God, Religion, and Public Education: Is There a Mesh?

P. Michael Timpane, Ph.D., is a senior advisor for education policy for The Rand Corporation. He has been vice president and senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; president of Teachers College, Columbia University; and director of educational policy planning for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He is co-author of Business Impact on Education and Child Development Reform (Committee for Economic Development, 1991).

The question we have been asked to address specifically is, "God, Religion, and Public Education: Is There a Mesh?" My answer to that question is a resounding, "Yes!" Not only should religion and public education mesh but my argument will be that they must mesh. They must mesh because education, in my perspective, is the greatest moral adventure of our society. Deciding what of our knowledge and of our values to pass on to the next generation is the ultimate moral decision that a society makes. And its schools, whatever the legal or constitutional framework, invariably and necessarily do just that-not just in what is taught in the curriculum or in how egregious matters like racial or religious discrimination or violence are dealt with. But, more importantly, it's in the warp and woof of schooling itself that ethical issues are presented and resolved everyday. It's in the institution itself.

For example, what kind of a message do we send young people if we warehouse them in schools of 3,000 or so children-if we subject them to an anonymous bureaucratic rule, treat them as a number, and give them every indication that the school is unable and/or unwilling to deal with their personal, developmental needs in any serious way? To take another example: We grade on the normal curve. That suggests a zero sum game, a set number of rewards in the school. And it suggests that it's an individualistic dog-eat-dog world; whatever I get comes out of you somehow.

Four Historical Stages. The history of the relationship of religion to public education in the United States has progressed in basically four stages. The first, from the mid-19th century on, is an era of an explicit religious component in the development of the program and curriculum of the public schools. Were that not the case, there would be no Catholic schools in the United States. The Church had no prior design to set up a system of parochial schools. It did so in response to the religious component of the public schools, which were explicitly American Protestant in their derivation. And so there ensued-and persists almost to this day-a tradition certainly of rivalry, and often of hostility, between the public schools and other schools that had a different religious mentality than the public schools.

The second stage, which takes up the first half and even three-quarters of the 20th century, is a growing pattern of, first, neutrality, then, separation, and then, exclusion of religion from public schooling. It was done in response to many legal and constitutional developments. But it was also a very practical response by public school educators who were being sued, who were being dismissed or not being hired in the first place, if they expressed any very strong, or if they expressed the wrong, religious sentiments in the performance of their public educational duties. So, over the course of this century, it became a matter of dogma among public school educators that you simply did not mention religion at all, either because you were forbidden to, or because you would get in trouble if you did. Or both.

In the last decade or so, a third development has begun to emerge-an attempt to find a new way to express moral and ethical issues within the public education framework. The challenge is: can we move beyond a set of nominal virtues to a larger religiously based humanistic ethic for education? That remains to be seen. I was in a public junior high school yesterday and on the wall-and this is true of every other classroom I've been in lately-were words like respectful, generous, helpful, kind, fair, honest, positive, wise, proud, creative, organized. These are attributes that are taught everyday, explicitly and implicitly, in every public school classroom, and they are increasingly visible in any schoolroom you visit. If rightly developed, they have a substantial basis in the religious traditions represented by the people in that school community.

The fourth phase I believe and hope we are entering is a tentative return of religion in a new and appropriate guise into public education. As evidence of this development, I would point out the strong and substantial initiative that the Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, has taken over the past eight years to put the U.S. Department of Education at the head of this movement. The department issued a statement of principles entitled "Religious Expression in Public Schools." It is quite a remarkable publication dealing with student prayer and religious discussion, graduation prayer and baccalaureates, teaching about religion, student assignments, religious literature, religious excusals, release time, teaching values, student religious garb, and the general provisions for prayer service and worship among students and so on. It establishes enormous room for activity within the public schools under each and every one of these headings. Each with constraints, but each possible.

