibility of your argument.

1. Religion Should Be Taught in Public Schools

The times when education was religious are in the past. As a result, today, we have a selfish and individualized society, where everyone protects himself. Religion should be taught in school, as this is the only way to return to society the forgotten moral standards and true values.

Religion is a way to show our differences through our unity. People practice different religions, but they have the same moral ideas. It is a way to unite groups of people globally, based on common values, even if religious groups are different.

Learning religion is a way to know the world. In Finland, children from primary school study religion practiced in their family or ethics, and this is one of the most popular subjects.

Since not many parents talk to children about God and religion, the school can fill this gap. Thus, schooling will become more complex. This is an opportunity to give not only academic knowledge but also to grow a human from a person.

In conclusion, it should be said that it is necessary to prepare for the teaching of religion in schools – to teach teachers to translate the true values and compile textbooks correctly. With this approach, religion has the opportunity to become one of the most important and favorite subjects.

2. Religion Should NOT Be Taught in Public Schools

In most countries, religion is separated from education. This is a balanced decision, as a civilized society implies the ability of each person to make an individual choice and believe in their values. Religion should not be studied in school because it is contrary to the views of most modern societies and can lead to enmity between young people and their groups.

We live in the 21st century, when the understanding of religiosity is critically rethought – now it is not identified with spirituality. Religiousness is part of spirituality. And spirituality is very broad; it is often called the whole life of a person. Therefore, each person should develop spirituality independently, without forcible influence and even not under the influence of certain religious norms.

Religion is an inner sense of belonging to certain values. When we start broadcasting it outside, where there are various other thoughts, then the person becomes vulnerable. And it does not develop self-confidence but adds disagreement in adolescence.

If the school focuses on the ethics of a particular religion, then the topic of bullying in schools will continue. Because now the child can be offended on a religious basis. And from a social point of view, it is necessary to unite society, and not to develop enmity.

As a result, the school can give basic knowledge of the religions of the world, point out their differences, and make a comparison of the traditions of these peoples. For deeper understanding, students might benefit from engaging with a capstone project writing service , which can help them explore these concepts through well-researched papers. This should be an objective presentation of the picture, without priorities and deviations. Then the children of all religious denominations will feel at ease in the classroom. As for religious ethics, it is better to develop an understanding of basic human values that are universal.

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Religion in Schools: Is There a Place for It? Pros and Cons

Why should religion be taught in schools? If you’re writing an argumentative or persuasive essay on pros and cons of religion in schools, this sample is for you.

Introduction

Religious studies help to raise morally decent citizens, religious studies promote religious freedom, religious studies help in explaining the mysteries of life, reasons why religion should not be taught in schools.

The discussion of religious studies in schools is a subject that has elicited contention in academic circles. Scholars are divided on whether or not religious studies should be taught in schools. The subject matter has also brought out controversy among curriculum developers. The main issue of contention revolves around establishing the boundary between religion and state.

Religious studies are critical in raising morally upright citizens in a nation. Although it is possible to reject the move to offer religious studies in schools based on the claim that parents should instill morals in their children at home, it is crucial to realize that many contemporary parents are usually busy to the extent that getting time to share moral stories with their kids is almost impossible. Hence, with this foundation, the paper argues that there is a place for religious studies in schools today and that the benefits of studying religion outweigh the demerits.

Why Should Religion Be Taught in Schools?

The main argument in favor of teaching religion in schools is that it helps to instill good morals in people. It also promotes faith as religious freedom and helps explain complicated life issues not addressed by other disciplines.

According to Cochran (2014), the study of religion should be encouraged from the entry-level since it assists in character molding. It is important to note that religious studies instill good morals in people. Examples of these morals include honesty, faithfulness, hard work, respect, and dignity.

All religious studies promote these virtues, including Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Religion also helps to prevent vices among young people in society today. The witnessed violence among young people may be attributed to a lack of religious teachings. Video games contribute to aggressive behavior in kids of age between 9 and 12 years (Ellithorpe et al., 2015).

Religion discourages vices such as early pregnancies among young people, most of whom are in school. As part of their work, tutors of religious studies discourage drug and substance abuse among learners, thus encouraging them to be productive citizens in a country. Since religion prohibits sexual relationships before marriage, it plays an essential role in eradicating sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV and AIDS, among others.

Furthermore, religious studies teachers address the issue of the sanctity of family and the need to promote faithfulness in marriage. Hence, as future parents, students who lack such understanding from school may fail to know the aspects that must be imparted to their kids.

According to Cochran (2014), religious studies help to develop learners’ character, values, and beliefs. Hence, failing to offer lessons that instill these concepts in school may result in a violent and undisciplined generation lacking meaningful focus.

According to Cheadle and Schwadel (2012), religion helps to promote ethics among learners. Such ethical elements help to nurture students to become all-rounded citizens. The religious principles in a school setting form the basis of professional work ethics in many organizations today. It also promotes good interpersonal relationships by making people appreciate diversity and/or create the need for peaceful co-existence.

These attributes can only be acquired through the study of religion in schools, where they are instilled from the formative stages of growth and development (Cheadle & Schwadel, 2012). It is also important to note that many careers today have their foundation in religion. Religion comes in handy in the career development of disciplines such as law, medicine, philosophy, psychology, and counseling, among others.

These disciplines have their foundation established on the morals and ethics of religion as presented in the various schooling levels. Moreover, people majoring in religious studies can grow to become professionals in various areas, such as teachers, counselors, and religious leaders.

They can also run religious organizations and ministries, facilitate proper international relations, and/or work in the media and non-governmental organizations. Governmental organizations such as public schools, the police force, and the military typically have a chaplain.

Such a role can only be developed after studying religion and developing an interest in the career. According to Jeynes (2012), schools that teach religion achieve the highest level of performance compared to those that discourage religious studies. The implication here is that religious studies significantly impact career advancement.

Religion also helps in acquiring essential life skills. Such skills are acquired after learning about religious personalities who demonstrated great faith, perseverance, and commitment. Students with such skills will also try to emulate such persons and hence grow to become responsible citizens.

It is also important to note that moral uprightness is acquired by instilling the fear of God in students’ lives. Such fear helps learners to acquire knowledge and wisdom. However, it is apparent that schools are the best placed to impart this understanding through religious studies.

As Russo (2016) reveals, the freedom of religion is a guaranteed fundamental human right in most progressive constitutions. Therefore, religious studies give students a better understanding of their religions. It is important to note that religious studies teach the basic pillars of every belief.

For example, through religion, students learn essential aspects such as the believers’ creed and the five pillars of Islam. Therefore, teaching religion gives one the freedom of choice in relation to worship.

It is also important to note that the best democracies in the world have their countries founded on the belief in a Supreme Being or deity. From these establishments, it becomes crucial to instill morals among learners by teaching them religious studies in schools.

Furthermore, Duemmler and Nagel (2013) reveal how religion helps learners to understand the cultural diversity of the world’s populations since different regions practice diverse religious beliefs. Understanding the varied beliefs will promote peaceful co-existence while allowing for better diplomatic negotiations among nations.

It is important to note that religion has a lot of influence on how people live, do their businesses, and/or relate with one another. Therefore, this situation makes religious studies a crucial aspect of schools since it helps prepare students to work in any part of the world.

In other words, religion plays an important role in helping students understand the world’s history. It may also help a student explain the patterns of politics, trade, and law. Religion forms the foundation of these major areas, which eventually directly impact people’s way of life. Equipping students with religious knowledge helps them understand and appreciate the role of faith in shaping the world.

According to Kunzman (2012), the worsening levels of education can easily be attributed to strict regulations on religious studies in schools. This restriction has led to deteriorating standards of education, as well as moral decay in society.

Religion helps explain the complicated issues of life that are not addressed in other disciplines. Some mysteries include life after death, miraculous occurrences, eternal living, hell, and heaven. Science and other disciplines do not explain these things, yet they are essential religious items.

Therefore, addressing these aspects gives learners a broader view of the matters of life. Furthermore, in line with Vermeer’s (2012) views, religious studies help to enhance learners’ critical thinking. It expands the scope of students since it goes beyond issues that happen in the present world.

Religion also reveals future events in the form of prophecy, helping learners have an insight into events to come. Hence, it is crucial to include religious studies in the school curriculum to boost students’ level and scope of thinking.

Religion answers many learners’ curiosity questions. For this reason, elements from religious studies dominate discussions on social and mainstream media. Therefore, such studies cannot be wished away. Religion dramatically influences people’s cultural activities and beliefs, making it an important subject of study in schools.

According to Banton (2013), religious studies form part of the social structure of a society. Hence, omitting the study of religion in school means denying learners a crucial element they need in their life.

It is crucial to note that religious education comes with some drawbacks when presented in a school setting. One disadvantage is that the subject excludes the interests of nonreligious groups. It also disregards cultural diversity and the personal beliefs of students.

According to Kurtzleben (2017), nonreligious groups such as atheists have interests and freedom that should be respected in schools. Religious studies are based on the belief in supernatural beings that are not recognized in atheism. Therefore, the teaching and practicing of religion in schools may make atheists and other nonreligious groups feel socially excluded and discriminated against.

Furthermore, religion may not consider every individual’s cultural diversity and beliefs (Kurtzleben, 2017). Nonreligious groups that form a minority may also feel harassed and discriminated against by the teaching of religion in schools. Furthermore, the study of religion contradicts some teachings of science.

For instance, while science teaching in schools will make learners believe and uphold the evolution theory, religious studies teach the opposite to the same learners. Hence, opponents of teaching religion in schools assert that it confuses the learner.

For instance, according to Gaylor (2014), it is advisable to teach atheism in schools as well for all learners to be well-represented. The evolution theory believes people are transformed over time through several stages and advancements.

I support religious studies in schools since the learner has more to gain than lose from religious subjects. Religious studies help in molding and shaping the world’s culture. However, it is important to allow students to choose whether they want to study religion since it has a bearing on their careers, as previously highlighted.

In my opinion, religious studies should not be made compulsory but optional. In so doing, it will ensure that the interests of religious and nonreligious students are respected and that nobody will feel discriminated against.

From the discussions above, it comes out clearly that religious studies should form part of the school curriculum. However, it is essential to underscore that the studies should provide an understanding of various cultures in the world to facilitate the integration of communities.

The peaceful integration and co-existence of the world’s population guarantee proper political relations. The study of religion in schools should not be aimed and converting individuals. Instead, it should help people to appreciate diversity. Carrying out religious studies appropriately in schools may help to stop many religious wars and persecutions that the world is witnessing today.

Banton, M. (2013). Anthropological approaches to the study of religion . London, England: Routledge.

Cheadle, J. E., & Schwadel, P. (2012). The ‘friendship dynamics of religion,’ or the ‘religious dynamics of friendship’? A social network analysis of adolescents who attend small schools. Social Science Research , 41 (5), 1198-1212.

Cochran, C. E. (2014). Religion in public and private life . London, England: Routledge.

Duemmler, K & Nagel, A. (2013). Duemmler, Kerstin; Nagel, Alexander-Kenneth: Governing religious diversity: Top-down and bottom-up initiatives in Germany and Switzerland. Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science , 47 (2), 265-83

Ellithorpe, M., Cruz, C., Velez, J., Ewoldsen, D., & Bogert, A. (2015). Moral license in video games: When being right can mean doing wrong. CyberPsychology, Behavior & Social Networking, 18 (4), 203-207.

