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COLONIAL ORIGINS AND ETHICAL ASSUMPTIONS
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The historical and legal aspects of the relationship between religion and public schools can be separated roughly into four basic groups: governmental financial support for schools, government oversight and regulation of schools, religious activity and observance in schools, and religion within the academic curricula. Since my focus in this book is on the level of classroom practice, I give primary attention to historical elements involving school curricula. Nevertheless, each of the four groupings has contributed to the shifting relationship between religion and public education and thus merits some attention. My goal in this chapter is to describe the relationships between ethics, religion, and public schools in America as an unfolding process over the past three centuries. I argue that while ethical education in public schools began rooted in a singular ethical source (various religious denominations whose values were merged into a pan-Protestantism), this connection gradually weakened until the 1960s, when schools began to address ethical education in abstraction from deep ethical sources, religious and otherwise —an approach that largely continues today. Some readers may object to this characterization of our current situation , pointing to the ongoing, periodically successful attempts to bring religious (usually Christian) doctrine into the public schools through issues such as creationism, sex education, Bible groups, and prayer. These efforts vary by region and are perhaps significantly underreported. What seems important to recognize about these manifestations of “school as cultural battleground,” however, is their general purpose of capturing political and curricular ground, rather than fostering dialogue and student learning across diverse ethical perspectives. In this sense, such efforts seek a return to ethical education rooted in a single ethical source rather than helping students understand and navigate the diversity of ethical sources that influence our lives together as citizens. With this tension in mind, I conclude the chapter by proposing an approach to ethical education that reframes the judiciary’s recent philosophical shift from separation to neutrality. Public school curricula must be more than an inert collection of ethical diversity; students need to learn how to engage respectfully with ethical difference. While we should certainly not return to our educational origins wherein a singular ethical source dominated, neither can we separate our moral and civic responsibilities to explore ethical disagreement from the very sources that inform that diversity. Understanding the still-unfolding relationship between ethics, religion, and public schools may help us appreciate the challenge and potential of ethical education moving forward. 14 Grappling with the Good COLONIAL ORIGINS AND ETHICAL ASSUMPTIONS Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and state.8 This conviction of Thomas Jefferson, expressed during a presidential letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, has served as a cornerstone legal image of the appropriate role of religion in American society, and nowhere more than public education. While this metaphor has become a familiar one, our understanding of the nature of this wall has shifted drastically since Jefferson’s letter. As many advocates of school prayer are fond of pointing out, this metaphor is not to be located in any founding American documents and did not actually appear in judicial decisions until the mid-twentieth century. Prior to the 1850s, the idea of separation between church and state was more popularly one of distinction rather than separation, and was concerned more with the disestablishment notion of keeping government out of religion rather than vice versa. It wasn’t until the common school disputes between Protestants and Catholics (which I address in the next section) that the idea of keeping religion out of government became a central concern in American life. Education in the American colonies varied by region, but nowhere did anything resembling a system of schools exist. While Thomas Jefferson , Noah Webster, and Benjamin Rush began to urge the formation and support of more standardized public schools following the Revolutionary War, Americans were content to leave education—and especially ethical education—in the hands of families and communities.9 Nonetheless, the issues of ethics and specifically religion in state-sponsored education trace their origins to the colonial period...