And an interesting thing has happened as a result of that. First of all, not only has it begun to change the policy of public school districts throughout the country, but it has also begun to eat into the presumption of denial, the presumption that there's nothing we can do: "We've just gotta leave this issue alone." It has made that presumption no longer tenable. More than that, it has begun, according to the Education Department, to encourage religious or faith communities and public schools to join together in practical grass roots partnership activities around some very obvious issues of mutual concern. For example: various community-based education programs in reading and literacy, and after-school programs for young children.

John F. Devine, Ph.D., is founder of the School Partnership Program at New York University. The program trains graduate students to provide individualized on-site instruction and mentoring to adolescents in troubled public high schools in New York City. He is the author of Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools (University of Chicago Press, 1996), and serves as an advisor to the White House on school violence.

Recent instances of multiple-murders in schools raise a key question that bares a deep wound in our culture: was there a common denominator-something besides the weapons, besides the violent media images-present in virtually every one of these incidents? Consider the fact that, after each of these events, the perpetrators' classmates almost always indicated that they were quite aware of what was about to happen. Columbine students said they had heard Klebold and Harris comment about "blowing up the school." Yet the principal at Littleton said he had never heard of the "trench-coat Mafia." And the teachers inter-viewed said they knew of no gangs or cliques in the school.

An Escape from Responsibility. Taken together, these phenomena reveal that there is not just one U.S. culture at work here, but at least two: the youth culture, hermetically sealed within the plastic bubble of its own peer group, and the "adult" culture, insulated inside its own gated community. And there is an almost total "disconnect" between the two cultures. The question then becomes whether over the decades we grownups-teachers and parents-have abdicated our responsibility of ushering children into adulthood. I think there is good evidence that over time we have simply disengaged ourselves from young teenagers and thereby acquiesced to the notion that the adolescent peer group should socialize itself. Rushing in to act as our surrogates are the advertising and entertainment industries who have been quick to read the meanings behind the music, the games, the humor, the dress, and to re-appropriate these symbols and supply them with new meanings.

Allow me to illustrate this with an image from the early 1950s. Truth to tell, when I was constructing the framework for my collaborative program between New York University and the New York City public schools in the early 1980s, I constantly consulted my mental model of the ideal Jesuit scholastic who, fresh from seven years of training, routinely made himself available to the high school students. High energy-level Jesuit scholastics had been role models for me and my peers when I was in school. Standing in the corridor after class, books under his arm, chatting, joking and mentally sparring with a small cluster of students, the Jesuit "regent," although normally not a trained counselor, tried to "be there" for his students, present to answer questions or just to hold an ordinary conversation which had the effect of signaling to the students, at the very minimum, that they were valued conversational partners. These informal encounters were not peripheral to Jesuit education; they were central.

A Useful Model: The Jesuit Scholastic. The scholastic allowed students to approach him and he interacted with them in a non-judgmental way. In coaching teams or in moderating after-school activities, he did not hesitate to reveal his own personality and goals, and students therefore felt comfortable opening themselves to him and revealing their inmost aspirations, dreams, girlfriend problems, family difficulties, whatever. He did not thereby simply become "one of the guys." On the contrary, he knew where to draw the fine line-a process we later came to understand as transference and counter-transference. He had no problem confronting the student who had crossed the line between what the school considered acceptable and unacceptable behavior. ("Mister, I notice you don't have your necktie properly pulled all the way up!") No one scholastic better exemplified this role than the current director of the Woodstock Theological Center, Father Jim Connor, when we were colleagues together at Gonzaga High School. I say this not to embarrass Jim but for a very serious reason: Jim was for me the perfect illustration of this crucially important, individualized attention by which every teacher in the school attempts to know all of the students, personally, by name, and hopefully, even by the end of the first week of classes!