Gaylor, A. (2014). The Dangers of Religious Instruction in Public Schools .

Jeynes, W. H. (2012). A meta-analysis on the effects and contributions of public, public charter, and religious schools on student outcomes. Peabody Journal of Education , 87 (3), 305-335.

Kunzman, R. (2012). Grappling with the good: Talking about religion and morality in public schools . Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Kurtzleben, D. (2017). Nonreligious Americans Remain Far Underrepresented In Congress .

Russo, C. (2016). Religious freedom in faith-based educational institutions in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges: Believers beware. Brigham Young University Education & Law Journal, 1 (2), 263-308.

Vermeer, P. (2012). Meta-concepts, thinking skills and religious education. British Journal of Religious Education , 34 (3), 333-347.

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Four Reasons Why You Should Teach About Religion in School

Globe with two ethnic characters holding symbolism for various world religions.

Understanding and weighing perspectives—from different people, cultures, and schools of thought—are important global competence skills that all student should develop. I’m happy to have Mark Fowler and Marisa Fasciano guest blog today to help us understand why and how to teach about religion in schools.

For a variety of reasons, many educators are understandably reluctant to raise the topic of religion in the classroom. They may worry about offending a student, misrepresenting a tradition, or favoring one belief system over another. If you’re unsure of the legal guidelines pertaining to religion in public schools, you might take the separation of church and state to its literal extreme and steer clear of the topic altogether.

Addressing and overcoming this reluctance is essential to the creation of respectful learning environments that adequately prepare students for an increasingly diverse and connected world. Not only is it perfectly legal to teach about religion in unbiased and academically sound ways, but educators have a responsibility to do so. Here are four reasons why:

1. Religiously motivated hate crimes are on the rise.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Hate Crime Victimization report, the percentage of hate crimes that were motivated by religious bias was nearly three times higher in 2012 (28%) than in 2004 (10%). Many violent hate crime perpetrators are school-age: in 2012, nearly one in five were under the age of 18. By encouraging students to understand and respect people of different religious beliefs, educators are combatting these disturbing statistics and contributing to a more peaceful world.

2. Our student body is more diverse.

In 1970, a little fewer than 5 percent of the U.S. population was foreign born. The majority of them were Christian Europeans whose cultural and religious practices blended into the mainstream. By 2010, our foreign-born population has nearly tripled , and the proportion from Latin America (54%) and Asia (28%) greatly surpassed the proportion from Europe (13%).

To ensure that students of less familiar cultures and religious traditions feel included and safe in their learning communities, teachers need to provide opportunities for all students to share unique aspects of their identities. As their classmates become more educated about these differences, the likelihood of exclusivity and bullying diminishes.

3. Religious literacy is key to a well-rounded education.

If students are to function as globally competent citizens, they need to understand religion’s profound impact on history, politics, society, and culture. They should know basic religious facts and principles and recognize the diversity that exists within each belief system across time and place. Familiarity with central religious texts is also important, and it’s legal to study these texts in public schools, as long as the purpose is educational and not personal or devotional. For example, the Bible can be studied as a piece of literature that has influenced many classic works.

4. Students have a First Amendment right to religious expression in school.

The U.S. Constitution contains two clauses, known as the religion clauses, which inform the relationship between religion and public schools.

The Establishment Clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,...”

The Free Exercise Clause: "...or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

As government employees, public school teachers and administrators are subject to the Establishment Clause and thus required to be neutral about religion while carrying out their duties. The Establishment Clause prevents public school staff from

mandating or organizing prayer;
praying in the presence of students;
indoctrinating students in a particular religious belief;
religiously observing holidays;
erecting religious symbols on school property;
distributing religious literature for persuasive purposes; or
displaying a preference for religion over non-religion, or vice versa.

The Free Exercise Clause, on the other hand, affirms that certain religious activity in public schools is protected. As long as students do not coerce or otherwise infringe on the rights and learning of their schoolmates, they can

engage in private prayer during the school day;
express their religious beliefs in homework, artwork, and other written and oral assignments that meet educational goals; and
obtain excusals from specific classroom discussions or activities for religious reasons.

Even though these guidelines may seem clear in the abstract, applying them to real-life situations often leaves room for interpretation and comes down to a judgment call. Educators can find it challenging to balance the requirements of the Establishment Clause, and the desire to protect students’ from unwelcome religious persuasion, with the right to free expression. To better prepare for this challenge, educators need to create conditions in their schools that allow for regular and sensitive communication about religious differences. That way, if religious tensions arise, they can be resolved more skillfully and effectively.

Dr. James Banks, a renowned expert in social studies and multicultural education, states “The world’s greatest problems do not result from people being unable to read and write. They result from people in the world-from different cultures, races, religions, and nations-being unable to get along and to work together to solve the world’s intractable problems.” By replacing anxiety about religion with a thoughtful strategy for promoting students’ religious literacy, educators are taking a step towards a better world.

The opinions expressed in Global Learning are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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Home — Essay Samples — Education — Public School — My Opinion on Whether Religion Should Be Taught in Schools

My Opinion on Whether Religion Should Be Taught in Schools

Categories: Public School Religious Tolerance

About this sample

Words: 2124 |

11 min read

Published: Jan 29, 2019

Words: 2124 | Pages: 5 | 11 min read

Works Cited

Bhatia, S., & Davie, G. (2019). Teaching about religion: Towards a research agenda for religious education in schools. Journal of Beliefs & Values, 40(3), 285-298.
Education Week. (2016). Religion in the public schools: A road map for avoiding lawsuits and respecting parents’ legal rights. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opinion-religion-in-public-schools-a-road-map-for-avoiding-lawsuits-and-respecting-parents-legal-rights/2016/03
FaithStreet. (n.d.). The lack of religious knowledge is dangerous. https://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2014/04/08/the-lack-of-religious-knowledge-is-dangerous/31639
Hans, V. P., & Hans, A. S. (2016). Religion and education: A guide for the perplexed. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Hickman, H. A. (2019). Teaching about religion and religious diversity in the public schools: A legal analysis. Journal of Law and Education, 48(1), 1-28.
Jeynes, W. H. (2015). A meta-analysis on the effects of religion in K-12 education. American Educational Research Journal, 52(4), 744-769.
Kennedy, K. (2018). Teaching about religion in a polarized age. Phi Delta Kappan, 100(1), 14-18.
Lee, C., & Patte, M. (2018). Teaching about religion in public schools : What do social studies teachers believe and what do they do? Canadian Journal of Education, 41(1), 128-159.
National Council for the Social Studies. (2017). Religious studies in the social studies classroom. https://www.socialstudies.org/sites/default/files/publications/se/8004/800409.html
Wertheimer, L. K. (2016). A Jewish writer’s argument for not teaching religion in public schools. The Washington Post.

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7 Reasons Why Religion Must Be Taught in School

1. We shouldn’t refrain from doing anything out fear of retribution.

My colleagues and I were working on an interdisciplinary unit that included a giant timeline that traced certain historical themes within each region of the world along side of one another, including politics, economics, art and literature, science and invention, and social history. As we were brainstorming what themes to use, I said, “Oh, yeah, don’t forget religion.” Now, I had grown to love and respect these colleagues over a long period of time, and we could pretty much say anything in our meetings and know that we wouldn’t be judged, but when I suggested that groups of students would research and plot the development of the major religions of the world, you’d have thought I’d suggested we convert the 8th grade class to Islam.

The awkward silence ended with everyone reassuring me that religion would be covered within the other themes. Finally, they conceded we could have a religion theme but we would not call it religion. We could call it “culture.” What I took away from the discussion was not that my colleagues were against teaching religion. They were against the idea of us being accused of teaching religion. It was an reflexive reaction to a very real fear that we were entering territory that gets teachers in big trouble. We are so hardwired to avoid what might upset even one or two parents or correspondingly raise the eyebrows of our principal. I know I am guilty of the same. I might navigate a little closer to the boundaries (or a lot closer, to my detriment), but I have refrained from “doing the right thing” many times to avoid the political aftermath of the decision.

The implications of the way we, as teachers, censor ourselves are far-reaching and frightening. We have got to find a way to put those fears on the shelf when we reflect and make decisions about all aspects of our practice, including curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, classroom culture, discipline--at least long enough to think about our practice on its own merits of appropriateness, importance, and relevance. We know that religion a perfectly legitimate and important subject to study, but we avoid it out of fear of retribution. That means we are depriving our youth of important knowledge they are entitled to receive. And we are allowing extremists and the under-informed to dictate what we do and do not teach, without even making them lift a finger, before there is even a issue to resolve. If we are supposed to be teaching our youth to be active citizens in their society, we need to model those behaviors more often.

2. We heard somewhere that teaching about religions was a violation of church and state, but it is not.

I don’t know how this “rumor” got started, but once misinformation is out there, it’s very difficult to undo it. It reminds me of when I taught about the most recent Iraq War. To this day, students who were old enough to remember the Iraq War believe that we went to war because Sadam Hussein was behind 9/11. After readings, discussions, debates, essays, even numerous pop quizzes with just that very question on the quiz, some kids were still resistant to stating that Saddam Hussein was not directly behind 9/11. Once we get an erroneous idea in our head, it’s very hard to get it out. You would hope we would be better at it than 12 year olds, but that is not always the case.

The Supreme Court has been very clear about studying religion in school. It’s allowed. What we can’t do is give one religion special attention over the other or promote a particular religious text as a singular truth. Religion can be included in our curriculum in a myriad of ways. We can study it as history, as literature, as art and architecture, as part of the study of a contemporary society or culture (including our own), or as it influences or is influenced by a current political or social issue. We can even teach entire electives, called Religious Studies. The Constitution and the Supreme Court give us very clear license to allow students of all ages to become students of the religions of the world.

3. We shouldn’t shy away from curriculum that could get a little dicey where we have to navigate in volatile waters.

Just because studying religion is perfectly legal doesn’t mean teaching it may not get a little challenging, at times. The same can be true of other important subjects, such as politics, sex education, racism, bullying, and conflict resolution. I’ve found most of the challenges don’t come from legal boundaries at all, but more from the stigma attached to discussing religion in the classroom. Most students think we’re not supposed to talk about religion, so they may react emotionally and impulsively if we don’t prepare them. Having a discussion before hand about what separation of church and state means, and what limitations do exist and what limitations do not exist, could eliminate unnecessary fires and reactions when we start discussing the actual subject matter.

I use the word, discussion, a lot because whole group and small group discussions, talking circles, or Socratic seminars, is powerful pedagogy that shouldn’t be avoided when we hit sensitive subject matter. Having said that, it is essential that students have already practiced important dialogue guidelines that have been clearly established prior to the exploration of religion. Having said that, all the preparation in the world won’t prevent some kids from going straight for the gusto, the topics sure to trigger a response from their peers. For example, some will be anxious to talk about their own religious beliefs at the first opportunity. Some will find a way to bring up the very issues we “pray” won’t come up- creationism, abortion, who doesn’t get to go to heaven, etc. I usually allow these attempts at shock and awe to play out as long as they stick to the rules of respectful conversations, which include staying on topic, using I statements, among others. By allowing the discussion, it usually demystifies the idea of talking about such taboo topics. Then we can get on with it, and the process becomes more fluid and on point. The key is to be underwhelmed by the topics they bring up, and strictly adhere to the rules of respectful discourse, which would have already been practiced with other units and topics.

There are lots of other mine fields we could walk into. There is always the awkward potential for Sally to go home and tell her parents she much prefers the tenets of eastern Buddhism, thanks to her ____ class, to her Methodist upbringing and she’d like to make a temple in the back yard and refrain from going to church from now on. That never happened to me, by the way, but it could, and it’ll be totally awkward, but that’s okay, because of reasons #4, #5, and #6. The importance of the subject matter transcends having to live with a little uncertainty and unpredictability.

4. The subject matter is very important if we are going to understand other people and other societies.

Just like any subject we teach at school, studying religion shouldn’t be the study of a series of isolated facts, but sometimes some very basic knowledge offers perspective and opens up a whole new world that they hitherto didn’t have a chance to know about. Most students, no matter what the age, predict that the majority of the world is Christian. It’s very interesting to them and exciting to uncover a more realistic perspective about the world. And then the questions just start flowing. They want to know who was Buddha, who was Abraham, are Catholics Christians? and so on..

Comparing and contrasting religions offers enormous opportunities to not only see fundamental differences but also similarities, which students can analyze and draw conclusions about. I remember the kids especially enjoying choosing between ways of knowing between an indigenous and non-indigenous world view, or eastern and western religious world views, then we uncover which views belonged to which group. We unpack what it all might mean for us in understanding other groups, our own culture, and our own values. They also like studying the similarities of the religions within the Western and Eastern religions. They read quotes from various sacred texts and try to make conjectures on whether they are Eastern, Western, or Indigenous then they try to guess which religion they most sound like. They also really liked a lesson that I retrieved from Teaching Tolerance showing the Golden Rule of Christianity also being the Golden Rule in every major religion. We read the original text and the translation and discuss the implications of these similarities.

Finding correlations, connections, relationships, and causation in relation to religion is an essential component in understanding much of what has occurred in history, politically, scientifically, artistically, in literature, personal relationships and economics. When studying a culture, historical or contemporary, we can’t begin to understand a group of people without knowing their beliefs. And a group’s fundamental beliefs about matters of ultimate concern are connected to all other beliefs and behaviors within the culture. We can’t look at politics, economics, art, social relationships, science, our environment, or religion, without looking at how they interact with each other. An indigenous spiritual world view might impact our treatment of the environment and our economic system. It might affect what one eats, how much one produces, who gets what, and so on. This, in turn, will impact how much time we spend with our families, how we treat Elders, and other social relationships.

5. The subject matter is very important if we are going to understand ourselves.

Students can see the long term effects of ideas and beliefs that permeate cultures today that arose from religions and world views of the past. If those ripple effects happen to be part of American history, we are really learning about layers of ourselves and assumptions about the world that we can now “unpack”, evaluate, then either embrace, reject, amend, or leave them to percolate as we continue our quest for self-identity, our beliefs, and our role in society. Students are fascinated to learn of the Puritan work ethic, pre-destination, and the “city upon a hill” mentality that has rippled into our economic and political systems today. They also learn the rich history of the Quakers and their firm and early stance against slavery, the subjugation of women, and the suffering of the poor. The Quakers, too, are part of our identity that they rarely have a chance to learn about.

6. The subject matter is very important if we want to eliminate prejudice, intolerance and hate.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, creepy ideas aren’t just for extremists. Better words for creepy might be intolerant or dangerous, but when I hear some of the flawed belief systems that kids will share if they are allowed to express how they really feel, and when I know these kids to be otherwise kind and loving people, the word that comes to mind is creepy. It’s one thing to here these statements come out of the mouths of a Ku Klux Klan member, but it’s quite another to come out, in chorus, from the majority of any given classroom of beautiful children. The incredibly good news is that a real education allows students to explore these prejudices and come out the other side completely transformed, but we have to have the courage to dive in and take on these powerful and difficult issues.

The only thing as poignant and powerful as watching someone discover their way out of a previously held prejudice is to watch someone who has been discriminated against and oppressed become aware of their predicament. We must provide a forum for to study all kinds of prejudice, including religious persecution. We must speak of the origins and effects of these prejudices. If we don’t kids automatically assume there is something wrong with them and there is something wrong with their family and their community, without ever verbalizing it. They assume this is the way of things, so they have a good chance of continuing the deeply entrenched destructive cycle of prejudice. But when those kids start to become aware of the direct causes that created the problems they are experiencing in their lives and communities, their consciousness emerges into an empowered individual who is no longer chained to the patterns they see around them. Naming oppression is the first step to liberation, and we as educators, have an absolute obligation to provide that space in the curriculum for our students; otherwise, we are being not only irresponsible, but we are promoting institutional racism and prejudice, much of which has its origins in religious persecution.

7. Kids can deal with it.

Often when I promote the idea of dealing with complex sensitive issues with kids, a common reaction is that kids are too immature to deal with all that. That may be fine for college students, but not high school, certainly not middle school or elementary. I believe we don’t give kids near enough credit. The earlier kids start learning about the world realistically in an educational setting, the more mature and reflective they become as adults. We can’t expect to shield them from thinking, and then expect them to start when they turn 18. Moreover, we are fooling ourselves if we think our kids are sheltered from important issues of any kind. They see, live with, see others live with, and wonder about far more than we can imagine--not to mention what is experienced via television, internet, and music. If we don’t provide a safe environment to learn to make sense of the world, we end up with kids who don’t have the tools to cope, who suppress and ignore or react, or who follow their parents lead, never quite knowing how to process and develop their own views. There are wonderful units and lessons out there already and yet to be created for kindergarteners through 12th graders that appropriately integrate and embrace the study of religion in a way that nurtures curiosity, inquiry, and growth.

Making religion an integral part of the fabric of our curriculum may not be easy, but it is certainly legal and well worth the effort if we want to help our kids become independent tolerant critical thinkers who seek to understand and improve themselves and the world in which we live.

This piece was originally submitted to our community forums by a reader. Due to audience interest, we’ve preserved it. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own.

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Webpage managed by Tim Hall, Ph.D. focused on K-16 education for #religiousliteracy, #religiousdiversity, #religiousfreedom, #globalcompetence

Why Should Religion Be Part of the Curriculum?

religionmatters · 29 Mar 2020 · Leave a Comment

Tim Hall, Ph.D.

In education, there is a fear of bringing religion into the classroom. This fear founded on a misunderstanding of the application of the First Amendment has a huge potential negative impact on students growing up in the globalized twenty-first century. But why is there a misunderstanding? And why should we care?

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states the following: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Many in public education have interpreted the First Amendment to mean that religion should not be taught in the classroom. But this is not the case at all. As Justice Clark stated in the majority opinion in landmark First Amendment case, Abington Township School District v. Schempp (1963), an education “is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historical qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”

Then, students need to learn about religion in the classroom. Knowledge of other faith traditions helps to eliminate prejudice, hate, and intolerance. Students who have a better understanding of religion and its importance to societies will be preparing to thrive in a global community. Therefore, teachers shouldn’t run from the topic of religion; instead, they should embrace it. The better students understand the importance of religion to culture, the better equipped they will be to face and form our globalized future.

But we can go deeper into the reasons that religion should be incorporated into the classrooms in America. These deeper arguments can be used separately or jointly to provide a solid case for teaching about religion in the schools with the first three being advanced by Warren Nord and Charles Haynes in the text Taking Religion Seriously Across the Curriculum published at the end of the millennium.

Civic Argument : Schools must have a common ground. We need to learn to listen to and respect each other on deeply held understandings. So curricula should reflect inclusivity—teaching about religious and secular ways of thinking.
Constitutional Argument : Schools should remain neutral, meaning religiously neutral, neutral among religions, and neutral between religion and nonreligion. Schools should not ignore religious perspectives of thinking and living and only teach secular views of thinking and living, which can be religiously contested.
Liberal Education Argument : Schools based on a liberal arts model of education require that students should be liberally educated. So they must understand a good deal of the content and context of religions. Liberal education is a long educational dialogue in which students listen to, reflect on, and think critically about a variety of perspectives tackling the most critical questions of life. Students should be learning about and from religions to gain a deeper awareness, reflectivity, and understanding of themselves and others. (1)
Global Competence : Knowledge of religions is essential as we globalize in the twenty-first century. Our world is only getting smaller, and students will have more contact with other faith traditions. An understanding of religions will allow students to interact with others successfully. In more concrete terms using the Four Domains of Global Competence developed by the Asia Society , an understanding of religions provides students an opportunity to investigate the world beyond their immediate environment, recognize their own and others’ perspectives, and communicate their idea effectively with diverse audiences.

Regardless, whenever reasons for religion in schools are offered, it is common to hear a chorus of “Yes, but…” from anxious teachers and administrators. Yet, if we are working toward a world with better understanding, our students must conceive the dimensions of religion in it.

(1) Warren A. Nord and Charles C. Haynes, Taking Religion Seriously Across the Curriculum (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998).

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Religion in the Public Schools

argumentative essay about should religion be taught in school

More than 55 years after the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling striking down school-sponsored prayer, Americans continue to fight over the place of religion in public schools. Questions about religion in the classroom no longer make quite as many headlines as they once did, but the issue remains an important battleground in the broader conflict over religion’s role in public life.

Some Americans are troubled by what they see as an effort on the part of federal courts and civil liberties advocates to exclude God and religious sentiment from public schools. Such an effort, these Americans believe, infringes on the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion.

Many civil libertarians and others, meanwhile, voice concern that conservative Christians and others are trying to impose their values on students. Federal courts, they point out, consistently have interpreted the First Amendment’s prohibition on the establishment of religion to forbid state sponsorship of prayer and most other religious activities in public schools.

This debate centers on public schools; very few people are arguing that religious doctrine cannot be taught at private schools or that teachers at such schools cannot lead students in prayer. And even in public institutions, there is little debate about the right of individual students, teachers and other school employees to practice their religion – by, say, praying before lunch or wearing religious clothing or symbols.

Moreover, as a 2019 survey of American teens shows some forms of religious expression are relatively common in public schools. For instance, about four-in-ten public school students say they routinely see other students praying before sporting events, according to the survey. And about half of U.S. teens in public schools (53%) say they often or sometimes see other students wearing jewelry or clothing with religious symbols.

About this report

This analysis, updated on Oct. 3, 2019, was originally published in 2007 as part of a larger series that explored different aspects of the complex and fluid relationship between government and religion. This report includes sections on school prayer, the pledge of allegiance, religion in school curricula, and the religious liberty rights of students and teachers.

The report does not address questions of government funding for religious schools (that is, school vouchers and tax credits) because the schools in question are largely private, not public. For a discussion of vouchers and similar issues, see “ Shifting Boundaries: The Establishment Clause and Government Funding of Religious Schools and Other Faith-Based Organizations .” Because that analysis was published in 2009 and has not been updated, it does not include a discussion of more recent Supreme Court voucher rulings or upcoming cases .