It's Not Just about the Ten Commandments. In criticizing "values education," then, I am not so much in total opposition to it as I am trying to stress that certain prerequisites must be in place in order for it to be effective. Chief among them are:

(a) establishing smaller classrooms and schools (although small schools are no panacea, it has become clear that the larger institutions have become unmanageable);

(b) radically questioning contemporary educational theory which stresses only testing and academic standards;

(c) radically reconceptualizing the role of the teacher by revitalizing the traditional "in loco parentis" ("in place of the parent") role which has been on the decline at least since John Dewey (I think someone could do an interesting doctoral dissertation showing that, historically, and paradoxically, the most successful secondary schools academically have been those that placed moral instruction as their highest priority);

(d) bringing together the entire school community, especially early in each year, to affirm a set of core common values and to agree on what will and will not be uniformly enforced;

(e) this agreed-upon mandate (which has to be embraced by every teacher in the school) would not be limited only to the school disciplinary code but would include such positive ideals as the acceptance and respect for diversity, the rejection of racism, a recognition that we live in a democratic society that is still far from attaining those democratic ideals, and the unacceptableness of any form of bullying or abuse;

(f) an awareness of the need to prepare students both to live and succeed in contemporary capitalist society, and, at the same time, to provide them with the thinking skills needed to critique it and condemn strongly its abuses.

In our discussion this evening, we might even go beyond these considerations and ask how some specifically religious values (e.g., a commitment to peace and justice, a preferential option for the poor) might, without violating the Constitution, become incorporated into the moral fabric of the schools. My own solution to this dilemma would not require that the Ten Commandments be hung on the school walls, but that we commit ourselves to the improvement of public education, by striving, among other things, for the ideal of St. Paul in Romans 2:15, namely, that teachers would recognize that they have these standards inscribed in their hearts.

Steven P. Goldberg, Esq., is a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center. He is the author of several books including Seduced By Science: How American Religion Has Lost Its Way (NYU, 1999) and Culture Clash: Law and Science in America (NYU, 1994), which won the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award. Before coming to Georgetown, he served as a law clerk to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., on the United States Supreme Court.

From the point of view of a lawyer, there's a sharp distinction that we would draw in this question of religion and public schools. The private activities of students, even when they're in school, are largely protected by the First Amendment. Just as students can get together and form a Young Republicans Club, so too can they have an explicitly religious group, and there's no question about that. There are statutes and Supreme Court decisions like that. It is encompassed within free speech. As Justice Scalia has written, "Understanding free speech without reference to religion is like thinking about Hamlet without the prince."

Indeed, the Supreme Court has stressed that many of our laws stem from religious teachings and those laws are, of course, constitutional so long as they serve secular purposes. The Supreme Court typically gives the example of the laws against murder which come from religious principles but are valid secular laws. On the other hand, explicitly religious teachings and prayers are not allowed in the public school setting because of the non-establishment-of-religion principle.

When Jesuits Were Tarred and Feathered. Although some of the Ten Commandments might play a role in teaching a course on ethics, to post the commandments alone on a classroom wall is an unconstitutional establishment of religion, the Court has held. And it's not a surprising decision. I'm often puzzled that people seem to forget what's in the Ten Commandments. A lot of it is explicitly religious. For example, saying that you shall not bow down to graven images is a rather explicit and controversial religious teaching, which, of course, cannot be put forward in the public schools. Similarly, requiring students to engage in prayer is requiring a religious observance which is not allowed and I don't think any of us want to go back to the days that Mike Timpane referred to, that is, when the public schools were explicitly religious. We don't want to go back to the time in the last century when a fifteen-year-old Catholic girl, Bridget Donahoe, was expelled from the public schools of Ellsworth, Maine, because she refused to read from the King James translation of the Bible. As many of you know, that's not the translation approved by Catholics. When the courts ruled against Bridget and her expulsion was upheld, the Jesuit who had supported her was literally tarred and feathered and driven out of town.

You can't have the state endorsing religion. As Justice O'Connor puts it, "Would it make someone who is not of that faith or who has no religion at all, feel like an outsider in our society?" If a program is structured to avoid that result, then there is no establishment problem. It seems to me that most of the current character formation programs that I've heard about easily avoid this problem. They involve discussions of ethical issues from a variety of perspectives and no reasonable observer would think that they endorse a particular religious perspective. I do want to just add one point, though, at the risk of being the unpleasant person at the dinner party.