Conflicts over religion in school are hardly new. In the 19th century, Protestants and Catholics frequently fought over Bible reading and prayer in public schools. The disputes then were over which Bible and which prayers were appropriate to use in the classroom. Some Catholics were troubled that the schools’ reading materials included the King James version of the Bible, which was favored by Protestants. In 1844, fighting broke out between Protestants and Catholics in Philadelphia; a number of people died in the violence and several Catholic churches were burned. Similar conflicts erupted during the 1850s in Boston and other parts of New England. In the early 20th century, liberal Protestants and their secular allies battled religious conservatives over whether students in biology classes should be taught Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The Pillars of Church-State Law

The Legal Status of Religious Organizations in Civil Lawsuits March 2011 Are legal disputes involving churches and other religious institutions constitutionally different from those involving their secular counterparts, and if so, how?

Government Funding of Faith-Based Organizations May 2009 The debate over the meaning of the Establishment Clause.

Free Exercise and the Legislative and Executive Branches October 2008 A look at state and federal statutes that protect religious freedom.

Free Exercise and the Courts October 2007 The courts have grappled with the meaning of the Free Exercise Clause.

Religious Displays and the Courts June 2007 Government displays of religious symbols have sparked fierce battles.

The Supreme Court stepped into those controversies when it ruled, in Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940) and Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township (1947), that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause applied to the states. The two clauses say, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Before those two court decisions, courts had applied the religion clauses only to actions of the federal government.

Soon after the Everson decision, the Supreme Court began specifically applying the religion clauses to activities in public schools. In its first such case , McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), the high court invalidated the practice of having religious instructors from different denominations enter public schools to offer religious lessons during the school day to students whose parents requested them. A key factor in the court’s decision was that the lessons took place in the schools. Four years later, in Zorach v. Clauson , the court upheld an arrangement by which public schools excused students during the school day so they could attend religious classes away from school property. (The new Pew Research Center survey finds that one-in-ten religiously affiliated teens in public school leave the school for religious activities.)

Beginning in the 1960s, the court handed religious conservatives a series of major defeats. It began with the landmark 1962 ruling, Engel v. Vitale , that school-sponsored prayer – even nonsectarian prayer – violated the Establishment Clause. Since then, the Supreme Court has pushed forward, from banning organized Bible reading for religious and moral instruction in 1963 to prohibiting school-sponsored prayers at high school football games in 2000. (The new survey finds that 8% of teens in public school have ever seen a teacher lead the class in prayer, and the same share have ever had a teacher read to the class from the Bible as an example of literature.)

In these and other decisions, the court has repeatedly stressed that the Constitution prohibits public schools from indoctrinating children in religion. But it is not always easy to determine exactly what constitutes indoctrination or school sponsorship of religious activities. For example, can a class on the Bible as literature be taught without a bias for or against the idea that the Bible is religious truth? Can students be compelled to participate in a Christmas-themed music program? Sometimes students themselves, rather than teachers, administrators or coaches, bring faith into school activities. For instance, when a student invokes gratitude to God in a valedictory address, or a high school football player offers a prayer in a huddle, is the school legally responsible for their religious expression?

The issues are complicated by other constitutional guarantees. For instance, the First Amendment also protects freedom of speech and freedom of association. Religious groups have cited those guarantees in support of student religious speech and in efforts to obtain school sponsorship and resources for student religious clubs.

The right of a student or student club to engage in religious speech or activities on school property may, however, conflict with other protections, such as the right of students to avoid harassment. In one case, for example, a federal appeals court approved a high school’s decision to prohibit a student from wearing a T-shirt containing a biblical passage condemning homosexuality. Because the student had graduated by the time the Supreme Court granted his appeal, the Supreme Court ordered the lower court to vacate its ruling and dismiss the case.

In another instance of conflict, some student religious groups want the right to exclude students who do not share the groups’ beliefs, specifically on questions of sexuality. For example, the Christian Legal Society (CLS), which has chapters in many law schools, requires those who serve in leadership positions to agree to a statement that renounces “unbiblical behaviors,” such as engaging in sexual relationships outside of heterosexual marriage. CLS sued a number of law schools after they denied the group official recognition because this leadership policy violated the schools’ nondiscrimination policies. In one of these cases, the Supreme Court ruled against CLS, stating that these nondiscrimination policies were constitutional so long as they were viewpoint neutral and fairly applied to all groups seeking recognition on campus.

As these more recent controversies show, public schools remain a battlefield where the religious interests of parents, students, administrators and teachers often clash. The conflicts affect many aspects of public education, including classroom curricula, high school football games, student clubs, graduation ceremonies.

Prayer and the Pledge

School prayer.

The most enduring and controversial issue related to school-sponsored religious activities is classroom prayer. In Engel v. Vitale (1962), the Supreme Court held that the Establishment Clause prohibited the recitation of a school-sponsored prayer in public schools. Engel involved a simple and seemingly nonsectarian prayer composed especially for use in New York’s public schools. In banning the prayer exercise entirely, the court did not rest its opinion on the grounds that unwilling students were coerced to pray; that would come much later. Rather, the court emphasized what it saw as the wrongs of having the government create and sponsor a religious activity.

The following year, the high court extended the principle outlined in Engel to a program of daily Bible reading. In Abington School District v. Schempp , the court ruled broadly that school sponsorship of religious exercises violates the Constitution. Schempp became the source of the enduring constitutional doctrine that all government action must have a predominantly secular purpose – a requirement that, according to the court, the Bible-reading exercise clearly could not satisfy. By insisting that religious expression be excluded from the formal curriculum, the Supreme Court was assuring parents that public schools would be officially secular and would not compete with parents in their children’s religious upbringing.

With Engel and Schempp, the court outlined the constitutional standard for prohibiting school-sponsored religious expression, a doctrine the court has firmly maintained. In Stone v. Graham (1980), for instance, it found unconstitutional a Kentucky law requiring all public schools to post a copy of the Ten Commandments. And in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), it overturned an Alabama law requiring public schools to set aside a moment each day for silent prayer or meditation. However, in a concurrent opinion in Wallace, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suggested that a moment of silence requirement might pass constitutional muster if it had a “secular purpose.” And in a subsequent 2009 case, Croft v. Perry , the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld a Texas law mandating a moment of silence because it determined that, in passing the law, the state legislature had sufficiently articulated a secular purpose.

But while courts have given states some latitude in crafting moment of silence statutes, they have shown much less deference to laws or policies that involve actual prayer. In 2000, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe that schools may not sponsor student-recited prayer at high school football games.

More sweeping in its consequences is Lee v. Weisman (1992), which invalidated a school-sponsored prayer led by an invited clergyman at a public school commencement in Providence, Rhode Island. The court’s 5-4 decision rested explicitly on the argument that graduating students were being forced to participate in a religious ceremony. The case effectively outlawed a practice that was customary in many communities across the country, thus fueling the conservative critique that the Supreme Court was inhospitable to public expressions of faith.

So far, lower appellate courts have not extended the principles of the school prayer decisions to university commencements (Chaudhuri v. Tennessee, 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 1997; Tanford v. Brand, 7th Circuit, 1997). The 4th Circuit, however, found unconstitutional the practice of daily prayer at supper at the Virginia Military Institute. In that case, Mellen v. Bunting (2003), the appellate court reasoned that VMI’s military-like environment tended to coerce participation by cadets. The decision was similar to an earlier ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which found unconstitutional a policy of the U.S. service academies that all cadets and midshipmen attend Protestant, Catholic or Jewish chapel services on Sunday (Anderson v. Laird, 1972). For the court, the key element was the service academies’ coercion of students to attend the religious activity.

Most recently, in 2019, the Supreme Court declined to review a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision upholding the firing of a football coach at a public high school for praying on the field with his players after games. However, in a statement accompanying the denial of review, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. (joined by fellow conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh) indicated the high court would be open to reviewing other cases involving similar issues. Alito wrote that the court denied review in this case due to “important unresolved factual questions,” and that “the 9th Circuit’s understanding of free speech rights of public school teachers is troubling and may justify review in the future.”

The Pledge of Allegiance

In 1954, Congress revised the Pledge of Allegiance to refer to the nation as “under God,” a phrase that has since been recited by generations of schoolchildren. In 2000, Michael Newdow filed suit challenging the phrase on behalf of his daughter, a public school student in California. Newdow argued that the words “under God” violated the Establishment Clause because they transformed the pledge into a religious exercise.

The case, Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow , reached the Supreme Court in 2004, but the justices did not ultimately decide whether the phrase was acceptable. Instead, the court ruled that Newdow lacked standing to bring the suit because he did not have legal custody of his daughter. In concurring opinions, however, four justices expressed the view that the Constitution permitted recitation of the pledge – with the phrase “under God” – in public schools.

While the issue never reached the Supreme Court again, it continued to be litigated in the lower courts. In Myers v. Loudoun County Public Schools (2005), the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld recitation of the pledge in Virginia, but a U.S. district court in California ruled the other way in another suit involving Michael Newdow and other parents. However, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010 reversed the district court decision, ruling that the recitation of the pledge did not constitute an establishment of religion.

School officials and student speech

The courts have drawn a sharp distinction between officially sponsored religious speech, such as a benediction by an invited clergyman at a commencement ceremony, and private religious speech by students. The Supreme Court made clear in Lee v. Weisman (1992) that a clergyman’s benediction at a public school event would violate the separation of church and state. Judges usually reach that same conclusion when school officials cooperate with students to produce student-delivered religious messages. But federal courts are more divided in cases involving students acting on their own to include a religious sentiment or prayer at a school commencement or a similar activity.

Some courts, particularly in the South, have upheld the constitutionality of student-initiated religious speech, emphasizing the private origins of this kind of religious expression. As long as school officials did not encourage or explicitly approve the contents, those courts have upheld religious content in student commencement speeches.

In Adler v. Duval County School Board (1996), for example, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals approved a system at a Florida high school in which the senior class, acting independently of school officials, selected a class member to deliver a commencement address. School officials neither influenced the choice of speaker nor screened the speech. Under those circumstances, the appeals court ruled that the school was not responsible for the religious content of the address.

Other courts, however, have invalidated school policies that permit student speakers to include religious sentiments in graduation addresses. One leading case is ACLU v. Black Horse Pike Regional Board of Education (1996), in which the senior class of a New Jersey public high school selected the student speaker by a vote without knowing in advance the contents of the student’s remarks. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nevertheless ruled that the high school could not permit religious content in the commencement speech. The court reasoned that students attending the graduation ceremony were as coerced to acquiesce in a student-led prayer as they would be if the prayer were offered by a member of the clergy, the practice forbidden by Weisman in 1992. (Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who was then a member of the appeals court, joined a dissenting opinion in the case, arguing that the graduating students’ rights to religious and expressive freedom should prevail over the Establishment Clause concerns.)

Similarly, in Bannon v. School District of Palm Beach County (2004), the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Florida school officials were right to order the removal of student-created religious messages and symbols from a school beautification project. The court reasoned that the project was not intended as a forum for the expression of students’ private views but rather as a school activity for which school officials would be held responsible.

Religion in the curriculum

The Supreme Court’s decisions about officially sponsored religious expression in schools consistently draw a distinction between religious activities such as worship or Bible reading, which are designed to inculcate religious sentiments and values, and “teaching about religion,” which is both constitutionally permissible and educationally appropriate. On several occasions, members of the court have suggested that public schools may teach “the Bible as literature,” include lessons about the role of religion and religious institutions in history or offer courses on comparative religion.

Creationism and evolution

Courts have long grappled with attempts by school boards and other official bodies to change the curriculum in ways that directly promote or denigrate a particular religious tradition. Best known among these curriculum disputes are those involving the conflict between proponents and opponents of Darwin’s theory of evolution , which explains the origin of species through evolution by means of natural selection. Opponents favor teaching some form of creationism, the idea that life came about as described in the biblical book of Genesis or evolved under the guidance of a supreme being. A recent alternative to Darwinism, intelligent design, asserts that life is too complex to have arisen without divine intervention.

The Supreme Court entered the evolution debate in 1968, when it ruled, in Epperson v. Arkansas , that Arkansas could not eliminate from the high school biology curriculum the teaching of “the theory that mankind descended from a lower order of animals.” Arkansas’ exclusion of that aspect of evolutionary theory, the court reasoned, was based on a preference for the account of creation in the book of Genesis and thus violated the state’s constitutional obligation of religious neutrality.

Almost 20 years later, in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that required “balanced treatment” of evolution science and “creation science,” so that any biology teacher who taught one also had to teach the other. The court said the law’s purpose was to single out a particular religious belief – in this case, biblical creationism – and promote it as an alternative to accepted scientific theory. The court also pointed to evidence that the legislation’s sponsor hoped that the balanced treatment requirement would lead science teachers to abandon the teaching of evolution.

Lower courts consistently have followed the lead of Epperson and Edwards. As a result, school boards have lost virtually every fight over curriculum changes designed to challenge evolution, including disclaimers in biology textbooks. One of the most recent and notable of these cases, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), involved a challenge to a Pennsylvania school district’s policy of informing high school science students about intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. After lengthy testimony from both proponents and opponents of intelligent design, a federal district court in Pennsylvania concluded that the policy violates the Establishment Clause because intelligent design is a religious, rather than scientific, theory.

Kitzmiller may have been the last major evolution case to make national headlines, but the debate over how to teach about the origins and development of life in public schools has continued in state legislatures, boards of education and other public bodies. In 2019, for instance, policies that could affect the way evolution is taught in public school (often by limiting discussion of “controversial issues”) were introduced and in some cases debated in several states, including Arizona, Florida, Maine, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Virginia.

Study of the Bible

Courts have also expended substantial time and energy considering public school programs that involve Bible study. Although the Supreme Court has occasionally referred to the permissibility of teaching the Bible as literature, some school districts have instituted Bible study programs that courts have found unconstitutional. Frequently, judges have concluded that these courses are thinly disguised efforts to teach a particular understanding of the New Testament.

In a number of these cases, school districts have brought in outside groups to run the Bible study program. The groups, in turn, hired their own teachers, in some cases Bible college students or members of the clergy who did not meet state accreditation standards.

Such Bible study programs have generally been held unconstitutional because, the courts conclude, they teach the Bible as religious truth or are designed to inculcate particular religious sentiments. For a public school class to study the Bible without violating constitutional limits, the class would have to include critical rather than devotional readings and allow open inquiry into the history and content of biblical passages.

Holiday programs

Christmas-themed music programs also have raised constitutional concerns. For a holiday music program to be constitutionally sound, the courts maintain, school officials must ensure the predominance of secular considerations, such as the program’s educational value or the musical qualities of the pieces. The schools also must be sensitive to the possibility that some students will feel coerced to participate in the program (Bauchman v. West High School, 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 1997; Doe v. Duncanville Independent School District, 5th Circuit, 1995). Moreover, the courts have said, no student should be forced to sing or play music that offends their religious sensibilities. Therefore, schools must allow students the option not to participate.

Multiculturalism

Not all the cases involving religion in the curriculum concern the promotion of the beliefs of the majority. Indeed, challenges have come from Christian groups arguing that school policies discriminate against Christianity by promoting cultural pluralism.

In one example, the 2nd U.S. 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.

Upholding the city’s policy, the Court of Appeals reasoned in Skoros v. Klein (2006) that city officials intended to promote cultural pluralism in the highly diverse setting of the New York City public schools. The court concluded that a “reasonable observer” would understand that the star and crescent combination and the menorah had secular as well as religious meanings. 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. Montgomery County Public Schools (2005), a Maryland citizens’ group successfully challenged a health education curriculum that included discussion of sexual orientation. 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.

Rights in and out of the classroom

At the time of its school prayer decisions in the early 1960s, 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.

Rights of students

The leading Supreme Court decision on freedom of student speech is Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969), , 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.

This endorsement of students’ freedom of speech did not entirely clarify things for school officials trying to determine students’ rights. Tinker supported student expression, but it did not attempt to reconcile that right of expression with the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions forbidding student participation in school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading. 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.

After years of uncertainty about these matters, several interest groups devoted to religious freedom and civil liberties drafted a set of guidelines, “Religious Expression in Public Schools,” which the U.S. Department of Education sent to every public school superintendent in 1995. The department revised the guidelines in 2003, placing somewhat greater emphasis on the rights of students to speak or associate for religious purposes. The guidelines highlight these four general principles:

Students, acting on their own, have the same right to engage in religious activity and discussion as they do to engage in comparable secular activities.
Students may offer a prayer or blessing before meals in school or assemble on school grounds for religious purposes to the same extent as other students who wish to express their personal views or assemble with others. (The new survey finds that 26% of religiously affiliated teens in public school say they often or sometimes pray before eating lunch.)
Students may not engage in religious harassment of others or compel other students to participate in religious expression, and schools may control aggressive and unwanted proselytizing.
Schools may neither favor nor disfavor students or groups on the basis of their religious identities.

A case decided by the 9th U.S. 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 following day, Tyler Harper, a student at the school, wore a T-shirt that on the front read, “Be Ashamed, Our School Has Embraced What God Has Condemned,” and on the back, “Homosexuality Is Shameful, Romans 1:27.” School officials asked him to remove the shirt and took him out of class while they attempted to persuade him to do so.

The Court of Appeals, in Harper v. Poway Unified School District (2006), rejected Harper’s claim that the school officials violated his First Amendment rights. Judge Stephen Reinhardt, writing for a 2- 1 majority and citing Tinker, argued that students’ constitutional rights may be limited to prevent harming the rights of other students. He concluded that the T-shirt could be seen as violating school policies against harassment based on sexual orientation.

Writing in dissent, Judge Alex Kozinski asserted that the school’s sexual harassment policy was far too vague and sweeping to support a restriction on all anti-gay speech. He also argued that the school district had unlawfully discriminated against Harper’s freedom of speech. 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 2007, 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. The Supreme Court eventually may clarify school officials’ power to suppress speech as a means of protecting the rights of other students. For now, cases like Harper illustrate the difficulties for school officials in regulating student expression.

Rights of parents

Parents sometimes complain that secular practices at school inhibit their right to direct the religious upbringing of their children. These complaints typically rest on both the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which forbids the state to deprive any person of “life, liberty or property without due process of law.” The Supreme Court has interpreted them as protecting the right of parents to shape and control the education 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.

The first decision by the Supreme Court on parents’ rights to control their children’s education came in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), which guarantees to parents the right to enroll their children in private rather than public schools, whether the private schools are religious or secular. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), the court upheld the right of public school students who were Jehovah’s Witnesses to refuse to salute the American flag. The students said the flag represented a graven image and that their religion forbade them from recognizing it. The court’s decision rested on the right of all students, not just those who are religiously motivated, to resist compulsory recitation of official orthodoxy, political or otherwise.

Of all the Supreme Court rulings supporting religious opt-outs, perhaps the most significant came in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), which upheld the right of members of the Old Order Amish to withdraw their children from formal education at the age of 14. The court determined that a state law requiring children to attend school until the age of 16 burdened the free exercise of their families’ religion. 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. Bailey, 1972) and from a coeducational physical education class in which students had to dress in “immodest apparel” (Moody v. Cronin, 1979). In Menora v. Illinois High School Association (1982), the 7th U.S. 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.

A great many school districts, meanwhile, have recognized the force of parents’ religious or moral concerns on issues of sexuality and reproduction and have voluntarily provided opt-outs from classes devoted to those topics. 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. Indeed, in virtually all the cases decided over the past 25 years, courts have found that the challenged curriculum requirement did not unconstitutionally burden parents’ religious choices.

The most famous of the cases is Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education (1987), in which a group of Tennessee parents complained that references to mental telepathy, evolution, secular humanism, feminism, pacifism and magic in a series of books in the reading curriculum offended the families’ Christian beliefs. The school board originally allowed children to choose alternative reading materials but then eliminated that option.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the county’s favor on the grounds that students were not being asked to do anything in conflict with their religious obligations. 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.S. 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 (1995), 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. The court concluded that this one-time exposure to the material would not substantially burden the parents’ freedom to rear their children and that the school authorities had strong reasons to inform high school students about “safe sex.”

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. 2, a federal district court dismissed a suit against Oregon’s Dallas school district, stating that accommodating transgender students does not impinge on the religious rights of other students or their parents. And in 2019, the Supreme Court declined to review Doe v. Boyertown Area School District, letting stand a 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding a Pennsylvania school district’s policy to accommodate transgender students.

Rights of teachers and administrators

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. Similarly, teachers may disclose their religious identity; for instance, they need not refuse to answer when a student asks, “Do you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah?” or “Did I see you at the Islamic center yesterday morning?”

At times, however, teachers act in an uninvited and overtly religious manner toward students and are asked by school administrators to refrain. When those requests have led to litigation, administrators invariably have prevailed on the grounds that they are obliged (for constitutional and pedagogical reasons) to be sensitive to a teacher’s coercive potential.

In Bishop v. Aronov (1991), for example, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a set of restrictions imposed by the University of Alabama on a professor of exercise physiology. Professor Phillip Bishop had been speaking regularly to his class about the role of his Christian beliefs in his work and had scheduled an optional class in which he offered a “Christian perspective” on human physiology. The court recognized the university’s general authority to control the way in which instruction took place, noting that Bishop’s academic freedom was not jeopardized since he retained the right to express his religious views in his published writing and elsewhere.

In Roberts v. Madigan (1990), a federal district court similarly upheld the authority of a public school principal in Colorado to order a fifth-grade teacher to take down a religious poster from the classroom wall and to remove books titled “The Bible in Pictures” and “The Life of Jesus” from the classroom library. The court also backed the principal’s order that the teacher remove the Bible from his desktop and refrain from silently reading the Bible during instructional time. 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. What is less clear is how public school systems should draw the line between teachers’ official duties and their own time. That was the key question in Wigg v. Sioux Falls School District (8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 2004), 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 appellate court affirmed the decision but went further in protecting the teacher’s rights, concluding that the school district could not exclude her from the program at her own school. 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. The court ruled that no reasonable observer would perceive Wigg’s after-school role as being carried out on behalf of the school district, even though the club met on school property.

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. The courts have also ruled, however, that attempts by schools to extend that control into non-instructional hours constitute an overly broad intrusion on the teachers’ religious freedom.

Religious activities and the principle of equal access

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. The constitutional rules governing the forum concept are complicated, but one consistent theme is that the state may not discriminate against a person or group seeking access to the forum based on that person’s or group’s viewpoint. 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. Vincent (1981), , in which the Supreme Court ruled that the University of Missouri could not exclude from campus facilities a student group that wanted to use the school’s buildings for worship and Bible study. The university had refused the group access, asserting that the Establishment Clause forbade the use of a public university’s facilities for worship. 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.