The Problem of Watered-Down Values. I do have a problem with some of the ideas of values education that are around today. You have to remember that a program can be constitutional and not be a particularly good idea. And I think that some values programs can be a very bad idea for religion -not so much bad for the schools, but bad for religion. To be blunt, my concern is that watered-down values teaching may be worse than none at all. Remember, if the real core of a religious teaching on values requires a study and belief in specific gospels or a belief in the authority of the Torah and the Talmud or a belief in the authority of Church and Papal pronouncements, we may have a problem. Sure, you can teach the end result-peace is good, discrimination is bad-without referring to the matters of faith that lie at the core of what you are saying. But I'm not sure that sends a message about religion that people of faith should be comfortable with. This all reminds me of the infamous quote by President Eisenhower, who once said, "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply religious faith, and I don't care what that faith is." General, civic religion, or "Religion is good"-I do not think that's good news for the actual teachings of the actual religions. So if we go down that road, I do have a problem.

Timpane: I'd like to tangle with the question. I'm afraid that religion itself has brought about a lot of revenge and other noxious outcomes that the latter half of your question referred to. If you inject specific religious content directly into a public education curriculum, it is not only unconstitutional, I think it's very bad educational policy because it leads to feelings and the actuality of rejection. You're considered to be inferior, not a proper and fully legitimate part of the community. Those are all extremely unfortunate outcomes that, I'm sorry to say, religion has introduced into educational settings all too often.

Devine: Part of the problem is that, more and more, teachers have not seen it as their role to be involved in anything other than the intellectual. Certainly in the schools that I've been working in, in New York for the past 15 years, the tendency, starting at the state Education Department and translated through the Board of Education, is that the really important thing that you folks should be doing is helping students to pass the regents exam and if you don't measure up, then we're going to close down your school and so forth. Public education has focused on the purely academic so much that this other whole side of getting involved in students' moral instruction and moral development has been lost sight of along the way. It's a matter of imparting moral instruction, and actually disciplining kids in the very act when the incidents are occurring. This has now become the province of the security guards. It's the whole messy side of adolescence that, I think, teachers and we adults generally have sort of moved away from. And so, there is much less in terms of human values, whether imbued with religion or not, imparted in the normal public school setting.

Goldberg: I have no doubt that the best teaching, certainly that I had, and I don't think there's any legal or other problem with it, is when teachers are terrific role models, to use the popular phrase-when they embody the kind of moral virtues that we're hearing about. But isn't there a problem from the teacher's point of view? I mean, they must feel terribly whipsawed. Every few years, people say you ought to go back to basics. You ought to do reading, writing, and arithmetic. Why are you doing all that other silly stuff? And then, they're told, you should be the repositories of moral education. They must be nervous that two years from now people are going to say: "How come reading, writing, and arithmetic isn't being done? How come board scores aren't up?"

Devine: Absolutely. I certainly don't mean to engage in teacher-bashing here. The point that I'm making is more about the circumstances in which we have placed teachers. In schools of three and four and five thousand students, teachers feel that to do anything other than to teach geometry or any other particular subject is really asking too much of them. I think if we place them in circumstances where they are dealing not with 3,000 students but with 250 students, with a lot of teacher instruction and teacher training, these tendencies to deal with the full adolescent almost naturally begin to reassert themselves. That's the point of the small school movement, and the alternative schools and so forth.

Patterson: That makes me turn to you, Mike, and ask whether that's a justified criticism from your experience as a past president of Teacher's College.

Timpane: All criticisms are justified. Schools of education are part and parcel of the same system that we're talking about. But, I just want to argue that you can't locate this problem in any one institution. This is a social problem impinging on the schools. Schools of education deal not only with schools but they also partake of the dominantly secular culture of the universities in which they sit. And as part of that university, they are part of an institution that pays as little attention to the public schools as it can get away with, even though the training of public school teachers is often its bread and butter.