The Supreme Court later extended Widmar’s notion of equal access to nonstudent groups. They, too, should have access to public space, the court said. Despite the decision in Widmar, however, some public high schools continued to refuse access to student religious groups. Those schools took the view that prayer and Bible reading in public schools were constitutionally impermissible, even if wholly student initiated. At least one court of appeals has upheld that argument.

Congress responded by passing the Equal Access Act of 1984. As a condition for receiving federal financial aid, the law required that public secondary schools not discriminate on the basis of religion or political viewpoint in recognizing and supporting extracurricular activities. This law has benefited a variety of student organizations, from gay and lesbian groups to evangelical Christian clubs.

In 1985, a year after Congress passed the equal access law, school officials in Omaha, Nebraska, refused a student request for permission to form a Christian club at a public high school. The club’s activities included reading and discussing the Bible and engaging in prayer. The students filed suit under the Equal Access Act, and the school officials responded that allowing such a club in a public school would violate the Establishment Clause.

In the court case, Board of Education v. Mergens (1990), the Supreme Court upheld the Equal Access Act. The 8-1 majority reasoned that high schools were indistinguishable from universities for purposes of equal access to public facilities. Because there were many student groups devoted to different and frequently opposing causes, the court determined that no reasonable observer would see the school’s recognition of a religious group as an official endorsement of the group’s religious views.

The limits of Widmar and Mergens were later put to the test in Rosenberger v. University of Virginia (1995) and Good News Club v. Milford Central School District (2001). In Rosenberger, the Supreme Court held 5-4 that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment required a state university to grant the same printing subsidy to an evangelical journal that it made available to all other student journals. The dissenters argued, unsuccessfully, that state financial support for a proselytizing journal violated the Establishment Clause. In Good News Club, a 6-3 majority held that the Free Speech Clause prohibited an elementary school from excluding an evangelical Christian program for children from the list of accepted after-school activities.

These equal access decisions have led to new controversies in the lower courts. In Child Evangelism Fellowship of Maryland v. Montgomery County Public Schools (2006), for instance, a federal appellate court extended the equal access principle to fliers that schools distributed to students to take home for the purpose of informing parents about after-school activities. For years the county had distributed fliers for children’s sports leagues and activities like the Boy Scouts. But it refused to distribute fliers for the after-school programs of the Child Evangelism Fellowship of Maryland, which are not held on school property. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the county’s flier distribution policy was unconstitutionally discriminatory.

The presence of student religious groups in public schools has raised one additional issue. At times these groups insist that their officers make specific religious commitments, such as accepting Jesus Christ as savior and maintaining sexual abstinence outside of heterosexual marriage. As a result, some students are excluded from joining the group or from its leadership ranks. In Hsu v. Roslyn Union Free School District No. 3 (1996), the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the federal Equal Access Act gave students in an evangelical Christian group the right to maintain religious criteria for office. The court said the school’s policy against religious discrimination by student groups was unenforceable in this instance.

The issue arrived at the Supreme Court in 2010 in a case involving a public law school’s decision to deny official recognition to the Christian Legal Society (CLS), a nationwide, nondenominational organization of Christian lawyers, judges and law students. Although the case, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, involved just one law school (the University of California, Hastings College of Law), other law schools around the country also had been sued by the organization for similar reasons. By the time the Supreme Court agreed to hear Martinez, lower federal courts in different cases had ruled both for and against the organization.

The case centered on Hastings’ policies toward student organizations. Student groups that are officially recognized by Hastings enjoy certain privileges, including access to school facilities and funding. But CLS membership requirements effectively bar non-Christians from becoming voting members and non-celibate gays and lesbians from assuming leadership positions, which conflicts with the law school’s stated policy of requiring registered student groups to accept any students as members. After Hastings refused to exempt CLS from the policy – known as the “all-comers” policy – the group sued, claiming the policy violated its First and 14th Amendment rights to free speech, expressive association and freedom of religious expression. A federal district court and the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit sided with Hastings, and CLS appealed to the Supreme Court.

The case was widely viewed as a contest between the right of free association and nondiscrimination policies. In its ruling, however, the court did not resolve any broad questions raised by this conflict. Instead, the 5-4 majority handed down a narrowly tailored decision that upheld the specific policy of Hastings Law School – the “all-comers” policy – as long as it is applied in an evenhanded manner.

Writing for the high court’s majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that Hastings’ policy requiring officially registered student groups to allow anyone to join does not unconstitutionally discriminate against groups with particular viewpoints or missions. Quite the contrary, she wrote, the policy is completely neutral since it requires all organizations to open their membership and leadership to all students. Ginsburg argued that it is CLS that wants an exemption from the policy and thus threatens its neutrality. Moreover, she wrote, an “all-comers” policy is reasonable for an educational institution because it encourages all groups to accept and interact with students who hold diverse views. Finally, Ginsburg noted that even though the Christian Legal Society has been denied official recognition by the law school, the group can, and still does, freely operate on campus and is even allowed to use school facilities to hold meetings.

Writing for the dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued that by affirming Hastings’ policy, the majority sacrificed core First Amendment principles in favor of political correctness and armed “public educational institutions with a handy weapon for suppressing the speech of unpopular groups.” In addition, Alito asserted, the majority overlooked certain evidence demonstrating that Hastings had singled out CLS because of its beliefs. Prior to the lawsuit, he said, many officially recognized groups on the Hastings campus – not just CLS – had membership requirements written into their bylaws that were discriminatory. Justice Alito also disputed the majority’s contention that CLS, even without official recognition, can still effectively operate on campus, noting that the administration has ignored requests by the group to secure rooms for meetings and tables at campus events.

This report was written by Ira C. Lupu, F. Elwood and Eleanor Davis Professor Emeritus of Law at George Washington University Law School; David Masci, Senior Writer/Editor at Pew Research Center; and Robert W. Tuttle, David R. and Sherry Kirschner Berz Research Professor of Law & Religion at George Washington University Law School.

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Religious Education Should Be a Part of the School Curriculum?

Religious topics and prayer used to be a part of the school curriculum and school days in the U.S. up until June 25th, 1962 when in the Engel v. Vitale case, the Supreme Court decided against it. While religion is sometimes taught from a secular perspective, there isn’t an emphasis on it as a study in school curriculum. Should religious education be a part of school’s curriculum or is it unnecessary and cause for confusion?

The debate has heavy arguments on both sides, with passionate opinions for and against. To help you see both sides and understand the debate that surrounds this somewhat controversial topic, following are arguments for religious education being taught in schools with rebuttals covering the opinions of those who are against.

All the Yes points:

It’s a positive topic, children should know and learn about all religions, it teaches children how to be open-minded and accepting of other people’s faiths and backgrounds, it teaches ethical values, re helps to challenge misconceptions, prejudice and ignorance which can divide society., all the no points:, religion divides, yes because….

Many argue that religion, for the most part, is a positive subject that can provide students with moral and ethical ideas that will help to instill good values in them. From Christianity to the teachings of Buddha and some Islamic beliefs, there is a basis of do good unto others and be kind to your fellow human and people will argue that this is not a harmful topic to be taught in class. An argument for it being positive in student’s lives is that it helps to provide character development due to positive messages like “love thy neighbor as thyself” from the Bible and “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.” With a focus on these subjects shared in religious books, many consider the idea of religious education to be a formative and character building one that will provide children with material that will benefit them as adults.

No because…

On the flip side, others will bring up that while many religions do teach positive messages about love and kindness, those very same religions also include material that is downright violent. Many people will bring up how the Old Testament is full of horrific stories and that the Koran seems to condone violence. With this in mind, many would argue that the violence in these religious teachings combined with the messages of love and peace in the same books could only serve to cause confusion for students and become a very difficult topic to teach in schools. Others wonder if the stories in these religious books are appropriate for certain ages in schools and if they are to be taught in school curriculums, when should they be taught? The violence and judgmental viewpoints in some religions causes many to question if teaching religious education is actually a good idea.

Some people argue that it’s important for children to have a broad awareness about religions. They believe that it will help them make an informed decision on the religion they would like to believe in and understand it, as opposed to only learning about religion at home. Many people who argue for religious education in school curriculums feel that they would have liked to have been offered an option as children about what to believe and to have been able to learn about the different religions that exist. The argument for children understanding about all religions is that they can have a more logical and well-rounded perspective on faith and religious beliefs so that they can choose to think and what they want to believe, for themselves, instead of it being something that they are taught as a fundamental fact by their parents.

While for a long time, parents of a certain faith pushed for religion to be taught in schools, they were only determined to have their faith taught on the school curriculum. When it comes to several religions being taught, many from strict and staunch religious beliefs will argue that it is confusing for children to be exposed to so many religions, especially if they are being taught to respect and practice a certain one at home. Many people will argue that this is imposing upon the belief system of individuals and their families and that it isn’t fair for children to be exposed by the oftentimes confusing messages found in religions different from their own. Some people consider children to be too young to consider the big questions about life and purpose that are often brought up in religions. They feel that these kinds of deep questions can only cause confusion in young children and make them think about serious topics when they should be still having fun.

Many will argue that one reason why there are so many issues with religions is that people are not taught to be open about other religions while growing up. For many, religion is a very personal thing that is taught by their own family, so if they feel attacked about their religion, they take offense at it personally as it if is an attack on their family and themselves. The argument for teaching religious education in schools is that helping children to be aware of the broad spectrum of religions and how there are children just like them that believe differently will help them to separate their faith or their family’s religious belief from being a personal matter of who they are. Many people have the opinion that children who are raised to learn about several different religions will grow up to be more tolerant of those who are from different backgrounds and religions—even very strict and possibly “strange” ones.

A contradicting opinion that some people may have is that if so many different religions are being taught in school, children could become confused with why their own parents have chosen to believe in one certain one. Depending on how the religion is taught, many argue that this could cause them to think negatively about their parents and why they believe in a certain religion when there are several different ones. If these children are raised to believe in Christianity, for example, but then they learn about another religion such as Buddhism or Hinduism, they may question why they “have” to believe what they are being taught at home. Some consider RE studies to be disruptive for family life and cause for confusion in children in both deep questions about life and in their personal relationships with their family and their family’s religion.

Many will argue that teaching religion in school is an excellent way to teach values to children. Because many religions do have strong ethical and moral values in them, people feel that they are a great place to start for introducing ethics and morals into children’s lives. Some believe that teaching the values from different religions helps to encourage personal reflection in students that teaches them to be aware of their actions and decisions and also inspires tolerance. Many would say that it also teaches them how there are different ways to believe similar things, but that all “roads lead to the same destination.” For those who believe in the positive side of religious education in school curriculums, the argument is that children are able to develop more than just academic skills, but also humanistic advantages by studying about religion in school.

Other people believe that ethical values can be taught in other ways. The argument is that many non-religious households are successful in raising their children to be respectful and caring individuals who function well in society and who are accepting and tolerant of those from diverse backgrounds. People believe that there are plenty of other ways to instill ethics and morals in children that have nothing to do with religion. From non-religious stories that teach values to historic examples of great people that had nothing to do with religion, the argument is made that ethics are not synonymous with religion, so why should that be a reason for religions to be taught in schools? Those on this side of the debate will argue that when it comes to ethics, religion may not be the best standard by which to teach it due to the often-glaring contrasts that are found in certain religions.

Religion does have the potential to divide (as does politics or any other Human phenomenon) especially if it is not understood. Therefore it is even more important to develop a greater understanding of it to prevent division, ignorance and prejudice especially with the increase in multi-faith societies.

This assumes that religion is being taught as a way to learn about all religions. Often this will not be the case. The chances are that the religion teacher will only have a really good knowledge of their own religion so will mostly teach that and will inevitably be bias in his/her teaching of other religions. This could have the opposite effect from that hoped for by the proposition.

The first question you must ask when looking at this is what about the people who are of different or no faith. Is it worth alienating just one person so that the rest of society can do what they want? If so, I would call that communism and I believe that every individual should have a say in what goes on. If we bring education into the classroom then we are just bringing prejudice into the classroom. There are definately good aspects to religion (but most people do not get their morals from religion), but what are children of religion supposed to think of nonbelievers when their number 1 commandment is “Though shall not worship false gods”? This will surely lead to the nonbelievers being outcasts in a place where they are supposed to just be learning. I will not deny that learning about religion is important in an educational sense but studying it from a spiritual sense should be done in a person’s own time. Why bring something that is totally irrevalent and based off of beliefs, not pure facts, be brought into the classroom?

We would love to hear what you think – please leave a comment!

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Should we teach religion in public schools? And if so, how?

The Dangers of Religious Instruction in Public Schools

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W hen I heard the question, “Should we teach religion in public schools?” it made me cringe. Why? The United States is currently in the unenviable position of being near the bottom of the list of industrialized nations when it comes to teaching evolution in our public schools. As a consequence, at least half of adults outright embrace creationism and reject evolution. The rejection of reason, this religious revival we’re still in the midst of, is imperiling our international standing. How can a scientifically illiterate nation compete in global market? What does it mean for our future when half our population rejects fact and accepts fable?

It is in this context that we must consider whether typical public school teachers—particularly teachers at the lower level—can truly be trusted to be objective about “teaching” religion. The Freedom From Religion Foundation is continually contacted by students and parents who encounter teachers and principals who view their captive audience of students as a ripe mission field for recruitment. We handle more than 2,000 complaints a year by members of the public concerned about violations of the separation between church and state, and the vast majority of these concern violations in our public schools. We have to closely monitor our public schools to comply with more than 60 years of clear precedent barring prayer and devotional instruction in our public schools. We’ve recently had to complain in more than one state about kindergarteners being forced to pray by their teachers!

This year marks the 65 th anniversary of the landmark McCollum v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, barring religious instruction in our public schools. Jim McCollum was the only child in his elementary school not participating in religious classes. He was persecuted, and so was his family, for pointing out that it’s up to parents to instruct their children in religious beliefs. It’s also the 50 th anniversary of Abington v. Schempp , barring bible-reading and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. The plaintiffs in both these cases became pariahs for speaking out against religion in their public schools. Unfortunately, even today, students who stick up for separation of church and state still often become outcasts, as demonstrated by the mistreatment of high school student Jessica Ahlquist last year. After she won a federal ruling in Rhode Island removing a prayer banner from her public high school, Jessica at one point had to be accompanied to school by police escort. She retreated to private tutoring after repeated and vicious threats of violence and retribution. Religion in our public schools creates divisiveness, and awareness of religious differences often builds walls between students.

In 1890, Catholic parents in my state of Wisconsin brought suit against the practice of devotional reading of the (Protestant) bible in the public schools. In concurring with a ruling that declared such bible reading unconstitutional, a Wisconsin State Supreme Court justice wisely noted:

There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion. Let it once enter our civil affairs, our government would soon be destroyed. Let it once enter our common schools, they would be destroyed.

Devotional instruction and religious exercises, of course, are very different from academic instruction—learning “about” religion. But the very way this question is posed, using the singular “religion,” rather than plural “religions,” reveals one of the innate dangers of such instruction. Supreme Court litigant Vashti McCollum often responded, in response to the question about teaching religion in the schools: If we teach religion, whose religion? It’s nearly always the dominant religion that is “taught,” with token references to other religions thrown in.

In the best of all possible public school environments, it would be ideal, of course, to include, at least at the high school level, a class on comparative religion. Most social studies and geography classes already study the religious affiliations of an area, and some of their identifying tenets. U.S. students should not grow up in ignorance of the world religions. But by the same token, nor should they grow up in ignorance of the world’s dead religions, or the fact that the nonreligious and nonadherents are among the largest segments of the world, when it comes to religious identification. Today in the United States fully one in five adults and one in three young persons identifies as “nonreligious.” If we’re going to teach religion in the public schools, we must “teach atheism” as well. Are Americans prepared to do that in a fair and neutral manner? Will teachers point out that the nonreligious segment is the second largest “denomination,” after Catholics in the United States? Ultimately, the object of any public school class, no matter the subject, ought to be to teach critical thinking skills. Are religionists willing to agree that children should be taught in public schools to question religion?

Perhaps it is religionists who should be wary of “teaching religion” in public schools. Atheists and freethinkers are often much better educated about religion and the bible than typical believers. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public life released a survey several years ago finding that when it comes to religious knowledge, atheists and agnostics score higher than any believers, who were often woefully ignorant of the tenets of their own religions. Members of the Freedom From Religion Foundation often tell us they came to their rejection of religion after reading the bible. A dispassionate and academic study of religions’ claims, as opposed to devotional memorization and parroting of the more palatable passages of the bible, almost inevitably will lead any thinker to realize: There are thousands of religions in the world, all claiming to be the One Truth Faith. They can’t all be right … Maybe, they’re all wrong!

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On religious and moral education: Should religion be taught in public schools?

Religious education for children is a controversial issue, especially in secular states. We discuss if religion should be taught in public schools and the importance of religious education.

Should religion be taught in schools?

Historically, it is difficult to deny the importance of religious education . During the Middle-Ages, most education was oversighted or run by the Church across Europe. Most of the books were copied by monks and theology was a key subject of study. Similarly, in the Muslim World the emergence of formal education was driven by religious purposes. Reading and seeking knowledge was recommended by Quran. Consequently muslims rulers contributed to the creation of impressive libraries in Baghdad, Cordoba and Cairo as ways of disseminating religious and moral education.

Over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries an increasing number of countries have been declared secular. This means that there is a clear distinction between the Church (or other religious institutions) and the State, and that no religion will enjoy privileges over others. The goal is that people with different religious and non-religious beliefs enjoy similar opportunities and are treated equally by the state. The issue of religious education becomes therefore a controversial one. Many argue that religious education is very positive and foster respect of authority, moral values and even academic excellence. But not everyone agrees with this view. Religious views often clash with scientific rationality , as in the case of the denial of the theory of evolution and other theories explaining the origins of our planet. Moreover, some parents are agnostic, atheists or simply prefer that their children choose their religion once they are adults. In some countries, such as France and the Netherlands, wearing ostentatious religious signs or symbols such as big Christian crosses or Muslims headscarves is banned in schools.

Religious education curriculum worldwide

Countries with an official religion tend to provide instruction in the faith to their students. For instance, in most Arab countries Islam is part of children's education. Similarly, i n Pakistan religious and moral education is mandatory for muslim children from primary to higher education. In Greece the basics of orthodox religion are taught to children in school. In the UK religious education (RE) has been part of the compulsory curriculum for students in state schools. Although it is taught in a non-proselytizing way and covers a variety of different faiths, Christian Anglican content tends to dominate. Moreover the Department for Education and The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation have announced consultations for the new General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSEs) and Advanced Level (A-Levels) subjects in order to reform the religious education curriculum.

Secularists claim that religious instruction should not take place in state schools, that government should not offer religious education as a public service . Many countries by law establish the separation of church and state. In China religious education is banned from schools. Only some licensed state-run theology courses include moral and religious education in their curriculum. In the USA and other countries, religious education is provided outside normal school hours, at Church , through supplementary private bible lessons for kids in "Sunday schools", weekend Islamic schools, Hebrew schools, etc. Children thus can attend public schools and also be instructed in the religion of their family choice. However, some parents think that this system of supplementary education is insufficient and they enrol their children in full-time religious schools or practice homeschooling . In the US these institutions are privately funded.

Although in some secular countries religious education is strictly forbidden in state schools, in many others governments provide religious education or sponsor private schools where religion is taught to students. For instance, in Finland religious education is compulsory. In Poland or Spain , the education of religion (usually Catholicism) has been optional for many years in government schools. In Israel , France and parts of Canada , the government funds private schools, many of which provide religious education to their pupils. As we can see, even among secular countries there is often some involvement of the government in religious education.

Some argue that religion should be taught in a secular way in public schools as a means of intercultural awareness and a way to limit the segregation of students, which may be otherwise sent by their families to study in private schools offering religious education.

But is it possible to teach religions in a neutral and balanced way? Should not that time be devoted to learning languages, history, sciences or maths?

Check out these videos on the debate on religious and moral education in schools

Many question emerge: Is religion beneficial for our society? Is it desirable that children learn religion in school? If so, should schools teach faith and worship or only offer an overview of different religions and their relevance for our history and culture? Who should teach religion? What do you think of bible lessons for kids or other mandatory religious education in the curriculum?

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Schools should teach religion. What they shouldn't teach is faith.

At high school graduation three decades ago, keeping my lips pursed shut, I stared straight ahead as my classmates bowed their heads and echoed the pastor’s words, “In Jesus’s name, we pray.”

It was the same silent protest I had performed repeatedly since elementary school in my rural Ohio school system. Pastors led us in prayer at annual Easter and Christmas assemblies in the gymnasium; a Christian band’s singers urged us to proclaim our love for Jesus at a special assembly.

My parents and I did nothing, though we knew the school was violating the constitution’s Establishment Clause prohibiting the promotion of one religion. We were afraid of backlash; we were the only Jewish family in the school system.

My story should be a thing of the past, but it’s all too present: Just ask Kaylee Cole, a 17-year-old from Webster Parish, La., who is fighting a battle over morning prayers and other overtly religious activities at her public school. Her mother sued the teen’s school system on her behalf in December; the case is pending in federal court.

Ms. Cole’s lawsuit comes at a troubling time for those of us who want to see more focus on educating the next generation about many religions, rather than pushing Christianity into public schools.

Ms. Cole, who told her story to CNN in late January , described how some classmates glared at her when she said nothing rather than recite the Lord’s Prayer as it was said daily over the loudspeaker during morning announcements. The suit claims that nearly all school events, including assemblies, have had Christian-sponsored prayer or religious messages. Ms. Cole considers herself agnostic; her mother describes herself as Christian.

The school system denies the allegations, saying in its response to the suit that the prayers were voluntary and student-led. Those claims of innocence ring hollow. But, if the prayers were okay, why then did the school system stop using the prayers in announcements after Ms. Cole’s mother filed the lawsuit?

Ms. Cole’s lawsuit comes at a troubling time for those of us who want to see more focus on educating the next generation about many religions, rather than pushing Christianity into public schools. The national conversation on religion and schools has been heading in the wrong direction.

Teaching about world religions is the better approach, because such instruction can help erase stereotypes of religious minorities and fill a pressing need to reduce ignorance about religion.

And religious conservatives have an advocate in the White House: President Trump has been vocal about welcoming expressions of religion in schools and has vowed to make it okay to say Merry Christmas again — though such a greeting has never been forbidden.