Patterson: It seems to me that each of you has stated in some way or another that it is a good thing that values are taught in the schools, whether one says they're doing so

intentionally or not. But whenever we talk about values there's a question of whose values. Is there really an agreement on what values are to be taught, putting aside how it's to take place? Isn't that also a core issue?

Devine: I'm surprised that incidents like Littleton have not moved the American public to examine the question you're asking. What are the philosophies of education on which these institutions are based? There's been very little effort to go back and reexamine, for example, John Dewey and progressivism. The American educational system was so influenced by Dewey in the 1930's that we still venerate him as kind of a quasi-God. I think it's time to ask once again: Is this part of the mandate of public education? Not just the task of producing scholars and students who can read and write and pass the Scholastic Aptitude Test, but by asking these questions about moral instruction and values. Some people have done this quite successfully. For example, right here in Montgomery County, I understand, there's an excellent program where teachers and administrators are getting together and asking themselves what are the values that we're trying to communicate in this school in this particular year.

Timpane: I think there certainly is a core of civic virtues that are common. And they are not a bad basis upon which to build-notions of justice and fairness, of non-discrimination, of due process of the procedural sort at least, and virtues. They are certainly connected to other, more subtle, and complex virtues and virtues of a more explicitly religious character. But in the pursuit of economic success and high academic achievement narrowly defined, the schools have neglected the teaching of even the civic virtues, let alone some of the more contentious virtues that we might argue about.

Question. I'm Leon Hooper, with the Woodstock Theological Center. I thought I'd bring John Courtney Murray, S.J., into this. He wrote a fair amount on education and constitutional issues in the United States and also a lot on religious freedom. Toward the end of a decade of very fractious fighting on these particular issues, he recommended that in our public schools students be taught about American religions by people who believed in them. He has three reasons for this. One was that our students have a right and, really, an obligation to know what American faiths are; that they pick up something, outside of their own church setting, about the richness and fullness of American faith. The second was that they learn how people proceed from the premises and primary commitments of their faiths to policy level decisions. That is mostly to develop public trust. If I concede that a policy that you're pushing has religious warrants deep within your own thought and your own traditions, I'm going to trust you a whole lot more. The third reason was civility-that the students had a right to be exposed to religious discourse that is civil and pluralistic. Murray looked toward the public schools, without much hope probably, as a training forum within which we could begin to discuss religious issues in public. Now, is there anything within constitutional law or within our educational policies nowadays, that would allow some wiggle room so that our students might be exposed to and perhaps begin to participate in religiously based discourse in a civil manner?

Goldberg: Well, that's a difficult question. Several decades ago, the Supreme Court decision in the McCollum case struck down a program in Illinois in which clergy came into the schools and conducted religious instruction for people of their faith. But I don't think that's what you have in mind. I think what you have in mind is more of the high school physics teacher who says look, if you really want to know what science is like and the scientific method is like, I'm going to bring in a distinguished Nobel laureate from a nearby university who's going to talk about the work he did on superconductivity and how the scientific method played out in his intellectual life. That you could do. On that model, a broad-minded teacher might say I'm going to bring in some guest speakers and you'll see how values play out in their life. And I could imagine an array of guest speakers that would be acceptable. If I were doing it I wouldn't just have a priest, a rabbi, a minister, an imam, and so on. I would also have a secular philosopher who wants to talk about it purely from a secular point of view so that the whole array might be more accessible to the students.

Question. It seems to me that one critical element has been missing from all of this and that's the relationship between the teaching of values and morality between school and home. When children come to school they've had five or six years of conditioning from their home. They bring attitudes, problems of repression, aggression, racism, hostility, whatever, from the home to the school and it's a continuing conflict if, in the school, the children are learning something different than what they see and hear at home. This has to be resolved if you're going to have sig-nificant success in what we've been talking about tonight.