Last year, a mother of a kindergartener sued the Mercer County, W. Va., school system to halt weekly religious Christian Bible classes conducted in classrooms. The mother, an atheist, noted that such classes held in school were unconstitutional. The school system, in response to the lawsuit, suspended the program for a year. A federal judge in November dismissed the lawsuit because the program never resumed. Meanwhile, in Florida, a state lawmaker is promoting a bill that would require all public schools to post “In God We Trust” in their buildings.

And West Virginia and Iowa lawmakers are promoting measures to require elective courses on the Bible in schools , mirroring laws already passed in a handful of other states. Such bills would be appropriate if they were truly designed to improve religious literacy, and the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute has been providing more training for teachers so they learn where the legal lines are (Religion scholars have been creating more resources for teachers as well.) But as Texas’s experience has shown , many of the courses end up using a Bible course to preach Christian values.

Religion does have a place in school: as a part of lessons meant to show various religions’ place in history as well as their similarities and differences.

Teaching about world religions is the better approach, because such instruction can help erase stereotypes of religious minorities and fill a pressing need to reduce ignorance about religion. Americans flubbed half of 32 questions on a religious knowledge survey given by the Pew Research Center .

Those who teach courses on world religions often include another important element: Lessons on the First Amendment. Ms. Cole’s school, for instance, rather than trying to satisfy the religious desires of its predominantly Christian community with morning prayers, would have done better by students if it had spent time teaching about the 1963 case, Abington v. Schempp. That case pitted a 16-year-old atheist named Ellery Schempp against his school system, where teachers lead morning prayers. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Mr. Schempp, saying it was unconstitutional for his teachers to lead students in Bible verses. Just like students in Abington, Pa. were, students in Ms. Cole’s high school are a captive audience.

Justice Tom C. Clark, who wrote the majority opinion in the case, laid out what was okay and what was not: Religious exercises led by public school teachers are not okay, but teaching about religion is fine.

Schools cannot promote prayer, because they are institutions for educating, not preaching.

Religion does have a place in school: as a part of lessons meant to show various religions’ place in history as well as their similarities and differences. And, around the country, most state standards actually require schools to teach about the world’s religions as a part of world history or geography.

Those who want to restore formalized prayer and God to America’s schools are misguided. Students can pray in school — that is their right — but schools cannot promote the prayer, because they are institutions for educating, not preaching.

I returned to my school system in Ohio about five years ago, and saw that my school had shed some (but not all) of its past practices of promoting Christianity, and students in social studies were learning about world religions. As a child, I felt like an outsider because peers saw my religion as foreign; now students may know enough to refrain from telling a Jewish girl that she is going to Hell because she does not pray to Jesus.

Linda K. Wertheimer, a veteran journalist, is the author of "Faith Ed, Teaching About Religion In An Age of Intolerance" and gives workshops on teaching about religion to educators.

Many think that religion should be taught in schools while others think it should be avoided. Discuss both sides and give your opinion.

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religious education
multi-faith society
values and ethics
religious freedom
secular education
interfaith dialogue
religious literacy
moral guidance
cultural understanding
critical thinking
indoctrination
religious beliefs
secular state
religious extremism
academic subject
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You have recently visited a city on vacation and stayed in a hotel. Write a letter to the manager about your stay. In your letter: Give details of your stay What were the high & low points of the hotel What are your suggestions; recommendations and / or complaints about the hotel Write at least 150 words. You do NOT need to write any addresses. Begin your letter as follows: Dear .....................,

People should be allowed to obscure their identity online. to what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement, art classes such as painting and drawing are as important to a child’s development as other subjects, so it should be compulsory in high school. to what extent do you agree or disagree, some people believe that the government should provide financial assistance to artists, while others argue that artists should be responsible for funding their own creative projects. discuss both views and give your opinion., some people believe that nowadays we have too many choices. to wat extent do you agree or disagree with this statement give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience. write at least 250 words..

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Should Religion Be Taught in Schools? Argumentative Essay
1) studying religion can help to explain mysteries of life. Religion helps in explaining the complicated issues of life that are not addressed in other disciplines. For instance, major argumentative disputations such as life after death, miraculous occurrence, eternal living, hell, and heaven can be explained by religion. Science and other ...
Argumentative Essay Samples on Religion in Public Schools
Up-To-Date Works You May Use to Write Your Religion Essay. Here we have collected scientific research papers that may help you develop your own arguments and provide proper citations in your argumentative essay. Religion in the Publiс Schools (Religion Liberty Perspective), 2012. Religion in the Public Schools (Law Perspective), 2007.
Should Religious Studies Be Taught in Schools
The primary argument in favor of teaching religion in schools is that it helps instill good morals and values in individuals. Religious studies promote virtues such as honesty, faithfulness, hard work, respect, and dignity, which are upheld in various faiths including Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Religion also plays a role in preventing ...
Should Religion Be Taught in Schools? Pros and Cons
According to Cochran (2014), the study of religion should be encouraged from the entry-level since it assists in character molding. It is important to note that religious studies instill good morals in people. Examples of these morals include honesty, faithfulness, hard work, respect, and dignity.
Four Reasons Why You Should Teach About Religion in School
Here are four reasons why: 1. Religiously motivated hate crimes are on the rise. According to the U.S. Department of Justice's Hate Crime Victimization report, the percentage of hate crimes that ...
My Opinion on Whether Religion Should Be Taught in Schools
To elaborate, many people of all religions agree that it should be up to the students parents what is taught to their children at school, and what is not. An anonymous opinion was posted that stated, "It shouldn't be a requirement for having religion in school. It should be a choice for religion to be a requirement. The students should a ...
7 Reasons Why Religion Must Be Taught in School
7 Reasons Why Religion Must Be Taught in School. By Kathy McLinn. November 30, 2014. 1. We shouldn't refrain from doing anything out fear of retribution. My colleagues and I were working on an interdisciplinary unit that included a giant timeline that traced certain historical themes within each region of the world along side of one another ...
Argumentative Essay on Religion: Should Religions Be Taught in Public
Download. Essay, Pages 2 (480 words) Views. 2138. People argue whether students should learn about world religions in school or no. Teaching religion in schools helps students understand the differences among the principles of each and every religion. It is a means of proposing that people are different from each other and have different beliefs.
Why Should Religion Be Part of the Curriculum?
Liberal education is a long educational dialogue in which students listen to, reflect on, and think critically about a variety of perspectives tackling the most critical questions of life. Students should be learning about and from religions to gain a deeper awareness, reflectivity, and understanding of themselves and others. (1) Global ...
Religion in the Public Schools
About this report. This analysis, updated on Oct. 3, 2019, was originally published in 2007 as part of a larger series that explored different aspects of the complex and fluid relationship between government and religion. This report includes sections on school prayer, the pledge of allegiance, religion in school curricula, and the religious liberty rights of students and teachers.
Religious Education Should Be a Part of the School Curriculum?
Table of Contents. Religious topics and prayer used to be a part of the school curriculum and school days in the U.S. up until June 25th, 1962 when in the Engel v. Vitale case, the Supreme Court decided against it. While religion is sometimes taught from a secular perspective, there isn't an emphasis on it as a study in school curriculum.
The Dangers of Religious Instruction in Public Schools
This year marks the 65 th anniversary of the landmark McCollum v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, barring religious instruction in our public schools. Jim McCollum was the only child in his elementary school not participating in religious classes. He was persecuted, and so was his family, for pointing out that it's up ...
Should religion be taught in schools?
In Greece the basics of orthodox religion are taught to children in school. In the UK religious education (RE) has been part of the compulsory curriculum for students in state schools. Although it is taught in a non-proselytizing way and covers a variety of different faiths, Christian Anglican content tends to dominate.
Schools should teach religion. What they shouldn't teach is faith
Self Explanatory. Schools should teach religion. What they shouldn't teach is faith. Classrooms are for educating, not preaching. Students shouldn't be required to learn how to pray in them. First ...
Should Religion be Taught in Schools?
Eliminating Stereotypes and Prejudice. Another way that teachers can incorporate religion in the classroom within their practice is by examining different cultures, their perspectives, and sources of motivation. Students can examine historical conflicts and reasons why the disagreements have occurred. In doing so they will have the opportunity ...
Faith, reason and religious education: an essay for teachers of
Thereby religion could be taught, not so much as a distinctive form of knowledge or as an initiation into a distinctive religious tradition, but rather as a 'phenomenon' of cultural interest which might well lead to its exploration as a form of knowledge. This was expressed thus by Jean Holm Citation 1975, in Teaching Religion in Schools.
Religion in the public schools: An examination of school personnel
The central focus on religion in public schools has been on the legal rights of students to freely express themselves in the school setting or to refrain from engaging in activities that are religiously motivated or that contradict their personal religious beliefs. Case law (e.g. Westside Community Schools v. Mergers, 1990; Widmar v.
Should Religion Be Taught In Schools Essay
1233 Words. 5 Pages. Open Document. Students could benefit from a religious focused course in high school. Despite religion in schools being highly controversial, public schools should be allowed to teach religion in school. Specifically this could negate religiously motivated hate crimes, help the student body become more familiar to religion ...
Should Religion Be Taught in Public Schools (Essay)
This is one of the key reasons why religion should not be taught in public schools; it is also one of the primary reasons why it should not be taught in private schools. It is a violation of the Establishment Clause for the government to teach a particular religious belief in public schools since this amounts to the government endorsing that ...
An Assessment of Arguments for Teaching Religion in Public Schools in
After evaluating arguments for teaching a religion course in public schools, and finding the most common ones less than convincing, I provide a justification rooted in the unique mission of public education. I then suggest that two types of courses, Bible Literature and World Religion, could, if properly taught, serve this mission in a unique way.
Many think that religion should be taught in schools while ...
Some argue that religion should be taught in schools as a way to educate students about morality, ethics, and cultural traditions | Band: 6. writing9. Pricing; Check essay; Latest Topics ... one of the easiest and most effective tips is structuring your writing in the most solid format. A great argument essay structure may be divided to four ...
Many think that religion should be taught in schools while ...
Many think that religion should be taught in schools while others think it should be avoided. Discuss both sides and give your opinion. #religion #schools. ... A great argument essay structure may be divided to four paragraphs, in which comprises of four sentences (excluding the conclusion paragraph, which comprises of three sentences).
Perfectingandpublishingassessrubric completed (docx)
Step 1: First Draft Paste your first draft of your argumentative essay. This includes your introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. Many disagree on the issue of whether global religions should be taught to kids in the classroom. In schools, religion is discussed, although it is avoided for fear of "hitting a sore topic" or upsetting ...

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Religion in Schools: Is There a Place for It? Pros and Cons

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Religion in the Public Schools

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The Pillars of Church-State Law

Prayer and the Pledge

The Pledge of Allegiance

School officials and student speech

Religion in the curriculum

Creationism and evolution

Study of the Bible

Holiday programs

Multiculturalism

Rights in and out of the classroom

Rights of students

Rights of parents

Rights of teachers and administrators

Religious activities and the principle of equal access

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Research Topics

Religious Education Should Be a Part of the School Curriculum?

All the Yes points:

No because…

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On religious and moral education: Should religion be taught in public schools?

Should religion be taught in schools?

Religious education curriculum worldwide

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Schools should teach religion. What they shouldn't teach is faith.

Many think that religion should be taught in schools while others think it should be avoided. Discuss both sides and give your opinion.

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